a big chunk of it that time i wasn't living a life that you would guess that

somebody uh... you know we decide to go i think this wilderness trail by herself i

was very much at what i think of as the sort of bottom of my life

my mother had died very suddenly cancer

about four years before she was forty five years old

she thought she had a bad cold

it quickly uh... progressed to something that we thought was worse we never

dreamed it was cancer but um... we soon found out that indeed it was

and he died seven weeks later uhÖ till the day after her diagnosis

i was really at this moment that I decided to hit the pacific crest trail

I guess sort of lost

my family had really disintegrated in the wake of my momís death

i had tried to keep us all together but i didn't really have the sort of

sustaining power

that uh... a mother has and that i didn't know was there until after my mom died

I had been married at the time

To someone I cared for and loved very deeply that i just was really too young

to be married and certainly too young to nurture that kind of commitment to bond

given my own grief and what was happening in my life

and so

I, I drive to

oregon

and catch a plane to Los Angeles and catch a ride

to the town of Mojave, California

and it was there that I began my hike in the mojave desert

i was out there by myself

i'd never gone backpacking before

not one night

and

I

didn't, uh

really listen to any of the warnings that that people had given me about

Weight and how is really important to just be very very very careful

about what to take

so i get out there and i have you know um... ridiculous things like a saw

that i don't know what exactly

i was going to

to cut but i had that

i have many other things

and uh...

i could really not actually lift my backpack i couldn't lift it even

like a centimeter at all

and yet i had to carry it uh... you know eleven hundred miles to the wilderness

by the end it's like day three i was literally um...

bleeding from like

various places on my body where the backpack made contact with my with my

shoulders and my hips and

my feet uh... were were terribly blistered and

it was agony on what i said when i wasn't thinking about those very

immediate concerns what was really happening inside of me as i was

essentially

coming to terms with my life

and things came up that were surprising uh...

of course my mother's

death was this

huge thing uh... for me and i certainly thought about her a lot on the trail but

i also thought sometimes negative things about her you for the first time I was

really in touch with

my sense of rage about her death

and of course it doesn't make any sense that i would blame her of course my

mother wanted to live

i realize that

you know later that that i needed to to do that to get to the other side

Of my grief

and there is no other side where you arrive on the shore and then you walk away and youíre clean

But I certainly

got to the other side of something so i could go on

and i think that um... the trail enabled to me to do that. i finished my trip

in a town called cascade locks on the columbia river

it's just east of

uh... the city of portland oregon right now live

and there's this place called the bridge of the gods that spans the columbia

river and it's this beautiful bridge

uh... i knew

All through my hike really once that this is my destination and i wasn't

gonna stop so i got there

by the time i reached that place

I felt uh...

not transformed in this kind of neat

Arc of a way

but i think that we we sort of

hope for a look for when we take its a big journey such as the one i took

but I felt like i would never be at that bottom again

at that place i was

when i began now i'm forty-three I finished hiking the trail

two days before may twenty seventh birthday

and yet you know i looked back and i can see that everything that i am

is born of

everything that i gathered back uh... to myself on that trip