The transition between trails is the hardest part of life, where dips into society are the fading norm, and life outside is becoming the foundation.
Forty days. Forty nights. Done. The Catalina Highway unspooling below me, down into Tucson, and with it the slow return of everything I’d left behind… the noise of traffic, the smell of hydrocarbons and laundry detergent, the pressure of interacting.
I put on my disco armor and danced into town anyway. Because what else can you do?
What makes the transition possible are the people waiting in the middle.
Trail angels. The ones who make space for strangers in their lives. Who see someone fresh off the trail and don’t ask them to be anything else. A shower. A zero. A place to sit while the brain ratchets back down to the frequency everything else is running on.
I wasn’t sure I was all there for my hosts. I was trying. And they let me be somewhere in between without making it a problem.
Freedom gets credited to solitude. To miles logged alone, wandering in the dark. And maybe that’s part of it.
But the other part is the people who make it safe to come back.
#ArizonaTrail #AZT #trailangels