“I am not happy,” my wife called out as we walked along Highway 101. “This does not feel safe.”

A semi roared past, engine whining as it clicked into higher gear, and I stumbled into the mushy gravel at the side of the road. That did feel close. I hitched my backpack higher and pressed on. We had less than a mile before we would be off the road, eating burgers in Manzanita. We just had to survive a little longer…

Two bikers in racing spandex pedaled up the hill on the opposite side of the highway, and then, yelping in joy, split the traffic with daring grace and crossed to our side to attack a patch of blackberries. They giggled like kids who’d happened upon a forgotten stash of Halloween candy in July. The guy had a speaker attached to the triangle of his bike frame blasting Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. His girlfriend wiggled to the music, fingers stained berry black. I looked at my wife, nodded my head to the bikers, and smiled. She frowned.

My girl did not just want to have fun.

The Oregon Coast Trail exists mostly in theory. For long stretches it has a fend-for-yourself feel. It starts in Fort Stevens State Park at the far end of a jetty, Washington in view across the river, and ends at the border of California. All between is linked by beach, bay crossings, wooded trails and highway shoulders.

Think of the OCT as the mostly ignored and completely at-a-loss-for-what-he-wants-to-do-with-his-life younger brother of the Pacific Crest Trail. Maybe you feel bad for him. Then, once you finally start talking to little brother, you realize he can be annoying. Kind of like, you-didn’t-plan-this-out annoying. Like, what-were-you-thinking annoying.

The day before, we had left the beach south of Seaside on a bright sunny morning to crest Tillamook Head. Spirits were high. We’d packed extremely light. My wife carried 12 pounds. That’s a cheesecake. Maybe three cheesecakes. Anyway, it was cake and we kept joking back and forth.

“How’s your pack?”

“Super light. How’s your pack?”

“So light!”

Halfway through the climb we time travelled to the week before. Back to when it was pouring rain. We trudged through mud as huge rain drops splattered down. Some left-behind cloud, heavy with rain, had been caught in an eddy of air currents just above the trail, and was ridding itself of excess mass in order to catch up to its cohort, racing east.

Then I saw a black bear. Or I thought I saw a black bear. Well something big and black dropped from a tree.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” I told my wife.

“Why?” she asked, pulling a shoe out of the mire.

“I think I saw a bear.”

“A what?”

This was August and we were shivering.

Then, as suddenly as the wetness had enveloped us, it was gone. We moved faster down a dry, firm trail to a small shelter where we met a family.

“This is their first big hike,” the father said, smiling at his little boy and girl. “We’re about a mile in. How about you?”

“We’re going to Cape Lookout. It’s like 60 miles.”

He looked us up and down. Mud splattered our legs. We massaged our bare feet, hiking shoes steaming nearby. “Really…” And then he started talking about Richard Swanson.

Three months before a man named Richard had been attempting to dribble a soccer ball from his home in Seattle all the way to Sao Paolo, getting there in time for the World Cup. He was doing it with a special blue ball, a more durable prototype a non-profit named One World Futbol Project was distributing to poor communities around the world where normal balls popped too easily.

Richard Swanson was struck and killed by a pickup truck while walking along 101 outside Lincoln City.

In Cannon Beach, nine miles in, we rejoiced to find a clean, public restroom. Four hours of hiking and we felt like we had returned from exile. We were exhausted. I examined myself in the mirror and washed the sweat from my face. Walking through mud sucks. It sucks at your shoes. It’s hard work.

There’s a point early on in any endeavor of difficulty where the temptation to give up is huge. You are far enough in to know how hard it will really be, but not far enough to be truly invested in seeing it through. Nine miles is nothing. That’s a day hike. We could just have one hell of a day hike.

We ended up falling asleep in a park. We woke up and decided to get a site at a private campground: regroup and replan. Maybe we had taken too much on.

The hostess at the campground looked bored. “It’s $35 dollars a night. Thirty-five extra for each tent. But we don’t got openings.”

“It’s just my wife and me. We share a tent. We fit into corners! We don’t even need a site. Just some grass.”

She wasn’t having it. “We don’t have openings.”

