Tehachapi, CA | Mileage: 0.0 + 2.7 (Around town)

It never really gets light in the motel room because the picture window looks into a covered stairwell and is obscured by a partial beige wall. So we sleep later than I wanted and then lie there tangled together and chat longer than I wanted. You’d think I’d figure out how to get out of bed within a reasonable amount of time or at least adjust my expectations given late departures have defined the last few years, but I’m a cuddle addict. I can’t pull myself away but I still get crushed every morning when we’re past late and I realize how many hours we wasted doing absolutely nothing but lying on each other in the semi-real.

This morning specifically, I’m hoping to wash our dishes and clothes, lift in the tiny fitness center (gym!!!), eat the free continental breakfast, shower again (what a luxury), eat a gigantic not-free breakfast, walk around outside, and sit in a coffee shop and write.

I manage to wash our jars and water bottles and utensils in the sink and backflush a liter through the filter in the time it takes Katie to wash all of our filthy clothes in the tub. Apparently this is not an impressive feat because I forget about the pot (we’ve mostly been cold-soaking so this seems perfectly reasonable) and I don’t have time to dump the used toilet paper bag or steal more toilet paper for the next section or brush out the gigantic knotted mat that is my hair and I’m told all of these things combined should have been much faster than the tub laundry.

Now it’s almost 9 which is practically midday so we skip the gym and the bonus shower and just steal some oranges and oats from the breakfast spread for our resupply and give up on packing because we’re sooooooo hungryyyyyyy and jealous of the sunny nice outside and we walk over to Kelcy’s, a family-owned place that advertised itself on the trail and has an impressively veggie friendly menu for a diner straight out of 1950. We order a quesadilla with soyrizo and a veggie omelet and pancakes to share AND there’s free black coffee for PCTers so I get one of those all for myself. Normally I just steal some sips from Katie’s which in all reality is actually stealing from the restaurant if they do free refills. So we enjoy an ethical? breakfast (eh probably not but let’s not think about it). I try not to watch the grandma with the towheaded little kids in the booth behind Katie because that’s a creepy thing to do, but they look just like me and Andrew with Grandma at Chef-O-Nett. Wow I miss the summer and the infinite time and eating fries at the pool and precisely shading in the little 15-minute pie segments for the summer reading program at the library and playing legos on the carpet in Andrew’s room for hours and biking to the playground behind Barrington with my friends and feeling so old and cool and independent.

The food is excellent and the server is even better and we wonder why all the waitstaff in Tehachapi have been so extraordinarily thoughtful and on it and generally great at their jobs. So I tell Katie to leave an actually large tip because we always try to tip a lot because it seems people in food service are never compensated fairly for their time and effort but I realized that as a result maybe we don’t compensate the people who really stand out for their promptness and care enough which is silly because isn’t that why tipping became a convention here in the first place? But now everyone’s just exploited and I swear I was only okay at my job but they paid me so much more.

We stop by the German bakery (it’s just like Schmidt’s but newer and brighter and less sausage-centric and more California) and order a savory pastry thing and a coffee because we’re not actually hungry yet, we just want somewhere to sit. We find a little table in the back with a red and white checkered laminated tablecloth and hunch on the wooden folding chairs and try to write but I’m distracted. And then it’s time to check out of the hotel so we blink away the baking sunshine on the sidewalk and wander past the gas station and the hibachi place back to our room in the burgundy Best Western SureStay.

We finish the chores I failed to complete earlier and change into our wet but freshly laundered clothes and get distracted by our new bodies in the full length mirrors. Ordinarily I would say this is quite vain, but try not looking at yourself even once for eight days straight and I promise you’ll be curious about the developments. Like how much did your hair grow and how bad is the acne on your face and did you get sunburned at all and are you hotter or uglier than the image of yourself that’s cached in your head? And thennnn on top of that you’re already a fitness junkie and you just exercised the wrong half of your body for about 12 hours a day and let your favorite half atrophy and you know that you’ve lost a not insignificant amount of weight because that’s what the scale at Hikertown said and remember it felt like you have more ribs than pecs or boobs when you showered in Wrightwood and maybe you’re not eating enough and digesting the muscles you’ve been working so hard to build. So you’ll really want to look at the result.

Katie is psyched because she “has abs now” which has already been a favorite refrain for the past six months but now they are real abs apparently which is better. I think the same abs have been there all along and our recent efforts just trimmed up the tiniest bit of fat but she’s excited and happy about herself so that’s really good. We take mirror selfies like those asshole men on Hinge to mark our progress because if we already look this different, I’ll probably be a tiny bit of sinew but mostly skin and bone by the time we hit Canada. At Hikertown, Sin Nombre (who was skinny to begin with and had already lost 15 pounds) said thru-hiking turns men in to concentration camp survivors and women into super models. Although I take issue with this framing for so many reasons, it’s kind of true that walking all day really changes your body in a visible way. I thought we were already pretty active and didn’t expect to look different at all. But now so many veins pop out of my forearms when I do something as easy as washing my hands (for reference, it took me a year and a half of relatively serious climbing to get a single vein to pop out when fully pumped) and there is actually no fat on my toddler tummy even at my waistline and I swear my boobs are smaller but maybe my legs are more toned? I think maybe I’m turning into a 15 year old boy. No need for T when you’ve got the PCT.

