Category Archives: songsoutofthecity

Országos Kéktúra – the National Blue Trail of Hungary

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The Hungarian flag emblem, and underneath the everpresent blue and white striped blaze of the Blue Trail

Touted as the oldest sanctioned walking route in Europe, the Országos Kéktúra makes a long loop around Hungary – traversing low mountains, ancient villages, rolling low hills of wheat and hay fields and extensive beech and other deciduous forest. Meandering on steep (Appalacian trail like) stone trail, rolling well groomed single track, seemingly unmaintained muddy forest trail, abandoned and active agricultural roads and some highway walking the tramp offers something significantly different from Harpo and my experience of walking the national scenic trails in the US.

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Well groomed single track thru expansive beech forest 

The road walking is kinda a bummer. After hiking for days on end thru high mountains in the Sierra, the green tunnel vibes, followed by a 5k pavement trek into town is a much different experience. This is offset by the fact that you can drink espresso every morning in some age old cafe, the bar tended by a patron only somewhat younger than the cobblestones that line the streets. And the energy, enthusiasm and kindness of the rural Hungarian people are unmatched. This is a kind of rural life we imagine with nostalgia in America, or even in Northern Europe (Huck reminds us – iz not like these even in Denmark anymore).

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If the blazes lead to the vineyard, prolly you’re headed the right direction. The various colored blazes indicate different hiking routes. 

The trail itself is exceptionally well marked – you’re in no danger of getting lost. There is also a set of GPS waypoints available that can be ported to Gaia or another GPS app. However, every time I had a question about routing, by the time I had my phone out of the holster I spied one of the distinctive blue and white striped blazes. Other blazes indicate side trails, ruins, loops, springs and other features of interest. And signs appear at every significant intersection with more information about sites, distances and prospective hiking times. As a bonus, every small town has several water pumps offering free, unchlorinated water which we drank unfiltered without problems.

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Huck with that 100km stare over one of many endless hay fields we traversed

For all the road and village walking, the sections through the hilltop forest are clearly the highlight. While this is all managed forest, we see a model of what contemporary forestry practices can yield. While I’m kinda bummed about walking past stacked lumber, it’s clear that these dudes know the value in sustainability of their forests. There are no clearcuts, and the diversity of bird and insect life is unrivaled by anything I’ve seen in the States outside of the Hoh rainforest. There seems to be a decent balance between nature and industry…as a conservationist it’s hard for me to approve, but I appreciate the openness of the manicured forest, and the acres of groomed roads that allow me to access it.

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The ‘mountains’ are really hills, but offer some exceptional views over the rural landscapes 

The most significant different is the language barrier, of course. In the cities on Hungary everyone is exited to practice their English, but in the countryside English is met with blank (if not a little embarrassed) stares. That said, Harpo and I managed to maintain our vegan diet with little problem, and people are SUPER NICE. Like, really nice. And Huck was praising the availability of things like homemade liver pâté and paprika cured sausage in small villages – local products mostly unavailable in urban areas in the US or norther Europe. There’s always bread baked daily and farm fresh veggies; also local schnapps.

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And then there are 100 year old ruins lost in the woods offering solace, a brief rest, and a look at graffiti from the 1800’s 

We ended up hiking the OZT in mid May, which according to the English language tourist site for the trail can entail heavy rain. We mostly avoids the rain, and the heat of the sunny days makes me wonder if an August walk would be unbearable hit. Given the terrain, we were able to easily cover 25/30 km a day (15 – 18 miles) including morning coffee breaks and long lunches. We were always building our evening cook fire before sunset. And given the frequency of small villages, we never carried more than a days’ worth of food (wit some emergency ramen in case of national holiday or not realizing shops in small towns close at 1 pm). We found our 2 season gear totally sufficient for the time of year and elevation – I never needed my base layer except when I was washing my hiking clothes.

