Project Eveningland

There’s this weird instinct that I get after about three weeks into any long hike. It’s a nesting instinct. I start thinking about all the changes I want to make to our house. It becomes a way to cope with homesickness—I walk the trail and dwell pleasantly on all the changes Benny and I might make to our little sanctuary on my return. But the instinct has become a bit painful now that I’m temporarily home.

Here’s the painful part: all the hiking energy, now with nowhere to go, has combined with the nesting instinct and propelled me on a series of madcap home renovation projects all undertaken while resting after a 1400 mile walk. It has been frugal fun, though.

Over the last year or so, Dad has kept speaking wistfully about how the bottom of the antiques market has “fallen out.” I thought, well, sounds like an opportunity to buy some actual furniture for dirt cheap. Ben and I picked out a wonderful little vintage end table we’ve needed for a while. We also cleaned out the garage and overhauled our basement storage system. Ben had bought me two little drawn prints of Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets. We took them to a framing shop. The list goes on and on. Ben tells me he loves all the changes and marvels at how fast they have unfolded. He’s so pleased he’s been willing to repeatedly stop for food and hardware supplies on his way home from work after a 12-hour shift.

I’ve turned our living room bookshelves into a small “museum” which displays a rotating (we have to rotate it) set of artifacts from our lives, with funny little placards that I write in the manner that someone would 100 years from now, sorting through our junk and putting it on display because we are inexplicably famous enough to warrant such efforts. It’s not aggrandizing; it makes everyday objects—like an old cow-shaped cream dispenser from my grandma—into precious artifacts. It’s actually the opposite of what I saw as the moral of “Everyday Use,” a short story by Alice Walker which I read in college and liked (good prose), but found a shade too prescriptive/narrow in its implicit argument about class, remembrance, and connection. I took a counterintuitive lesson from it: it’s actually a great joy to recontextualize old objects and give them dignity and honor. It makes me feel connected to them in a different way from everyday use, and that carries its own delights.

I got the museum idea partly from an activity we did in journalism school: write your own obituary. We all got depressed—you could feel the shift in the classroom mood—but then Professor Haggerty hurriedly explained that you should write it as if you lived to 120 and did wonderful things. Then it became great fun, for me anyway. Same idea here—we are dreaming of a long, long life filled with humble adventure and good memories.

Ok, I’m guessing you’re here for hiking updates, and here they are! My father flew out to Colorado on Saturday and has been hanging out and vibing on my home improvement kick (Dad shows love by doing things for you, and he got on my wavelength immediately). He installed an antique chandelier he brought in his suitcase. The fixture once hung in my maternal grandmother’s house when she was a girl. We think. Dad found it in Great Uncle Steve’s basement (G.U. Steve was grandma’s baby brother) before he passed. We will have to confirm with my grandma, who recently celebrated her 99th birthday. The house burned in, if memory serves, an unsolved arson. Would have been 1930s I’d think. We tease my poor mother by suggesting that all the stories from that side of the family end in tragedy.

It’s more complicated than that. Grandma’s life has been difficult and at times tragic (and so was Freeman’s, my maternal grandfather) but she had a happy marriage, raised nine children, and is now cared for by her devoted family to the degree that she can live independently in her own home. And her mind is sharp at 99. That’s no tragedy story! And yet, there were many tragedies—certainly enough for intergenerational trauma to have epigenetically sprinkled anxiety and depression across our lines. Or maybe I’ve misunderstood the science or maybe the science is wrong. An interesting thought in any case.

Look, I promise I’m going to get to more hiking updates right after I’m done talking about chandeliers. So Dad painstakingly strips down this old chandelier, which has been sitting in barns and basements for maybe 70 years. He puts in all new sockets and wires. Then spends half a day cursing (but not really) in the basement trying to get the damn thing together again and make the modern parts fit safely. Ben picked up some vintage-looking LED bulbs on his way home and we all admired the (now dimmable and low voltage!) brightness of something old made useful again. I thought I felt a pride coming from the thing, a sense that the trendy Edison-style bulbs had taken it by surprise, that it now “felt” joyful to shine in the way it once had. All may yet be well.

We aren’t done chandeliering. Ben and I got a weird idea: let’s put a big giant new chandelier in the garage! I got the inspiration from watching The 100 on the CW just before the pandemic (I binged it on Netflix). Folks, the show was dumb, if for no other reason than that it expected us to believe a bunch of starving kids shipwrecked on earth from a decaying space station could have six packs and perfectly coiffed hair. But the set designers were just off the gosh darn hook! One season featured a crashed spaceship’s cargo bay turned into a still/bar, complete with a massive chandelier salvaged from an underground presidential bunker. Awesome and absolutely the mood we are going for in our garage. We chose red glass, which I had seen a bunch of in the antique store and loved. It’s not, like, an actual nice chandelier, but it sure looks like one!

What a whirlwind of a week and a half. I’ve also found time to reorganize gear and mostly pack for the last leg of my hike. I’m going to rejoin the CT where I left off, about an hour outside of Gunnison. It’s going to be hot and dry, but I am deploying a set of overlapping heat countermeasures that I feel will keep me alive and healthy and happy for the journey. I’ll attempt a conservative eight-day carry to a resupply package. That resupply should carry me all the way to Durango, the southern terminus. I’m attempting 185 miles on two food carries (i.e., two resupplies). It’s an isolated trail.

I haven’t done much to exercise besides walking and stretching. I will have to adjust to thinner air up there (the Colorado trail averages—averages!—an elevation of 10,000 feet above sea level). My trail legs are probably gone. The only way to keep my body in thru-hiking shape is to actually be thru-hiking. It just does not sustain outside of that context.

The blog entries will be daily beginning Wednesday night, but may have to be posted in batches, because the service down there is gonna be thin.