Finding life in a thousand little deaths

Originally published January 2018.

“What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant.” – Victor Hugo

I have never found a statement that points closer to what traveling feels like for me than this quote by Victor Hugo, and I have been feeling it especially strong so far during our time in New Zealand because we have been packing in so much into such a short amount of time, which, don’t get me wrong, has been absolutely amazing. But each moment of being born in the moments meeting a new land for the first time, taking the first hike through its chest, meeting its heart and its plants and hearing its birds and trickles of its streams, is met by an equal moment of death. Death in your having to say goodbye, in having to keep walking, in knowing that you will probably never be in this place again.

It is hard for me, coming into contact with so many diverse landscapes, barely having time for my brain to fully process the beauty of one place before we are suddenly in a completely different type of landscape, leaving me on overdrive, trying to hard to be present but scrambling for time to fully soak each place in and feel it in my bones.

That is the hard balance of intentionality and presence, that living intentionally in the now can easily go too far in the extreme to the point where you have trouble letting go, letting time pass by, being okay with putting miles and miles behind you, knowing you will never walk those same miles again, for even if you somehow do get to come back to that very spot, both you and the land will be changed.

I felt this same feeling two years ago when I was traveling out West in the states, specifically when there was a week span of time when we backpacked in Yosemite National Park for 4 days, straight into backpacking to the bottom of the grand canyon and back out again, straight into hiking the two most renowned hikes in Zion National Park (Angel’s Landing and The Narrows) the day after we got out of the Grand Canyon. The High Sierras’ gargantuan peaks straight into the insanity of the dry and barren depth of the Grand Canyon straight into the red rock formations of Zion National Park in Utah. All in the same week. So much to take in, so much to process.

This week has been on quite a similar scale.

Straight after getting off the Routeburn Track, we made our way toward Milford Sound.

However, to the most unfortunate of coincidences, the only way out of the Routeburn area was to drive BACK through Queenstown, yet again, which meant we HAD to get Ferg Burger, yet again. So, I ate a Holier Than Thou tofu burger the size of my face and fries and garlic aoili, yet again. And we ate so much we were sick, yet again.

But I mean what else do you do when you get off the trail than overwhelm your digestive system, that for a week has been surviving on bland tuna and oatmeal, with grease and fat and rich and creamy and salty and heavy?

We climbed back in Beep-Boop, all feeling vaguely nauseous by our recent indulgence, and continued on toward Milford Sound. We stopped in a small glacier lake town called Te Anau, and I had the most glorious $5 eight-minute shower I have ever had. The feeling that remains after you scrub 6 days of sweat and dirt and grease and tuna juice and dust and blood off of your beat up body is pretty comparable to ecstasy. And this is coming from someone who doesn’t like to shower.

We ate lunch on the beach of the lake, and continued our drive to a campsite about an hour from Milford Sound.

However, the K’s forgot to get cash small enough to pay for our camp fees, so they only could pay for one of them, so the three of us had to play hide and seek with the camp warden all night, avoiding him so that he could not see that three of us were staying in the van when we could only pay for two. This involved me going on quite a few walks as he was walking around, but we managed to avoid him all night. In the clear.

We have been good hippies while we have been traveling, craving veggies and salad like a pregnant woman, and we enjoyed a nice dinner packed with micronutrients after our bland diet of carbs and protein on the trail. Mine included a giant carrot, of course.

The next morning we drove into Milford Sound. Oh man. They K’s are the sweetest and bought me a boat cruise ticket for an early birthday present, because I wasn’t going to go with them originally because my travel budget is a bit less than theirs, but then I was suddenly going.

It meant so much to me, being able to see one of the most significant parts of New Zealand that I thought I was going to have to put off until later in life, when I’m not counting dimes and nickels.

Milford Sound is just as insane as everyone claims. We had a freaking blast, seeing the giant fjords jut straight up from the sound. We saw seals and waterfalls that were way taller than our lack of depth perception could help us see and ate veggie sandwiches and drank long blacks (NZ version of an Americano), our hair blowing crazy in the wind and our spirits blowing just the same.

After the 2-hour cruise, we got back in Beep Boop, drove back to Te Anau, had lunch, then drove the rest of our 4.5 hours to Wanaka, another quaint lake town northwest of Queenstown.

Wanaka was two days of rest. Recharging our legs and sleeping and sitting on the lake. We pulled into our campground that night at 8pm, and I saw three guys throwing frisbee in a giant grassy field at the campground.

