A Walk Across California

My life, which is my geography, has been split between those places that mean something to me for their natural vibrancy, their indescribable connection to my spirit, and those places that bear the weight of my human history.  Nature has always been the balm of my tumultuous times. To a young person buffeted by difficult meanings and unclear negotiations of life, nature and its trails offered a clear path and a moment’s release from the wild ride of growing up.  Later nature provided a framework for study, hours indulged in botanizing or observing animals, often in the happy company of others equally enthusiastic.  Emotions distilled from loss, urges of generosity, and the gift of beauty found a deeper purpose in activism to save wild bits and odd creatures.   This walk stems from the gratitude of a life held in the complicated fabric of nature – a world of such diversity of form as to leave a mind speechless and in that rarest state of all –still.

 

Rite of passage

 

Turning fifty years old this year I have wished to create a suitable celebration or monumental recognition of this fortunate chunk of time.  Like many of my cohort of mid-lifers whose parents have died I feel like I have “queued up” for my own exit. Now is the time to get in some accomplishment before it is too late. The quantum leap in my role in the “scheme of things” is the immediate impetus for a perhaps overly ambitious project. My choice of marking my place as having once indeed lived has developed into a plan to walk across California.  The walk qualifies as a “big deal” but I am no athlete and I have chosen to do this trip in chunks, and when that is not possible, in bits. 

 

I have wished to cross California on foot for at least twenty years.  The notion served as an idle dream born of the responsibilities of family life that had kept me tethered to home for much of my daughter’s young life and my parent’s last days.  The frustration of the lack of hiking and backpacking in my life led to the creation of my alter ego Phoebe Black, a woman, like the black phoebe bird, that flies away from her perch to return again and again, a life of many trips with little distance.  It was a comfort to adjust the realities of motherhood to an understanding that a lifestyle could be forged that was a response to different demands, treasured demands, but different.  I stopped thinking of myself as migratory and became instead a flycatcher.  Life was a constant activity of hopping here to the grocery store, and then home, and here to a trail, and home, and here to a school, and here to a patch of birding, and then home, always home again. 

 

This walk will have a similar structure.  Four years ago my family of three moved to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. I had lived in California in the East Bay hills for my entire life prior to this abrupt change. Now I plan to return to California for short trips when I can, to walk for as long as I need to get across the state.  My now fourteen-year-old daughter Irene is ensconced in a boarding school in Victoria British Columbia (her desire not mine), and this phoebe has bigger chunks of time to fly away from her perch.  I will return to my Washington home territory, after gleaning my nourishment, my favorite food of California, taken in as I walk.  My walks will be assisted by my car, my bike, motels or camping sites, meals in restaurants, showers, friends and most importantly by my husband Stephen Evans who will accompany me as much as possible since I am not particularly brave.  Steve will also serve as photographer and by his own insistence on knowing where he is, as co-navigator.  In the summer our daughter will join us for her own march across her birth state, hopefully not perceived as a forced trek.   At this writing I have cobbled together four separate days of walking, and one stretch of five days for a total of approximately seventy-five miles and the landmark of having reached the Central Valley.  Future writing will recount these days, and a new chunk of walking is planned for early June.