What to do when all is chaos and uncertainty? The world around me is in chaos, and the body I inhabit is in chaos. I feel as though I’m balancing in the middle of this turmoil, in the eye of the storm. A step in either direction could be enough to suck me into the swirling blackness, or, I stay huddled in the calm center feeling relatively at peace… a disturbed, disjointed peace.

I’m going to start talking to a therapist. I’ve never done that before, but as I keep brushing up against the swirling madness all around me, it seems like a good idea. Is it better to ignore the bad all around me, or better to face it? Do I risk letting it in if I face it? 

Does it help knowing that we are not alone? There are so many people in my life that have let me into their confidence, who have given me a glimpse into their personal eyes of the storm. Is that easier to do when both of us are dealing with some crazy shit? Perhaps it is. 

One form of distraction has been to look at cheap places to stay in Europe. Check this website out. This morning I jumped on and first filtered for France. (I used to speak french 20 years ago in Burkina Faso, I know how to order breakfast and ask where the toilet is, I should be good, right?) Then I filtered for proximity to the sea, I choose 100m or less. Then I simply sorted by price. The results? I can stay in an apartment with a view of the ocean in France for a week for less than $300. From here I can monitor the cheap airfare websites, and depending on the window of time I have to travel, can easily book a flight, and find one of those cheap apartments almost anywhere in Europe. Why Europe? Why not? It’s somewhere? It’s anywhere? It’s relatively safe? I’m already out of my element, why not go further?

So yes, there is this insatiable desire to travel right now. I have my 170-mile Portuguese Camino trip all mapped out. I made a data book (translation: a spreadsheet of distances and logistics), and if I have a two-week window to walk it later this year I’m going to do it. At a 10-mile-a-day pace with a luggage transportation service and hotel or hostel lodging each night I can do it for a pretty reasonable price tag and not hurt myself. Surely I can walk 10 miles a day by this fall?

But those windows! Those windows of time and opportunity have been changing daily. I may have to get chemo infusions throughout April now…which I was thinking would be ending in March. I don’t have a good plan for my neck yet either. The three-month mark since my Corpectomy surgery is up on March 21, but with another collapsing vertebrae, and cancer still ravaging the entire region around neck and upper spine, is it really a good idea to take the brace off? My doctors are trying to get me in to see a specialist, but they are all so busy. The appointment I did have for March is now in April. Meanwhile my neck wants to be free…I am doing some exercises that my PT has recommended, and some of that is just sitting still with the brace off. Just balancing my head alone is a challenge right now. (Ahh, I just took it off, why not? I can sit still while writing). 

Meanwhile we are nailing down details for my birthday party in June…that is something I can plan. I’m relishing the planning phase. So fun. It’s going to be so great to see many of you and eat Amber’s excellent wood-fired pizzas and play lawn games. I’ll open up the sign ups in about a week, so stay tuned!

Where shall we go tonight? It’s 1:26am and I have an oat milk latte on deck to get me though the next hour. Maybe we visit hikertrash? The hikertrash period of my life spanned from 2014 – 2017. Well, it really originated years before that…so tuck yourself in, here is the full story:

It starts with design. I love graphic design. Because I went to college from 95-99 we were in the early stages of multimedia and computer design software programs. I got to use the early versions of Photoshop and Illustrator and really test the limits of the programs. It was so much fun, and I made a couple of multimedia CD Roms during college (does anyone remember those?). 

Senior year I made my poetry class the focus of my project. I asked each student in class to pick one of their poems, I recorded each of them reading their work, then I found a piece of art and music that I thought accompanied their poem well. When viewing the CD Rom, you would navigate by moving a piece of what looked like refrigerator poetry with the poet’s name on it up to a certain spot on the screen, then their poem would come up on screen. As the voice read the words, the words moved up the screen all the while music was playing. I had so much fun making that CD Rom, but unfortunately it’s lost to the fast-moving technology junkyard now. It can’t be played anymore, and so lives on in my memory of the thing, and now here on the page.

