To say I’m in the high sierras and haven’t had reception in a week. Will be in town resupplying tomorrow, more posts then! Plz no worrying! It’s stressful for me to think that if I don’t have reception, you guys will think I’m dead.
Xoxo
C
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Day 6: ADZPCTKO
I’m at Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kickoff, aka ADZPCTKO, aka kickoff! I’m at a big campground and there are lots of limping, sunburned hikers and they gave us free burritos and now they’re showing hiker movies on a giant tyvek screen. All day I’ve been stumbling around in the sun, asking people for advice about my tendonitis and hanging out with Thyra, Angela and Ben. Tomorrow morning I get on the trail again. I’m going to hike just fifteen miles in two days and then I will have caught up with Angela, Thyra and Ben, so when they get back on the trail (they’ve been nursing injuries too) we can all hike together! Other humans, hallelujah!!
Speaking of injuries, I’ve gone, in the past few days, from knowing nothing at all about archilles tendonitis to being a total know it all about archilles tendonitis. There’s a special way I can tape it, special stretches I can do, and I can scrape it with a spoon to break up calcium deposits. I can change my walking gait, I can take ibuprofen before bed, I can “ice” my heel with a wet bandana. I’ve even done minor surgery on my left shoe, cutting out the part of the back that hits my sore archilles. I’ve changed to different socks. And I’ll probably never try to carry seven liters of water and twelve pounds of food for twenty miles in one day again.
I’m glad I got this injury thing out of the way right off the bat. Life is suffering, right? Pain management, check.
I’m exhausted. I got up at four a.m. today to ride with Bob and Linda to kickoff- they were part of a crew of trail angels that were shuttling hikers here and there during kickoff. It was hard to say goodbye to Bob and Linda, who will hereby be known as the Most Generous and Kindly People Ever. I can’t believe that they welcomed me into their home the way they did, drove me around San Diego for this or that, and even picked me up off the side of the road in the first place. It’s hard to know sometimes how to express gratitude, but if it hadn’t been for them I definitely wouldn’t have been able to heal my injury the way I had. I’m in awe of their generousity, and I hope someday to be able to help out other hikers (or anyone, for that matter) the way that they helped out me.
Bob and Linda, the magical trail angels of magic
And friends! I get to hike with real live friends now!
Angela, Thyra and Ben
I’m so antsy to get back on the trail. I can’t wait I can’t wait I can’t wait!!
Day 5: Fish tacos and the wheel of life
This morning after I woke I lay in my nice soft bed, googling pictures of snakes on my phone. I’d only encountered one snake so far on the trail, a smallish one that had been stretched languidly across the path.
“Well hello there, baby snake,” I’d said, as I’d stepped casually around it.
Now I frowned as I scrolled through common snakes of southern california.
That snake had been a rattlesnake.
I’m a fool, I thought. A fool, fool, fool.
Why does everything in the desert want to kill me?
Or,
Everything in the desert could kill me and chooses not to.
Today was the day of searching for objects.
The western world is full of consumer goods. A cloud of consumer goods, floating over the land like fog. In the morning we wandered through this fog, looking for this or that piece of molded plastic and foam that would somehow make all my dreams come true.
At REI they didn’t have my shoes a half size smaller. My shoes are fine, I decided, as I poked at the racks of physical objects. My feet will probably swell more. What is a pair of shoes, anyway? I bought a few microscopic pieces of gear and a pair of those socks with the toes. Maybe I like these, I thought, as I Iooked down at this particular manifestation of woven thread, their existence, branding and packaging a cumulative result of thousands of years of history.
At rite-aide I bought a phone charger kit that came with lots of bits, because one of the bits looked like it might fit my solar charger. Back at Bob and Linda’s RV I spread the bits across the table. Five special bits, each the product of so many things. Ideas, conversations, engineering, factory assembly. The permits to even build the factory in the first place. What had the workers been paid? Whole lives played out, dramas.
None of the bits actually fit. I called sweethome again, and she rifled through my boxes in the basement. Boxes full of objects shaped all sorts of ways, manufactured and distributed all over the world. What was value? I wanted this bit so bad it was like an ache. Sweethome texted me photographs of the powermonkey bits that she found. The powermonkey charger comes with around five hundred bits, like a jigsaw puzzle. I think one of those might be the right bit! I texted. Now the postal service would be involved. Who had not played a part in the acquisition of the bit for my solar charger? Whole wars fought for this, civilizations born and died out.
