And that’s why I’m celebrating turning 25 by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. You can read more about my adventures over on my Patreon.
Gracetopher’s Travels (Miss Me Yet?)
Pacific Crest Trail
Backpacking
It’s just what my family did. My parents went backpacking on their honeymoon, and when I came along they weren’t about to do something as silly as wait for me to be able to walk by myself before getting on the trail again. I was three the first time I hiked a substantial portion on my own – 7 miles up Mt. Hood to Paradise Park, carrying my own little backpack (which contained nothing more than my sleeping bag).
Dreams
I’ve wanted to hike the PCT for as long as I can remember. I met a couple of through hikers the summer between high school and college, and they were instantly my heroes. That was going to be me, once I was done with college and had the freedom to take five months out of my life for this. I almost did a portion of the trail the summer of ’14, but I got a job at the Portland Japanese Garden instead. In some ways I was relieved because I wanted to do the whole thing all at once anyways.
Quarter of a Century
I learned that the PCT had been officially completed in 1993, the same year that I was born. From this came the idea that I’d hike the trail in 2018 to celebrate both mine and the trail’s 25th birthday at the same time. I lived frugally (as I always have), and I saved up every penny I could for the coming adventure. I biked and I ran and I hiked; I would be prepared for this trail.
Plans
Nothing goes according to plan. Ever.
The Roof
January 1, 2017. Being me at 23 wasn’t easy; I’d already nearly died in September after spending all summer dizzy because of weird ear issues. Then less than 24 hours into 2017 I fell off of a roof and broke my back. In case you wondered, those medical bills are not cheap. All of the money I’d worked so hard and so long to save…. I’m glad I had it to sustain me in 2017, but now here we are. It’s 2018, I still want to hike the PCT, but I can’t afford any of the fancy gear I’d hoped to buy on top of a plane ticket down to the border with Mexico and the cost of mailing myself the food and other supplies I’ll need along the way.
Not to mention, I broke my back. It healed remarkably fast and remarkably well, but L1 and L2 are weird shaped and missing 25% and 30% of their original height forever. A year ago today I wasn’t allowed to lift more than 10 pounds, and while that restriction has lifted, I do still have to be much more careful about carrying heavy things than I ever had to in the past.
Solution
DIY, minimalist backpacking, and upping the intensity of my Physical Therapy exercises. I’m borrowing a friend’s copy of Ray Jardine’s Beyond Backpacking, and I’m going to make this work some way some how. Because my feet are itching, so it’s time to scratch that itch on a 2,650 mile long trek.
After all, what better way to celebrate the fact that I beat the odds so spectacularly? I broke my back at 23, but I envision beginning year 25 of life stronger than ever. Picture the Gracetopher: April 15, 2018, officially a quarter of a century old, standing on the border with Mexico, broke-back kid with a backpack anyways. Hiking northward towards Canada.
Euskera: Endangered Language
The language of the Basque Country is called Euskera, and it is currently on a list of endangered languages. It is slowly making a come-back thanks to nationalist sentiment but is still spoken by less than a million people. Although it is the co-official language of the Basque Country, Euskera is actually spoken by less than half of the residents of the region; where I am you wouldn’t guess, but I suppose all the city-dwellers offset those of us in the boondocks.
It doesn’t help of course that dialects of Euskera are massively different, even in very small areas. There is a standardized language used for publications written in Euskera or for movies and television shows, but it is not the normal Euskera spoken by real people. When you can’t necessarily communicate with other people who are supposed to be speaking the same language as you… perhaps it is understandable that some people choose convenience over preserving a beautiful ancient language.
Despite the trouble involved in communicating in different dialects however, as little as 80 years ago Euskera was “very widespread and inescapable in daily life” (http://www.unc.edu/~sdteeter/basque.html). What happened in the past century then? The Spanish Civil War. When Franco assumed power, he banned all of the languages aside from Castellano. When he died in 1975 and Spain finally became a democracy, the four provinces making up the Basque Country were allowed a large degree of autonomy, and the Basque language was once again allowed.
