Pacific Crest Trail Journal
By Fred Allebach
7/9 /08
George takes us to Napa for the AMTRAK connecting bus, lots
of waiting. We finally leave Martinez at 12:15 AM for an all night train ride
to Klamath Falls, OR
7/10
We had the fortune to sit directly in front of the people
from Hell who talked loud when everyone was trying to sleep. I slept maybe 2
hours. There were great views of Mt. Shasta from the observation car. We met
Noel Maza from Ridgecrest, CA; she overcame a lot, she’s ambitious, confident, ready
for life, wants to be an artist, study art history, travel; we give her a big
vote of confidence. From Klamath Falls we take the shuttle bus to the PCT
trailhead along Route 140 and hike 6 miles in to Frey Lake with a view of the
volcano Mt. McLaughlin, went swimming, mosquitoes terrible, Kim is in the tent
planning tomorrow’s itinerary with maps and book.
7/11
It was a pleasant evening after we got in the tent, all the
while dreading when we would have to go out and pee. The mosquitoes are indeed
very bad, horrendous, overwhelming, insistent. It’s 2:00 PM and we hiked 10
miles to Island Pond; took a dip and I’m holed up in the tent for refuge. We
hung in the tent and looked at maps and discussed possible routes and then went
out to make dinner, had a little smoky fire and at around 6:00 PM the skeets
ratcheted it up 10 notches, almost causing one of us to crack. Once they have
you almost cracking they come on even harder to see if they can break you. The
air is filled with their incessant whining, but they can’t touch this now. The
tent is filled with dead mosquito body parts. I pray to God I don’t have to pee
all night.
7/12
We have been swimming everyday so far, very nice. Today we
were run out of camp early with no coffee, mosquitoes extremely bad and
remained bad as the mid-morning passed but we gained some elevation onto a
southern exposure and the warmth, dryness and wind gave a nice respite where we
were able to brush our teeth and take care of other business. Then it grew hot,
water low, nearly lost the trail after a distraction from a girl that was
peeing right at our junction and we walked around onto the wrong trail, then a
recovery, some crossing of deep, exposed snow drifts across the trail and up to
Snow Lakes, where we bathed, I washed my sox and we filled up our full water
capacity of 5 gallons and came back up to a mosquito-less ridge to dry camp
with a great view of Mt. McLaughlin and Upper Klamath Lake. The sky seems smoky
to the south but clear to the north. Our entry point on the trail pushed us
north of a thousand some smoky California forest fires filling the region with
noxious haze. Hopefully we walk ourselves out of that. Kim wins in Yahtzee.
7/13
We came around a big southeast facing bowl and through a
saddle where immediately was a huge snowfield and the only way to go was
straight down, with no trail, time for a snack. Before this we had to post hole
across a very steep and long snowfield with no other way, steep scree and
rubble threatening possible landslides all around, through the snow was the
only choice. Get swagger or die. It was hairy, scary, but we did it. (1A) After
the snack we slid and made our way down through multiple, trail-less
snowfields, all the way down to find the trail in front of a hemlock. There it
is. We got it going.
Then, looking at bad, swampy camping with no drinkable water
we decided to carry an extra 2 gallons up about 3 miles to a saddle where
presumably the skeets wouldn’t be so bad, but here we are inside the tent at
6:00 PM with hordes of them outside. We are fed well with stuffing, gravy and
instant butter and herb mashed potatoes, teeth brushed and in for the night. I
carried 25 lbs. of water 3+ miles to here.
7/14
I ended up with two heel blisters for this water carrying
folly and we made a lot of adjustment stops early, to forestall worse
developments later. Kim cut moleskin for me with her Spyderco knife and later
thought she lost it, but then it was found stuffed in somewhere, Black Hole
incident # 3049. We took an alternate route to Stuart Falls, a pleasant spot by
a large falls, a well used camp at the fall’s base where we could bathe, wash
sox, have afternoon coffee and generally lift and bolster the spirits after
much trouble with all sorts of afflictions having to do with getting trail
broke etc.
Dinner looks to be good and the gurgle of the creek and roar
of the falls promising a soporific evening of R & R and there are hardly
any mosquitoes! It’s 10 miles to Mazama campground at Crater Lake, our first
resupply and recontact with civilization, opportunity for shower and laundry.
The forest here is very nice, hemlock, spruce, fir, all shaped differently.
They have patterns primeval, are captivating, they sway, have a sense of
mystery, sense of the great North, of snow, ice, of which on our hike there is
still plenty left and we must navigate long stretches of trail obscured by
thick, deep patches of lingering, shaded snow. I can feel a sense in me change
as I become accustomed to living outside, new things open up, an appreciation for
that which lies hidden in nature, there all the time, that we don’t see with a
city awareness.
7/15
Went through very impressive hemlock forest, a mature stand
of really big trees for a long ways, got to the Mazama store and got our food
but no bug pants, the campground was nasty, noisy, babies, Harleys, people
losing their cool and fighting over how to set up the tent, how to deal with
the kids and it was very annoying to me to walk a half mile and choose a site
and later upon walking back, be told it was reserved, even though there were no
signs up to that effect. Being on foot in a world made for cars can suck.
7/16
Up early, found a hiker box, got fuel, met Ray from VA,
Michael the bicyclist, the miner who noticed my hat, Goose the ranger, Phish,
Lady Bug, Dan and many others who asked what we were doing, where we were
going… Ray gave us a lift to the Rim at Crater Lake and we mailed letters,
talked with people and finally off to Lightning Spring, where I fixed my pack’s
waist belt with 1.5 hours of sewing. A mountain lion notice was up near the
spring. Kim is studying our route; a purported 25 miles with no water ahead and
then 16 miles of no water after that.
7/17
Up at 5:00 AM and out of camp by 6:15 with 4 gallons of
water between us. We knocked off 8 miles in 4 hours or so and had some nice
views of Crater Lake, lots of smoke from distant fires. We decided to yellow
blaze and hitched at a road crossing, a guy from across the way turned out to
be an AT guy, LWOP (Leave With Out Pay) and his wife Bonnie and he offered us a
ride. We talked for a long time about trail stuff, how Bonnie was like second
fiddle to LWOP’s trail fascination and finally, after an hour or more of
chatting in the sun we broke out to climb the flanks of Mt. Thielsen, 9142’,
and in 3 hours we had climbed 7 miles, with almost 2 gallons of water left. We
found a great dry camping spot right in front of the glaciated cirque,
immediately below the Picacho peak type pointed summit of Mt. Thielsen. We are
fed, tired and have 1+ gallon left and 2.4 miles to Thielsen Creek, not bad.
The yellow blaze with LWOP saved us approximately 7.5 miles before the Thielsen
Creek water. The packs were heavy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an excellent book Fred
is reading. Kim is reading The Brothers Karamazov and liking it a lot, for 900+
pages, that will be about 13 pages a day to finish it when we finish our hike.
7/18
Cold wind and full moon. The landscape here is its own
flavor, a combo of Sierra Madre wooded canyons, the Smokey’s rolling hills,
Vermont rolling hills, glaciated terrain, volcanic effects, northern evergreen
forest, a unique blend. Everything was fine and dandy after we left camp until
we came around the north side and discovered big, steep, icy snow slopes across
the trail. There had been an overnight freeze; the snow was icy, very
dangerous, which meant we had to go down and around the bottoms of a number of
large slopes, all looking back up at the pointed Thielsen, as we bushwhacked
through rubble, snow, thick trees and then back up to the trail. Another steep
icy snow slope and repeat the latter. We stayed safe, not exposing ourselves to
large falls. This was all slow going and with the usual other stops for water,
snacks etc. we had not covered many miles before noon. And thus as it became
warmer the mosquitoes became thicker and we hoofed off 5 or 6 quick miles to
Maidu Lake, a veritable circus convention of mosquitoes. We have been somewhat
hardened off, now we simply put on our suits, cover up, set up and get into the
tent once our business is attended to, rest a bit, go out again, cook dinner,
clean up and then back in for Yahtzee, reading, studying maps and sleep. You
got to be business-like and stay focused with 1000s of mosquitoes after you.
Maidu Lake is quite pleasant. Kim went swimming and some strong breezes saved
her from being mobbed by our tormenting insect friends. Today we crossed many
areas where there was still quite a bit of snow and finding the trail can be
difficult. Afternoon snow can be slushy, heated by the sun and you sink in
deep, the going is tough, much effort made to gain a footstep, which wears down
the old knees and ankles after 13 miles with a pack. The Mt. Thielsen
Wilderness is a good section, very nice. Go between Hwy 138 and through to
Shelter Cove, around 8 days is leisurely.
7/19
It was quite cold last night and by morning there was not
one mosquito active. We got up at 5 and were gone before 6, met Jordache up by
the Maidu Lake junction. He was the second thru hiker through this year, behind
Eric D. It didn’t take long for the bugs to become entirely bothersome and it
was like that most of the day, 14 miles of hot, sweaty swatting of mosquitoes.
There were a few moments of respite but we needed our bug shirts and hats. We
never used any DEET or any insect repellent, only passive protection. At the
end we found a small lake, set up, went swimming, very nice, then back in the
tent, warm up, Kim made dinner of Mexican TVP, taco sauce and dried mashed
potatoes, fucking excellent! Clean up, Yahtzee, reading, not much else; the
tent is filled with dead mosquitoes and we don’t care. I ate one in my dinner.