The maybe-bits would meet me in warner springs, 66 trail miles north. Soon that pound of dead electronics I’d been carrying would finally come to life.
While we drove around sunny sandy eggo (as my friend Frannie calls it) Bob gave me all sorts of advice for my ankle.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I had your exact same injury once. And you know what they told me? They said you hike on it, the endorphins kick in once you get going and the pain goes away. It’s not going to get more injured, they told me. You just hike on it.”
This was the most encouraging piece of advice I had heard so far. And my ankle was feeling a lot better today- there wasn’t much pain, although I did feel a sort of grinding when I moved it. Vitamin I, I thought as I took an ibuprofen from my little plastic baggie.
Bob and Linda wanted me to get trekking poles but I felt adverse to poles. Poles were like weights I had to carry in my hands! But realistically I was injured now, and would probably be injured for the rest of my hike.
“I bet I’ll find some in a hiker box,” I said.
Another thing I did today was weigh what was left of my food. Eight pounds!
“That’s a lot of food for four more days,” said Bob.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve probably been carrying too much food.”
Dammit, I thought, remembering my brutal first day, my heavy pack, my rolled ankle. Why hadn’t I weighed my food? I had weighed everything else in my pack, to the point of obsession. I looked in the stuff sack, at the dusty dried fruit and dirty half-eaten bags of trail mix. What was this stuff, even? More bits. Bits of matter that once been alive somewhere. Bits of matter that had wanted only to try hard and then die an honorable death! Because what else is there, really? Now the plants and animals were all sorts of salty shapes and colors, folded up in dusty ziploc bags in my stuff sack. What strange creatures we are, I thought.
In the evening Linda, Bob and I got fish tacos and sat on the beach to eat them. Tan people, looking as if they’d never been depressed a day in their lives, rollerbladed serenely past us, their blonde hair whipping in the wind. I thought of my friends in Portland, grasping desperately at the first bright days of springtime, and the dampness there that clung to the surface of everything there. My fish tacos were good, and the sun was dipping rosily in the sky. And then Portland, for a moment, didn’t even seem real. What is reality? I thought.
Bob and Linda read the blog post I wrote about them earlier and then commented on it (they liked my writing, although they don’t really live above a “marsh”- Hi Bob and Linda!) And this created a sandwich of experience- the actual experience, and my story of the experience, and Bob and Linda’s experience of reading the story of the experience. And then my experience of talking to them about reading the story of the experience. This felt discombobulating, like traveling too fast between time zones. The future! I thought. The internet, eating away at our concepts of space/time.
Now it’s 9:45 at night in pacific standard time here on planet earth in the galaxy milky way, and in six point five earth hours I will wake in the darkened RV with the sound of the freeway in the distance and assemble my collection of extremely specific objects in their special order in my “pack”, and I will ride with Bob and Linda to the PCT “kickoff”, where I will attend a workshop on lymes disease and eat burritos. At night I’ll lay in the cold grass and the stars will twinkle on the far horizon and the moon will almost burn me with its light. And then I’ll walk north until my shoes wear completely off. Turning the wheel of life, as they say.
Rearranging my precious bits in their dusty plastic bags
The baby squirrel
Last night a baby squirrel wandered into our camp. The squirrel was cold and dehydrated and I emptied the soap from my tiny dr. Bronners bottle so that I could feed it drops of warm salt water. Finn and I wrapped the squirrel in a towel and it slept in the footbox of my sleeping bag. We named him chippy.
While I waited to fall asleep under the howling california stars I imagined the logistics of caring for a baby squirrel on the trail. I knew what to do, having once raised an abandoned baby squirrel that Paula found in the street. But where would I find puppy formula, out here in the desert?
Chippy is warming himself right now in a paper bag in the sun. We’re leaving him with the park ranger here, who seems to like animals.
We’re off to the border. In an hour I start hiking!
In friday’s frantic exhausted shuffling I forgot to pack the bit that connects my phone to my solar charger. So my phone is almost dead. It might be a few days before I post again, but then a bunch of posts right at once. Don’t fret if you don’t hear from me. For now- The desert! The heat! My pack is so heavy with all this water!
UPDATE: I did not catch bubonic plague.
