This is what I wrote in my log for the day:
"Day 18: almost stopped at monastery but it was two miles off course. Today found carmelite monastery whose patron is Teresa of Avila on my route. Many beautiful view of ocean, walked until too tired, crashed out of the way roadside. Comfy grass. Longer stretches without food and water, more planning required."
I awoke in my bivy bag either from the sun, a groundskeeper, which I saw upon waking, or my alarm. Likely my alarm as I didn't want to miss a $10 gourmet (camping there cost upwards of $300) breakfast buffet. The Treebones owners were exceptionally nice on the phone and I hoped they wouldn't mind my sleeping on their property for a little while, I also hoped none of the paying customers had seen me.
At breakfast, I sat by myself but a few people noticed my gear and came over to ask what I was doing, they guessed I was doing a long-distance trek. One of the women I had seen in the bathroom, around 4am, told me she was glad to see me at breakfast.
The buffet had ample vegan options -- bread with natural style peanut butter and jam, house made granola (very good!) with soy milk and blueberry compote, oranges, juice, tea, and coffee. I went back for a few servings while trying to get the Wi-Fi to work. No luck. I asked the staff for assistance and they let me use their own tablet! I was trying to plan out the next leg of the journey. When I told the staff what I was doing they offered to make phone calls for me, and returned with a list of various lodging options. Unfortunately they were all outside my price range. Planning lodging in advance was difficult as I always wanted to get in the maximum number of miles possible. I called the monks the woman in Guadalupe had mentioned. Their rate was half the others' but they had a two night minimum. So I gave up, and figured I would find a camp on the way, there looked to be a number of campgrounds on the map, or crash somewhere if I had to. It was already getting to be afternoon and I hadn't put in any miles.
Lethargic from lack of sleep and the high calorie breakfast I set out. I welcomed a stop at a park with bathrooms four or five miles north. Another mile or so and I came to a police or fire station. I laid down in a patch of grass in front of the building -- it seemed like a safe place, and closed my eyes for fifteen minutes. Getting up again I started to debate whether or not I should stop to see the monks, they were two miles off course, up a mountain. I decided that I didn't need to see the monks to have a religious experience. I wrote in my notes, "God is with you everywhere." I looked at large grasses blowing in the wind and could see God there. "You don't have to go to a monastery to be with God." Nature, this trail, were my way of being with God.
I still made it my goal to reach the monastery by 4:30pm, in time for the evening Vespers service, just in case I changed my mind about visiting the monks when I got there. While I had an internet connection I had also found a Carmelite monastery, the same branch I had joined briefly fourteen years ago, near the city of Carmel right along the CCT, and decided I would stop in when I passed it.
I turned on my Gregorian Chant and Kundalini yoga music, and listened to it as I covered the next few miles. Most of it was in another language, either Latin or Punjabi. The Gregorian Chant I knew from my short time as a nun, and the yoga music I had downloaded from a teacher at the yoga studio half a mile from my place in Riverside, my second home. This place did seem holy, the scenery was breathtaking, and I pictured the groups of Catholic and Buddhist monks I had heard lived in the area, as I ran.
Since my initial injury by a massage therapist and the ensuing cascade of other injuries last year, Jennifer, Michael, Michelle, and Marlene, Kiyomi, and Mohara had all tried to help me heal. Jennifer with raw vegan juice and food, Michael with herbal elixirs, many Pranic Healing sessions, and gifts of his own salt lamp and jewelry with special stones, Marlene with gentle massage, Michelle with her wisdom, Kiyomi with her essential oils, and Mohara with yoga and various rubs. At the studio I attended a Pranic Healing session one weekend and the teacher told me that she kept seeing water, that water was the way to my healing. A few weeks later, Jennifer and Michael were selling juice at a health expo and I stopped by. They said I should have a session with a Reiki healer there, so I did. After her session she too told me that she kept seeing water, that my path to healing would involve water somehow. Already by San Clemente I started wondering, "could this be the water to which they were referring?" Two weeks before I started my journey on the CCT I had been unable to run with the group in my hometown of Muscatine without severe pain, and somehow, I had covered hundreds of miles on the CCT already, pain-free.
