greetings, earthlings! please forgive the glorified travel blog as we travel 82 miles on the Alta Via 1 trail through the Dolomites, and later to Vienna and Barcelona. read on for: bovine reflections, “Wink Wink,” how to escape farts, men, meat, Solnit, and giving up (used with object).

i’ll skip the full itinerary of this long hike, but to orient: it’s done in a line, north to south, through northern Italy. it begins where the Winter Olympics happened. blessedly, the snow has melted.

you eat and sleep at rifugios, literally “refuge” or “hut,” but more like a buzzing cabin running at the density of a Manhattan boarding house in the middle of nowhere. this means you don’t have to carry a tent or a sleeping bag or food or cooking equipment. it also means have to sleep next to strangers in creaking bunks and share a shower with 40 trail-dirtied people.

each day, the trail takes you through every shape and color of rock right next to each other.

some landscapes feel interstellar, and some feel like home. first, you’re on the moon. then, it’s like you took Smith Rock State Park, blew it up 100x, extricated it from Central Oregon with a claw machine, and plopped it into the lush trails of Mt. Hood.

downy, dewy soil leads you through familiar firs, with hot pink mini rhododendrons dotting the the bushes. yellow starlets, eggplant-purple bellflowers and perfect, canonical daisies carpet the floor. turn your head and you find sweeping scenes of rock in a rainbow of geometries: slabs of silver, piles of red, spires in orange.

i wandered between lakes, watching the cows amble like TV. in soft rolling hills of meadow, i listened to the munch of their grass-vacuuming. green-blue pools sat among folds of rock.

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Caroline Polachek says of the song “Welcome to My Island” that the line “Desire / I want to turn into you” has several meanings. one is “wanting to turn into desire itself,” where desire is “like electricity, that force that pulls us through the world.”

this trip came on the cusp of two seasons: one devoid of such desire, that life force, and another where i hope to build it up again. i was feeling wistful, yearning for yearning. i thought this song was going to be the vibe.

but things took a turn on day five. in the comfort of the only private room on the hike, fresh from my own shower, i lay naked on my twin bed and allowed myself one endeavor into the internet. Charli xcx released a new song. it became, perhaps incongruously and due to forces outside of my control, the vibe for the rest of the trip.

(i would inject the “Wink Wink” video intravenously, if you know what i mean (says the least bad girl ever).)

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the sun did its long summer set as i perched among 360 degrees of rolling grasses. i read from Rebecca Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain—coincidence of title and surroundings unintended.

twenty cowbells clanged a gentle lullaby in the distance as a marmot scurried past. trails traced outward like strings of yarn, and dramatic but benevolent piles of clouds, backlit with sun rays, clustered upward.

spotted, tan, black and white, Jersey and Guernsey and fuzzy-eared Highlands, the cows materialize next to you on the trail. they drink from the puddle or stream, swat flies with their tails, recline on the grass, cuddle in pairs, yawn. their inexplicable names get tagged on their ears: Emma Wisconsin, Soraia Netflix.

the cows always travel together, bunched up close, even though they have space as far as the eye can see. in an infinite grass buffet, they choose to stay with each other.

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i am a pillow princess only in the sense that if there’s another living being within 20 feet of my pillow, i will stir at every breath that emanates from their throat, every wiggle of a pinky toe. Pillow Princess and the Pea, if you will. something in my brain is broken that not even 50 milligrams of trazodone plus 600 milligrams of ashwagandha can fix.

in the rifugios, i slept (”slept”) in an attic with no door. i slept on the top bunk among 7 to 15 other people, with no ladders, with railings that collapsed in the middle of the night. i slept in the Cupboard Under the Stairs with a four-foot door and a man’s stinking feet 16 inches from my face.

on the second night, i climbed up to a third-level bunk. no one had claimed the two bunks below me, so i thought i’d escape into a cocoon of quiet. then, a husky man chose the bed just under me, even though there was no one in the bottom bunk. he snored—to be expected, sure. i shoved my earplugs in and my strapped on my AcousticSheep™️ white noise headband.

what i did not expect was the farts. the man flatulated so forcefully that the particles floated up and left me unable to breathe, never mind sleep. after the fifth (5th) fart i stripped off my pants, stuck the waistband over my head, and breathed through the pant legs like an oxygen mask.

this was not the only odorous incursion. living the Lesbian Lifestyle for several years now, i’d forgotten how bad a man smells. in another rifugio, someone’s personal effects besotted the air around my face with an inscrutable, unbreathable swirl of death, burned plastic, rats, toxins: a hellish mystery to the olfactory cortex. it is my Gay Agenda to never again inhale the off-gasses of a man’s sweated undergarment.

