Reading Milan Fust on the Pacific Crest Trail by John Wilkinson
The story arc I had in mind when I quit my job in New York City and spent about five months hiking from Mexico to Canada was something like: I’ll escape the monotony of everyday life and after some travail, some natural beauty experiences, some instances maybe of danger which only serve to strengthen my resolve, I’ll attain some revelation or realization about the essence of American freedom and then neatly tie all of my questions and anxieties about life into a neat filmic knot, probably right at the culmina- tion of my journey. That’s not what happened obviously. Once I got to the Canadian border I turned around, walked back thirty miles and hitched a ride to Seattle, and then thought, fuck! What do I do now? I don’t think I’ve figured that out yet. It was good while it lasted though, really fucking good.
There were meadows of wild-flowers, 500ft waterfalls, there were altitude headaches, rattlesnakes, bears, boredom, discomfort, silent morning cowboy coffee, ice cold sodas after five day stretches of burnt desert walking, blisters, shoes falling apart on my feet, hunger, boring food, afternoon naps in long grass, lakes with marmots swimming in them as I bathed a few feet away, getting drunk in little towns in California with other dirty stinky hikers, seeing my lean, grubby, bearded, reflection in gas station windows. There were clouds that I saw form over Mount Shasta and then disappear instantly, and five minutes later reappear. There were days of snow-melt lakes in the High Sierras, infernal midday desert heat and desert night winds which howled all night long and into my dreams. There was trail running through storm and fog, over rain drip mushroom bloom and then injuries and wet clothes which wouldn’t dry and for a long time there was the fact that California just would not end.
In 2012, 425 hikers reported finishing all 2,650 miles of the trail, others didn’t report finishing and many others attempted to finish a thru-hike or completed section hikes or hiked for a few days, or just gave people rides or put hikers up in their homes. I met a lot of very impressive people, old kind people who appeared, did me a kindness and disappeared. I met a man from New-Hampshire who had built his own pack, told me he’d built his own house, built guitars for a living, had fashioned everything himself - an American. I met women in their 60s who had left their husbands at home and were hiking the trial for the third or fourth time, some with deeply stoical stories. I met kids from places like Tacoma, WA. and Allentown, PA. who had perhaps been unemployed, kids from this futureless generation who instead of doing nothing were doing this, full of gusto and mule-like energy.
When I first started though, the main experience was a crippling loneliness and pathetic sentimentality. I might compare those five months to a course of medicine or perhaps to some sort of mythical peyote quest, such was the strength of my mental alteration. Certainly the solitude more than anything else was what felt transcendent. But yes, first came the loneliness and it was constant, like heartbreak. It was there when I woke up and when I fell asleep at night. Through the desert I walked sobbing and whining, miss- ing everyone I knew, castigating myself for every mistake I could remember ever having made. I soon became beset by a deep love for my parents, a cloying insane sense-of- duty which was so unbearable that on a few occasions I had to literally fall to my knees and sob in the dirt. Childhood memories, came rushing back, they were unendurably sentimental, small memories which had been lost in storage for years were again huge, they came at me so vividly they felt like they had just happened...and then there were the girls I’d loved: too much to bear.
This loneliness lasted for about a month, on through the desert, which I grew intensely to despise, hating it’s every single attribute. I reached the small town of Mojave, Ca., in late May, almost certain that I would quit hiking the trail. I walked into town dead sick after drinking dirty water from the Los Angeles aqueduct. I spent three days in Mojave at the Motel 6 recuperating, drinking soda and watching films on HBO. During my last day and night in Mojave 90mph winds hit the town, and the roof came off my motel. Before I left town I went into a thrift store and bought a book, the hanging wood, by Martin Edwards, a terrible book, a lazy, derivative murder mystery set in Cumbria in England. All of the characters were terrible, the plot was terrible, everything about it was terrible, but my mind devoured every last bit of it. The next town I got to I bought Jules Verne and Charles Dickens, writers I’d passed over for more personal writers when I was younger. I had a wonderful time reading about Phileas Fogg, and then I read Great Expectations, what a fantastically ripping yarn! After that I loaded my bag with books - in a world of ultralight hiking gear, my pack would be laden with books. Up high in the Sierras, I swam in the lakes and drank from them, so pure was the water. For a few days I got lost and discovered passes and lakes not on the trail, celestial, unreal places of America which I jogged through apprehensively astray and tired. Several times a day I enjoyed a little ceremony of boiling water, for coffee in the morning, tea at lunch and noodles for dinner. And now I also spent about four solid hours a day reading. I laughed at distractions, I positively chuckled about them. No cell phones, no internet, not even a person to talk to, just a trail to walk and books to read. My loneliness had been broken, my mind now popped like a muscle designed only for focus and introspection, each book I read in this wonderful restive state was so vivid that I found my eyes often filled with tears.
Some towns had only bad books but I would read them, some towns had wonderful books, and I’d read them too. I read German detective novels, Fitzgeralds I’d never read before, I read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers; John Singer, the deaf-mute was so real that I lay in my sleeping bag and cried for him. I read Stoner by John Williams and was utterly floored by it. I read the genius Chekhov. I read Henry James who I’ve never liked, I read him anyway. I read writers who I’d missed like Aldous Huxley and Oscar Wilde. I read adventure books like Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and Into thin Air by Jon Krakauer. There was no rhyme or reason to what I’d read, I just picked up what I came across in resupply towns. The best town for books was Sisters, Oregon. A small town, it only had one little bookstore, but it was packed with good ones. Here I bought a very mighty book, one that had me screeching and crying and smashing the floor with my fists at its brilliance. My favourite book of all:
The story of my wife by the Hungarian-Jewish writer Milan Fust, a mad sprawling, stream of consciousness comedy about a tough guy sailor, spun mad by jealousy of his wife and by his own deceit; an unreliable narrator just as dishonest to his wife as she to him, or perhaps more so because he is the storyteller (she could be entirely innocent). Milan Fust was a beautiful genius to me. I wanted to stop hiking and run down from the mountains into a town and shout “Milan Fust, the Hungarian-Jew! Ever read his stuff? Hey! You over there, ever heard of Fust?” I wanted to walk into a diner and slap my hands down on the counter and say to every man, woman and child “Go to a book-store and pick up The Story of my Wife, by Milan Fust It’s a good one, you’ll enjoy it!”
My passion for reading and the job of hiking up mountains, walking beside lakes and though forests was really wonderful. And then suddenly it finished and that was it. There was no experience I’d had that would serve to make me know, what next. What now. I couldn’t suddenly walk into a corporate boardroom and say “Listen up! I’m tak- ing over. I know how to hike for miles and miles and put up with discomfort and such, these experiences have given me great insight about being an important man so quick, hurry up, get me a coffee I have some important things to do and so forth”. I learned little except that reading a lot of books and seeing California, Oregon and Washington by foot is very wonderful. You don’t have to do it alone, even if you start by yourself you’ll meet some wonderful people along the way and probably, if you so desire, find a partner to hike with. But, I wouldn’t swap the solitude I experienced for a companion. I’d never have read all of those books for one thing, or have gone so deep into my own mind, without distraction . In the future I should like to experience another course of solitude. I have a little dream about a cabin somewhere, maybe the Lost Coast in California, or the Carpathian Mountains.