OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL SLEEP

I slept under a bridge Thursday, and thought nothing of it. The bridge, vibrating with the constant traffic of Interstate 15 above tons of concrete and asphalt, was the second bridge I slept under that week. In the middle of the scorched desert day, you take what shade the trail provides, lest you want the fate of the ant under the magnifying glass. "Should I worry about laying on the ground?" one passing hiker said to me in the dark, cool tunnel. "Homeless people may have been here." "Buddy," I quipped, "we are homeless people." Now, our circumstances are far from the desperation and plight of truly homeless people. Hell, the average thru-hiker saves thousands and quits their jobs just to go on a five-month saunter through the wilderness. But the point got across. We aren't just sleeping in designated campsites night after night. We sleep where we can: next to a stream at Deep Creek, under a park pavilion at Silverwood Lake, on a couch in Big Bear Lake, on a dirt road above San Bernardino, in a McDonald's in Cajon Pass. And with each new location, it becomes less and less weird. Truthfully, I'm too tired to care—a similar attitude I've taken to my hygiene around day-hikers or folks in town.

Still, the nomadic life, while romantic in theory, is challenging. There is no permanence, aside from the pain in my feet and the dirt on my hands. There are no beds. There's no neighborhood bar where everyone knows you. Your friends and loved ones are thousands of miles away. We wake up every morning at 5 a.m. and hike 20 or so miles until we're too tired and hungry to continue, leaving the temporary homes we made in the dirt and walking once more into the relatively unknown, with only maps and word of mouth as our guides. But as we continue to hike north, toward that glowing goal of Canada, we are far from alone on the journey. The Pacific Crest Trail is just as much a series of connected state parks and national forests as it is a network of people. With each new, unfamiliar town we enter or section of the trail we stop, we see familiar faces—our "hiker trash" brethren, people we've been hiking with on and off since we began more than three weeks and 362 miles ago. I see my old pals from San Diego: Stef, Daniel, Golden, and Snot Fish. I'll see my new friends: Dash, Toodles, and that British guy whose name I can't seem to remember. I'll see people who just seem to pop up randomly and without warning: Strange Bird, Paul, and the dreaded leech. And I have my hiking buddies who have been with me since the first day: Alex, Piotr, Ben, Cody, and Ryan. We are the wanderers of the West, the Bedouin of the backcountry, the itinerant of the idyllic. And we sleep wherever we want.