So it’s clear I’m quite a bit behind on my posting, and while I’ll have a load more up for you by morning – I’ve been trying to devote all my writing time to catching up on daily posts, rather than talking about the brown part of being a Brown Girl on the PCT – I need to get this off my chest. Continue reading
Tag: HWB
Day 33 – 500
It’s up at 4:45 today – Sasha left yesterday afternoon, so I’m making something of an effort to catch her, at least before she gets in and out of Tehachapi. Matt has agreed to give Moses a ride out1, and Moses has insisted he’s leaving Casa de Luna with me, so Matt’s agreed to give me a ride, too. The plan is to leave by 5:30 – there’s an 11.3 mile roadwalk around the closure that I want to finish before the heat of the day sets in, and I’m done in enough time to hit the road. Continue reading
Day 32 – Pay it Forward
My alarm goes off at 5:00 – and I turn it off. I roll over and sleep until 7:30. OH GOD IT’S LATE. But I have nothing to do for most of the day; it’s all just waiting until tonight. I’ll hike out around 6, walk back to the trail, and camp in preparation for the following day. Continue reading
Day 31 – House of the Moon
I wake at 5:30 to help with breakfast; Mama T shoos me back to sleep. I wake at 6:30; again, I’m shooed back to bed. So I lounge and I write until I can stay down no more, and I come just in time to eat pancakes and then do dishes. And then the day is my oyster. My relaxing, nothing-to-do-unless-I’m-asked oyster. Continue reading
Day 30 – Uh-oh
I’m up at 3:30, take my time about getting packed and I’m still ready to go by 4:05. It’s still super dark, darker than it was when I went to bed, or so it seems, but that’s the fun of pre-dawn “light”, or so I’m told. It’s always darkest before the dawn, or whatnot. Continue reading
Never Alone
When I first started this blog in the fall of 2014, planning to hike the PCT in the spring of 2015, I did so partly because I love to write and my mother I wanted a place where I could prove I hadn’t been eaten by a bear share my experiences, being human and a woman and brown and hiking.
I also did so partly after having inquired around the PCT community and scouted around and done quite a bit of Googling, finding that there seemed to be no place, no person that would tell me, as a black woman, about what to expect re: socio-racial relations on the trail. At least, not that I could find. Continue reading
The Long and Winding Road
So I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, particularly about the meanings ascribed to brownness and ladyness and intersectionality and hiking, and what I see as the tension among those things and between those things and the space I’ve carved out for myself on this blog. It’s complicated – like most things worth understanding are – so bear with me. Continue reading
Real-World Imposition: Intersectional Privilege
In towns, it feels like I’m near-constantly glued to a screen. Mostly, it’s because I chose the wrong external battery for writing blog posts – I should’ve brought the big one – but also because I have relatively few hours in which to contact the outside world, see what’s going on, not become completely disconnected from context. Otherwise, it’s all eating and resupply and talking with friends and and and – it’s easy to just forget the rest of the world is there.
But when I heard through the Facebook grapevine that Blackhawk started the Colorado Trail, I got absurdly, unabashedly excited. Not only another brown person, but another black person! Hiking! And while he’s only slightly newer to this whole backpacking thing than I am, he’s out there! Doing it! Getting it done despite hesitations and fears and a heavy pack and all those things I’m feeling. And I’m excited for him and excited for me and excited for us and and and–
And I wonder how different our experiences will be: he as an identifiable black man, me as a visually-ambiguous brown-black woman-girl.
Extra Weight
So a couple days ago, after Jane and Sarah’s departure, I’m walking Frisco trying to find postcards, stamps, batteries, other little odds and ends I need for the leg to Twin Lakes, and I’m made aware of folks looking at me. Staring. Doing a really bad job of hiding the fact that they’re staring, and not like “hey baby” staring, but confusion staring.
And then I realize that I’m pretty much the only brown person in town. Continue reading
More Than Me
So in planning this whole thruhiking endeavor, I’ve been well aware of how selfish it is. I have few illusions about my endeavor; my fiscal ability to escape, to (literally) walk away from the problems plaguing Black and Brown folk, is an indicator of my privilege1. And while this blog, I hope, is indicative of my attempts to stay engaged in/with the struggle for equality – or at least to push for it in other arenas – I thought I’d try to do something a little more potent, too.
As such, I’ve set up a CrowdRise fundraiser for Big City Mountaineers. BCM is a Denver(-ish) based non-profit that works to get urban, at-risk (read: primarily Brown) teens into the backcountry, so they can get a second to breathe, to collect themselves, before heading back into the fray. People who travel, who move, often get a better sense of the bigger picture: it opens their minds to possibilities beyond what they know. There’s a reason myopia is a disease, and I want to help afford these young adults the opportunity to both broaden their perspectives and give them a chance to focus on themselves, away from others who police their bodies, tell them who they should be and how.
Getting outdoors has been healing for me – I’ve found in the mountains a place where I just get to be me, away from all the politics and presuppositions around my skin color. And while I’d argue no escape can or should be permanent, if you’re up for giving these kids a break, please consider donating. They’ll have the rest of their lives to live the struggle.
[1] Along with the initially-ambiguous nature of my ethnicity, my cis-gender, my able-bodiedness, arguably my nationality… I pulled a pretty okay birth card, all things considered.
Brown Girl on the NST 