I saw a marten up close, pretty neat, big bushy tail, good size animal. It is a
mustelid, from the weasel family.
7/20
The mosquitoes were outrageous! So many flocked to our tent
that it was just amazing. You dread having to pee at night and at about 3:30 AM
I could hold it no longer and went out. Now, during the day it is hard to pee
when, say 100 mosquitoes start to come at your; it’s hard to start a stream. At
night you get started but soon realize they are all over you, from the feet,
legs, butt, head, everywhere, but since you can’t see, you get a better voiding
of the bladder then the day when the stream has to be cut short as the attack
is just too boisterous. Kim said it doesn’t get any more real than 500
mosquitoes on your ass. So I did my 3:30 AM pee and then ran back into the tent
and those two openings of the door let in 100s and 100s mosquitoes, which we
needed to kill by flashlight for about 10 minutes. When daylight came an
amazing horde of 1000s of mosquitoes coated the underside of the rain fly and
were on the netting. As I write this I have to stop and kill a few every 5
words or so. Too bad the blood and smashed bodies don’t show on typed copy.
We broke camp and ran with no breakfast or anything. I had
to have my rain suit bottoms on, heating me up well as we climbed up to a
ridge, each followed by our own private horde.
At a place that looked promising, in the sun, on an exposed ridge, in a
breeze, we thought maybe we could try to kill them all, those that followed us
up from our swampy abode last night. Upon killing them all there would be
peace. That didn’t work but it seemed OK after a while, as there were only 100s
instead of 1000s. A big issue was where we could have a bowel movement without
getting ass bit to hell. “That’s the truth”, says Kim. You have to remember;
there is no inside, no bathroom and no place to hide. Having a bowel movement
becomes a technical skill and it’s open for conversation. And lo and behold, on
a rocky crest, the wind blew up strongly from below. It was all rock, full sun
and a perfect spot to take a dump and I performed the job without 1 bite,
having held it for 2 days waiting for the right spot. So then, after getting
our business done we dipped back into the forest and down 10 miles to Summit
Lake, for a nice swim, wash clothes and in time for an afternoon hot coffee and
relaxation. The bugs are insistent but tolerable. My threshold grows.
There is no one here but us. I wonder why there is no one
here? Are we crazy? In this big snow year, some places 500% of normal, the bugs
are worse longer into the summer owing to the lingering moisture. They should
be better by now, according to the norm but hell, it was fires and smoke in
California, snow here and we wanted to get going. You can’t wait all summer for
the perfect time. Our Lost Coast hike was a great warm up. We’re 106.2 miles so
far, 1/7th of the trip! It feels good to relax now after two or
three 14 to 15 mile days.
We met Justin, from Rutland, the #3 thru hiker of the year.
He was incredibly dirty, while sporting Dirty Girl gators. Summit Lake is now a
smoothish, lightly rippling, undulating reflection of green as we retire to the
tent and inspect for ticks, and leeches. What a lift a mere picnic table gives
to life! What civilization! And a little smoky fire to ward off the insects as
the sun sets among the green ripples not six feet from our tent, pure
tranquility.
7/21
Moonrise over the lake was mystical, invoking millennia of
ancestors living outside full time, amidst settings just like this, a full,
long reflection over rippling water. As usual the bugs were awful and piss was
held way too long, up until I had to go out and then was bitten up bad,
couldn’t finish, ran back in, trailed in 100s, killed them all etc. What a
routine. I got all dressed for bugs and went out and made a smoky fire, which
made life half bearable and we were able to occupy the picnic table and use the
pit toilet and then we made our break. The skeets were horrid but with
breakfast in and coffee on board we felt good and braved large swarms walking
by series of small tarns and we emerged on a windy outcrop where we could stop,
take pleasure in killing them 1 by 1, until the horde had been reduced to a
manageable level upon which time we ate the last of our cheese and meat and
generally enjoyed the sun and wind and bug free environment.
We headed up into some great high country by Diamond Peak, a
huge glaciated area where we traversed long snow banks and had to scout out the
trail cross-country multiple times. We got water from a snowmelt stream and
enjoyed our adventure very much. Slogging through big snow bank of half melted
snow after another gets tiresome after a while and as we had covered most of
our days mileage we pulled up while still in the high country, to avoid the
bugs below at the lakes. It was all nice and pleasant until a few thunder
storms came through, forcing us to take action, cover up, regroup and go in the
tent but now dinner has been served, instant 4 cheese mashed potatoes, TVP and
taco sauce and gravy mix with garlic olive oil and we are in for the evening
taking cover from the resurgent bugs. The big black ants are a force. They are
stealthy and deceptively effective, they soon find any food or water and they
will bite as well, but they are cute.
7/22
It was a long run still, through lots of slushy snow before
we dropped down to Shelter Cove Resort, around 8 miles away, where we chatted
it up with some old folks in lounge chairs who were full of questions for us in
our big packs, and we obliged them on our way to pick up our resupply. We got
settled in to the PCT hikers site and divvied up the new food and now Kim is
off to do laundry and shower while I set up camp. We saw Justin again and met
B. Strong and Dave Claugus, economics professor from Sacramento, two fellow
section hikers. B. Strong has done the PCT 6 or 7 times by section and Dave is
working on his first.
7/23
Rosary Lake. We hung around Shelter Cove for most of the
morning making calls etc. chatting with the RV set, a guy I named Bison and his
wife, and another geezer who talked about Merle Haggard, the Bakersfield sound.
They all had huge RVs and boats, trailers etc., a different tribe from us. Dave
was having to hitch to Eugene to buy a tent as the bugs were too much for a
bivouac sack and hood only, leaving just a small breathing hole out his bag as
the mosquitoes swarmed over him all night or until it got cold enough to knock
them back. He was sucking them into his mouth all night long, pure torture.
Bison’s wife offered Dave a ride to Eugene so he lucked out, a little trail
magic. Kim and I liked Bison, a real simpleton, a very nice guy.
We pulled out and walked 7 miles to here and made camp near
a beautiful lake with dramatic cliffs and glacial features coupled with a soft
green forest. We always do the find the best spot dance between us and end up
agreeing on a spot after looking about for flat spots, high ground, wind cover,
visual cover, snags etc. We are starting to be in the book rather than on the
outside looking in. A level of immersion is being gained. The experience is now
real and not any sort of abstraction.
7/24
Charlton Lake. Hiked 15 long miles and saw a view of 3 Sisters
and other northerly volcanoes. I came uncorked by the bugs and threw all my
stuff out of my pack in a blind rage of frustration, nearly popping my $300
down bag.
Kim felt ill. We got to the lake here and took a wrong
trail, an extra ½ mile, then back, found a camp, set up, mobbed by skeets,
swam, made a really good tortellini dinner with side of instant sweet potatoes.
I cleaned and fixed up the stove, in the tent by 6:00 PM. Mosquitoes are very
bad and heading into even more the next 3 days, some supernatural entity save
me! The mosquitoes are very hard on you when you have to have a bowel movement;
I’m glad I don’t have to remove my pants for all my business. Otherwise the
forests were great and green.
7/25
I got up and made a smoky fire and after getting ready, we
headed out, soon into a burn area of a few miles where we took a 1 hour break
for snack etc. to enjoy the mosquito free environs, then back into the forest.
The bugs really got to Kim bad; she nearly came undone, but after an early afternoon
snack things started to look up and we pulled out 10.3 miles to Stormy Lake,
very nice, set up tent, made coffee, drank it in the tent, Kim found a nice bug
free spot on a sunny, windy shore, I sewed up tears in my bug suit, read a
newspaper front page I found 2 days ago, then made a fantastic dinner of cous
cous with pine nuts and clam sauce with garlic oil and parmesan plus a Lipton
vegetable side dish soup with kind of a Mexican flavor and then dessert of
cherry licorice and tootsie rolls. It is windy and pleasant, a snag groans,
frogs chirp and we are safe in our little nest with all our reading and writing
materials, a quite successful day of enjoying the Oregon Cascades despite the
insect hardships.
7/26
Dumbbell Lake. 11.7 miles to a camp spot with a rocky spit
where you can sit and dangle your legs in the water, bathe in clear, chest deep
water. We ate a huge dinner of chicken noodle soup and curry cous cous plus
beef flavored stuffing and gravy. Washed sox, cleaned up, generally uneventful but
slow enough to stop and enjoy dragonflies landing on us at Horseshoe Lake. I
started to work on my stride and heel strike, easing up on the shock, trying to
make my walking motion smoother. We are in the supposed last of the bad bugs
and they were bad again tonight, making dinner hard to appreciate, sometimes
you have to walk and eat, to stay ahead of the swarm but now, from within the
safety of the tent and full of food and clean, all seems A OK as Kim reviews
our route with me, going through some dramatic volcanoes and lava fields.
7/27
Did a quick 7.5 miles to Elk Lake Resort, nice views of the
local volcanoes from up above in a burn area. We ate lots before arriving so as
to not go shopping when we were hungry. The resort is bush league but nice views
of the mountains.