So anyway, graphic design. I loved (love) all aspects of it, and even when my attention was captured by hiking and sleeping on the ground, I always knew I had some skills I could dust off if needed. When I moved to Portland in 2004 after finishing grad school, the job I found was for a sign shop, Sign Wizards, where I would make signage for a wide variety of businesses. The one aspect that was very Portland and I really lucked out in, was following in the footsteps of a very creative and eclectic bike nerd at the sign shop, Dylan VanWeeldon. Dylan had cultivated relationships with many of the bike builders in town and would make logos, paint masks, decals and more for them. I inherited many of those relationships and really geeked out at helping to make frame art for bike builders like Ira Ryan, Sweetpea Bikes, and Aherne Cycles (and some of them are still around today, over 20 years later, woot!)

I also had to dial in my graphic design chops and create clean line art that could be traced by a router and made into a 3-dimensional shape. Now that was miles away from the messy layers of Photoshop that I had a habit of creating in college, and miles away from the multimedia timing of a voice to a line of poetry. It stretched me. The work stretched me. 

One of my jobs was at the Portland airport. Back in 2005ish the airport opened a connecting passage to bridge two different areas of the airport, and our sign shop was hired to create all the new signage for the concourse connector, and of course, that spilled out into the concorses too as the arrows and all those big overhead signs had to be changed. Let me tell you about the Portland Airport blue PMS color….there were 10 different blues that had been used over the years! How to choose the blue that would match in one concourse, with a slightly different blue in the other one? Should I make them all the same blue or match to the existing blue? Then there was the different thickness of the aluminum used to make the signs. Again, sometimes we were only replacing one segment of a 4 piece overhead sign, do I match thicknesses or make all 150 different signs in the order with different thicknesses and different blues? It was quite the nightmare. But I learned. Oh how I learned! Then I had the pleasure of learning that what an architect draws is not what gets built in real life. I was given architectural renderings of what the moving concourses would look like in the new connector, and I had to design and order signs that would fit on the walkways, things like “watch your step” and “no babies on the rails”. I designed and ordered based off the prints and imagine my surprise when we showed up for the install and the actual walkway was a completely different design with no place to put the signs I had ordered three months prior based on the specs. WTF? How does anything get built? 

Ok, that was my graphic design job from 2004-2006 before I left to hike the PCT. 

What was next? That probably would have been 2008 when I moved to Bend to work in wilderness therapy. Wilderness Therapy will be a different story, but all the while I was traipsing about in the high desert with teenagers that really didn’t want to be there, I was still playing with design, and made some paint masks for “hikertrash,” a phrase that was ripe in the thru-hiking community. Hikertrash is both a badge of honor and a derogatory phrase. Dirt is the great equalizer on the trail and even the most well-behaved and proper among us has their hikertrash moments when they wash out their dirty socks in a grocery store bathroom, or they stink up a restaurant because they are too hungry to take a shower first before eating when they get to town. I by no means own the phrase hikertrash, have not tried to trademark or copyright it, I simply offered my own version of it to the world. Lint was a good friend at the time and he had hikertrash in an old english font tattooed across his belly, so I made a version of that and painted it onto his pack and made a few t-shirts from it that first year in Bend. 

Lint was also the tall bike friend that I have already mentioned in some of my Portland memories. I thought tall bikes were so cool, and made a tall bike design that I started to screen print on things. 

Oh, let me tell you about screen printing! 

Kirk and I had started dating at this time, this was 2009 in Bend, and I decided to teach myself how to screenprint. I went to Goodwill and bought an old picture frame and some sheer curtains. I stapled the curtain to the frame and picked up some photo emulsion from Michaels. I printed my tall bike design onto a transparency (remember those from school all you OGs out there?), coated the picture frame screen in photo emulsion, then put my transparency on it, set it in the sun for like 20 minutes, then rushed it inside to rinse out the negative of the tall bike which would leave a stencil of sorts that I could then place on a shirt and ink…voila screen printing! 

