Tag: …while black

Interlude: Consumption

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I’ve been consuming a lot lately. Well, maybe not food, like I probably should be – I’m doing a surprising number of miles for living out of a Subaru, and I’ve likely spent the last week sore as a result of not eating enough. I’m not good with food. But I have a really hard time keeping myself from gorging on social media, mainly to keep up with people I care about, but also to indulge in that singular masochism that is reading the news.

And there has been so much news of late. Too much news to really recount. Continue reading →

Interlude: Well, That Happened.

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It seems that Donald Trump was just sworn in as the 45th President of the United States.

Well then.

I’ve seen a lot of posts to the tune of “this can’t be happening”/”this can’t be real”/”this must be a bad dream” after the election and in the weeks since, particularly given the influx of cabinet appointments of people who are either unqualified or have incredible conflicts of interest.

Y’all. This is happening. This is real. This is not a bad dream.

But you’re right in feeling that something’s not right. It’s not right that Congress has made it easier to transfer public lands to states, and easier for states to sell those public lands to private interests. It’s not right that Congress wants to make it harder for federal agencies to do anything about climate change or to classify species as endangered, regardless of what scientists have to say about either matter. It’s not right that Congress wants to gut the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and make it harder for similar laws – that protect all of us and our public spaces – to get on the books. As people who enjoy our outdoor public spaces, none of this should feel right.

But as today and tomorrow are days of action around the country, today I’m going to focus on concrete action. Here are some things you can do to try to protect our wild spaces:

Continue reading →

Interlude: Late Nights, Long Days

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I’ll admit that I kind of avoided talking about election season while it was going on. It was hard for me to keep up, honestly – I was kind of dealing with my own shit, dealing with the slow, inexorable decline of my endorphins, my dopamine, my seratonin, as I started to spend my days hunched in front of a computer instead of confidently striding down a trail. I mean, I kept up as best as I could while taking care of myself, but truth be told that was hardly better than it was while I was on the trail. I’d come into the living room to Spesh watching The Daily Show or @midnight and I’d get a few pieces here and there. I’d get on the book of many faces and see various articles that people had posted. That sort of thing. I didn’t hear much outside of my algorithm-induced echo chamber, but I knew, despite what I was hearing, that we were staring down the barrel of a potential Trump presidency. Continue reading →

Never Alone

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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 →

To and ‘Fro

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It seems weird that, of all the things I have to do before I hike the PCT in a few weeks, doing something with my hair is one of my top priorities. I’ve been pretty broke too lazy to actually do something with it all winter – stuffing it into a Buff whenever it got out of hand – but when I’m potentially not going to have access to someone who even knows that black hair is different from white hair for five months of my life1, now’s the time to figure out how I’m going to deal.
Continue reading →

The Long and Winding Road

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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 →