7/28
We met thru hiker Kentucky Greybeard last night and he set
off the realization of hiker hierarchy, status and prestige considerations,
even in the woods. You see, there are many purposes under the sun out here and
at times the truth of these many purposes seems to be self-evident to the
speaker but not self-evident to the listener. The upshot is that the same type
of status bullshit that people run around with in society exists equally in the
middle of nowhere. People are as blind to diverse constructions of humanity and
stuck in their own movies as anywhere.
Similes and analogies for what I am thinking would be sin
with religion, as relating to notions of purity and obedience to authority. Fat
with dieting, as with clean and unclean eating, purity again. Then there is
display of status as with BMWs, houses and possessions, material success and
all its symbols. You have some of all this out here but in the reverse in that
the highest ascetics have the least. There are uniforms to denote membership,
certain brands, certain equipment. You have blue-collar and white-collar
hikers. There are camo guys with big knives toting tons of homemade jerky.
There’s the REI, Northface guys. The overall common theme among these tribes is
that many look askance at each other and pass judgment, even though they are
way more similar to each other than say, to golf aficionados. This passing
judgment upon the very similar is known as the intimate enemy phenomena.
To me then underlying question one should ask is why are
these different folks out here? Why do certain people hit it off and others
not? Well let’s split some hairs here.
The long distance guys have a goal and seem to hurry along,
many very nice, others haughty and in a hurry. The hurrying part is hard to
figure as that seems to countermand the enjoyment part, but that opens up a
fundamental schism in backpacking, ultra light versus old style heavy and all
its arguments of comfort or not etc and all the contradictions therein. So you
go slow, carry more weight, stop more, see the terrain more up close, deeper
maybe, your goal is a process and not an end point. As a slow I look at the
hurrying guys and can’t help but think they bring the rat race out here, the
competition, what I see as all the worst of society. At the same time some of
these cats act like yogis and holy men, breezing through arrogant, haughty and
it’s at this juncture of a few bad apples that the whole bunch gets messed up,
as most of the hurries are usually friendly and accommodating, with time enough
to chat.
After a few weeks out Kim and I are no longer green and on
the outside looking in. We are in now, can be centered and grounded in our
style; we’re OK, just as we see wine tourist snobs in Sonoma and let their
elite attitudes fall off us like so much dew, we need not worry about other
hikers scenes. People go to their respective churches and social clubs and
there they sew the threads of their community and part ways this is done
through negative comparison with others, who live and have similar communities
but may say lavender instead of purple. Intimate enemy, negative comparison,
you just notice all these differences and it makes you think.
This lavender/ purple difference is slight, relative, yet
stands as the basis for much strife. Professor Nelson, Kim’s trail name (1)
says, “there are no greater or lesser persons and when we come to that truth,
we’ll be a great nation.”
After a leisurely morning with hot coffee, (I emphasize hot coffee, as in order to save fuel, I
have been drinking cold coffee), and a fire, and drying condensation off the
tent and socializing with Kentucky Greybeard and the local help, we headed out
and pulled 10+ miles out to Mesa Creek, going by some fantastic scenery below
South Sister and through the Wickiup Plain. We saw Dave C. and he had turned
back because of too much snow near Obsidian Falls. He had gotten lost, into
some areas of heavy blow down and drifted snow and he fell down bad twice. He
had fallen before on a previous hike and broken his leg and had to crawl miles
until he could get cell phone coverage for a helicopter evacuation. So he came
back. He said, “When you’ve lost a big bet, it’s not worth it to double down to
try and get your money back.” Kentucky
was waffling too, scared of reports of lots of snow.
We are going to try and go through. Some folks here gave us
a better map and in spite of heavy snow we’re going to give it a go. We can always go back. It was a long day
today, started hiking at a late 10:00 AM and now finishing up at 8:30 PM,
tired, full of a pound of angel hair. We met various folks camped here and
asked questions of them all. It seems a GPS would help a lot in this situation,
with the trail buried under snow. Otherwise it seems like just another gadget.
7/29
We slept adjacent to two big snow patches and the
temperature got down into the 30s. It was cold last night! Our Western
Mountaineering summerlite bags did not perform to spec. Kim’s bag was under
filled in two compartments and with mine too, if your butt touches, it is cold.
There are mammatus clouds around, and a big lenticular cloud over South Sister.
I’m making hot drinks to boost morale. There was a strong dew and major
condensation inside the rain fly. The sky is overcast with touches of blue.
I thought Kim would wake up scared, not sleeping, fear of
the heavy snow pack ahead but she is game and confident. We work together well
to stay safe and do what we need to do to keep going. Earlier on I told her she
needed more swagger on the exposed snow areas, to walk without fear, more
loosely, less tight, and now she has more swagger than me.
At the end of the day we made it to the lava field
escarpment, 11.2 miles and pulled out below Collier Cone, to the north of
10,000’ North Sister. We made it through all the heavy snow. Dave turned back,
Kentucky chickened out, Charlie Tango said if he had known how tough it was he
would have skipped this section yet we saw 17 people. It was hard but not
impossible. Now we are at Sawyer Bar next to the lava in a large area of lava
fields. Bar refers to gravel and sand bar and is a common term for riparian
place names in this region. The day was moody and sublime, temperamental with
grey skies, spitting rain, clouds masking and accenting the Three Sisters; the long
views were great, reminding me of moody, cloudy days in the Chiricahua
Mountains in AZ.
7/30
Out of Sawyer Bar the morning was tremendous for scenery and
volcanic drama, with lava, craters, cones, lone stark trees, smashing vistas
and then as we crossed the shoulder of Yapoah Crater we got the killer view of
Mt. Washington, Mt. Jefferson, 3 Finger Jack and Mt. Hood, all floating in the
clouds. We found a suitable spot in the lava to soak in the views while we had
a snack.
And then a gradual descent with special interlude through
mixed lava flows, snow and forest until we got to Lava Creek Lake early, where
Kim wanted to stay. She wanted to clean up and wash her hair, dry her boots,
read and generally have the afternoon off. I resisted some but here we are, me
in the tent and KDB up at the picnic table working on snacks and dinner. The
bugs were gone for like 1.5 days while we traversed the Three Sisters but now
lower down and by a lake they are back and I’m in the tent, can’t stand the
fuckers anymore. So much for being hardened off.
It’s deserted here at the camp ground, highway 242 is still
closed for too much snow, so we have the complete lake and camp to ourselves,
but shoot, we’ve had big lakes all to ourselves already; what is special here
is the picnic table, the veneer of civilization, the comfort of sitting upright
and spreading out papers and things and to not be in the dirt. Kim made a great
dinner, the coup de grace being re-hydrated blueberries, cherries and plums and
then corn flour stuffing with celery boiled in the re-hydrated fruit water and
then top with parmesan, really good, plus a Lipton vegetable side of Spanish
rice and mizo soup for an appetizer, tootsie rolls and cherry licorice for
dessert. Food is a big deal.
We met thru hiker Sweet Fish who remembered my trail name
(Zombie) from the AT. He said he did the AT in 2004 and Kim heard he did DAT in
2004, what, is that some drug, DAT? Sweet Fish is a good guy. We met some
others, Captain Ahab, his daughter, French thru hiker Dragon Ant and now after
Yahtzee, 8.9 miles today with lots of doodling around.
7/31 Big Lake Youth Camp
The 7th Day Adventists welcomed us with great
charity, free laundry, free showers, free camping and $5.00 meal tickets,
vegetable curry and tofu, quite good. I was impressed that they did not
proselytize at all. We met our first arrogant thru hikers, totally
self-absorbed, cliquish, even unfriendly and rude.
We saw a play based on Romeo and Juliet at the evening fire
circle. They had Christian sing-along music beforehand. It was a morality play
on sex too soon and giving away your precious gifts to strangers who don’t care
and whom you don’t really know. Alas, the compelling forces of nature, to mate
versus culture and marriage and stable societal structure. To let youngsters
have at it with sex, drugs and rock and roll is like letting inmates run the
asylum, giving in to all impulse and appetite. We stayed up late at the play
and then crashed back at the tent with no reading or anything.
The hike in here was marvelous, through the lava flows of
Little Belknap Crater. There were lava tubes reminiscent of the Pinacate and
the extinct Sand Papagos, their gods and memories now vanished. I call them
back from the ground of my memory, into the threads of today.
And the days passed.
And the years.
And death came and
swept them from their refuge; all of that race
disappeared with all
of its tales and all of its history.
But all things came
back to life in that place. Other trees stood tall
and other men bent to
the ground. Newborn litters roiled in the
caves; the tapestry
never unraveled.
Wenceslau Fernandez Flores
El Bosque Animado (The Animated Forest)
We passed through a burn area, massive wildflowers and ferns
contrasted with charred hulks of tree trunks both fallen and standing. Here in
the morning the skeets continue to harass and plague, not as bad but I am tired
of them after me every second, especially when both hands are occupied.
Thru hikers are single minded like businessmen with no time
to chat by the water cooler, speeding to work on their commute. There is a
mindless drive to it all that leaves no time to smell the roses, to soak in a
moment, always pushing, head down, forward! Most are quite nice and they will
stop for a few minutes, others go right by, passing us, passing side vistas, so
that the quality of their experience is more of an athletic event, a physical
statement of endurance, rather than gathering an intimate sense of the land and
the people they pass by. It is not a wilderness experience per se in the sense
of looking for the magic, the mystery, the depth, not a John Muir inspired
endeavor. “Got to get there before the snow starts in Washington”.
