This is the fifth in a series of stories and essays from the Pacific Crest Trail—a 2600-mile hike from Mexico to Canada. If you’d like to support Dressing Like a Kangaroo, share this post with someone who can’t stop walking.
Ninety-mile-an-hour winds are enough to send a human across the desert like a tumbleweed. Eighty will put a grown man on his ass. But, seventy-mile-an-hour winds: that’s a good time. Seventy gives you that stomach-in-the-throat rollercoaster thrill like your feet barely touch the ground.
Due in large part to the winds, the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm is a little piece of sideways planet: it’s got a different gravity to it. A sideways gravity. It makes for a topsy-turvy riddle of a world. The small birds can only fly East towards the sunrise, and the grasshoppers they chase are bullets in the wind. Ants pour out of their ant hill—flattened to a hole in the ground—and are swept loose from the crust. The caterpillars, the poor caterpillars, have no hope of being a gentle butterfly. Not here. Their tubular forms just tumbled down the trail.
Squeezed between the Sierras and the San Jacinto range, coastal breezes bottleneck through the valley. It’s called the Venturi Effect, the same principle that makes jet engines so effective.
Being in Tehachapi Pass on a windy day is like experimenting with a different physics engine. It’s a playground. I tossed sand into the wind to watch it disappear over the horizon. Inevitably, my activities devolved towards childish fantasies. I was throwing food as hard as I could into the wind to see if I could catch it in my mouth. And then, a pissing contest, of course, with the advantage of a jet engine.
I’d all but given up, for the moment, on my real goal. My responsible goal, if you could call it that. A certain amount of explanation is required when you step away from everything you know to trek through the mountains for half the year. The decision to quit your job, end your lease, and throw your furniture on the curb invites questions. Mainly, why?
There’s hardly an explanation I could give that would fully satisfy the concerns of those who loved me and wanted me to do well in life. The best I could hope for is an answer to satisfy my own fears. I told my parents, I just like walking all day.
Looking back on it, I can see why that response is unsatisfactory, but it’s about as close to the truth as I could get.
Some adventurous people dream of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail for decades while waiting for the right time to sail into the wind. I wasn’t one of those people. I just snapped one day and decided I’d quit my job and walk full-time. The trail was a convenient excuse.
They say you shouldn’t hike a long trail to solve all your problems. I’d say I wasn’t trying to solve all my problems, just one big one: what should I do next?
I think I was expecting the clouds to part at some point, deep in the desert or high in the Sierras, revealing a giant bearded man in the sky—or at least a burning sage bush vision. I was chasing some sort of spiritual, divine answer to guide me, and walking was as much of a devotion as I could make.
I know that walking full time isn’t really at all a job, but I thought maybe it would give me clarity on some way to make do that didn’t drive me to madness. I wish I was blessed with the mind of a lawyer or a doctor. But, unfortunately, in some cruel joke of the heavens, I am passionate about walking. And I’m good at it.
I was born in the wrong era, a few thousand years too late. I think I would have made a killing carrying quipus—messages translated into knots in rope—from Inca village to Inca village in the high Andes. But, the career path of walking has been made obsolete in recent years by the cell phone, the highway, the horses, and the written word.
After thirty days of walking, thin and dusty, I took my first rest day in Tehachapi. It’s a grayish city that flutters around my mental map of Southern California riding the wind. I spent a day drinking gas station coffee and eating mass-produced donuts, sneaking into a hotel to do laundry, and sitting by the pool.
After a day of sitting around, I hitchhiked out of town toward the wind farm. There’s an eight-mile stretch of trail sandwiched between two highways under the whir of the windmills—five-hundred-foot tall mechanical soldiers who paraded the hillside.
This section of trail, compared to the illusory wilderness on either side of it, is scarred by roads, stampeded by windmills, and wrapped in barbed wire fencing. There’s nothing traditionally beautiful about the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm, and the wind had carried off any hopes of obscuring the blemishes. There were no trees; it was a brown and beige grassland. My own hopes of receiving some sort of spiritual message blew away as soon as I passed the last Joshua Tree, and they would remain dormant until I climbed the peaks of the high Sierra.
Or at least that’s what I thought, but spiritual experiences aren’t revelations that can be chased. While the whole world was tipsy on the wind, I forgot entirely about all of my ambitions, and I thought for the first time: I could die here and be happy. Not in a morbid sense, but in a transcendent sort of way. There was nothing more I needed to do.
The otherworldly gravity, the hilarity of the whole world tilting on its axis, made my life feel inconsequential in the best of ways, just experimental physics.
In that moment of clarity, I decided that’s how I wanted to go: dropped off the edge of the earth. I pictured my ashes pitched into the wind with the force of a jet engine1. I pictured a funeral where nothing stays put, where the flowers, the chairs, and the guests are whisked away and scrambling around the desert to the tune of circus music.
It’s hard to take anything too seriously in a seventy-mile-an-hour gust; you are relieved from the burdens of living on earth. The gravity of it. That’s where spiritual moments happen. You can’t predict them. You can only lighten yourself and hope the wind takes you away.
Thanks for reading! For an introduction to the full project, you should check out Inefficiency is the Heart of Adventure.
I’m serious. Spread my ashes in a seventy-mile-an-hour gust on the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm.
What a terrific plan for your ashes. I keep chanigng mine. Everywhere I wanted to be got too riich for my taste. Luxky you! I think I'll wind up in an urn my best friend bought me yeqrs qgo.
Love your writing Ethan.