Only thing we could do was keep walking. We walked down the beach, Haystack Rock getting closer and closer until we passed it and it got farther and farther away. We passed people flying kites, building sand castles and riding three-wheeled bikes. The sun slipped and people crowded around it for photos, its orange glow another head pinned between mom and dad. An invited photo-bomber in couple selfies.

We walked on a wagon track that had been carved into the side of a cliff so Western Union could pass at high tide. We waded through tide pools. We huddled out of the wind in a little cove for dinner.

People saw our packs and asked us what we were doing. They were floored by the answer. They wanted pictures with us, they fed us s’moores and they brought up Richard Swanson.

“It’s so sad,” they told us and eyed our packs.

The OCT wasn’t marked well. Or in some cases at all. The little medallions that were supposed to be nailed to trees and signposts at regular intervals were hidden, or rusted, or disappearing into the folds of a tree’s bark. The map the state provided as a PDF download wasn’t much help either. It was a bird’s eye view but the bird got caught in an updraft of warm air and was too high or blurry-eyed to actually know anything about map reference points. Distances seemed to shift and change. Covering a finger’s width of map could take an hour, or it could take three. We thought we’d make it to Ecola State Park by nightfall.

We were way off.

It got darker and we resorted to setting up our tent illegally, where the trail again left the beach for the woods, just outside of Arch Cape. Me, being a rule-follower, was scared. My wife, being a rule zealot, was terrified. We barely slept that night. Each twig breaking or bird flapping was the park ranger coming to arrest us. Actually, I was thinking those sounds might be Big Foot coming to eat his human candy.

Ecola State Park was another half a day away. Half a day of angry hiking. It is not good to tell the one you love that you are an hour away from rest when it really is six. Our feet hurt. Our packs dug into our shoulders. The views became less pretty; or rather we were less able to think they were pretty. In fact they were boring.

Then Highway 101.

But we survived and the San Dune Pub in Manzanita was heavenly. Thick, greasy burgers and tall, cold beers. My wife insisted it was the best ranch dressing she’d ever had. We pressed on in better spirits. The wind was blowing at our backs. OK, the wind was gusting at our backs. The seagulls kept getting flipped into the air. They couldn’t fly. They huddled close to the sand and skittered off perturbed when a wave crept up and touched their feet. We laughed, bellies full.

At the mouth of the Nehalem Bay we were supposed to call the marina and for 15 bucks they would ferry us across. Instead we hailed a guy out crabbing with his two sons.

“Hey, can I give you this?” I offered him a ten on the dock.

“No, but I can give you this,” and he threw me a can of Bud Light. Despite being a terribly uncoordinated human being, I caught it. Out of the air. Like a pro.

There was a fire on shore and we bought a live crab and cooked it on the spot. I’m allergic to crab but my wife devoured it, sucking out the poor thing’s muscles from each of its legs, one by one, while I sipped my beer and chatted with a mom, her two daughters, and their Chilean nanny.

“Did you hear about that guy with the soccer ball?” she asked. “The one who got hit?”

A month before the hike I turned 30. It’s a number that doesn’t feel much different then the one before except for the fact that everyone acts as though it should. People like to say things like, Oh, the big 3-0, or, Sad to see your 20’s go? or, if you’re my uncle, Welcome to the dirty 30!

Also my professional life the last year had been in a bit of an upheaval. I sold my first novel and moved across the country. I couldn’t find a new job and so my day to day consisted of waking up and reading, writing and editing. A lifestyle I had long fantasized about that in practice was disorienting. Routine in life is the finger in the page so that we may come back to it. You go to work every morning to make money, but also because you go to work every morning. It’s hard to miss the passing of time when tomorrow will be the same, basically, as today.

In my new life as a full time author, I struggled to find routine. And so it felt like the last year had gone by extremely fast. Here I was, 30. It wasn’t so long before that I was 20. And 20 looking at 30 are cavemen considering iPads. And me considering 60 are dinosaurs anticipating cavemen.

But apparently time was sneaky fast and sixty was going to be here in a blink.

Or maybe not.

Richard Swanson was 42.

