Nine years earlier, when he was preparing for his first expedition up 20,320-foot Denali, Gary was anxious, short-tempered, and frequently frustrated with everything that had to be done. This climb was fulfilling a dream Gary had pursued for many years, and I naively assumed that the last few months would be a time of happy anticipation, rather like a child’s run-up to Christmas. Silly me. About two months before he was due to fly to Anchorage, I came down with a cough bad enough to send me to the doctor. He diagnosed bronchitis, and put me on antibiotics. Then Mary, just 16 months old, acquired a deep, racking cough unlike anything she’d ever suffered. This time, the pediatrician took a nasal swab, and the next day she gave us the shocking diagnosis: whooping cough. We’d all been immunized and, furthermore, we thought whooping cough had gone the way of smallpox and polio, no more to be found in the developed world. We were wrong. The next thing I knew, Mary and I were spending the night in an isolation ward at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Walnut Creek. There, she had a little gizmo shining a light through her finger so her blood oxygen could be measured, and every few hours she coughed so badly that she would throw up. Gary got sick, too, and he and Mary were quarantined for a week at home while the antibiotics took effect. And in the middle of all this, our beloved elderly cat died. With Gary’s training schedule in disarray and his health in question, he seemed to me both insensitive and selfish. I really hadn’t grasped that with a major mountaineering effort in his near future, he had to look out for himself more than for us. He had to be picky and self-centered if he wanted to survive. But I didn’t know that. By the time I took him to the airport, I was ready to tear up the return half of his ticket.
So in 2004, it came as no surprise to me that we were at our worst during those frantic last days. But we were hardly unique in that regard. Many thru-hikers also start the trail in something less than an ideal frame of mind. There are others whose leave-takings with spouses are tense, whose parents are reluctant to let them go, who wonder if relationships will survive or erode during the next six months. Those people are out there, but they don’t talk about it on the trail. Once people start hiking, they generally shake off all those doubts and stresses, at least for the first few weeks. All that really matters is that they’re finally walking. Everything lies ahead, and only Mexico lies behind.
WITH THE STRESS OF PREPARATIONS finally over, we began our hike as a family. And, of course, as a family, the dynamics of how we behaved at home continued on the trail. A complete change of surroundings didn’t change the fact that Mary and Gary share many personality characteristics, including stubbornness. This made for more than one tense day in the backcountry. As for getting out of camp in the morning—well! Any parent who has ever shouted at a dilatory child to “for heaven’s sake, find your shoes and put them on before the school bus gets here” can understand perfectly well what it was like for us. (How Mary could misplace so many personal items in the confines of a 6-by-8-foot tent is a mystery to this day.) We accomplished many goals during our six months of hiking together, but achieving quick starts in the morning wasn’t one of them.
Nonetheless, backpacking as a trio was wonderful. We were never lonely, on the trail or off. The longed-for but sometimes disturbing phone calls home that thru-hikers make during town stops, with their reminders that loved ones are far away and relationships and responsibilities are being neglected, didn’t trouble us. Our most important relationships were moving up the trail right along with us. The PCT became a shared experience we can draw on for context the rest of our lives. A day featuring particularly heavy rainfall will always be “an Olallie day,” and an unexpected treat will be “like that Gatorade near Bear Valley.” If I want to warn Mary that a new acquaintance strikes me as untrustworthy, I need only say, “He reminds me of Zeke.”
Having Mary along set us apart from the multitude of what some people refer to as “hiker trash.” Her presence guaranteed us a warm welcome and often an admiring audience at many of our stops. As a pre-teen attempting to walk from Mexico to Canada in one year, Mary inspired scores of parents to reconsider their own children’s outdoor experiences and ambitions. As trail celebrities, in a minor way, we occasionally enjoyed greetings such as, “Are you the famous 10-year-old?” (from a teacher hiking near Kennedy Meadows in the southern Sierra) and, “So you’re the famous family!” (from the postmistress at Belden in northern California). When everything from our feet to our feelings was hurting, the open admiration we encountered gave us a tremendous boost.
When we returned home, adjusting to routine life was made infinitely easier because of the shared nature of the experience. Solo thru-hikers in particular often find it terribly difficult to make that transition, because there is no one who can hold up the other end of the conversation. True, everyone asks questions, but they’re invariably the same questions. Once the returning hiker has explained how boxes of supplies are mailed to post offices and how food is protected from bears, conversations usually revert to the latest news about jobs and politics and vacation trips to Disneyland. As Triple Crowner Jackie McDonnell put it in Yogi’s PCT Handbook, her guide to all things PCT, “They’ll never understand.”
In our self-assumed role as crusaders for childhood exercise, Gary and I spent a fair amount of time talking to people we met along the PCT and explaining how it was that two 50-somethings and a 10-year-old could tackle a 2,650-mile trail. We told them all about our family values of exercise, good nutrition, and healthy living.
But as we worked our way up the trail, many of our other family values fell by the wayside or had to be adapted for the trail. I spent a lot of time thinking about these as we progressed on the trail:
EQUALITY: At home, I am the breadwinner, while Gary is a stay-at-home father. We spend most holidays with my family, but we fly East every year to visit his friends and relatives. I do the cooking, Gary does the laundry. I pay the bills, he keeps the cars running. We both wash the dishes. Sounds like the very model of a modern-day marriage based on equality between the sexes, but put us on the trail and it all disappears. I told Gary before we even started, “There are going to be times when I am too cold, wet, hungry, and miserable to even think. At those times, you will have to take charge, tell me what to do, and tell me in words of one syllable. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings.” Several times, I stood alongside the trail, cold, wet, and hungry, and moaned to Gary, “What shall I do?” Groan, whine, whimper. And Gary, who was also cold, wet, and hungry, would tell me what to do.
Now, I’m not totally insensitive. There were plenty of times when I resented Gary’s commands. I’d think to myself, just you wait until we get home! I’m going to tell you just where to put the dishes and just how to wash the clothes and just how to vacuum the living room rug! And I’ll use that same snarky, sarcastic tone of yours, you jerk. There were times when I thoroughly understood the homicidal feelings some people hold toward the leader of an expedition. Several years ago, I read the book Shadows on the Wasteland, by an Englishman who skied across the Antarctic with another explorer. The author, Mike Stroud, described his feelings on an earlier expedition—an effort to reach the North Pole unsupported by dogs, machines, or air drops—toward his partner, Ranulph Fiennes. Each pulled a heavy sled, and they had a gun to use against polar bears. It was clear from the start that Fiennes was the stronger of the two, and he was usually way ahead. This bothered Stroud. A lot. In fact, it bothered him so much that one day he concocted an elaborate plot by which he would catch up with his partner, pull out the rifle, and kapow! Death to the evil one. He would throw the body into the ocean, and make up a story about a polar bear and a frozen gun. He could call off the trip and still go home a hero. I never got quite to that point of resentment on the many days when I had trouble keeping up with Gary, either because I had to stay back with Mary or because I just couldn’t move that fast. On the other hand, I didn’t carry a weapon, either.
There were times when Gary reminded me of the tyrannical Captain Bligh in the