Zero Days. Barbara Egbert
I tried. I really tried to develop a salty vocabulary on the trail. But my good Lutheran upbringing wouldn’t let me do it. I managed an occasional “hell” if I not only slipped on a boulder but banged both shins while crossing an ice-cold Sierra stream. And I managed to squeeze out a few “damns” here and there when the mosquitoes per square inch of skin exceeded a dozen, or when I stubbed a blistered toe for the tenth time in one day, or when I realized that the road crossing we’d just reached still left us 10 miles short of the campsite I had confidently anticipated seeing in just half an hour. But I never became any good at it. Gary, on the other hand, swore like the proverbial sailor, and used up the entire family’s quota of cuss words in an average morning. Mary, being 10, was the manners police officer for all of us. Ask the parents of most any grade-school child, and they’ll tell you how that works. Little Miss Enforcer never missed a chance to remind us that good manners could and should continue on the trail. And Gary never missed a chance to push her buttons.
Somehow, I always found myself in the middle of these discussions, which usually went something like this:
Captain Bligh: Burrrrppppp!
Scrambler (after waiting for a good three seconds): Daddy, say, “Excuse me.”
Captain Bligh: Daddy say excuse me.
Scrambler: Daddy! Say, “Excuse me”!
Captain Bligh: Say excuse me!
Scrambler (louder and more agitated): Daddy! Excuse yourself!
Captain Bligh: Excu—
Nellie Bly: Oh, shut up, both of you!
Captain Bligh and Scrambler (in unison): We don’t use that language in this family!
Nellie Bly: Well, excuuuuuuse me!
CLEANLINESS: Hah! Normally the kind of people who obsess over showers and clean clothes, we were the trail’s dirtiest hikers. Others somehow found time to take dips in lakes and streams, but slowpokes that we were, we always seemed to have barely enough daylight to get from tent site to tent site, eat, and sleep. It got to the point that Mary found clean people objectionable because the fragrance of their soap, shampoo, and deodorant was too strong. We have photos of our legs as black as obsidian from shorts-level to socks-line. We did wash our hands after every “bathroom break,” which is more than many backpackers can say. But without soap, our hands always looked grimy. And our fingernails were just filthy.
I hadn’t always felt so comfortable with dirt. When Gary and I first started backpacking, I insisted on taking along enough clean socks and underwear to put on fresh pairs every day, and enough T-shirts to change every other day. I would bathe in cold streams if nothing better was available. Gradually, I learned that I didn’t need clean clothes to survive, and that just because I smelled as bad as a three-day-old corpse, I wouldn’t automatically become one. On the PCT, we each carried two sets of clothing—shirt, underwear, and pants—and wore one set between each pair of town stops, saving the clean set to put on after our showers while the dirty clothes were being laundered. The one thing we carried an ample supply of was socks. We realized early on that dirty, gritty socks contributed to foot problems, and on many days in northern California, I spent my snack breaks washing socks in the dwindling creeks, downstream from where Gary was filtering water. We would dry the wet socks by hanging them over the horizontal straps on the outsides of our packs, cinched tight so nothing would fall off. In case there was any doubt, this clearly identified us as thru-hikers. After Captain Bligh spilled a bit of macaroni and cheese on his trousers during dinner, Mary wrote a brief journal entry that summed up the state of our personal hygiene: “Dad spilled food on himself. He thinks he’ll smell like sour milk. What’s the difference?”
Our hygiene was a little better when it came to food, although we occasionally ate something that had touched the ground briefly, as long as it didn’t look dirty, and there were no cows around. I forget who told us the M&M riddle, but it came to express my views pretty accurately:
Question: How can you tell different kinds of hikers apart?
Answer: Put a red M&M on the ground. A dayhiker will step on it. A section hiker will step over it. A thru-hiker will pick it up and eat it.
PRIVACY: In a tiny tent? Gimme a break. We did have our customs that provided a little privacy. I would wake up first, get into my clothes, and then wake the others. Mary, being so small, figured out how to dress inside her sleeping bag. Once we were both out, Gary would dress. But there were plenty of times when we all had to change clothes at once, and just ignore each other. Bathroom breaks were no problem during the first several weeks—we were among the first on the trail, and during April and May, we often went for days without seeing a soul. When nature called, I would just step a few feet off the trail and squat while Gary and Mary traveled on. (When it was Mary’s turn, I stayed with her.) But on the more popular sections, I got caught a couple times. Luckily, the two men near the San Joaquin River in southern California pretended they hadn’t seen me. The seven or so hikers near Thielsen Creek made believe that being mooned on the trail was just another part of the Oregon outdoor experience.
FOLLOWING THE RULES: For backpackers, Gary and I are on the obsessive side of the ledger when it comes to obeying regulations. We get permits to hike, we get permits to camp, we fill out all the forms, we follow the rules about fires, and we stuff our dollar bills in those little “iron rangers” if no live rangers are there to collect our money. We’re that way in private life, too. We pay our bills on time, drive the speed limit (OK, I go 5 miles per hour over), and never miss a vehicle registration deadline. We started out on the PCT with every intention of continuing our straight-arrow ways. Gary wrote in for our trail permits and paid for the Whitney stamps so we could climb the highest peak in the lower 48 states without worrying about hassles at the top. (Only a few thru-hikers skip the permit stage, but many don’t bother getting the Whitney stamp.) We generally camped where we were supposed to, never built a fire, disturbed no archaeological treasures, and harassed no endangered species.
But as we moved north, we discovered that you can’t do the trail and still follow all the rules. In serious bear country, we were really careful about food storage, but there were rainy nights in Oregon when we slept with our food in the tent. As for campsites—there were places where we just couldn’t obey every last regulation. I particularly remember a long section of trail approaching Castle Crags State Park in northern California. The guidebook noted that camping was illegal for several miles before the park border, because the trail ran through private property. And it was also illegal to put up a tent once inside the state park, where camping was allowed only in established campgrounds, and the trail didn’t go through them. Thanks to water concerns and other logistics, there wasn’t a way we could avoid camping somewhere in that stretch. Imagine my complete lack of surprise when, just before the park border, we found a spot where people obviously camped quite often, sometimes in large numbers. We stayed there, too. We bent the rules as little as possible, but without some bending, it would have been very difficult to finish.
We also went from purists to pragmatists when it came to staying on the official Pacific Crest Trail. We all agreed on our definition of a thru-hike: Walk all the way from Mexico to Canada in one calendar year, with all sections linked together on foot. (For example, if we had to skip a section due to a forest fire, which often happens to PCT thru-hikers, we would have to go back and walk it after finishing the rest of the trail.) We also started out determined to stick with the trail as much as possible. During our town stop in Idyllwild, we engaged in a long discussion of whether we did wrong to take an alternate route, the Little Tahquitz Valley Trail, when we couldn’t stay on the official route because it was buried under snow and I kept falling down. My feeling was that the detour was perfectly OK. Bolstering my opinion was the fact that another hiker, Walks Alone, had to drop out because he broke his collarbone falling on the slippery official route. That could have easily happened to me. As we moved north, we kept it official as much as possible, but when the weather began to worsen, we took occasional alternate routes, especially if they were recommended in the guidebook. Taking an alternate route sometimes was safer, but not always. The closest we came to risking death was in September when we decided to walk around Russell and Milk creeks because of their reputation for danger during rainy weather,