At the portland airport
And my heart is breaking re: dogs. Finished getting ready at 3:30 a.m. and slept a whole hour. Woke to Cooper’s headlights flooding the trailer. Small dogs were confused, these little creatures who want only to be near me. And I am a little creature who wants only to be near them. At the airport no-one cared that I had a funny hat. Why was everyone so awake? I checked my bag and bought a bottle of water. I made it to the bathroom and sat in a stall and sobbed. My dogs! They will think I’ve been eaten by a larger predator, and then they will move on. It’s me who will miss them all summer, with the long tail of my human memory. Kinnikinnick and her soft fur, and Potato with his dingleberries. What strange lives we lead.
OMG SO CLOSE
Just 36 hours to go an $600 more to raise! GAHHHHHH! I can’t stand the excitement and neither can Potato!
WE’RE SO CLOSE! Will you be the special magic backer that pledges while I’m sleeping? Someone on the other side of the world? It looks like I have some fans in the UK now- will you be the special magic UK reader who tweets to their 57k twitter followers and helps me make up this mere $600 that I still have to raise?
Also my friend Hannah has done this really nice thing-
She says she’ll double her pledge if three other people do! Will you be the special backer who sets off a cascade of double-pledges, leading to the ultimate success of my campaign?
UPDATE: Richard just doubled his pledge! Will you be one of the other two people to double yours? Thank you Richard!!
THANK YOU to everyone who has pledged since my last post- Jim, Mary, Louis, Sharen, Keith, William, Emilie, and Shawn!
I just spent many hours editing followed by an hour researching windshirts and now my brain is fried. I don’t really know what a windshirt is but apparently when I am in the desert it is going to be super windy and I am going to want one like, a lot. I’M SO EXCITED for this epic journey I cannot even HANDLE IT. You know what’s going to be awesome? When I have all my gear and I can tell you how much everything weighs and I’m going to make a video showing you everything that’s in my pack! How nerdy is that?
Here’s the link to the campaign-
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1624393171/carrot-quinn-walks-from-mexico-to-canada-the-book-0
AND THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
just $800 left to raise!
Just $800 left to raise for my campaign! Will you be that next special pledge? You are generous and kind and POTATO LOVES YOU. Here is proof.
Thanks to Trixie, Trevor, Allison, Michelle and Rodrigo, who pledged since my last update.
WE’RE SO CLOSE!!!! Halp!
Here is the link the the campaign
60 hours left and just $1200 to go!
READERS! FRIENDS! PASSERS-BY!
There are just 60 hours left of my kickstarter, and $1200 still to raise! That’s only $20 an hour! We can totally do this! But I really need your help! Please share the campaign on your facebook, your twitter, your tumblrstagram. Email it to your grandmother. Tell you cats! HERE IS A PICTURE OF POTATO TO MOTIVATE YOU! Potato is looking bummed because we’ve come SO CLOSE and it would be SUCH A HUGE BUMMER IF THE CAMPAIGN WAS TO FAIL. DO YOU WANT TO MAKE POTATO SAD? I DON’T THINK SO! $20 an hour! That’s, like, NOTHING! PLZ SHARE! HALP!
AND THANK YOU!!!!!
HALP!
I’m in my craigslist ride headed to seattle
And this is an experiment- blogging from my phone! On the PCT I’ll be doing this every day, typing words slow on the tiny keyboard on the tiny screen, my fingers cold, condensation on the keys, in the dark. In my tent with the nature all around me, stretching on and on forever. And typos!
I don’t know what kind of phone to get. I want a physical keyboard but Androids are buggy, in my experience, and iphones only have touch keyboards. Do blackberries still exist? Are those goods phones? Have you ever had one? I need advice.
Really I just want a tiny machine that writes, and connects to my blog. Maybe email. It wouldn’t have to even be a phone, not really.
Also I’m on twitter now, if you’re into that kind of thing. I post really wierd shit. @carrotquinn
I’m teaching a class on kindle publishing in Portland, on February 23rd
Learning to publish my work for the kindle platform has been a fascinating, frustrating, occasionally exhilarating process. I’ve learned so much in the last month, both from others and from trial and error myself, and now that my book is steady on Amazon, with a solid ranking and more than a month of consistent, daily sales, I’d like to share what I’ve learned with other small authors, so that more of us can get paid for the valuable work that we do.
The class will be at the Independent Publishing Resource center, at 1001 SE Division St in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, February 23rd, from 4 to 6 pm. The two-hour class is $15 for members of the IPRC, and $25 for non-members. You can register here.
This is an exciting time in self-publishing. I hope to see you there!!