If you are among the holdouts who read every single day of this journal in the browser where the photos are cropped to landscape and invariably fail to load, this is the day to install the HikerFeed app. I promise you want to see us in our half-nude glory.

We get carried away in front of the mirror and housekeeping knocks on the door while we’re shirtless and flexing and not packed up yet because it’s after 12 so we apologize through the door and speed our stuff into our packs as quickly as possible while laughing hysterically and slip out into the parking lot. We walk back to Mountain Coffee House and order the same green smoothie we had last night plus a peanut butter one and sit at the little table in the back corner and write. Our wet clothes are cold so we move to the picnic table outside in the partial sun and it’s warm and lazy and excellent until I get bored and hangry. We walk down the side street that is parallel to and just as wide as the main for some unknown reason (think four lanes with buffer), but it’s quiet and car-free and has cute little houses and gardens and shade trees. I keep forgetting we’re in California because it looks so much like the dusty mountain towns in western Colorado like Gunnison with the unnecessary asphalt and the green but mostly brown foothills and the odd mix of people a place so far away attracts.

We order a bagel sandwich and a coffee from the cute shop next to Thai Chapi that was closed yesterday and wonder if Sweet Pea will text us to hang out like he said he would or if he’s too busy doing whatever one does with one’s girlfriend of three weeks that one hasn’t seen in four weeks and is absolutely infatuated with. We settle on falafel sandwiches from the Mediterranean place across the street when he asks if we want to meet him and Alaina for pizza at the brewery (big beer guys; Alaina’s the bartender at Dru Bru up at Snoqualmie Pass after all). So we say yes but we’re busy sending Abhishek (my awesome ex-manager) my resume and some photos because I told him I’d update and send it in April but now it’s almost June oops. And then we’re a mile away and we take our time walking back because we detour to a recycling bin and it’s such a nice day but I start to feel bad about our tardiness and Katie moves like a eight ton snail so I pull her down the sidewalk.

Local Craft Beer (what a creative name) is in the parking lot of a strip mall (ugh cars) but it’s actually nice and cozy inside. Sweet Pea and Alaina are sitting in the sunny wooden booth right by the door so we shove our packs down the bench like dirty scrubs and I try to order food at the counter by myself but there are way too many salads and way too many pizzas and way too many beers so eventually Katie comes over to check in on me which is embarrassing but helpful. We end up with a yummy strawberry blue cheese salad that comes in shiny silver mixing bowl and a big veggie pizza and a passion fruit cider and the brewery’s own hazy IPA. Turns out the IPA is 10.8% ABV and about puts me under the table because it comes out way before the food and I am smaller now and much past my drinking prime. Sweet Pea and Alaina are cute and cuddly and seem happy and good which is cool because we’re always skeptical of straight relationships whoops. They try to play something on the jukebox with the neon pink lights but it never comes on which either means the queue is more than two hours long or it’s just a money eating machine disguised as a jukebox. Alaina seems really cool, but she’s quiet and shy and hard to hear over the din of the restaurant. She whispers lots of things into Sweet Pea’s ear and I wonder if this is what Abby means when she says Katie and I have a bad habit of side conversations. We mostly ask questions and learn a bit about the pass and her background and her road-trip to Nashville and her plans to get back up to Washington and the music they like. Since Sweet Pea left, she’s been asking men she doesn’t like (think liftees with sexual harassment issues) if she can slap them and of course they always say yes but, from the videos I’ve seen, she can deliver quite the zinger and the men look very surprised. And then Alaina challenges Katie to an arm wrestle which is so unconventional and awesome and we all know who wins but i have mad respect and I’m so excited for the vegan hot dogs at Dru Bru approximately three months from now. It’s getting late and we’re exhausted because now we sleep at sunset and I’m feeling floaty and a little sick from the beer so we say goodnight and farewell because they’re driving up to Lone Pine for the day (Sweet Pea is a hiking addict and wants a sneak peak of the Sierras) and we’re going to hike out tomorrow, so we probably won’t see him again for a few weeks until after we get back from Chicago.

