The cowboy broke the news to me that we couldn’t ride his horses because one of them was sick and he needed to go to the vet to get some medicine. I was pretty disappointed but I understood. I still let him fuck me doggystyle before I left. I watched our shadows on the wood wall when he bent me over and thrusted into me. I found our images to be beautiful.
Today was the day that I was going to hike with Pneumonia. I waited for him in Hanksville. I was excited to have finally found someone to help me through the sections I skipped and tread on forward. I had reached out to my community, hundreds of people were proud of me for knowing when to turn around. I’m assuming they thought I was going to quit hiking, but I was really just looking for someone to come out with me. Pneumonia was the only one out of hundreds that said, “Fuck it, I have nothing better to do,” then bought a ticket out here.
I washed my clothes in town at a place that offered free laundry for Haydukers. There I befriended a cat who sat on my lap and nuzzled into my face. In the meantime, Pneumonia bribed an Uber driver to bring him all the way out here. It was a four hour ride from the airport.
I gave him a hug and thanked him for making the trip out here. Upon first greet, I felt the vibe was off between our personalities. He was very friendly and humorous by nature but had an undertone of aggression that didn’t match with the calm demeanor I was used to experiencing in a hiker.
He was sporting thick jeans.
“Uhm, are you going to wear that?” I asked. “In the desert?”
“No, fuck no,” he said, “I’m going to throw it out and put on my hiker clothes.”
“Okay, cool.”
“You have the maps, right?” he asked, followed by, “is there any weed in Utah?”
He got more snacks at the market then we walked to the main road to hitch onto the trail. On the way there, we met a young cyclist.
“Where ya goin’?” Pneumonia asked.
“London to London.” He was bike-packing around the world, currently at the two year mark on his journey. He had initially planned to bike around the world in a matter of 8 months. Only until he went out did he recognize how naive that was. “I did have a plan and a route that I made but that went out the window about two days into my adventure.”
He was looking for a place to shower/do laundry as he was reaching day 5 of being filthy.
“There’s free laundry right there!” I said.
We parted ways and started to hitch to the trailhead. Some river guides from a rafting company picked us up and drove us about 20 minutes down the road to Poison Spring Benches where we would start. I already hiked this section except for the very last stretch that I couldn’t traverse. I figured it would be easiest to get on here rather than making it an out and back.
I saw lightning strikes before we got dropped off in the middle of the highway. We walked less than a mile and set up camp using the near full moon as our headlamp.
“Did anyone else want to come do this with you?” he asked.
“Nope, you were the one and only,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah, I was sort of high when I told you I decided I would come out.”
It became clear to me that we both didn’t know what the fuck we were about to be doing in the high desert. At this point, I was just happy to have someone next to me.