I hadn’t thrown in probably a month and a half (a long time for me), so naturally I skipped dinner and threw for 2 hours until it got so dark we literally could not see the frisbee anymore. I taught Michaeli and Tomer (Michael and Tommy), the two Israeli guys I threw with mostly, some new throws, and we laughed and poked fun. I ran back to the van to scarf down food because by now I was starving, and then I went and had a few beers with the guys at their van, talking about anything and everything, laughing about our cultural differences, teaching each other a little English, a little Hebrew, (my favorite word is for “cool” which is “sababa,” I found every excuse I could to be able to say it), all the while getting attacked by sandflies the entire time.

The next day I walked around the city exploring by myself (my favorite). I walked to the famous tree in the water, sat on the beach and wrote “The Going” (previous blog post) while listening to a tanned man with long hair picking away beautifully on a guitar, went for a swim in the lake.

That night I hung out with Michaeli and Tomer again, meeting their other friend Nissan, who joined them from traveling up north, and their three German friends, and we talked about politics, how to advocate for a better world while being so young, and they asked me a lot of questions about my book that I’m writing. It was way too quickly time for me to hug and say goodbye because we had to leave pretty early the next morning to head to the West Coast, so I hugged the necks of my new friends, joking and saying things like “I hope you become the most world-changing German politician that ever lived” and them replying “give me a shoutout when you become famous with your book,” leaving in sweetness and kindness, feeling the subtle tension that remains in knowing that you quite possibly will never see them again.

Such is traveling though, the beautiful and the difficult and the happy and the sad.

We woke up the next morning and drove 3 hours north/west to the beginning of the Copland Track, the hike we would do for the next two days.

We stopped along the way at the renowned Blue Pools, skipping rocks on the turquoise surface, Lucas always putting us very embarrassingly to shame.

We eventually made it to the trailhead for the Copland Track, suited up and began our 11.5 mile hike for the day, which immediately started off with a decent river crossing, so we ditched our boots and hiked through wet, slippery, muddy jungle with what seemed like a hundred stream crossings in our Chacos. It was so insane going from alpine mountains and lakes and peaks to suddenly being in the midst of a literal jungle. It reminded me of the Vietnam scene in Forrest Gump, filled with palms and vines and moss and green and green and more green.

Again. A thousand little deaths to make room for new beauty that I was now in the midst of.

The hike was more difficult than we thought it would be. We thought it would be fairly easy, fairly flat, but we crawled up the last 4 miles or so, feeling like it was never going to end.

We crossed the most insane foot bridges of my life, 100 feet up a raging glacier river, which can be pretty trippy when you can see straight through foot wide the chain link fence that separates you and falling to your death. They are pretty safe though, you would have to be super uncoordinated to stumble and flip off. Good thing we weren’t scared of heights though. There would be no way you could make yourself cross it if you were actually pretty scared of heights.

We made it to the hut, dropped our packs, threw on our swimsuits, headed to the river to rinse all of the mud off that had splashed all over our legs from 11.5 miles of jungle, and then up to the hot pools, what makes this hike famous. The hot pools are about a 5 minute walk from the backcountry hut, and they were pretty epic. Way hotter than I thought though, probably hotter than most hot tubs I have been in.

We met 4 more Israeli guys (there’s a lot of Israeli’s here), that we talked to for a bit, met a guy from California who had his PhD in philosophy (he still hadn’t found the meaning of life yet, in case you’re wondering), a guy from New York here studying geology, and we shared a room with a really nice couple from the UK, on a holiday trying to feel out if they wanted to move to NZ.

So many people from all over the world always! This was the first time we met multiple Americans in one place though. So far I have only met a few people from the states. There are way more Europeans and Israelis.

We went to bed early like you always do after a long day of hiking, got up early and hiked our 11.5 miles back out. We made killer time, but I still felt like I was crawling by the end, the fatigue of almost three weeks straight of hiking catching up with my body.

My feet had been abused with blisters and sandfly bites, my big toe feels like I have tendonitis in it, and my patellar tendons felt like they were quite literally going to burst out of my skin with any step that I made. My body needed a day of rest.

That didn’t stop us from limping up a very steep hill to get a view of the Fox Glacier on our way to Hokitika on the West Coast, but after that we were done with walking for the next bit. And glad for it.

So yeah. From the most lush green jagged giant mountains on the Routeburn, to the steep fjords on the Milford Sound, to the mangled wild jungle of the bush of the west coast, to turquoise rivers, to geothermal pools overlooking mountain valleys to the beaches of the west coast,

I’m feeling the thousand little deaths, and soaking up the life found in all of them, letting myself be born in every new encounter, whether landscape or person, and equally letting myself die in the act of saying goodbye, of turning away, of continuing on to the next little birth, keeping my hands open, praying that I would continue to learn how to keep them there, instead of grasping and clinging to the impermanence of this life.

I can’t help but to end these days on my knees in gratitude.