TRANSCRIPT OF LHB, SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO, 2017

I’ve become obsessed with through-hiking the PCT. I haven’t felt so overcome and possessed by something in a long time, possible ever. I’m reading everything I can find about it. And I’m reading about t on my phone while I walk along pavements, while I cross roads, while I sit on trains, and when I’m getting on and off trains and buses, when I’m in the bath in the morning after I wake up, and when I’m in bed at night. Sometimes at the weekend here when I’m lying in bed underneath the skylight through which I can see clouds passing over and I can see the underbellies of seagulls floating, and I can hear them shrieking, I spend half a day reading about the Pacific Crest Trail on my phone. Reading people talking in minute detail about each day, what they eat, every object that’s in their pack, how much their pack weighs, how far they hike each day, and then I stop and watch Hunter and Cole fucking young men they get in. That’s not their names, and in one video I remember Cole saying something like, no don’t say your real name. I told C about them and she laughed, lol, they sound like the name of a boujie veg box company. And always Hunter fucks the men, then Cole, then it’s back and forth between the two, the editing switching it up, because I’m watching the excerpt because it’s free, it’s the condensed version, the long version is very long and kind of feels like unedited real time. But that’s the one you pay for and I don’t pay except once I did, because I wanted to see more of the ginger guy Erik who has pale eyelashes and a ginger shaved head and a pink mouth and pale ginger facial hair and a large wasp tattooed across the middle of his chest. He looks over his shoulder when he’s getting fucked, and his ginger mouth is open a little. In one shot they have him wearing a Viking helmet and it’s sliding off his head at an angle. In the next shot it’s gone. I think it’s Cole that edits it. Cole and Hunter never get fucked on camera. They just do the fucking. But in the few videos they do post where it’s just the two of them, Cole does fuck Hunter but Cole never gets fucked in the videos. But maybe he does privately outside the videos. So sometimes I switch over to that. And then when I’m done and I’m lying on my back looking at the skylight with the clouds moving across the blue square of the sky and the underbellies of the seagulls, I switch back to the PCT and carry on reading about the people who are hiking, moving between all their blogs, reading about what their eating, what they’re eating out of, and what utensil they use to eat their food, and how much that utensil weighs, what they’re carrying, how much it weighs, what they’re wearing, how much it weighs, what they started out carrying, what they switched out, what they eat, what they got sick of eating, and what they obsessively thought about eating when they ran out of food. And on the two hundred mile stretch where there’s no roads and no towns, what they thought about eating over and over again, and how they deal with shitting and pissing, what they use to wipe themselves, and what the shit is like, and what they use to dig a hole to bury it, and how much the object they use to bury the shit weighs. 

I’m reading real-time blogs of two queer women who are hiking the PCT. I don’t think they know each other but I came to their blogs tangentially via a queer person who through-hiked the PCT in 2013 and then again in 2014. And I’m reading these two blogs, and these two queer women who don’t know each other. And maybe they don’t know each other’s doing it, I don’t know, they’re walking at different speeds. I know because they’re posting at different times from different locations. One is ahead of the other, maybe by a couple of hundred miles. And I think the one behind is maybe taking more rests, more zero-days. Because in her blog she mainly seems to be writing about days off in towns, and what she’s eating. But these two women, they’ve both said in their blogs from the trail, where the fuck are the queers? And all the while, all the time I’m reading this and switching between the blogs, and reading the gear lists, and what they started out with, and where they’ve been, and switching to the porn, and sleeping, and making this film, and editing it - they’re walking. Just walking and walking down that narrow path being linear. They’re walking now. And if they get to the border of Canada, they’ll get there at about the end of September. 

While I’m watching Hunter and Cole, one of the PCT women has posted a picture on Instagram. When I’m done with them in their Boston loft I switch to look at this picture from the desert. She’s called Archaic Honey, or Britton, or Pitch. It says Aries. Witch. Antifa. She says she’s just woken up in the picture. I can’t tell if she’s indoors or in a tunnel under a highway. I can see her dark armpit hair and her two very long plaits down to her waist. There’s sunlight. Her eyes are shut. A few days later, me and C are sitting on a crowded train coming up the east coast of Scotland. We can’t get seats together. She’s sat behind me. People are standing. It’s hot and it’s a racket. A kid is kicking off and his mum is kicking off more. I find this picture again on Instagram and look at it. The arm held up, the armpit hair, the prominent bicep, the very long plaits, the dirty skin. I pass my phone behind me for C to look at. I look back. C is looking at the picture and smiling. Her voice is deep. C says, yeah she’s hot, it’s a problem. She’s stopped blogging she says because she doesn’t have time for it, it’s too much with the walking. And she’s just using Instagram now, and she’s posting videos while she’s walking, and most of the time she’s just saying, I’m walking. But she’s just posted a picture lying on her back and it says, I just crammed 2,500 calories. It looks like creamy mush in plastic. And she’s dirty. And her hands are dirty. 

It’s always the same pictures that people post. The piped section of the L.A. Aqueduct, the old sofa at San Bernadino Forest, the store at Kennedy Meadows. Forrester’s Pass where people have been falling this year. Some hikers are walking fast, crunching miles, doing thirty mile days. Not because it’s a competition, but because they’ve run out of money and need to get to Canada. So that they can do an about-turn, get to somewhere that may become their home, and work. Not a Chance, No Chance, Chance got her name at the start of her first through-hike from white bros who named her that because they said no chance will she finish the hike. Trail name are anonymous so that things don’t follow you back into the real world. Other people are supposed to decide it for you. Other hikers you meet along the journey. According to some aspect of you. An object that they think particularly defines you, or some characteristic of you on the trail. A hiker on the blogspot Unlikely Hikers says take your own trail name, fuck them, don’t let them name you, you decide what your trail name is. And one woman called Not a Chance, or No Chance, or Chance, who’s though-hiked the PCT three times, and in a interview - a video someone made about female through-hikers, I can see the scars on her arms. And she works to hike. Works in pizza parlours of fruit picking. And saves to hike. That’s the cycle. And when she’s on the trail she’s worrying about life outside when she finishes. Having to go back to life outside. The cotton world they call it. Because you don’t wear cotton on the trail, you wear synthetics because you sweat, and cotton is too heavy to carry, you just have one set of clothes, maybe three pairs of socks though some consider that excessive. And people have different strategies for wiping their piss while they hike. Many women use a bandana, and they wipe their piss away with that, and walm with it drying on the back of their packs, and people that pass and see it, they know it’s a bandana specifically for wiping piss. 

Now it’s mid August. One of the queers dropped out. She did 454 of the 2663 miles. The other one is still going, and now the one who I heard about them both through has started too. She just posted a picture of her tent in a forest. It’s not much bigger than a human body. And it’s just a thin layer of transparent gossamer. She says it’s a psychological barrier. A thin screen between her and the stick breakers (the animals). She’s started later, in August, because she’s section hiking this year, not through-hiking. And she’s going in the opposite direction, north to south, which makes for a much more solitary hike because far fewer people do it this way. Most do south to north. You have much more time alone north to south, with long sections, days or weeks at a time not seeing anyone. Though I don’t understand how that works. If all those people are going south to north don’t you pass them all? If you walk south to north you have to start with a 700 mile stretch of hot, waterless desert and reach the Sierra Nevada mountains before the snow hems you in. If you walk north to south, the Northern Cascade mountains are at the start and you have to move fast to get through them before the heavy snow. One of the things that prevents people going north to south is that the sun is always in your eyes.