That first screen was junky and didn’t work great, but I still have it. It’s the origins of my first business! I traded up after that and bought actual screens to work with, and started Bike Bend Wear. Based off my first tall bike silhouette, I designed a bunch of other bike silhouettes, purchased used clothing from goodwill and other thrift shops, would screen print my design onto them, then sell them at bike events around town. Cyclocross was the big thing back in the day, so I usually had a booth at the races. It never made me any money. I always spent more on supplies than I made, but I had fun and it was a way for me to get creative and stay in the graphic design world for a bit while I was working in the outdoor industry. 

Bike Bend Wear was only around for a few years, then I started working for Cascade Publications in 2010. I had just finished up a seasonal logistics gig at the Outward Bound base out of Odin Falls (Central Oregon) when I got a job to design and lay-out a monthly 40-page color art magazine and write feature articles. It was a HUGE career leap for both me and Pamela Hulse Andrews who hired me, and it quickly became apparent that my job was really the job of 3 people. I was supporting Pamela’s other publication, Cascade Business News, by designing ads and writing profile articles, while compiling and designing the monthly Cascade A&E. I was WORKED.

I had an editor’s column to write each month, a feature article to write about our cover artists, and any number of other articles that appeared in the magazine. Pamala would work as the air traffic controller and feed me press releases to place in the magazine, some with adequate photo sizes, others without. I got really good at finding ways to make art and photos work, tracking down the people who could send me the right files, and working fast. I was working soooooo fast. I had only one mode, and that was work as fast as humanly possible. I also had to learn the ways of printers. We changed printers several times during the four years I worked for there, and each time we got down and dirty with paper quality, 4-color presses, printing profiles, and more. Wow, again. Lots of learning.

Somehow during this time I had decided to thru-hike the Continental Divide Trail in 2015, and while dripples of Bike Bend Wear were still happening here and there, a friend and fellow-thru hiker in town suggested we start a business together. I had a few hikertrash designs out there and on shirts that people were wearing, and Brian Frankle was a business guy who saw potential. He had successfully started the backpack company ULA, (still around today) and sold it, and was dabbling in other business pursuits in town.

Together in 2014 we decided to launch hikertrash as a brand.

I had a number of new designs, we would get stuff printed in town: hats, shirts, coozies, etc. and sell online while raising money for the triple crown trails. This was in the day before the drop-ship companies, and it quickly became apparent the business was really about inventory and shipping, not so much the fun design side of things. I had a blast going to hiker events where I would often do live screen printing on the hikers and their clothing, and Kirk even made me a screenprinting press out of recycled materials (well 98% recycled materials, some of the screws were new).

We officially ran the business from 2014 until 2017. We had hats on all the triple crown trails! We had hikers tattoo my designs onto their bodies! It was all a rush, and even better to be giving back to the trails at the same time. 

Ultimately both Brian and I tired of being a shipping company, and in 2017 decided to sell to another hiker friend of ours, Boomer, who had plans for a hiking pole company. It never really got off the ground and hikertrash ended up going away a short while later.

BUT hikertrash lives on, there are still hats out there, there are still shirts out there. I still have all the old designs, and even have thoughts of reinvigorating the brand as a fundraiser for my cancer year…it’s complicated though. I am looking into ways of getting the designs back out there, but not as a company, strictly as a fundraiser, but it gets messy with taxes and income and all of that. I still think it would be a worthy pursuit, especially if I have time, but only if it can be relatively easy and I don’t become a shipping and inventory hub again. I think with the drop ship printing capabilities today there is probably a solution, but it’s the back end stuff I’m just not sure about. I guess this is where I ask you all for your ideas and suggestions. Do you see a way where I can use a service like Printify to design a bunch of hikertrash merchandise, and then sell it online with the proceeds being a fundraiser for me, an individual? Without a bunch of tax and accounting headaches? Let me know…

(It’s now 2:22 and I just heated up some vegan banana bread I made yesterday…it’s delicious! I used flax for eggs, almond flour for regular flour, and flax oil for vegetable oil. It doesn’t hold together real well, but it tastes delicious!)

I think that’s enough remembering for tonight folks…time to find some photos for this post and get it out there into the world. Thanks again for coming on these night-time ramblings of mine, it’s great fun on my end. 🙂