Crossing the Andes and a lesson on complaining

A little over a month ago I went on a 4-day hike at 12,000 feet through the Andes to Machu Picchu. I have at last de-traumatized myself enough to talk about it. It took a month. A month of ice-cream and good TV and novel brainstorming and whole days where I didn’t leave the apartment. A month of hedonism. Look at this. Hell.

I can talk about it now, but I can’t talk about it well. Even the thought of it is exhausting so it’s difficult to be eloquent. Me. Hike. Tired. Keep Going. I have memories, things that I thought about the most, feelings that prevailed. I was often annoyed to be hiking alone and in the back. We were in a 16-person group and I went with 2 friends and this was not how I envisioned the hike going, me alone in the back. Had I envisioned it this way I probably would have done better emotionally — funny how expectations help us that way. Sure, I could have been mature and immediately cast aside my expectation and adjusted to the change, but everything else was changed too and I just wanted something normal and this was an easy thing to affix on. My adorable expectation. Awwwww look. It’s dead. Something else I thought about a lot was how fast the hike was going by. This could have been my exhaustion. I was too tired to really notice anything but how much oxygen I wasn’t getting and how many hours of suffering lay between me and catching my breath. Several times I looked up and said, “Wow, this is really pretty. Wow, I should be taking pictures of this.” What I was halfway saying when I said this was, Is everyone insane or can we just take a break already?

There was a spirit of competition on the hike which I admit to being swept up into, mostly because they were being competitive not because I wanted to be competitive. There are things I want to be competitive about and hiking is not one of them. Competitive people, however, is one of the things I want to be competitive about. I sucked at going uphill. I did not have the cardiovascular strength for it, coming from a family of wimps socialites as I do. We excel at restaurants and movies. We don’t do outdoors, darling. I was much better at going downhill. The good Lord atoned for his slip-up with my lungs by giving me hand-eye coordination. I would run downhill, skipping over stones with hare-like precision, never knowing where my next step would fall but not caring because there was no way I could stop if I did. After hours of being alone in the back this was crack cocaine. It helped that I had trail running shoes and not clunky hiking boots. My friend bought me them. I would not have known to buy them myself. She is either very smart or she was sent by angels. There were things that happened that I don’t feel like writing about in length.

• A small brush fire
• A puppy peeing on my backpack
• Strangers on the trail, always in pairs, encouraging me to keep climbing
• Getting half as long a break as everyone else
• My body becoming too tired to digest any food of substance
• Vomiting trail side
• Falling off a 12-foot ledge and bruising my thigh
• Waking up at 3am and stargazing for 45 minutes
• Leaving the trail to sob in the bushes for a while
• The assistant tour guide offering to hold my backpack in Machu Picchu because I was having enough difficulty carrying just my clothes and probably looked like the soulless shell of a person
• Letting him

What matters is, I guess, that we made it.

About that fall off a ledge. My hip is still sore all down the side. I’m remembering those books where people get battle wounds which “never really heal” and that’s probably what I’m working with here. My coworker has a deep-tissue bruise from a car wreck years ago that is still a tender knot. Not that I’m complaining. I’m on the slow descent to death and the mileage is bound to show. About complaining… Here’s a big thing I learned on the trail. Everyone processes differently. On day 2 my friend and I were discussing our fellow hikers. Which ones we liked and what we liked about them, which ones had personalities that were more difficult to adjust to. She said, “I don’t like hiking around Mildred though. She’s kind of a negative person.” “Who is Mildred?” “The one who complains all the time.” A face immediately came to mind. Mildred. Those rare times when I was in the front of the group, I had encountered her myself. The difference is, rather than a negative presence she shone as a bright pebble in my memory, one of the nicer, more accessible people in the group. I was baffled my friend who got along so smoothly with me would not enjoy the one person who, on day 2, I felt like getting to know better. I tried to defend her a bit, not because I’m one of those people who believes we should only say nice things about each other — I’m not — but because I had been complaining the whole time. It’s just that, you know, no one was ever hiking with me to hear it. I thought about why I liked this girl. It’s true that our verbal interaction had mostly revolved around complaining. Could it be that I was a negative person and so naturally felt comfortable around negative people? Was I subconsciously resistant to improving myself? I asked myself this quietly and honestly and for a long time. I had a lot of time to think since I was, you know… This is what I decided. What I “learned.” If you are constantly finding something to complain about over a period of weeks in a wide variety of situations, you might have a problem. But, like everything else, in moderation complaining is not innately wrong. A tone of voice is not innately wrong and neither are words, so why should they become immoral in combination? Would not the morality be dictated by the situation? By the feeling such words and tones evoke in the listener and speaker? The fact stands that complaining is positive to me, in moderation. By voicing my problems, my problems seem smaller, more manageable. If they can be contained in a few sentences how horrible and earth-shattering can they be? And if someone understands my problems — what the problems are, why they are problems — they might be able to give me advice on how to beat those problems. Even if they have no advice, the fact that they’ve experienced similar problems or know people who’ve experienced similar problems would serve as a testament to me that I won’t die. I’m not the first; I won’t be the last. Let’s take an example. A very difficult hike. From my viewpoint it is helpful to discuss how difficult the hike is and all the ways in which it is difficult. This legitimizes my struggle — I’m not crazy; I’m not a wimp; I’m having problems for a reason. A good reason. Encountering someone else complaining on the trail would be a beacon of hope. Finally, someone who sees this situation the same way I do! Yes! Rally! Let us conquer this mutually-agreed-upon very difficult thing! Perhaps we can laugh about how absurdly hard it is! But this is not how everyone deals with problems. Some people deal with problems by telling themselves that there is no problem. If there is no problem, or if the problem is not very large, then there is no reason in the world why they should not be able to do it. So they go about doing it. They focus on the moments of fun or how awesome they’ll feel in a few days when they can say “I did it.” They enlarge these moments in their mind. Encountering someone who keeps reminding them of the difficulties they are having is an affront to their reality, is damaging, is negative. And when I encountered anyone on the trail who ignored my observations on how much difficulty I was having, I felt like I’d been told off for being a wimp, or worse, boring. I started seeing that person as a snob, as an affront to community, as negative. Our language comes up short here. There is a lifestyle of complaining and then there is situational complaining used as a coping mechanism which is no better or worse than situational delusion and distraction. You wouldn’t call a dieter who is focusing on the cheesecake he will be having after a week of commitment delusional and distracted, would you? This realization led to another. “Just think of how good you’ll feel when you’re done!” I have heard it a hundred times and have never found it motivating and have always wondered why people keep saying it.