As tramps go, our short 350 km section of the Országos Kéktúra has been super fun, and inspires me to explore more of the Euorpoean walking routes. The OKT is part of a longer trail – E4 – one of a series of walks that connect existing regional trails into long form traverses of northern and Eastern Europe. The sense of stepping back in time, traveling through pre and postwar Europe and even into feudal times – the unimaginable past, before the detritus of global capital forever littered the landscape – is irreplaceable. The lack of McD’s and billboards allows breathing room unlike the rural landscapes in the US – and offer a new and different sense of exploration.

Hazy Days on the Duckabush River

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Puget Sound headed towards Bainbridge Island

It started with a slate grey sky. The glass and steel of the city matte under a thick smear of wet clouds, pinpricks of light glistening on the concrete. I needed to get out – the architecture was hemming me in, constricting my breath, making the clouds seem even lower. The forecast for the weekend – 100% chance of precipitation at all hours. Welcome to March in the Northwest.

I’ve been battling a sense of aimlessness coming back from the trail. I often find myself drifting through interstitial spaces with a blank stare – a dissociated look, distracted by speed and movement, looking for some distant horizon but surprised instead only seeing dumpsters, closed windows and construction barriers in excruciating detail.

After thru hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2013 I immediately started working on a gallery show with New Mystics and had a performance with Saint Genet scheduled for the summer. Returning to the comforts of the known was satisfying – the measured productivity of work, the intellectual engagement of art making, the support of the crew. Even if Harpo and I didn’t have a permanent address we still had each other, even after spending the previous weeks battling ice storms in Georgia.

It’s unnerving, returning again.

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The Duckabush River running high through the Brothers Wilderness, Olympic National Forest in Washington’s Olympic peninsula.

Coming back from the PCT has been a familiar animal in a different skin. After so many peregrinations the connection between my body and the body politic seemed unravelled, tenuous. Feeling alien in a hostile landscape, I find myself trying to conjure images of plenitude that somehow always seem two dimensional and unfulfilling, grasping at the tattered ends of some familiar memory faded by sun and worn thin by absence.

The easy, transportable sense of home that comes from pitching a tarp wherever you end up is harder to attain in the city. The sense of purpose inherent in the continual forward motion of thru hiking make feeling at home easy on trail. A community is simply manifest because a sense of commonality is clear – we’re all here in the woods together, mostly doing the same thing – escaping the city.

The city – a multifaceted and fractured beast – rapidly transforms itself, always eating it’s own tail. It’s hard to hold on because of the rapidly shifting topography; every memory becomes unrooted and unreal as the architecture that housed it changes or disappears. People are all travelling on different vectors, subject to unknown or unknowable forces, riding strange waves towards disseperate futures. It can feel isolating, as if everything is moving away from an invisible center you’ve just accidentally arrived at.

The pressure of architecture, the continual compression of dense human consciousness, the alienation originating in feeling alone in a crowd provides a contrast to the expansive space of nature, where details are infinitely complex yet uncrowded, quiet yet never silent. Swallowed by that quiet, resting in the belly of the Earth, I feel secure again. My sense of discontinuity fades away as I’m soaked by the pouring rain, as I traverse icy streams with frozen toes, as my perception creeps closer to my reality. This kind of loneliness is satisfying…

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Trail magic deep in the cut – 3 full cans of Bud Lite, one empty MRE and a lexan spoon.

PCT Memories 2015

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Sun worshipers, WA
Glacier Peak wilderness from a side trip to Miner Ridge
Old school blaze in Northern WA
Yosemite National Park , looking picture perfect
The New Mystics crew met us at Snoqualmie with a resupply box. We proceeded to hike a couple miles and swim in a lake… it was a great visit.
Groucho & Harpo on the summit of Baden-Powelll
Future Dad and Groucho during the 24/24/24 challenge, outside of Augua Dulce
Sunrise on the Whitney summit.
Sunrise hiking the rim trail around Crater Lake, OR
Harpo with the goods…
Cleanup day with Future Dad, Deep Spring CA
1000 Islands Lake, at the divergence of the John Muir Trail and the PCT in Yosemite National Park
Huck and Harpo at the Pizza Palace, Chester CA
Finishing at Campo with the Wrong Way Gang, our adopted trail fam.

