Walking North

For two months, I awakened each morning to the first hint of dawn filtering through the blue wall of my ultralight tent. Sleeping and waking to the rhythm of the sun after walking 15-20 miles a day was a welcome routine change from 24 hour shifts as a flight nurse on a helicopter. I slipped dusty socks onto my beat up feet along with tie-dyed gaiters hooked to my trail runners. Then I packed up my gear and hiked north. 

There's something elegantly simple about getting up every morning and having one’s sole purpose be walking north. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is simple. Not long after I hiked the entire Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), I would look back aching for the connection that I felt with Mother Earth, the moon cycles, the sunrises and sunsets, the animals, and the wildflowers. However, in this moment around mile 800, about two months into my six-month journey, I remembered why I had set out on this adventure. 

This wasn't a quiet remembering. It felt more like a Mack truck knocking me down. I found myself in immense pain, my shoulders and upper back spasming, which made backpacking extremely difficult. I couldn't explain it. I had not injured myself. I had been doing this activity almost every day for the last two months with no problems or pain. Even though I could feel it in my body, there was a quiet inner knowing that it wasn't physical. It wasn't my backpack that was causing this pain. It was what I had been carrying internally for so long. I was hiking alone in the middle of a nine-day ration period with no cell phone service, suddenly with images of patients that had coded or died in my presence, asking for air time in my mind's eye. 

It was as if the universe was reminding me that I had been given a much needed gift. 

Spaciousness. 

This is a word I didn’t yet have for what was happening.  

It was now time to deal with my shit. 

It was time to lay down what was no longer mine to carry. 

When I started this hike on April 3rd, 2022, I was overweight and out of shape, and for the first month or so I wasn't sure I was going to make it all the way to Canada. Most of the armor that allowed me to perform in a high-stress environment was still fully intact. I hadn’t had this much time off work since I was a kid. I realized I didn't actually have to go back to work the next day, or the next week. In fact, if my psychiatric nurse practitioner had her way, she didn’t want me to go back to that type of work ever again, because she believed it wasn't good for me. I needed to move on, but I wasn't ready. 

I was burnt out, unhealthy, and going through a divorce. For the first time in my life, I could actually see how people could end their life. While I wasn't actively suicidal, the idea that I could see how I could get there scared me. I made the very difficult decision to allow myself to see the truth that I needed help. I needed the long break from rescuing others to heal myself. 

That's how I was able to get six months off. I'd like to call it a sabbatical, but in truth it was a mental health disability leave. In the military and first responder cultures that shaped me, admitting I needed help felt like failure. It was very difficult to accept. Up until this point, I hadn’t spent a single dollar of my disability payments. I was determined to give every cent back so that I didn't have to accept the diagnosis.

After several days alone hiking in pain, I found my way to a playlist that the friend who had picked me up in San Diego and taken me to the PCT trailhead had somehow known that I would need. This is a friend that I had done many adventure races with in the past, who agreed this time to crew me at the start of my biggest adventure yet. Her infinite wisdom had gifted me with Spotify family plan access and an intentional healing playlist. 

I had reached out to her via satellite messenger while camped alone one night so overwhelmed by all these memories coming up inside of me that I was feeling in my body and had been carrying for so long. Unable to talk on the phone and still a week's walk away from the nearest road access, she gently encouraged me to listen to the playlist. That music, as if guided by some higher wisdom, became my therapist for the next week. There were a few songs I played over and over, probably hundreds of times.  I allowed the music to move through my body as I walked north. Somewhere between one step and the next, I found myself transported back into the helicopter. 

On a hot summer day, a young man who had throat cancer was bleeding out from his tracheostomy site. From the back of the helicopter, after I calmly gave a radio report to the regional trauma center, I realized that my tone, cadence, and speech were so calm that I perhaps didn't paint a severe enough picture about his condition. I called back and told them to prepare for the worst, as we had just filled a suction canister with his blood. He was dying. Unsurprisingly, he coded when we landed on the rooftop helipad, and his body fluids and blood gushed out the back of the clamshell doors when I opened them. I jumped up on the gurney and performed chest compressions twelve stories above downtown Sacramento. This continued down the elevator and while being wheeled along a lonely dark hallway to the trauma bay. The attending physician looked at the team and said, "When the flight nurse calls and asks for a massive transfusion protocol, you should do it."

They rushed in to take over. 

He was awake and communicating with us when we picked him up. 

In less than 20 minutes, everything changed. 

While walking beside an impossibly clear alpine lake surrounded by snow-covered peaks, I saw his face again. 

I wept. 

In my earbud, a voice softly whispered “Bless and release what does not bring you peace…”. 

I honored him.

I honored his family, and told them that we had done the best that we could, and wished them all many blessings.

I allowed myself to feel this sadness, to grieve this loss.

I remembered and released the heaviness of that moment that I had compartmentalized so I could care for the next patient that day, and the next one after that.

This was just one of many scenes that played out over that stretch of trail. I revisited other helicopter transports, ICU patients, and even skiers that coded on the sides of mountains when I was an EMT ski patroller.

I saw them all.

I felt them all.

It became clear to me that this was what I had come to the trail to do. 

The gift of not having to go back to work created spaciousness so I could finally feel safe enough in my body to allow these memories, and the energy bound up within them, to be released. 

Looking back now, four years later, I smile at the woman who thought hiking the PCT would heal everything she had spent decades carrying. 

She didn't know she had only just begun taking the first steps. 

She knew only to keep walking north.