Now schools in the Basque Country are taught in one of 3 models: Model A in which classes are taught primarily in Castellano with Euskera as a separate subject, Model C in which classes are taught in both languages, and Model D in which classes are taught primarily in Euskera with Castellano as a separate subject. There are also night schools offered to give adults the chance to learn their ancestral language. Hopefully these measures can save the oldest language in Europe from extinction.
How to Shear a Sheep
Step one: Wait until it is warm out.
Sheep have wool for a reason: to keep them warm in the winter. They can of course be shorn much earlier in the year than we shear them here, but once shorn, the sheep are colder and therefore expend energy keeping themselves warm instead of making milk. Since Pikunieta is centered around cheese-making, the quality and quantity of milk is the first consideration in every decision made about the sheep.
Step two: Wait until it is dry out.
This year is a bit rainier than average, but even an average year in the Basque country is wet. When sheep are raised for their wool, shearing them wet can lead to discoloration, rot, or even in extreme cases fire in the bales of wool being shipped elsewhere. Here though, the wool is shorn for the health and comfort of the sheep and once shorn is nearly useless. The reason we shear the sheep dry here has more to do with the comfort of the shearer.
Step three: Get your sheep together and shear them.
Generally you want a professional to shear your sheep (especially if the sheep are raised for wool). It’s much faster and therefore less stressful for the sheep, and it is also much safer; cutting a sheep with an electric shearer is quite easy.
In the past, Spanish sheep shearers would tie the legs of the sheep, but now the Tally-hi method is the most widely used. This method of sheep shearing was developed in Australia about half a century ago and is currently used throughout the world. By holding the sheep in a certain way they struggle less, and therefore shearing goes smoother and quicker. To learn exactly how to shear a sheep in the tally-hi method, you can watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKXww52dD3s
So Apparently Twenty Years Isn’t Enough Either
Ok… I haven’t been immersing myself in Castellano 100%…. I still write this in English for example, and I write e-mails and letters to my American friends in English. I’m also currently caught up in a fantasy novel that just so happens to be written in English. I know English. Pretty darn well. It’s my mother toung, and the vast majority of the millions and millions of words that have passed my lips have been in English.
Why then do I now have trouble remembering words? Yesterday I couldn’t remember conveyer belt (even just now it took quite a bit of brain power to remember). The day before I couldn’t remember beret…. that one took me a good 17 hours to figure out.
I don’t know the Castellano equivalent of these words, but I can’t look them up in a dictionary if I don’t know the word in English first. Le sigh…. All the problems that arise from communicating in different languages.
Isn’t Five Years Enough?
Five years. Five freaking years. That’s a quarter of my life! You’d think my Castellano would be a little better than it is….. But no. I’m stuck here listening to people speak words that I can’t understand….. It’s frustrating. Plus, if I want to speak, the entire conversation has to stop while they wait for me to figure out what words I need and how to conjugate those damn verbs…. And then if I’ve chosen the wrong word or conjugation the conversation is stalled even longer while they figure out what I’m trying to say.
I feel as if I go around playing monkey-see-monkey-do to have even a chance of figuring out what’s going on. There are concepts and concrete objects that we never covered in any of my Spanish classes, and even more frustratingly, there are those that we have covered, but have simply slipped my mind. The 6-year-old Oihan speaks two languages fluently… Oh my jealousy! I’m like a 3-year-old in a 20-year-old’s body when it comes to communicating.
I suppose I should look on the bright side though…. if I feel like saying or writing something that nobody in the house will understand very well, all I have to do is use my English. Which is kind of cool.
Spain?
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I’m not in Spain. If you happen to be an overachiever you may have looked up where the Basque Country is and said “Huh? That’s within the borders of Spain…. What is this crazy girl on about?” Plus of course Barcelona. Who doesn’t know about Barcelona? Isn’t it obviously in Spain as well?