We got to Barview Jetty Park just at sunset. Up and down the concrete loops were motor homes lit up by the power of humming generators. People ate elaborate meals and watched movies. There was one huge shelter made from what must have been 25 tarps, covering the area of a basketball court, impregnable. We staggered by, aliens in a new world, drawing stares that we returned with equal wonder.

We paid for a tent site and bought firewood. We even got change to use the quarter-operated showers. Our feet hurt. Our food was too salty. My shower was cold. I shivered. I tried to wash my shirt with hand soap and then dry it over the fire. The grate roasted jail lines across its front. My eyes turned red and teary.

We left early the next morning and happened to walk out with one of the camp hosts. She brought up Richard Swanson and then began telling us about an English bike rider who had lived in their campground for months, drinking heavily, until one day he just didn’t come back. They still didn’t know what to do with all his stuff.

We walked along train tracks to the wide docks of the Garibaldi Marina. There we caged a ride across Tillamook Bay with a guy and his buddy ferrying out supplies for his bachelor party. The bay was stunning. Far off green shores cradling a bright sky mirrored in the water we cut.

The guy getting married was visibly nervous.

“You’ll be fine,” I told him.

“Yeah?”

“Definitely.” Here we were, on a boat, more than halfway done with our journey. We were invested. We would finish this thing. The world was a fine place—I was certain of it.

Their campsite was at Crab Harbor, a spot near the end of the Bayocean Peninsula. We waded in the muck and helped pull the boat in. Again we offered our ten-dollar bill and again it was waved off. From the woods emerged the guy’s other buddies, all carrying beers in foam cozies. They were making a night of it. We waved goodbye and started walking.

In Oceanside we ran out of water. I knocked on the door to a house where I thought I had seen the curtain flutter. An old man answered.

“Can I fill up my water bottle?” I asked.

He smiled. “I wondered what you were doing when you walked by in that pack.”

As we chatted about our hike and Richard Swanson I filled our bottles at the door of his stainless steel fridge. I told him about the English bike rider. His wife looked at me from her wheelchair and smiled.

I pointed out the big ocean-facing windows. “This place must be fun in the winter.”

We ate dinner crouched behind a log. My wife had to pee under the fingers of a half dead tree while I played lookout. We pressed on.

In Netarts we saw houses on the verge of tumbling off cliffs and played a counting game as we walked. We kept changing the rules so that we had to do increasingly ridiculous things in front of passersby. Me on my knees jamming out on air guitar. My wife crowing like a rooster.

We tried to get a boat to take us across Netarts Bay to Cape Lookout State Park. The guy said no. We offered him our magical ten. He said no again.

“I took one of those idiot hikers across last summer,” he told the two ladies who were in his boat, just finishing up their chartered trip. “And the guy wouldn’t get out of the boat. He didn’t feel safe. I kept going up and down, couldn’t find a spot. Almost wrecked.”

So we walked along Netarts Bay Road. Every time we heard a car approaching, one of us yelled out and we stepped off the road and waited for it to pass. Trucks and hatchbacks. Motorcycles in flock.

It’s easy to consider death when we take ourselves out of the equation. The only beginning to end present in our life, after all, is us. I’m not surprised when I meet people who consider themselves special in some cosmic way; I’m surprised I don’t encounter more. Everything we do is in service to our personal narrative, whether we admit it or not. We don’t expect it to end because how could it? We’re pretty much vital for it to be in the first place.

But of course it will.

I will die one day as will everyone I know, and it probably won’t come in the way I expect it.

A mile outside of the campground, sweaty, thirsty and aching, my sister and brother-in-law drove up and stopped in the middle of the road on a blind curve. They rolled down their windows and shouted.

“Good work! You’re almost there!”

“Keep driving,” I told them. “You should go.”

What does it mean that right after they left a semi came around the curve, whipping up a breeze? Probably nothing.

We left the road and crept through trails I had run every summer since I was very young. Hide and seek and capture the flag. We approached the family campsite and weren’t noticed until we were there, by the fire, warming our hands.

My family was happy to see us, almost giddy. As if we had travelled farther than we did, were gone longer than we were.

My wife smiled—happy too—either because we had did it or because we were done. We took off our packs and rubbed our sore shoulders. We sat down in lawn chairs. My uncle handed me a beer.