I had three days and 30 hours of driving with nothing but the road in front of me, my dog at my side, and endless, looping thoughts.
Maybe it’s the heartbreak I have to be thankful for. Because in the end, that’s what’s motivated me to write this. To pick up my phone’s voice recorder between ridiculous sobs over something that never was and start talking as I listened to “If the World Was Ending” on repeat. To start planning. To start scheming.
When I’m happy nothing ever gets done.
Even calling it heartbreak makes it melodramatic. Nothing broke. I did this to myself. Against all my better judgement – I built something in my head based on faulty evidence and it collapsed with me inside it. It’s an ache. A longing for something I shouldn’t even be missing. And it enrages me that I can’t just shut it off and run. All I can do is feel it and let my mind and body sort through everything I’ve put it through for no other reason than gross hope.
In these moments, there’s a choice. Fully disintegrate into emotional goo – or scream my heart out to Billie Eillish’s new album and drain the venom.
I chose the scream. And I chose the phone calls to friends who listened to me whine and cry and self-loathe into oblivion. And I chose to let myself feel things that translated into what some could consider reckless driving at speeds far above the posted limit in the middle of Wyoming.
A couple days back home granted me clarity. And opened my eyes to the complacency I’d tumbled into since the coronavirus lockdowns first hit. Dreams and hopes I’d left on the floor. Half-finished websites and journals and plans. Abandoned ideas that had once lit a fire inside me that I’d doused out with busy work and distractions and the hope of something I knew wasn’t meant to be.
Things fall apart when I stop listening to my gut.
I fell in love with the American West five years ago. Somewhere in between seeing the Fire Wave in the Valley of Fire and the Joshua trees of JNTP, the desert began pulling at me. My visit to the Moab reassured me I was moving in the right direction. The moment I came out of El Portal at Yosemite and the valley opened up beneath me, I knew I would never leave this part of the world.
Second is my love of the road. Long drives in the backwoods of the Midwest were my solace as soon as I turned 16. They were my one escape from youthful depression and the toxicity of my family as my parent’s marriage died it’s drawn out death. Not a thing can’t be solved by a drive into the woods in the night with no direction. I tested this love with a trip down Pacific Coast Highway a year ago. And while the drop offs into the Pacific Ocean and decrepit bridges over deep valleys along Big Sur had me white knuckling for hours, I still treasure the memory. The imminent fear of death makes every moment last.
I created this blog and brand a few months ago. Lacking direction and purpose, I have let it stall. I had a goal of 52 hikes this year. I have a goal of getting to the highest point in each state of the United States. I’ll see every National Park before I die. I’ll scale half dome. I’ll climb Kilimanjaro. I’ll backpack through endless through hikes. I’ll shed the mediocrities of what people consider a “normal life” for these experiences I crave instead. I won’t kill my ambitions at 28 and allow myself to be the walking dead until I end up in a crematorium.
At first, I wanted to share these experiences with the goal of motivating others to do the same. But now I’m realizing that more so than helping other people – I need this blog for me. More than this blog, I need this life change for me. I’m no athlete – I’m not some survivalist. I grew up in middle-class white suburbia. I work a corporate job. I could live and die comfortably if I so chose. I’m just a girl who’s feeling the walls of the room of a mundane life squeezing in and I’m hopping out through the ceiling instead of accepting the pressure.
And all it took was the depths of heartache for me to wake up and smell the sunflowers.
The outdoors, the canyons and the forests and the oceans and the mountains… that’s where I belong. I know this sounds romanticized and naïve. I don’t plan to speed off into the Redwoods and live in a hut and commune with the grizzlies. It’s not only serenity I crave. It’s the juxtaposition of beauty and devastation, the pain of being pushed to limits and sometimes falling short. The realizations I have about life when everything sucks. A feeling of being awake that I’ve lost in the concrete jungle. I’ll trade this cozy night of sitting at my iMac with my swirling lava lamp for a cold night in a frozen camp with the stars as my only light. I want to see the Milky Way and take solace in how small I am. Taste fresh air and open my eyes to waves crashing into cliffs. Feel the high of getting to the peak after a long struggle.
There’s so much more to this world and I refuse to sit idly by and let it slip away. As forests burn and glaciers melt, time’s running out for the planet. As I start to hit the age of thirty, my path through life becomes further cemented every day. I’ve had these thoughts push further and further to the surface of my brain but sometimes it takes more than passive plans to put the train in motion. For me it was welding shut a door that I’d held open with my foot for years too long.
This blog is a love letter to something worth chasing after. Freedom. Challenges. Independence. Adventure. The American West and all the beauty of this country. Perhaps someday the world if we ever return from this collapse. Probably my beagle and my Silverado too.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Trusting myself doesn’t come easy. Realistically, trusting myself and being wrong about it brought me here.
But I’d much rather live my life with intention than just continue to ride the wave of normalcy.
Bring me the road. Bring me the west. Bring me home.
-KG
Hiking West 