8/1 Stealth camp on side of 3 Finger Jack
The sky is filled with clouds with dark grey bottoms and
fluffed, broken tops of various shades, passing by from west to east, windy;
the forest is burned all around with a few clumps of evergreen trees remaining.
The meadow is green grass interspersed with purple and blue lupine and other
flowers red, white, lavender and our tent sits in the middle, safe from all but
1 snag. Through the course of the trip we skated from many possible snags
falling on us at night.
We left Big Lake around 10:00 AM. The 7th Day
Adventists actions spoke louder than words. Kim spent time with what I later
called suffering fools gladly, to which she took exception. Typically I would
want to get out of resupply situations and back to woods ASAP while Kim would
prefer to linger a bit and enjoy the stop.
Kim enjoys our forays into civilization more than I do. I am ready to
bolt after we get our goods; she likes to dally.
We met Sweet Fish again across Santiam Pass and he called us
over to share a big hoagie, ice cream and Doritos. He is good people. Somebody
from Bend had just given him and his companion Truant major trail magic, so he
spread it around. (2)
Met some other day hikers 1 of whom, a criminology
professor, said the only truth he had arrived at was that death was coming, his
wife’s truth was that there is no status quo. We watered up full below and are
dry camping in this meadow, as you have to call your shots when water is scarce
and far between sources. The scene here is ineffable, inscrutable, fleeting,
moody, dark, dramatic, grey and foreboding yet not threatening us with any
immanent danger. Just by being here we soak in this power.
8/2 Rockpile Lake, 12 miles
Woke up in the clouds and intermittent rain all through the
night, wet tent to carry, woods fogged in big time. We noticed small burn areas
up behind 3 Fingered Jack and big snow fields and then we came out onto a steep
backside when the clouds started to lift, revealing the upper sanctuary of the
mountain, with spires and ramparts quickly peeking and then obscured by fog and
fast moving clouds; we soak in the drama (3). Around to the north side the
cloud ceiling lifted more and more, spots of sun came on until after we had
left the mountain, we could look back and see the whole thing. Then the sky
cleared for the most part and we stopped to talk with many, including Steve
Strong who hiked with us for a while.
We pulled it out to Rockpile Lake here where it was too cold
and windy to swim but we were able to dry out the tent and other gear, had hot
drinks, made dinner, cleaned up, soaked in the sunset, Kim kicked my ass in
Yahtzee with 337 and now it is preparing for a cold night with a 14 miler
tomorrow to position ourselves to cross a glacial creek early the next day
before the sun makes too much melt water and the creek rises up making crossing
dangerous in the afternoon.
8/3
A bitchin’ long day, 14+ miles over lots of snow, lost for
over an hour in the snow area by Cathedral Rocks and now down to Milk Creek,
very tired, Kim pulled me through with good energy and then she crashed after
dinner. We found the trail as someone had tied up a blue popped balloon on a
tree and I happened to see it there. There were footprints everywhere in the
snow, so following tracks was a false sense of security. Some guys went way out
the way here; way down to some lake and many got lost for hours and hours. Back
at our first big snow area, Ism and company were lost for over a day, missed
the trail by going to the wrong side of the drainage at the bottom.
Macaroni and cheese and pepperoni for dinner, very good,
some TANG, tootsie rolls and the sugar has me back mentally, otherwise the
knees hurt, soaked my feet in the glacial milk to relieve the odor; my feet
smell like the lion house at the Bronx Zoo in 1962. We were forced to camp
right next to the trail and met Voyager and Lumbar, 2 very fine older men,
maybe 60s; hiked with Steve Strong most of today and enjoyed his company.
8/4 Jefferson Park @4 miles
A short day, we crossed Russell Creek with no problem, in
fact the whole creek was covered by snow at the crossing, with big rock fall on
top of the snow even. Upstream the snow had broken revealing a pack of 6’ or
more deep with a big gap between the snow and the milky glacial run-off
underneath. Later in the season you can fall through stuff like this, jam your
leg, knee or worse. We got lost some in snow covered trails up to a big flat,
open area in front of Mt. Jefferson: glaciers, ponds, streams, creeks, rivers.
We camped next to the Breitenbush River with the big mountain in front, with
time to wash sox, have early afternoon coffee, dry out the boots. “We may not
be back”, said Kim, so now we relax, shoot, 3.5 hours of free time before
dinner! Saw the Pleiades out shortly before dawn, harbinger of changing
seasons; the winter sky is creeping in. Now we are surrounded by snow pack
between 2 forks of the Breitenbush in a wooded area. Life is good. Met thru
hiker Milky, a milkman from the lake district of England.
8/5 Ollalie Lake 12.2 miles
Met an Italian couple doing Oregon north to south; they
hadn’t seen Mt. Hood at all until today. Ran into Steve again, incessant trail
talk. Met some young folks with Cope the black lab, got to the lake, swam naked
(as usual) and some old guy promptly showed up in a car and got out with his
camera. Had an early dinner, starting to get real hungry and fantasize about
food, early into the tent, sun still shining, hot, reading, joking around, not
much to report, met our first south bounders, some injured and having to get
off the trail.
8/6 Warm Springs River 20.8 miles
Contrary to popular belief this river is as cold as it gets,
pure ice water, snowmelt, 2 dips of the feet and that is enough to reduce
swelling. Took off out of Ollalie Lake at 6:30 AM and now are fully set up at
4:30 PM with ½ hour before dinner, which by doing 20, we get more food! More
food because we gained time, gained food. Met Thomas the Hiker from Colorado,
Mr. It’s All About Margins, he recommended ULA pack for 35 lbs. weight, 20 base
weight, 15 for food. Also recommended Henry Shire tents. I definitely need to
lose pack weight; my pack is too heavy for 51 years old. Kim got me through
today as I was dragging and whining. We had a big fight but got over it OK, you
can really blow your stack in the middle of nowhere, as Kim amply demonstrated.
There was a bit of rain toady, enough to wet all the plants along the trail but
not much more. Met some more SOBOs (south bounders) and some Boy Scouts, a
family, Mom, son and friend, more and more people out as we near the Portland
metro area. More were out near the Bend area as well. Saw Mt. Hood a few times.
We are sneaking up on it and on Oregon in total. Kim made tuna from my Mom with
chicken soup mix plus mashed potatoes and stuffing and it was good. Last night
we ate Mom’s salmon that she sent, in a similar mix. Now tired, in tent 6:00 PM
humid, warm, in a dark forest with stream noises in the background.
8/7
Ultra-light backpacking, some factors: type A personality,
individualistic, goal oriented, responsive to market pressure and hype, aspects
of moral purity, isomorphic with the rest of life, in terms of people comparing
and making value judgments. It is analogous to the whole diet purity trajectory
with weight equaling toxins as the boogie factor. It amounts to snobbery by the
purveyors of the most extreme against the middle path. In fact, this scenario
unfolds mostly in my own head as the long distance crowd is overwhelmingly
gracious, polite, smart and inside their own hikes. There have only been 4
snobs so far in 300 miles, but they stand out, like a loudmouth giving an
unsolicited comment about one’s appearance or their car or job or lifestyle.
Their squeaky wheel cries for psychological oil. Feathers get ruffled by
implied criticism and value judgment.
Here’s another analogy: unclean? The apocryphal quote of
Jesus, “it’s not what goes into a mans mouth that makes him unclean, its what
comes out of his mouth that makes him unclean.” Sausage eaters or veggies and
vegans, the food stuff is really relative and arbitrary and so is the rest.
Only by membership in the clean and pure can salvation be gained. This is a
purity and congruence issue, of membership in particular, closed and elite
communities. It’s the same pattern and dynamic, for food, gear, sin, weight/
fat, health, values; it’s a caste system, a hierarchy of status and membership,
a sneering at the untouchables of heavy weight backpacking, a sort of Edward
Abbey fundamentalism.
The gear industry sprouted up to cash in on particular fears
and desires. The trap is, that the experience is not about the gear and
gadgets; it never has been and never will be. To be comfortable is a worthy
goal but that is not the purpose of the whole endeavor. I guess part ways,
hiking has been turned into athletic event and gear then, becomes more
important in and of itself.
Part of the rationale for ultra-light packing is based on
negative comparison and that negative comparison just happens to be the style I
grew up with, my tradition, the heavier style, so yes, I am defensive; I feel
attacked. Yet I must adapt and deal as it would be foolish to reject all
advances just because they were different.
Timothy Lake 13.1
We knocked out our miles, tried to hitch (around to
Government Camp) for a half hour at a road crossing, wild fantasies of pizza,
no rides, on to the lake, water from a nice spring, washed up dirty clothes,
swam, dried out the tent from last evening’s rain and condensation, dried
boots, read books, nice meal of crab soup, stuffing with berries, olive oil and
cheese. A Steller’s jay tried for the food but was baffled by the container.
(4) Tomorrow it is 10 miles to where we hitch to Government Camp for our
resupply, huckleberry ice cream etc, hoping to dodge the periodic thunder heads
tonight with no rain fly, as it is hot; we are in the lowlands, humid, thick forest,
massive Douglas firs and spruces, big trees, lots of people out for summer fun.
Later on had to get up and put the fly on, as the storm was too close.