Barcelona is in Catalonia, and as my new Barcelonan friends have informed me, Catalonia is not Spain. Quite a few people in Catalonia actually want to break away from Spain and form their own country. Not everyone of course…. but it’s not uncommon to see a Catalonian flag flying from someone’s balcony in Barcelona instead of a Spanish flag. One little birdy told me about a bit of resentment in Catalonia; they feel that their industriousness is wasted when the central Spanish government uses their tax money on services for the more impoverished (and supposedly more lazy) regions of Spain.
The Basque Country is also peopled by those who want independence from Spain. Like Catalonia, there is a different language, but unlike Catalan, Euskera seems to my ears as if it has absolutely nothing in common with Castellano (what I have been mistakenly calling Spanish for all these years). Euskera is the only non-Latin based language of Spain, and I have heard that it actually has more in common with Turkish than with Castellano.
Plenty of other aspects of the culture are far different as well. The folk music here for instance bears no resemblance to stereotypical Spanish music; it involves acordians and at times something that sounds a bit like yodeling. It’s pretty cool though, you should definitely look some up. The countryside of course is far different from your stereotype of Spain as well. Green forests (from all the rain), plenty of hills, and sheep out the wazoo.
That being said; for an Oregonian like me, the weather is perfect. Especially for a summer. Maybe I’m not in Spain, but that’s alright, I happen to like the Basque Country just fine.
¡Besos!
I’m not in Spain…. but the Basque country does have some similarities with Spain. For example: the greetings. Everyone new I’ve met here has greeted me by kissing me. No joke(and only a tiny bit exaggerated)
Ok, so it’s the whole two kisses on the cheeks sort of thing, not a full on kiss-on-the-lips romantic style thing… and I definitely knew to be prepared… but it was still a bit unsettling. More unsettling than I expected it to feel. It doesn’t help that I spent most of my childhood not even doing so much as hugging my father. My mom would decide sometimes that she needed to demonstrate her love for me and that a hug was the best way to do so…. but it was always super awkward. I didn’t really learn to like hugs until high school when I actually made friends who liked hugging people. Needless to say… my kisses (even those on cheeks) have hitherto been reserved almost exclusively for romantic encounters….
Not that I mind really. It’s all a part of the cultural immersion, and it’s cool. It just threw me off a bit more than it should have. And it’s proof that no matter what they say, the people of Catalonia and of the Basque Country do have something in common with the rest of Spain after all.
Adventures on the Barcelona Metro
As promised, the second part of How Grace Travelled to the Basque Country.
I got out of my hostel early-ish on Saturday… I wasn’t actually supposed to be there, so I thought that best. I ate a few leftovers for breakfast, and then I set off. I considered walking to the train station, but it was several kilometres away and I had a backpack and a suitcase… What if someone tried to steal something? And besides, who wants to walk a good hour dragging a suitcase along? And of course, there was also the fear that the tickets to Zumarraga would be sold out before I got there…. Then I would have the same problem I had had the day before.
So instead I took the Barcelona Metro… The subway. For 2 Euros and 26 minutes of standing I could escape Barcelona. And who knows… The train didn’t leave until 3:30… If I felt like it I could perhaps drag my suitcase to some nearby tourist attractions. I was thinking about something like that when I happened to glance down and see my wallet moving off it’s own accord.
PICKPOCKET!!!!! My brain shouted. I lunged at the woman next to me, but she seemed so startled that I immediately doubted my instinct and apologized. I should have checked right then… but instead I let her get off at the next stop. Then I looked in my wallet and discovered that all of my cash, aside from a 20 Euro bill that had been tucked away in a separate corner was now gone. Shit. Shit, shit, shit, SHIT. HIJO DE PUTA!!!! Luckly I had caught her before she could get my debit card… but that was 100 Euros!!!!
