Diary - Mile 558
All the night walking. (Or only 3 nights that felt like 3 weeks).
Yesterday was exactly one month since I started the trail. And I am in Tehachapi, the city that officially ends one section of a map in the Farout app we are all using. Now, four more times of this and it’s done!
A couple of days ago, I have put my little thermometer on the sun at 15:00. In 5 min it showed 51C. We’ve tried to night hike this week. The view suddenly gets restricted to a small circle of light right in front of you. In it, is your whole hiking experience. You suddenly notice how much dust is in the air. It’s like having a 90s box TV that is broken and “snows” right at your face. Tens of white little moths lift of the bushes, flutter around your head and fly off into the dark. The most prominent feature of spiders become their eyes- they reflect the light, so when you go through a foresty area, all you see are spiders, dotted around like diamonds. You climb up a hill and see cities down below, lights flickering, wind farms flashing red, on and off. All of that accompanied with sounds of cicadas.
Other than these small beautiful moments, night hiking is reeeally not great. It’s like shooting long dialogue scenes in a crammed apartment on a night shoot at 2am when wrap is at 4am. When there are no calls, no e-mails, set is half-asleep, office is literally asleep, and you are desperately trying to keep your body from shutting down.
You finish hiking at 4am, have good sleep till 8am and then it gets too hot, so till noon you keep rolling around like some rotisserie chicken, trying to find a position with least surface touching between your body and anything else. You fail, you go outside in the shade, and get attacked by flies. Then you wish you were Neville and had a pet toad that could eat all those bloodsucking monsters to extinction. Or better, a whole frog farm chilling around you. But you don’t have any of those sadly, so you choose between being bitten or too hot. And now, since night walking was too tiring, we sort of mixed and matched, did two sleep cycles and accidentally ended up walking 41 miles in 24 hours. I need a rule to not walk more miles than the number of years I’m alive. Cause I feel 80 now…
The desert is beautiful, but brutal. The views are not compensating for the misery anymore my mind starts reacting to sun similarly as it reacts to math, as soon as I have to face it, it goes “No. Just no. Nope, nope, nope. No.” I would happily be done with it now and have trees instead. Shade, please. Shade and ice. One more week to sizzle in this frying pan.