8/8 Timberline Lodge/ Mt. Hood 14. miles
We broke out of Timothy Lake at 6:50 AM and knocked off 10
miles in 3.5 hours, nice fog, bad mosquitoes. Saw Little Crater Lake, a neat
little geological feature and got to Rt. 26 and hitched for 15 minutes before
Don and Amber gave us a ride in the back of their old Nissan, packed in with
all their camping gear for an exciting ride to Government Camp, no extra room,
truck way overloaded, Mt. Hood vistas whizzing by at 60 mph. The people for
whom it is most inconvenient give us a ride while those who could do it easily
ignore us.
We munched out seriously at the Huckleberry Inn on half
pound burgers, huge fries, a big time stuffing of the face, went to the PO to
get our resupply, package and letter from Mom. We repacked, dried out the wet
tent from the thunderstorm last night, where thunder rolled massively around
the valleys and hills, then back to the Huckleberry Inn for huckleberry
milkshakes and we hiked straight up the Glade ski trail, gaining 1785’ in 3
miles, phew! It wasn’t the steepest but we had full loads and full bellies,
steep enough. Then we enjoyed the CCC, WPA built Timberline Lodge, very cool,
neat to see the fruits of the New Deal. Too bad there is nothing like that now
and the country has moved to primarily every dog for himself ethics. After
checking out the interior of the lodge, which was in some way the inspiration
for Stephen King’s book The Shining, we hiked away from all the hoi
polloi and set up in a wind break with a long view of Mt. Jefferson and right
beneath Mt. Hood.
8/9 Paradise Park
A short day, we pulled up by 11:30 AM to enjoy the potential
views, if the clouds lift. It rained last night, another wet tent, heavy, nasty
etc. The cloud ceiling pulls up once in a while to show snatches of the high
glacier-covered peak of Mt. Hood, foggy, misty, magical, fickle weather.
We met Rambo the postmaster yesterday, “revenge is OK, pay
back is better”. This guy was a real piece of work, good that he is retiring
soon. Here’s the earful we got: for the no-contact restraining order put on him
by his ex-wife, he was going to turn it back on her for calling him. He was
also trying to bait his girlfriend’s ex-husband into a fight as he was/ is a
wife beater. Then he went on about Navy SEALS and tough guys and collecting
Viet Cong ears in Vietnam and how tough SEALS are for jogging with telephone
poles on their shoulders. Steve Strong, a marine in Vietnam, said people like
Rambo have never done it for real, they are all talk. Steve called Special
Forces “snake eaters”. Then Rambo went on about how guys he met at the VFW
returning from Iraq wanted to go back for more tours, as they really wanted the
Iraqis to have their freedom. At this point we needed to escape this blowhard
atmosphere and we left. We were not impressed, more disgusted. For tough guys
the threat of violence is a tantalizing power trip of dominance. But it is the
most simple, primitive and basic type of dominance. It’s animalistic actually,
less human, and those who are impressed by it get sucked into that vortex. A
person can always handle a bully, a Stagger Lee, a SEAL, football players, by
loading and blowing them away like Harris and Kliebold in Columbine. Bullies
die by their own medicine.
Had a nice interlude with Steve again, here at camp with a
wide- ranging conversation and fresh boiled coffee and tea that Steve offered.
It’s foggy and cold, can see my breath, caught a chill, 2:00 PM, don’t want to
retreat to the tent but I may have to. Kim has gone for a walk out into the
mist where astounding views might be seen on other days, as we are a good ways
up on Mt. Hood and Mt. Hood is not chopped liver.
The fog makes a thin veil between the known and the unknown;
all that is ethereal becomes closer in the fog. All that might be or could be
becomes more possible, the barrier between faith and knowledge is obscured and
even those who hew to reason must find a moment’s pause in the deliverance of
otherworldly fog. The misty wind has driven me to the tent; with lack of
movement cold has penetrated my clothes; and what a nice little shelter we
have, a perfect 3 season tent for two, our home away from home, our portable
nest.
The clouds were moody all day, a special feeling, Kim said
“you like the moody sky, why not me when I’m moody?”
My boots have been good for tough substrate and snow but
very heavy when wet. Lots of people have sneakers or hiking shoes, the feet get
wet, you have to watch rubble more closely, lava, snow and mud are tough but
they are nimble, light, and dry fast. My Gortex boots are wet anyway, they get
wet anway, so there is no use for Gortex footwear on a long hike. Gortex is one
of the great hypes of all time. It is gear for gear’s sake.
We had a massive dinner of mac-n-cheese, chorizo TVP from
Mexico, mashed potatoes and then licorice and Reese’s pieces for dessert.
Some of the trees we have walked through or will walk
through: Pacific silver fir, red fir, grand fir, white fir, sub alpine fir,
Noble fir, Alaska cedar, western larch (tamarack), sub alpine larch, Incense
cedar, weeping spruce, Engelmann spruce, sugar pine, white bark pine, lodge
pole pine, western white pine, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, western red cedar,
mountain hemlock, western hemlock.
8/10 Paradise Park
Kim got up and made coffee, we caught the clear sunrise on
Mt. Hood, our stay was made worthwhile; we didn’t cut and run too quickly, didn’t
bruise on through to miss the special qualities of this place; we lingered.
The trail provides a forum and context for a community of
hikers of various types. This is extended on the Internet with various
journaling sites, gear companies and efforts to sell books and videos about the
trail.
In my mind, backpacking or simply living outdoors for an
extended periods, strips off the superficial veneers of the various status
hierarchies in society. Every one gets leveled off on the trail; we’re all potentially
equal and aside from small differences in gear or stated goal of the moment,
there are no BMWs or any huge status markers to separate one from another. So
in spite of being acutely aware of whatever status markers there are, hikers
are potentially a community of the less materially oriented. It is a simpler
version of humanity where what is inside can shine brighter.
Sure the long distance folks are different than weekenders
or short section hikers but only the very few emphasize the differences. I
suppose mountaineers are a whole other breed. Then there are rock climbers,
mountain bikers, trail runners, horse people, llama and goat people, ATV and
motorcycle users etc, all the different tribes of outdoor users. Hikers don’t
need serious expertise, so that status differences are more a matter of ego
than reality. Anyhow there is a community based on good stuff, on angels, on
shared simplicity, on being able to reveal your heart and true inner tone. The
simplicity of it all brings us back to reality, stripped away from the petty
considerations of town, a core of humanity remains and is revealed. There is a
depth to be found in simplicity; it is the richness of inner life, the
thickness of the moment. It is a spiritual path with just a minimum of material
props. At the same time the structure of nature is “out there” exterior to
one’s identity and it is the interplay between this natural context and one’s
interior that opens up levels of being human hard to find in the modern world.
There is the physical challenge and suffering at the hands
of nature, you use your wits and skills to remain happy and comfortable. In
this community these sorts of things can be shared. Shared ties that bind sew
this group of people together. What a nice rosy picture! Perhaps I am being
overly rosy. There is judgment but it is
really by the very few. Their smugness stands out. There are different
in-groups and concomitant out-groups and the challenge is to not be swayed by
peer pressure and social control, herding pressure but to arrive solidly at
your own style of hike and be secure in that. You do your thing and keep the
negative comparisons to a minimum. This seems to be a common state that serious
hikers arrive at, a baseline realization, hike your own hike, what else can you
really do when you are conscious about it? Everyone is climbing a mountain; no
sense on insisting there is only one way to the top.
Yet all is short and sweet with trail interactions; you
don’t see these people day after day. You are never around them long enough to
see much more than a pubic persona. You get the gravy, kind of like church. To
accept others differences is not unique to the trail, just easier because of
the inherent simplicity and fleeting nature of the contacts. So, it is an easy enough
avenue into universal spiritual stuff, into fraternity and community, for some
it becomes their whole life. They stumble into this scene and pow, there is
meaning, depth, where once was superficial materialism. This hiking is a real
deal, the puffery quickly fades as you get dirty, cold, wet, hungry; you do it
for ascetic purposes, to deprive, to strip away the bullshit and leave the gems
at the core of who you are. Getting from point A to point B is only a prop, the
apparent raison d’etre, for me the real reason is to be transformed.
The trail or God, we cannot escape that which is human in
us, we make the trail, we make God, we then get on our knees and pray to it; we
are the context makers. I suppose to create a context filled with beauty and
magic and the power of nature, of wild rhythms and then put our tendencies to
create meaning inside of that, you could do worse. Sometimes less is more and
in our current consumer, material culture, what a breath of fresh air to be
free of advertising hype for weeks at a time! To be free from social pressure
to conform to hollow values of material success and acquisition. People evolved
living outside, using the capacities we have, so it is no wonder the long
distance hiking feels so good, it is like going home; it’s where we should be.
Kim made this point: the trail makes you whole because you
are using all aspects of yourself, spiritual, physical, intellectual. The
structure of the experience makes you whole, moves you that way; it takes us
right back into the same milieu that we are exactly adapted for, outdoor living
and survival.
Lolo Pass, 13 miles
We took our time and enjoyed being on Mt. Hood. Hood came
out for us. We stopped to appreciate Zig Zag Canyon and Sandy Creek Canyon,
huge areas of glacial outwash, huge! Then on to Ramona Falls and the beginning
of tons of people, God, people everywhere, unbelievable, clean, city people
with perfume, coming out of nowhere, group after group after group, singles,
families, couples, with dogs, dogs, dogs. The greatest of which was Jake the
Pit Bull with a giant stick in his mouth strutting down the trail ahead of his
mistress.