I then made sure to keep a much better eye on all of my things, especially my wallet. And at least I still had the card. I could buy my ticket with that, and then everything would be good.
Except my bank flagged it when I tried to buy the ticket. So I tried the ATM. Where my bank also had a fit. Great. My own bank thinks I’m as bad as that woman on the subway. AWESOME. Although I suppose it’s a bit comforting to know that I’m protected from people like that…. At least a little bit.
So there I was. In the Barcelona Sants train station. With one suitcase, one backpack, one currently useless debit card, and 20 Euros. Tickets were 61.20 Euros… Where the hell was I supposed to find the rest????????
Then it comes to me! I keep a secret stash inside my phone cover. It happened to be exactly 40 Euros. That plus random change I had forgotten to count gave me just enough to buy my ticket, use a payphone to call the farm and let people know what was going on, and still have a little bit of change left over (thank goodness for the 1 and 2 Euro coins!)
I was of course too afraid to do anything but sit in the train station guarding my things like a hen guards her eggs forthe next 3 hours… but after that and a 5 hour train ride, I was finally safely in the Basque Country.
Adventures With BlaBla Car
Well, I have now been in Spain for a week… Goodness.. So much has happened! There’s quite a bit to tell about my time on the farm, but first I suppose I should talk about my adventures getting here….
When I last wrote I assumed I’d be leaving the very next day. I was trying to travel via blabla car (an online ridesharing program). I communicated with someone who was going about 10 minutes away from Bergara: I could leave in Bergara and meet someone from the farm at the bus stop there, and in the meantime only spend about 24 Euros for a 6 hour car ride instead of 60 Euros for a train ride. It sounded like an amazing idea, and I was excited to finally get to the Basque Country.
Everything seemed perfect. I spent time with my new friends at the hostel for one last night, and then woke up early to pack and check out. In the meantime I was watching my e-mail for details about where to meet for a trip that was supposed to start at 4 in the afternoon. I sent some more e-mails to my ride… trying not to be annoying…. and I sent a message on the blabla car website… Then before you know it it was 3:30. I was nervous by then, so I decided to walk a kilometer to the nearest shopping mall. There were payphones there, and I used one to call the driver I was supposed to ride with. I spent 4 Euros on that stupid phone call, just to struggle through language barriers and learn that my ride had already left. Without so much as an e-mail to let me know that they had decided not to give me a ride. In other circumstances I would shrug and say “their loss”…. but there was not a bed for me at the hostel that night. It was a Friday, and we were crowded by people on weekend trips. I didn’t know what to do… I had no place to stay in a city I barely knew on a Friday night….. There were of course other hostels, but how was I to know whether they would have space or not? I went back to my hostel temporarily, there was at least wifi there and I could use the internet to help me make my decisions.
I sat on the terrace stressing while around me newcomers and a couple of the people I had spent the week with started drinking. I tried the couchsurfing website, but the only replies I got were from sketchy people. I knew I couldn’t spend a night safely on the streets with the amount of stuff I had. If only I could have fit everything just into that backpack…. I considered trying to hitch-hike… but that is of course a bit dangerous. I didn’t even have my knife because it’s apparently illegal in Spain. I’m also not really that confident in my knowledge of Spanish geography. I could go buy pepper spray and a map and ride the metro as far as it would take me… But I would have to leave soon so I could find a safe(ish) place to sleep once it got dark.
I did eventually decide against hitch-hiking, and instead looked for other hostels on the internet. I found some farther from the city center that weren’t full and was going to book, when another American showed up. She had been teaching kindergarten in an international school in Germany, and her friends had apparently booked too many beds for the night. It wasn’t entirely kosher, but I paid her 7 Euros and slept in someone else’s bed after one last night of salad, wine, and simple food on the terrace.
Stay tuned for my adventures of the next day: Adventures on the Barcelona Metro. Spoiler alert: it’s even more stressful than the Blabla car fiasco.
Gracetopher Kirk 