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the next day, i started up a rocky white-gray incline with vistas of blue in globular, striated towers. cresting the pass, a switch: on the other side, a world of red, knobby and pointy peaks. from inside them, birds and marmots whistled.

the path switchbacked through lingering snow patches and Austrian war tunnels carved into cliff sides. i reached Rifugio Lagazuoi at the top of an exposed bluff. from it, you can see like God. with the world spread out before us, i shared a table, and what words we could, with an older Korean couple. it was her birthday. i took a photo of them with their meal, and she slipped me a Halls cough drop and said, “USA!”

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i am not one to take issue with a generalized “men” on a personal level. i’ve been spared the worst of their offenses as i’ve exited heterosexuality and entered my career in a place relatively fair in its (white cis)gender politics. but on the trail, the men were inescapable. i was reading No Straight Road Takes You There, but i should have been reading Men Explain Things to Me.

there were men at the rifugios, men in your bedroom, men lacking spatial and sonic awareness at 5 in the morning, men smoking ash into your eyeballs, men pointing you in directions you didn’t ask for (often wrong), men talking down to you like a child. the way the voice of a white American man billows down entire mountainsides should be studied for science.

tortoise-men cut in front of me on the trail. 65-year-old day hikers and youthful ultrarunners alike assumed they’re faster than my doughy body, but i have a strong chase instinct and a strong flee instinct. i alternated between a trot and a gallop to avoid their obstructions to my view, surpassing all of them on the uphill.

despite my ongoing obsession with sidewalk etiquette (or trail etiquette, as it were), people like this make me cool-culture. i don’t want to greet these men as i pass them and wonder: will you be the one who scuttles in front of me only to slow me to a crawl? will you be the one to spread your cough particles through the sardine-can cabin we’re forced to share? the one whose snoring keeps me up, thickening the plaque in my brain toward an early dementia?? the one whose farts waft up to me, because you’ll choose, among all the space in the world, to sleep as close to me as possible???

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the other time i went to Italy, i was, in effect, vegan-minus-gelato. this does not work so well, nutritionally. i was served large plates of tomatoes and grilled eggplants and returned shrunken. this time i ate everything, more than everything: polenta with venison stew, gnocchi the size of tennis balls, blueberry juice, fried cheese the girth of Texas toast, pork sausage, hockey pucks of cheese i didn’t want to finish for the sheer volume of goo until i looked at my cow friends mooing 15 feet away, one licking the salt off a man’s arm and two others nestling up next to each other on their bellies. i couldn’t let their good work go to waste.

i walked my way through changes in cuisine from north to south, as Austrian influences gave way to Venetian. cheese dumplings and goulash became polenta and casunziei (a moon-shaped pasta) filled with beets and topped with smoky scamorza cheese.

throughout the whole hilly hike i never got sore, i think because i ate so well, and because i ate (hate to say it) so much meat. at home i don’t partake often, but here, it (and only it) was on offer: ragu, stew, breakfast ham, regional beef-pork sausage, speck speck speck speck speck (bacon).

i’ve never eaten so much while hiking, or maybe ever: buffet breakfast, full lunch, multi-course dinner (primi then secondi, each ⅘ of a meal in its own right), 1-2 cakes, and a liter of beer (weiss, keller, lager) per day, most of it included in the price of the stay. the way it seemed to help has been a lesson for my body, or maybe my mind.

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a couple times a day you come over a hill to a view that defies description in words, or in paint. still, i made some elementary paintings Studies en plein air and/or with beer. (i think if you call them Studies they’re allowed to be Bad.)

my journal got wrecked by my back sweat seeping through my pack, teal ink dripping off the pages and turning words to mystery. romantic, almost. i thought about that artist who makes paintings with her period blood.

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my favorite rifugio companions were (obviously) two lesbians from New York with roots in the South. my least favorite were three separate pricks from San Jose, who 1) mansplained my own pace to me, 2) shilled for Big Pharma all dinner long, and 3) made fun of poor people for using the emergency room because they are uninsured.

one day at lunch, i overheard Greek spoken by two men hiking on the cheap and making their own Greek coffee on a Jetboil. i offered them my leftover spaghetti with ragu and my extra fried cheese. they accepted, and they asked where my family is from. one of them is probably my cousin, with roots in the same two regions. (despite all the ways i have chosen a different life, again i recreated the dynamic of Greek(-American) woman lovingly foisting food upon Greek men.)

i ate with two cute young couples from Australia planning big Indian and Sri Lankan weddings a week apart. one evening, a bubbly Polish photographer snuck up behind me as i made my paintings/Studies and asked to take pictures. on another, i made art next to an Australian family, parents and teenage boy and girl all drawing and painting and photographing from the top of Rifugio Nuvolau as the fog rolled in.

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i passed a few hours at Lake Coldai, perfect teal in a basin of rolling meadows at 7,031 feet. a wall of rock shot into the sky around it, with patches of snow tumbling into scree.

following the cue of a man soaking his legs in the lake, i rolled up my shorts and waded in. the man called out in a paragraph of Italian that amounted, when he translated, to, “no shoes; little fishies very hungry!!!” with biting hand gestures.