We went farther than we wanted to and now we’re at Lolo Pass
with even more people, cars and dogs. This is where the train stopped today,
couldn’t be helped. We’re near a major urban area; Portland and people are out
for the weekend, no people of color, all white people. Our Oregon run is
drawing to a close as Kim plans our final exit to Cascade Locks. The Oregon
Cascade volcanoes, along the trail, from south to north: Mt. McLaughlin, Crater
Lake/ Mt. Mazama, Mt. Thielsen, Diamond Peak, Three Sisters, Mt Washington, 3
Fingered Jack, Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Hood.
8/11 Lolo Pass
The dawn comes quietly; the weekend warriors have all
departed in their Suburu Outbacks and our customary silence reins, 30 miles to
Cascade Locks and then…many possible plans.
Kim has been cold in her $300 Western Mountaineering
summerlite bag, seems they shorted the down in some compartments, which are
nearly empty, forcing her to sleep with all her clothes on when the temp is in
the 40s. In July, she has been cold almost every night. My bag, of the same
type, is fine, much more down. (5)
Maybe one reason people like the trail so much is that it
affords the chance to open up the moment, the now, instead of a relentless
focus on material success and the future, or to be trapped by incessant
internal dialogue about events past. However, many folks bring the conquering,
material success metaphor to the woods. They bring quests for the highest
purity, and that’s OK, just don’t drag me into that movie. As Ken Kesey said,
“always stay in your own movie.” The weekenders are like psychological
pollution, their energy rubs off; they are not on this retreat. I guess on a
real meditation retreat you are isolated from people so you don’t get much
contact ruffling of your feathers.
However I define the trail or the context, we can never
escape being human, we will always bring that with us; we can run, but we can’t
hide. There is no escape from the appetites and impulses of our nature. The
woods just offer a good chance to clear away the fog of personal, cultural and
social inertia. The trail becomes one more metaphor for life in general, and
trail or not, hike your own hike, stay in your own movie or what ever, live
your own life. You sure don’t have the world by the tail if you’re living for
external ideals, if some other program is running your computer. And only you
can know.
Of course, and as with any assertion about the nature of
things, this all boils down to unprovable assumptions as to the way things are.
How IS this? A good case in point, we now have a nice little hobo camp beside
the road, a perfect hobo scene. Childhood fantasies of riding the rails and
being free that way can now be re-entertained. We are the trolls now, people looked away from us in here; we were
like homeless people and as I said to Steve Strong the other day, quoting my
friend Voodoo Richard, homeless street musician and hustler par excellence, “the
great thing about not living anywhere is you never have to go home”. “Bullshit,
that’s ridiculous”, said Steve and I then quoted Hunter/ Garcia, well, “once in
a while you can get shown the light in the strangest places if you look at it
right”, what I thought to be timeless wisdom, a final statement, Quakerish even
but which Steve passed off quickly as Grateful Dead bullshit. So there I was
shot down in what were to me some interesting observations as to how things are
here on the trail.
You don’t have to go home, home is where you hang your hat,
you see gargoyles and faces in trees and bark, in rocks and ripples; you find
yourself on a continuum with all of life. I am life become conscious of itself,
after billions of years of crawling around and consuming itself; I look back
from the vantage point of the moment to realize what immense roots I rest upon;
I shared this and met my own comment, “don’t intrude into my movie!”
So all this musing is clearly just my version, the view
through my filters, obvious to me, even self-evident. But taking a truth to be
self-evident is nothing more than that. Reason creates a potential common
ground to put everything on the table. Faith and superstition serve to limit
that which can be put on the table. But all avenues lead back to each other, so
it all depends on what you’re after. Words are just symbols after all and many
times people are after the same types of things just said in different ways.
And shit, like any good hobo I’m going to have to cruise the
parking lot to see if people dropped anything from their vast stashes of gear
and gadgets. People drop a lot of stuff. Us low-budget hikers go for the free
boxes, dumpsters and tailings of the society we seek to escape from. It’s the
cleaner fish strategy. If there is a lot of waste, it’s free, why not use it?
Gleaning the perfectly usable cast offs is the honorable profession of many an
animal. Our ancestors fed their evolutionarily growing brains by learning to
scavenge bones and crack them open to get the nutritious marrow, culminating in
a brain that can write this.
And so you have all these hikers, people in need, hungry on
the trail, need a shower, laundry, phone, mail and so is bred a class of people
to serve us, Trail Angels, which is a nice job as hikers are mostly educated,
middle class people who just happen to look like hobos, bums, street and
homeless people. We appear that way but we are pleasant and witty, thankful and
ready to share the boon of our self-discovery in the woods after long, timeless
months by lakes, ponds and mountains. Trail Angels serve people who are not
really structurally helpless, just momentarily without their cars. It is what
you might call feel good service. If
you get some trouble with societal food distribution, all hikers would be up
against their lack of knowledge of how to procure food from the wilds; we are
all eating packaged food out there!
Kim made the transfer of trail magic to city magic; why not
do the same for people in the city? Why not serve and spread good will among
those who are maybe not all just dirty middle class witty people? Kim leavens
my bread. She pointed out the other day that I seem to only be attracted to
people who are self-aware. I don’t enjoy listening to people carry on about
their exploits, their stuff, their myopic worlds. I like folks who can get to
the meta- level and put some stuff on the table for reflection or who can at
least spice the conversation with that sort of stuff. The broken record types
drive me crazy, those who exclusively talk about themselves with no interest in
anything else. I don’t suffer fools gladly, as their record keeps going around
and around; they know not that they have told you the same things 3,4,5 times
already. So she’s right, if someone is at a level of minimal reflection, I am
impatient with them.
Here’s a scenario: hobos with $1000s of dollars of high tech
gear, Titanium Hobos, a new type of superhero, like Zap comics, the Titanium
Hobo, Pop Tart Power Rangers, I see comic scenarios: heads down, the bachelor herd,
hiking on mindlessly, they see the archetypal female pass by, she has an
outlandish trail name, they are awakened, she is rare relative to all the
males, causes a stir for 100s of miles in her wake. Other scenarios: show down
at the free box or thru hikers get bin-Laden, disguised with beards, run out
them out of the caves with incredibly bad sock odor.
8/11 Wahtum Lake 15.1 miles
We were up early in the hobo camp and out by 6:30 AM, a
gradual rise with nice views towards the Coast Range. Mt. St. Helens was in the
clouds, Mt. Adams was clear, Hood came out after a while, a nice day and it
turned nicer, ate huckleberries and pulled in to swim, wash clothes, munch out,
tired bones, in tent by 7:15 PM. It is action all day long, from the get go it
is packing, unpacking, moving, protecting your temperature, eating, not much
rest, major calorie burning.
8/12 Wahtum Lake
Who are these people who leave toilet paper on the side of
the trail? Who leaves foil wrappers in the fire pits everywhere? They must just
be folks who don’t know any better. Do they imagine that everyone does the same
and it all just disintegrates? Do they wonder why there isn’t more TP out here?
They must wonder how the pros do it? How could this squeamish subject be
handled in a matter of fact, practical way? Are feces and urine so dirty that
you can’t even touch toilet paper after you wiped you ass with it? Seems like
the reason we see these piles of TP is that people can’t handle toilet paper
more than just drop it quickly after the bum is wiped. It is a squeamishness of
clean hype, hermetic, unrealistic and anal-retentive. This is a failure to
surrender to nature and being able to be dirty gracefully, too much germs hype
and not enough practice living outdoors.
Everyone reserves the right to make up their own rules when
it suits them and until people learn better, some of these choices will remain
below the threshold of ethics and in the realm of ignorance. It’s similar to
people with unrestrained dogs in the woods; they have no idea how disruptive to
wildlife a dog is, how rude it is to have to deal with their psycho insanely
barking sheep dog trying to herd you. Dogs are pets, not people, not wild
animals that deserve to run free. Yet ignorance is bliss and learning takes a
lifetime.
8/12 Cascade Locks, 15 miles
Woke early and went down Eagle Creek trail, met Duane Rings,
in his 60s, who comes out for a “reality check”, who takes heart medication, “might as well die out here”, and
“you have all you need just on your back.”
A real nice guy, classic heavy weight packer, lots of gadgetry, with his
head screwed on straight.
I lost my knife, the third loss of the same type of knife,
went back a mile to look but no dice, hopefully someone will find it and enjoy
it, as I do when I find stuff. The waterfalls and tunnel falls were superb. Met
Stale Crackers from the AT and had a nice visit. Then met thru hiker “Serpico”,
Justin, a really fine young man. We walked miles with him then hung out and ate
with him at the campground picnic table, with talk of reason and religion,
really fun to witness the machinations of his mind, his concerns, thoughts and
struggle with Truth and morals, compared to his brother, his job, what really
matters, just a really interesting, thoughtful guy. Serpico’s hiking partner,
Chris works at a wine bar in Mesa and is another really clear, friendly guy.
We are right on the Columbia River now.
8/13
We’ll go to Portland today. As we waited I went for a walk
and missed a good conversation with Kim and other thru hikers about philosophy
and theology. Onward ho!