Riding on a Cloud

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IMG_4356I went to see a great show at On the Boards last night. OtB is known in Seattle as the premier presenter of new theatre and dance works. Riding on a Cloud, by Rabih Mroué, fits squarely in the modern theatre category – featuring a single ‘actor’ seated at a table with various props (a cassette machine, a DVD player, a stack of DVD’s, some paper notes, a glass of water) and a large video screen. The piece seemed simple at first, even minimal, yet revealed its complexity in very satisfying ways.

The work plays on the balance between fictive and real narratives, the precocious nature of memory, and the problem of representation. Yasser, the ‘actor’ plays himself on stage (thereby frictionally representing his ‘real’ self, as everything in theatre is fiction), occasionally wandering away even from his role as himself to observe the audience. The audience tries to determine what is true versus fictional in Yasser’s narrative, which is presented through a series of DVDs he plays throughout the performance. It’s telling that after 20 minutes of performance we learn that the DVDs are made in the wake of Yasser’s traumatic brain injury, the result of a sniper’s bullet during sectarian fighting in Lebanon (a true story, as it turns out). The DVDs are footage created in response to a real event which dictates the dramatic action of the show, rather than the other way around. We learn that Yasser has difficulty with representation – he is unable to create relationships between objects and photographs of the same objects, even photos of himself. The show is full of things which could be true, and some which might not. Other things are only hinted at, and then revealed over time – these reversals highlight the tension between the dramatic narrative and the nearly silent actor on stage, who’s story is represented only through media – otherwise he exists only as he is, somewhat charming and a little bit injured.

A Brother’s Tale, the New Yorker review of the show, does a good job of situating the work in it’s national and political context. I found myself more interested in it’s exploration of our relationship with language and representation. Creating our personal narrative – our portrayal of ourselves to others, is our most significant act of representation. This practice often hinges on language, our most basic tool. When we share our experience with others, we depend on language to bridge the gap between us, to ensure the continuity of our experience, to reassure us of our assumed truths. These are narratives that we depend on being true – our memories, relationships, our personal history and moral code. Language and (Bataille would argue) sex are the only hope humans have of overcoming our inherent isolation.

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My x-ray after brain surgery – the result of a bike accident, I was in a coma for 12 days. The last thing I remember was having dreadlocks (I hadn’t had a haircut in a decade)… imagine my surprise at waking up unable to speak, fully intubated, and with a rat tail. Also, my business partner at the time had press released my injury to the Stranger, and while I know not to read the comments, my moms did not – which caused her considerable anguish – and overlays another layer of ‘unreality’ on a very surreal situation.

The experience of the traumatic brain injury (TBI) brings into sharp focus how narrative is plastic, flexible, and often uncertain. A sufferer of a traumatic brain injury, I experienced aphasia similar to what Yasser describes. The radical shift aphasia engenders is a restructuring of language, which in turn drastically shifts how we understand our relationships with others and ourself. I relearned how to speak, the names of things, and beyond that, redefined my relationships with people. Or more accurately, taught myself to believe the stories people told me.  If we can not assume that any narrative is true, then even memory becomes an uncertain and slippery thing. I had the hardest time connecting to close friends, where I could not connect emotionally to the narrative they presented – I felt cut off from intimacy, alienated and alone. Retelling stories of people around me, including my own, eventually allowed me to reconnect with myself and others – to recreate myself in my own image – yet for me the certainty remained that I was a completely different person before and after. For any survivor dealing with aphasia, there is a very real and continual question about what is true versus what is believed, and there is no clear way of distinguishing which is which. I have spent years trying to dovetail these two competing realities, sometimes more successfully than others.

