Transition

I just got back from the wonderful Lost Coast Trail after many hours of driving and backpacking with Chiaki. So many lessons learned along the way, many ups and downs as you might expect from an intense adventure.

This writing adventure over the next week or so may all be lessons from the trip, but I am not sure yet. It looks like a lot of details are going to be left out of this story for now.

It’s funny, as the trip was ending there was a moment I realized, oh, there is reality on the other side of this. After being sucked directly into nature with just a few humans around for days. At that moment marked a sort of transition. One that had not yet begun, but the realization of the transition was there. What’s funny is this is markedly different than the transition that happened at the start of the trip.

The start of the trip was a whirlwind and chaotic. Chiaki and I more or less packed everything the night before leaving and starting our 14 hour drive north from San Diego to Black Sands Trailhead. We then immediately got on the road and plowed forward, stopping for a wonderful bite a chinese resturant in Fremont, and then onto a Motel 6 for the night.

I proceeded to get sick. And at this point we still didn’t have food for the trip. We stopped to grab some gear/food and then we continued on. As we drove, I was not feeling better, but we had some time to kill and played a round of disc golf in Ukiah.

When arriving at the trailhead, we had to pack food and pack our bags. Divying out what meals we wanted each day, and how much we were going to eat per day. We had to fit all that food in one bear canister I had. We expected the journey to take 4 days and 3 nights.

We went to sleep, woke up, had our oatmeal and were on our way. Picked up by the driver Justin and started to meet some friends immediately in the shuttle. We got on the trail and there was silence. An abundance of silence. Silence I hadn’t had in maybe months. At least not this kind of silence. I started to freak out. I’d been surrounded almost constantly by the AI whirlwind among many things. This was the transition from the whirlwind to the silence. It was unexpected, unconformtable, unfamiliar, and I did not consciously recognize it in the moment.

This was markedly different from the end of the trail where I immediately understood I was going through a transition once again. What’s interesting, is in the silence you can hear much better. In the chaos you cannot hear very well. I guess it’s time for me to begin to listen.