Beaverton
Explored Cascade Locks a bit, got chips and soda, fruit and
berries, hung out with the German kid and Steve. Debbie came and got us, took
Steve to the Greyhound in Portland. Debbie and Ed treated us to a wonderful
meal and hospitality, ice cream and we are very grateful and well taken care
of.
8/17 Cascade Locks
We had a 4 night rest, resupply, hiatus, recharge with the
really great and generous hospitality of Debbie and Ed Foltyn, giving us rides to
and from Cascade Locks, taking us shopping, picking us up in Portland and most
notable, the food: hamburger BBQ, chicken BBQ, Hot Lips pizza, ice cream and
Ed’s coup de grace, home made pico de gallo salsa with 4 jalapenos, ½ sweet
purple onion, a few fresh tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, vinegar and extra virgin
olive oil, out-fucking-rageously good and then, corn on the cob, fresh pasta,
fresh pesto, garlic bread and blackberry/ raspberry pie and ice cream for
dessert, all REALLY good. Thank you Ed.
It was enough time to get out of sync with the trail. As a
middle-aged couch surfer, there is always the trouble of taking a shower and
not being able to tell if it is shampoo or conditioner without your glasses on,
as well, you knock things over and intrude on people’s lives. I guess the best
you can do is gracefully accept charity and hospitality, as you are not in
command; you are a guest.
Now, we are back at Cascade Locks at 8:30 AM Sunday, a few
details and then across the Bridge of the Gods and back on the trail.
Cedar Creek, 8 miles
Monster stumps from days gone by stand as lonely reminders
of what once was; sunlight dapples momentarily on deciduous leaves on a dreary,
humid day filled with mood and transition. The tentacles of civilization howled
down the freeway, along power lines, through the Bonneville Dam. That inner
quiet and stillness of the woods is fleeting, the flutter of a falling leaf,
changing color, here and then gone; we had just about got it and then by
shifting gears in the city, we seem to have lost it. What? The scenery is not
fantastic? What, the woods are thick and dank, not special in any way that
moves the soul all on its own, a few measly trees here compared to a volcano?
Here, a place where motorcycles and ATVs have been, defiled, young woods, not
mature or deep with age and mystery. The sky is grey, clothes drenches with
sweat. The grandeur has slipped away into a moment hollow and fake.
On looking for a camp spot, level ground is a very important
consideration, especially for a two-person tent, to find that much flat space
in the woods is hard. Many times after choosing the best spot we later notice a
big snag or 2 ready to kill us upon falling; we get the flat spot but are then
exposed to a falling tree! We have skated many snags so far to sleep on a flat
spot.
8/18 Rock Creek, 13.8 hard miles in 8.5 hours
Kim has cranked a huge fire on a rainy day. We got soaked to
start out, foul moods as well, for a bad start to the day, sort of a
continuation of yesterday’s black cloud but that inner weather system seems to
be clearing just as Washington’s exterior weather has welcomed us with plenty
of rain. We got chilled in the wind, all clothes drenched, shivering, ate food
and hiked to stay warm, through many clear cuts and state logging operations;
it’s ugly but I guess part of what gives us the raw material for homes, this
here paper, dressers, tables, construction materials, all wood products have to
come from somewhere.
The forests here are moister, more moss; we are at lower
elevations, more humid.
The whole shoe industry, hiking shoes and boots included,
all have toes that come to a point in the middle. Any examination of the human
foot shows that its shape and the shape of a toe box of most shoes, is not even
remotely similar. And the latest thing is insole hype, foisted on you as you
buy more and more expensive shoes. As if a $120- $200 dollar shoe or boot can’t
supply a decent enough insole that you don’t need to buy an after-market insole
immediately for like $30 dollars more! The audacity! There is no good reason
for this other than to stoke a false market for designer insoles. It is a scam.
The audacity of REI and the shoe industry, to pull such transparent bullshit on
a discriminating public! This would be like selling a car and then saying,
“these tires are no good, you need new ones right away”. And why can’t they
make shoes that have the shape of real feet? Real feet don’t come to a point in
the middle, sorry. We’re not frigging elves here.
I have switched to wearing low-top hiking shoes and it is
much harder on the ankles, arches, Achilles tendons. But it is not like wearing around wet bowling
balls as with full hiking boots, which get soaked anyway in the WA rain,
despite your paying extra for Gortex and despite all the expensive wax you
smear on them, they get frickin’ wet anyway. For this reason, many have
completely given up on the fear of wet feet and thereby have liberated
themselves from Gortex, wax and serious weight, not to mention saving 50 or 60
dollars with the low tops. This is the type of move you make after you see
through the hype. Selling Gortex and gadgetry has a certain inertia at the
store, but months on the trail teaches you what really matters.
It seems EMS and REI have turned into clothing stores,
everything cheaply made overseas. The real good gear is now made by small
garage enterprises or by specialists for whom function is still important. These outfits that are responsive to actual
feedback and needs and are not constantly morphing style jobs like my EMS $100
dollar rain pants that suck, absolutely no good, that changed from 3 years ago
to have less features, less planning, clearly decisions made by stylists and
economists and not mountain sports experts, as the company name would indicate.
In order to know what your hike may be, you have to develop
a sense of what you are after, what will work, what is extra, what is just pure
hype and inertia. How comfortable or uncomfortable do you want to be? Kim has
the fire super cranked now, with big fat logs on, cutting through the damp and
dark, bringing a warm sense of light and heat to a dreary afternoon.
8/19 Rock Creek
Well, with the real estate situation being what it is, we
have decided to lay claim to this camp by the creek and take a zero day. It
rained pretty good last night and the forest is drenched and dripping with
periodic spells of more or less rain. Why should we get absolutely soaked again
just to make 10 miles when the Master and Commander figured it out we can take
a zero. (6) The woods float out in the darkness of our pre-dawn tent and we
remain snuggled and cozy inside; drip, drip, drip, we are safe and sound.
So savings, loans and mortgages be damned; we have a tent,
dry inside, another big Kim fire, a piece of plywood to sit under if things get
tough and lots of food, salami and cheese even. So while the rest of America
frets and counts beans and hedges against the rising tides of global inflation
and the incipient deflation of the post WW2 economic boom and associated bubbles,
we have it made drinking hot coffee under a piece of plywood in the verdant and
dripping Washington woods.
Now, apparently Kim’s aptitude and native intelligence was
not recognized or appreciated in her childhood; siblings mocked her reading,
she was excluded from the shop with Dad and the boys and she washed dishes.
Kim grew up being shoe-horned to an extent into female
roles. Her aspirations were bigger. So it is my theory here that her great
interest in managing fires is to be able to do boys activities, that she can
throw herself into with complete abandon. This is like scratching an old itch.
We may even get into some advanced fort building later to make us a shelter
from the storm. The control of fire is primary, basic. It cuts the uncertainty;
you are warm, you get dry, lions don’t like it, you are safe, the darkness is
cut. Fire is an arrow to the heart of darkness. Fire is a hedge against death
itself. Fire is power over the night. When we started to mange the night and
darkness, we raised our heads to the threshold of humanity.
I can be forgiven for thinking of theories regarding my
partner. In the lab of our relationship, there is plenty of time to develop
them. But theories in this context are fishing around for what can never be
known, as home channels lay forever hidden in the veils of their own identity.
Kim now brings in more huge pieces, as in the rain you can
crank a fire really hard, to huge proportions with no worries of starting a
forest fire. She’ll probably make a 5’ stack of burning wood; only beach
driftwood fires or summer camp bonfires get bigger than this.
Moss encases full tree trunks amidst a verdant splendor of
multi-faceted greens. For more theories we figured out this was a hunter’s camp
and that hunter’s wives kept it neat. Then we imagined the nature of the
hunter’s psyche. Are they by nature an ignorant, few-toothed, drunk, camouflage
wearing lot? Or do the few bad ones give the whole bunch a bad name? Then we moved into a wide ranging political,
religious discussion that we artfully managed to not get into a huge fight
about and Kim is now off gathering even more wood. The fire is now around 2 ½’
high, full of waterlogged sections dredged from the surrounding and soaked
underbrush, as the pitter patter pitter patter of rain percolates down through
the canopy of wide, green leaves. Yes, we are in a mixed deciduous forest,
quite the change from the pure evergreen of the Oregon PCT. Now we witness a
blanket of growing life and water trickling to the sea, as the world goes to
hell in a hand basket; here we find a moment of peace.
What was dream, of swimming through rippling water, sliding
through tree trunks, into a large lake, what was dream and what now reality?
The night’s dreams open up, gently down the shore. The sun and blue sky make
sporadic appearances, teasing me with hopes of clear warmth and expansiveness,
hope of dry travel, dry tent, dry boots, dry socks, dry ground cloth and then
as quick as it giveth, it taketh away, hope gone in a mat of grey threatening
rain and socked in drizzle. All dryness gained is lost again. What futility to
grasp for the dry amidst an onslaught of wet. Yet you can’t allow a total
surrender to wet in your inner sanctum. The survival instinct fights being wet.