Ultimately, Riding on a Cloud is a dark but uplifting show, addressing heavy issues with poignancy, humor and a genuine and interesting voice. Yasser becomes a poet after his TBI – after his loss of language he sees through the broken words to discover the most direct and beautiful phrases. His life, along with the framing of his personal narrative through the device of a theatre show, are victories of identity over insecurity. His story, whether true in whole or in part, allows us to examine our own stories. Yasser’s overcoming is an affirmation of personal narrative, revealing the inherent validity of our struggle for identity, the value of our own stories and the importance of telling them.

Tale from the Trail: Getting Found

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2013 Appalachian Trail Thru Hike
Mid-October
Middle Virginia – Mile 1477

We reach McAfee Knob in late morning – I’ve been waiting for this photo op since I saw a hiker’s jubilant photo here on a postcard in Millonocket, Maine on Day 1 of our AT thru hike.

Groucho is grouchy, brooding and snacking, but consents to take the photo.

Even though the air is brisk, I take off my wind pants emulating the carefree look captured in so many NOBO summer photos. Feeling vain and proud I realize we made it. I can send my folks a picture of beautiful me in beautiful Virginia, my dad’s home state. I contemplate going off trail right then and there. This photo is proof of my accomplishment. What more do I have to do or to learn after 1477 miles?

We start down the mountain. Groucho always walks faster than me, but today I feel light and keep up. I stop to tie a shoe and look up. Groucho has disappeared around a corner. Darn. I’d tried to keep pace, willing my steps to bring us into harmony after a difficult and divided morning.

I step lively and reach a clearing where power lines cuts through the forest. Animal paths weave through the open meadow and I see an opening in the trees beyond where the wide path continues. I continue, lost in thought and bathed in a blaze of sunlight for a moment.

Groundscore! Back in the trees I find a pair of sunglasses. I put them on and jog down the path wanting to share my tiny joy with Groucho, who must be just around the bend. Feeling confidant and light on my feet I head down a gentle slope. I cross a gate blocking the path and look back at the sign on the gate “no motor vehicles” says the sign.

Odd.

My steps slow as I reach T in the path. I could go right or left but not straight and there are no white blazes to indicate which way to turn. Typically on the AT there are friendly 2” x 6” white vertical blazes spaced about a minute apart. Blazes fade or flake off trees occasionally, but are reapplied by volunteer crews. When a major or confusing turn is coming in the path, they paint two blazes askew but side by side. If the Righthand blaze is higher, turn right. When the left is higher turn left. Some parts of the trail, like just outside Dartmouth, the trail is almost over-blazed at the frantic collegiate overabundance of the DOC at marking every tree for the last 100 years. What I’m saying is, it’s hard to lose the trail…

My throat tightens. When was the last time I saw a blaze? How long have I been walking alone? Did I miss a turn? I felt like I was right behind Groucho, but was I?

Unease sets in as I realize with irony that there was a gap in our map set, and this is the blank space – my first time without a map in 1400 miles. The maps we’ve been cursing carrying because it’s so hard to lose the trail, even on a moonless night in deep forest. And this is the first time I have actually needed it.

I check my watch. 4:00pm, with sunset in about 2 hours… there’s time. I stop and breathe I plan to turn right at the intersection and walk for 5 minutes – if I don’t see a blaze I’ll backtrack and take the left turn for 5 minutes. If that doesn’t work, I will backtrack further… maybe I missed something at the power lines.

Then I see the craziest spider right on the path. Large and in charge – with a huge orange pumpkin butt. I stop to take a photo. If I die out here will they be impressed with my huge spider picture?

I walk for a couple more minutes and realize it’s been too long. Even night hiking in Vermont we saw blazes every 40 seconds or so. When hiking alone I rarely feel fear, but as I head down the fire road fear starts to creep like vines into my consciousness.