I came to a patch of construction work, apparently there had been a small mud slide and only one lane on the two lane road was open. A worker told me that I would have to wait to be driven across the construction zone, but after I explained my run, he said that I could do it on foot, with the condition that I run at a fast pace, so that the cars wouldn't have to wait too long. And run I did! The sun was beating down by this time but I had been moving slowly until now and had the energy to zoom ahead. I pretended I was running a 100 mile mountain race. The workers at the other end were impressed, but I knew most of my running friends could easily have run the same speed over that segment.
In fact, I knew that most of them could cover the 25-30 miles a day that I was covering, too. Some ultra runners did that much in their daily training, while holding down full time jobs! Pete Kostelnick, a fellow Iowan whom I had paced at Western States the year before, had run over 70 miles a day to set the world record for fastest crossing of the United States, and regularly ran thirty miles a day in training. Yolanda Holder, a nearly sixty year old ultra runner who lives in the neighboring town of Corona had just walked nearly 60 miles a day for over fifty days to complete the Sri Chinmoy Self Transcendence race around a single city block in New York. And I knew the AT, PCT, and other long trail records had FKTs with averages of nearly 50 miles per day. But, I didn't want to aggravate my injuries, my first goal was just finishing. Navigation and trying to follow the trail as closely as possible turned out to take a lot of time too, and keeping my phone charged necessitated that I either spend the night at a hotel or sit in one place for a few hours each day. This was also my first long distance hike and I had grabbed a few things and went, without much planning. I have in my notes that today I listened to another Rich Roll podcast episode in which he mentioned that naïveté can be a good thing. If you don't know the real risks you can be bolder and more confident, aspiring to achieve things that the more knowledgeable might see as out of reach.
I made it to the monastery just in time for Vespers. Pausing to consider my options, I again decided that I should keep moving forward, this journey was my lot and my work. A few steps down the road was the Lucia Lodge and Store. I stopped at the store to buy dinner and snacks for the road (over $40!). I should've checked the price tags. The man at the store, Tony, was friendly. We talked while I ate my dinner of canned beans and cereal with soy milk and charged my phone as it dangled from an outdoor outlet high above. I had bought a couple of Big Sur stickers, I liked the artist. He said I should put one on my water bottle, and brought out a scissors to help me carve the stickers into shapes that would fit the molded plastic. He also offered me a free postcard. When I told him I couldn't carry it with me he said he would mail it, and when I arrived home it was there.
As I left Lucia the sun began to set. I was grateful for the road closures as this made the traffic thin. With the towering cliffs in Big Sur the CCT generally stuck to Highway one. Tony had told me about the upcoming water and food stops and I had made notes in my waterproof notebook, which I consulted as I ran. He had said I might get water at the Esalen Institute, about ten miles up the road. By the time I arrived at Esalen night had fallen. I saw a man with a flashlight directing visitors in one of Esalen's parking lots. I asked him about the water. Unfortunately they couldn't offer me any, but he said the park up ahead had water and a bathroom and said that if I was looking to camp there was a site just down the road from the park with big boulders where he often saw people camping. It wasn't strictly legal but the police seemed to let people stay there, it was on the ocean side of Highway 1. I asked the man what Esalen was about, he said, "everything, you should look it up." The next day, sitting in a bar charging my phone, I found a placard about Esalen right in front of me. What a place I had run by! It was the birthplace of the "Big Sur Folk Festivals," which featured many 60s music legends. In 1964 Joan Baez held a workshop at Esalen, "The New Folk Music," which was the start of the series. Wikipedia says that Esalen "became the center of practices and beliefs that make up the New Age movement," and holds workshops on yoga, spirituality, meditation, organic food, and psychology, among other things.
I found the park, it was a short detour inland but as promised had water and bathrooms. I refilled my two bottles, then trekked back to the highway, looking for the boulder landmarks that the man at Esalen had told me about. After a few miles and no boulders -- it was by now completely dark and my cheap flashlight did little to illuminate my surroundings -- I resigned myself to simply looking for any reasonable place to lay out my bivy bag. I came to a dirt road leading off the highway and followed it for a little while, I worried that some vehicle could come barreling down the road and run me over, so went back to the highway and continued looking. I was growing increasingly sleepy. Every place that looked like a good place to camp had a sign prohibiting it. Finally, I spotted a flat patch of grass under a tree, just off the road, and took it. The grass made perfect bedding and contentedly I fell asleep.
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