After breakfast, we checked into the Santa Fe Motel for $80, which is about half the price of everything else in town. We would have stayed there the night before too, but it neither has a website nor appears on Expedia so we had no idea it existed until we walked by, walked in, and asked the man if they had any vacancies. The motel seems to be historic (the sign advertises color TV which, if I recall correctly, was an invention of the last century) and in a state of partial disrepair. Our room is sparse and cute and there’s a cool wood vaulted ceiling and an arched doorway into the bathroom, but the white walls look pretty grimey and it smells like cigarettes and we can’t figure out how to open the window or the A/C unit appears to be smashed in. Which really shouldn’t be surprising for $80 in a town where the going rate is $150+, but Katie says we might as well ask if we can switch rooms so we walk to the tiny office in the front. I assume the door will be locked because it’s late, but it’s not and that’s because the family who runs the motel lives there and a TV (probably a color TV) is playing in the background and a small Indian woman appears at the window. She says there aren’t any other rooms available for $80 because all the empty ones have two beds which costs more, but she offers to come help us open our window and the three of us walk to the back of the parking lot and our room and I feel really bad for interrupting her evening. She assures us that it’s a non-smoking room and doesn’t smell like smoke even though there is a pile of at least twenty cigarette butts in the dirt next to the door mat, but I think she smells it too because she comes in and wrestles with the window high above her head for a few minutes. But she can’t get it to budge and the handle on the locking mechanism is obviously missing because of the bare screw holes and so finally she gives up and said the last people must have broken it see here. And Katie says yes we know but can you help us open it because it’s hot and it smells like cigarettes. And she repeats the last people broke it see here maybe leave your door open to let the room air out so we say okay and thank you and she walks away and I’m frustrated now because she was so impressively unhelpful when she could have switched us to a larger room for free or provided a screw driver to open the window or even just sprayed some Lysol to mask the cigarettes but I hate myself for being frustrated because she lives in and probably single handedly maintains this motel for $80 a night and I have the means to pay more or live elsewhere or not work at all and spend my time hiking and checking out this town. So we say at least the sheets look clean and I rinse off in the tiny dirty shower (Katie passes on this front) and we put our packs up on the dresser because there are little bugs in the bathroom and on the floor by the door and I climb into bed naked because it’s so hot and the window is broken and the A/C is broken and I’m not sure if you can really leave your first floor motel door wide open all night and what if there are bed bugs.

A few weeks ago, we watched a podcast where Shannon Beveridge (a queer influencer Nicole Willing showed us) interviews Fletcher about their on again off again relationship and the song Fletcher wrote about Shannon’s new girlfriend that blew up lesbian TikTok and the fallout from that and seeing each other again for the first time in four years. They mention a few of Fletcher’s music videos, so we’ve been wanting to watch them and this seems like a good time.

Wasted Youth is the best song on an otherwise boring, poppy, and generic EP that just hints at coming out and being infatuated with someone society says you shouldn’t be. Apparently Shannon and Fletcher spent a night fucking around on the beach and in a laundromat and at a diner in 2016 when they were our age and falling in love and a friend happened to film them (artsy types) and Fletcher decided to use the clips for Wasted Youth and damn it really hits.

I cry silently through the video, tears dripping into the crook of Katie’s arm. I realize that I’ve never watched anything that’s made me feel so much. It’s all just too relatable and real. It’s like coming of age ten years late. I don’t know if I’m relieved to finally find the representation I’ve been looking for or devastated that it came long after I figured out how to be confident and happy and honest and outgoing on my own. What would have happened if I had found Wasted Youth in high school when I couldn’t act right or dress right or want the right things? I always thought I was a late bloomer, too shy and immature for parties and drugs and sex. Turns I was just gay and shit at pretending.

We go straight into Sex (With My Ex), which Shannon filmed with Fletcher in New York after they had broken up in 2020. It’s mostly obscured clips of them in bed and the lights and the city and the subway and everything’s so familiar I feel this thick nostalgia that clogs my throat and my head. The song ends and they stand on the street looking into the camera together and say goodbye because they’re breaking up and I fall apart.

Katie sets the phone down and holds me. I don’t know if it’s Jenna or some future where Katie and I break up or empathy for this random pop star we found two months ago whose songs are so absurdly specific and who still seems so stuck on Shannon, this girl she gave up so she could go out and sleep around the way normal people do before they find a soulmate. Am I jealous? Maybe. Is that naive and stupid? Absolutely. What do I want? I haven’t the slightest idea that’s why I decided to walk all the way from Mexico to Canada after all. It’s just tragic and too real and I’m rattled as fuck and maybe I wish I had this perfect record of my feelings and my relationship but we don’t film anything and this is the first time I’ve ever kept a journal and we lie there holding each other and crying for a future we can choose and a past we don’t have.

I need a tissue so I grab my glasses from the hand towel we laid on top of the nightstand and I swing my feet over the side of the bed and I swear the floor is moving in the dark. I shine the phone light and it’s like the bug shopping mall. All shapes and sizes moving every which way. This shocks my brain out of its depressive stupor. Thankfully most of them are small and the walls seem clear so I tip toe to the bathroom in my shoes and turn on the light and the door and the floor and the walls are bug city so I quickly blow my snotty nose and wash my hands and slide out without touching anything and close the door to shut the bugs in and jump back into the bed. I don’t know why they waited until dark to come out, but I probably won’t sleep until morning.

Go watch the videos and let me know if you cry. Maybe it’s just a gay thing.