I turn back with a sinking heart, taking the other branch of the T for a few minutes, finding no blazes there either. I must have missed a turn, but where? If I go back to the power lines, will I see the AT this time? What if I sprain an ankle or see a bear? If I die out here, alone, would anyone find me?

Without my map, I don’t know where these old fire roads lead, or which direction I’m supposed to be going. And even if I find the right trail, how far ahead of me is Groucho? I check my watch again. About 4:30. I am, at minimum, half an hour behind him, and his phone only has service sporadically.

I try to text anyway “Thought I wasn’t getting enough miles in today, so decided to trail blaze on a forest road or something. Trying to find the AT now”. Fingers crossed he will get it. Fingers crossed that I am right and that going back was going to take me closer to Groucho and the AT.

Jogging back up the road I scour the trees for blazes or possible side trails, nothing, nothing, nothing, and more nothing. Nothing even looks familiar. Will this road even lead me back to McAfee’s Knob?

I sing songs. I sing loudly. I sing to erase fear so I won’t make stupid mistakes. I make up lyrics when I didn’t know them:

“Under Pressure, pushing down on me, pressing down on you, no man has fallen. It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about, watching some good friends screaming ‘let me out’. Tomorrow you’ll get high high highhhhhhh. Turn away from it all like a blind man, get on the floor but it don’t work. People under pressure they get crushed and torn, Why? Why-ieeeeee …” In moments of desperation I turn to Bowie.

I turn a corner, seeing the powerlines. This must be the AT junction. I scour the rock structures and trees and there are no blazes and no alternate paths.

Am I going crazy?

I cross back across the power line and to the path I thought was the AT where I last saw Groucho. I start to panic, and things are starting to feel a little Labyrinth for me. Flushed and heart pounding, I wonder about who has the tent? How do I get in touch with Groucho? Should I hike all the way back to the Knob? All these thoughts churning, sucking me further into a vortex of despair….

I look up, and suddenly I see a northbound blaze.

Relief. I spin to see where the southbound blaze is… and finally I see it, leading to a tiny bit of trail leading off the forest road.

Curses. This IS marked, but I feel like there should be a freaking beacon or something. I TOTALLY missed the blaze before and I can see why; 30 meters away the power lines cut a bright, sunlit swath through the dense forest. It’s as alluring as Odysseus’ sirens – the sunshine and signs of civilization had called me off course.

I turned onto the proper and super well blazed AT southbound and quicken my pace. How far ahead is Groucho by now – an hour or more? Will I have to run to catch up to him by dark? Does he even know I am missing?

10 minutes later I find Groucho rolling a joint, sitting on a rock. Having noticed my absence he stopped, and sat. Knowing he was on the AT (as evidenced by a nearby blaze) he decided to wait for me.

I feel so relieved at being found. And, despite moments of panic, having kept my cool. All of the worry and fear of the last hour begin to melt away. I feel foolish, but also jubilant. I found myself!

Groucho walked for a bit, stopped for water, and waited for me to catch up. He almost immediately realized something was wrong because he had only just seen me ten minutes before. He decided to stay put, but after about an hour of smoking joints he was feeling a little anxious and about to come looking for me.

I feel great – with the weight of uncertainty vanished, and my hiking partner found. We are both relieved. Despite our individual strength, stamina and endurance, and despite our independent natures, our ability to hike whole days without talking to each other, and despite the everyday annoyances that sometimes drive us apart — we are a team, and there is comfort and sweetness in our camaraderie. Sometimes you don’t know what you have or need until you (almost) lose it. The trail would provide this lesson in a myriad of ways on our journey. We are a great team.

We stay close, talking, and arrive at the Catawaba Mountain Shelter. The spring is dry, but a trail angel left gallon water jugs, and hey – a fire pit! We’re both emotionally exhausted, so we end the day a little early here. I collect wood, and Groucho cooks over an open fire. We eat chocolate, drink water and relax. Everything feels easy after this afternoon. I read Agatha Christie in front of the fire until I get tired and we go to sleep with quiet efficiency.