Mile: 566 to 583
Johannah: "Are you Animal Style's parents?"
Fey: "No, there is a definite family hierarchy."
Johannah: "What is it?"
Fey: "Dayhike and Jetpack are the parents. Spearhead is the cool aunt. Boom and I are the kids who went off to college. Animal and Capi are the younger brothers. And Hardway's the cat."
Hardway: "I come for the leche."
We tore ourselves away from the wonderful Tehachapi, and Dayhike generously offered to shuttle us all to the trail in the rental car. Right away, we were greeted with a long, hot climb. I was moving like a snail with my heavy pack, full of a week's worth of food and tons of water. We weren't the only ones moving slow; we stopped for a nap and woke up to find Spearhead in a shady spot next door and Hardway about twenty feet back in the woods.
I don't have much to say about this day because I got a headache, and we got into camp late, so we had little interaction with our crew except for playing leapfrog with them on the trail. So allow me to use this opportunity to introduce the character of "Hardway."
[Starting slowly up the climb, all smiles, sort off made it to the top?, Fey feigning smiles, WIND!, Hardway from behind- quite a bit of stuff on that back]
Mitch, AKA Hardway, earned his name by always finding the hardest way to complete a task... Sometimes unnecessarily hard, making us question what this guy was all about. He would carry ten liters of water when everyone else carried five; his pack is enormous, and it's still a mystery what the heck he's got in there; he'd elect to take steeper, longer alternate trails rather than the PCT... And then hike back up them to hike the section of the PCT he missed; he stops to make coffee several times a day; he typically erects a complicated campsite in the evening, stringing a tarp in the bushes rather than just setting up the heavy tent he's carrying; he has lots of surprising one-liners that crack me up; he hates the heat; he's grumpy. We first met him week 2, assuming he'd be long gone by now, considering he's an athlete; he played baseball his whole life, and he's a fast hiker. But we think he likes us. He'll hike way ahead and then sit in the desert the whole day until we catch up. Or he'll let us get ahead and then run 30 miles to catch us. Or sometimes he just bypasses us altogether. I've decided he is the kitty of Slow Magic. He likes us but doesn't want us to know it, so he just hangs around in our proximity. For one, I imagine he can't commit to a group with "slow" in the name. Today, when he found Dayhike and us resting under a bush, he turned around gazing back at the vast desert we had come from. We could see the mountain range in the distance that we had hiked the entire past month, and Tehachapi was just below. "God," he said with reverence, "that looks just.... Hot."
