it’s a bad dream we’re not having anymore

…and now I’m not breaking
the train’s just shaking
and I’ve never made it here before
…it’s a long life
full of long nights
and it’s not what I was looking for
everybody dreams of horses flying ‘round the shore
it’s a bad dream we’re not having
anymore

- The Counting Crows

[saturday]

I wake up in the back of the Subaru, parked in a sort-of parking space in a crowded campground near Luther Pass. I’m simultaneously shivering and sweating — a weird physical reaction to sleeping crammed in a down sack, inside a semi-airtight vehicle, steadily emitting warm, damp carbon dioxide while the ambient oxygen dips below freezing.

I feel like dirt. I want coffee.

There is no coffee, obviously.

Dan drops me at the campground exit, where I can pick up the Tahoe Rim Trail and climb three thousand feet up the north ridge of Thompson Peak — just because. Because for some reason I can’t quite remember, this is how I decided to spend my Saturday.

My legs don’t want to move. There’s crud in all my gears, and most of all, there’s crud in my brain:

Why can’t you take care of yourself?
Why don’t you have any friends?
Why are you so weak?
You’re a burden.
You’re frigid.
You’re a freak.

I swim upstream in this mental sludge for one, then three, then ten miles. It’s like wrestling a huge snake; every time I clamp down on the head or the middle or the tail, some other bit of it curls around and pummels all the air out of me. My brain is in a full-on spin cycle, whacking around, a total unbalanced tilt-a-whirl. Stop the ride, I tell it desperately, weakly. I want to get off.

Why are you so weak?

God damn it.

The sun refuses to come out. I hike faster and faster, not even registering how hard I’m working, but I can’t get the cold out of the tips of my fingers. I know I should stop for a minute and eat something, but I just…don’t. The tilt-a-whirl spin cycle of doom is whipping me forward, driving toward oblivion.

It’s just a grey, crappy day, full of bad dreams.

At Star Lake, I run into a group of mountain bikers. They are warm and cheerful-looking, dressed in shorts and t-shirts. How are they warm? Why the heck do I feel so cold?

“Is there snow on the pass?” one of them asks me.

I yank out my headphones — I’ve been trying to drown out my brain with hard rock — and reply: “Only a little. Enough to be pretty, not enough to be obnoxious.”

The mountain bikers are pleased, because they do not realize how obnoxious literally everything else in the world is right now.

I bail down the Star Lake trail and run hard toward High Meadow trailhead. The trail winds back and forth across the slope, down and down. I can’t stop thinking about hot chocolate. I can’t stop beating myself up. The air around me thickens, but the tips of my fingers have forgotten how to get warm.

By 3pm I’m walking the road into South Lake Tahoe, iPhone clicking down the tenths of miles to the nearest Starbucks. Soft, misty raindrops patter on my head, my hands, the lid of my pack. I have somehow done twenty-three miles — I don’t remember any of them — and I finally feel strong and fast again, walking in the rain, cars whizzing by, road noise and wind finally, finally muffling the angry voices in my head.

Just walk, I think. Just keep going.

[sunday]

I wake up to a twenty-mile-per-hour wind beating on our screen door. I get my pack, stuff it with my down jacket and ski gloves, and climb in the car.

At the Looney Bean, I order a smoothie with almond butter, bananas, and about six shots of espresso. It tastes disgusting, but I drink it anyway, in short, fast sips.

At Wilson’s Eastside Sports, I buy brand-new Dirty Girl gaiters in a swirly black-and-white pattern. I imagine myself wearing these gaiters on a mountaintop, toes pointed slightly together, feet anchored in granite, sky all around me, shadow stretching east, wind blowing in my hair. I am nothing more or less than an extension of these gaiters. I have espresso running in my veins.

I am not having bad dreams today. I am just not having them.

I drive to the McGee Creek trailhead. When I step out of the car, there is no wind — just a hundred thousand aspens, covering the hillsides in yellow and orange flame. The trail is smooth and clear and I run it, whacking my hiking poles against my legs, waving and laughing as I pass ambling photographers and young families and couples with friendly dogs. I am going higher, higher; I don’t know how many miles higher. I am going to the pass, however high and far that is. I am going as high as I can.

Warmth spreads from my legs, from my chest, all the way out to the tips of my fingers. I’m not cold today.

I climb through the aspens, over steep granite switchbacks, past meadows and lakes. I see the pass, and then realize that what I’m looking at is not actually the pass, just a lower ridge — this happens approximately one thousand times, but I don’t really mind, because I am going to the pass and all of these preliminary ridge-crossings are clearly necessary and appropriate and imminently surmountable. The temperature drops at least fifteen degrees, and the wind picks up. I pause to pull on my gloves before my hands have a chance to go numb.

The trail turns to loose red slate, beautiful to look at and maddening to walk on. I cross a little snowfield, post-holing up to my calves and resigning myself to wet socks. I pull out my jacket and find that, between the cold and my thick gloves, I lack the manual dexterity to operate the zipper. I shrug, fold the edges of the jacket over my chest, cinch my pack straps down on top of them, and carry on. I blow snot into my right glove and watch as it freezes in the fuzzy crease between my thumb and forefinger.

I suspend belief until the last switchback. That’s not really the pass, I tell myself cheerfully. You think it is, but it’s not. You’re going even higher. You just don’t know it yet.

And then it is the pass, and I’m standing in a little saddle in the middle of a windswept red rock world, looking out at snow-dusted pines far, far down the other side.

It’s so cold. Twelve thousand feet in October cold. Frozen glove snot cold. Freaking ridiculous cold. Cold enough to make me feel every flicker of warmth in my body, every kilojoule of energy in my hot, espresso-laden blood. Cold enough to freeze me into myself in this moment, standing on a mountaintop in my swirly black-and-white gaiters, arms outstretched, letting the wind widen the space between my unzipped jacket and the shadowy phantoms of my own weak, frigid, burdensome little dreams.

I look over the pass one last time, and then I turn into the wind and head back down the trail.