This is what a consciousness must struggle with on the wet side of the
Washington Cascades. It’s sort of a shock, coming from mostly dry, clear sky
people. Endless cycles of wet, grey and more wet and grey, just the threat of
it is depressing. The false hope of a patch of blue sky and dappled sun taken
away, yet after 20 years on Tucson I shrink from the brazen sun as well. To
have it be clear and temperate is what I like. The Bay Area has about my
perfect climate.
The forest through here is younger and the remains of old growth
stumps dot the forest floor with a sense of mystery and awe, similar to seeing
the skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger; did those things really live? What was
life when giants walked the earth? The stumps speak of a forest primeval, of a
grandeur and maturity that will not be seen for a 1000 years; majesty cannot be
replaced on a short time scale. Majesty can’t be bought and sold. The sawed off
remains are like an unspeakable defiling by man. To take a tree of that scale
and size just seems wrong. You can make a dresser out of a smaller tree.
Yes, man can take his trees and kill giant whales; it is a
lack of respect for nature that leads to wholesale slaughter, extinction, clear
cutting, the arrogant lack of foresight and every dog for himself in the moment
and the future be damned. That is the legacy of man so far, the sawed off giant
stump, the extinct mega fauna, the over-fished and depleted oceans, no brakes
until he must and then kicking and screaming. The US is the supreme example of
arrogant consumerism, an example of short-sighted economic freedom and now the
rest of the world wants cars, computers, oil, meat and guess what? The pie is
getting smaller.
Well, after dinner and dental hygiene the rain returns to
soak the tent, all else stays dry until tomorrow under the lean-to or inside
the tent. We might be a little heavy on the gear, but we are dry where it
counts now.
8/20 Rock Creek
The rain has turned infernal, pelting us all night, soaking
the bottom of the tent, splashing up inside, 12 hours of solid, steady, hard
rain. The tent performs well enough. The creek rose a foot or more. The fire
once so grand and powerful is now extinguished, cold, wet, muddy ash. Thunder
roils in the distance; the surrounding forest is totally drenched. The plywood
offers slim protection and now it is sorely uncomfortable beneath, sitting
hunched on a wet log, vertebrae grinding back and forth seeking comfort that
will never come. What do you expect from free real estate? Gloom is in the
forecast, grey, squishing, soaked. If we
stay or go, we still have to do the miles to get back to our rendezvous with
Kim’s sons. Even then we have no inside
to go to. We may find a momentary respite in a restaurant, library.
The long dark night of incessant dripping, loud against the
tent walls, recalls Noah, the Flood. Now a person can see why there is so much
moss everywhere. This is a frigging temperate rainforest, a robust bloom of
intense greenery fed by all these water noises around me. The stream, the rain,
the drips on the leaves, all conspiring to trap me until the moment of bolting
and the total drenching of the tent and ground cloth. Once your shelter is
sopped and it still rains for days, then it is only a matter of time before
your sleeping bag and inner sanctum of clothes gets wet too. For this it is
better to have a synthetic bag, rather than down, as once wet, down does not
work.
The MSR Hubba Hubba tent, while light by some standards, is
not equal to the task of this storm. It is adequate only. I pity the thru hikers
trying to capture their miles in equipment now surely inadequate. Every pound
shed to save weight is now a pound of margins of exposure to the weather. We
have extra gear and are still not dry, but we’re not drenched either; we holed
up; we had lucky plywood. So go figure; the lightweight gear is just not going
to stand up to a heavy, 12 hour rain. It looks like another zero day. Why get
everything soaked when all we really have to do is get back to Cascade Locks by
Friday? It’s a one day walk on logging roads off trail.
The hike’s feeling got derailed by stopping in Portland; we
lost our momentum. With this incessant rain Kim has lost her drive to go on.
She has a book that says WA can be rainy for weeks at a time in August and
September. The book also says the average is for less rain now. We had some
disputation about how things really were here in Washington, whether to call
the whole hike quits or what. We (as representative of any human dispute) say
the same things over and over as if by volume and repetition an argument will
be won. Nobody backs down. The fight goes on, shoot an arrow here or there,
yell, kick, scream; in the end it is a pure power struggle with dueling
positions and lines in the sand. We love
to listen to ourselves and are less good at listening to something that
contradicts our opinions. We are like dogs of the same household, who start by
barking together at strangers but then in the excitement start to attack each
other. It’s pretty funny to watch, except when it is you who is acting it out.
While our tent is adequate, it has some major flaws. The
rain fly is too high off the ground and when drips come down the outside, they
splash back into the mosquito netting inside. Once the water splashes on top of
the ground cloth there at the intersection of the tent bottom and the rain,
your inner defenses have been breached, water seeps between the cloth and the
tent floor, gradually soaking the whole bottom over the course of the night,
the bottoms of the sleeping pads get wet. When the sleeping pads are rolled up,
the wet bottoms then get the top part wet too. Thumbs down on the Hubba Hubba
for rain; mosquitoes yes, very good, heavy rain, not very good. The floor is
soaked because of poor fly construction and splash back onto the ground cloth.
To be fair, any tent will have some issues in hard rain like this.
The rain came down all day in savage sheets, strong,
bursting down, amazing force, flooding our camp, putting out my own big fire,
then a break and then more, gully washer after gully washer as we looked at
each other in awe and amazement. “Can you believe this!?$#W%$” The flooding
came right up to our plywood lean-to and the sky opened up for even more rain.
Three days of rain now, pretty amazing.
8/21 Cascade Locks 15
miles
It kept on and off through the night and we took a brief
respite to pack and begin a dirt road escape back to Cascade Locks. The rain
came back for a guest appearance and soaked us again but before long we were
eating cool, sweet blackberries and dreaming of pizza in town, which we got in
Stevenson, WA, a nice little town with cute homes. Then a brisk highway walk
surrounded by roaring semi trucks, traffic and trains until we pulled out our
15 miles back to Marina Park and free PCT hiker camping, where I promptly began
to dry out gear, Kim took a shower and went to do laundry. We found dinner and
snack food in the Post Office hiker free box, mostly all dry now, organized and
waiting for Kim to come back and we will proceed with the evening.
8/22 Cascade Locks
A chill breeze blows off the river, the Columbia River, a
major passage west in the conquest of the continent, Lewis and Clark, Thomas
Jefferson. The river is still a major artery into the heart of the country,
still, with railroads on each side in WA and OR, highways, bridges, barge and
boat traffic, dams, locks, hydroelectric, this here river is a major thing, a
substantial entity, a power player in past history and current events. The
river is many things: the mother of all salmon, source of cheap hydroelectric
and associated aluminum production, Indian fishing rights, commercial and
recreational fishing pressures, dams on the main river and all the tributaries,
salmon can’t get by, the Grand Coulee, the Lake Missoula flood, the Scab lands,
the geese and migratory birds, the infernal rain, yes, with this river there is
some history and current events.
River people lurk in hidden thickets ready top grab
expensive hiker gear left unattended. Trains, cars trucks, planes and boats all
rumble through the night. The Gorge, mightily etched by glacial floods of
unimaginable depths and power, now a campground with electric and water, with
picnic tables ready to civilize the wanderers of America, hikers, RVers, bums.
Geese sound off in notes speaking large rhythms of nature as the bustle of
mankind makes its temporary ripples. The earth will swallow all in the end and
none of it will matter. All success and failure will become the same in the
eyes of eternity. All this rumbling noise is nothing but life exercising its
noisy prerogatives; here now, gone tomorrow, ephemeral, breath on a frosty
morning. Museums show the old technology, the old cheese graters and stoves,
quaint now, cutting edge then. All farm implements were horse drawn. Now we are
in the machine and petroleum, plastic, computer age, super light weight, hi
tech. To be on foot between towns in 2008 is to be a fish out of water. You
don’t belong on that road on foot but sometimes have no choice as a long
distance hiker. Cars and trucks rule; pedestrians are nothing but a pain,
slowing down the anonymous masses on their urgent business.
What artificial deadlines we set and then must meet! From
point A to point B on a trail! The hiker never really escapes being human, just
puts a different face on it. As Ism said, the race is long and the only
competition is with ourselves. Our large and complicated brains confuse us,
sidetrack us, take us down one rabbit hole after another, camouflage,
distraction, purposes all under the sun, folly, all a house of mirrors
deflecting one from the NOW, the very moment which is all that can ever matter,
all we’ve ever got. So much energy we put into our deadlines. So much money we
spend to buy this or that security as a hedge against the grim reaper, against
discomfort, age and infirmity. I wonder at the folly of it all.
8/23 Cascade Locks, Marina Park, 15 mile day hike
Davis and Jacob came yesterday afternoon. We went for pizza,
burgers, ice cream, walked across and back on the Bridge of the Gods. Before
they came Kim and I went to the library, met Beth and Larry, 2 hikers similar
in style to us. We went to an art gallery. We did 15 to beyond Tunnel Falls and
back on Eagle Creek, a pretty long hike actually, and back for showers,
shopping etc.
8/24 Cascade Locks
The campground is full. I thought about elites and how they
are universally despicable. If you don’t aspire to be one, then you are blind
to the glitter of it. It doesn’t have to be with anything major, could be with
music appreciation, cars, whatever, but what elitism does is to stake out some
status over others, even if the status staking is basically an artificial
thing. What is it for? Dominance? Access to females? Access to resources?
That’s the antecedents of it. In today’s day and age it is more of a game, it
can be just snobbery, when basic material comforts can be taken for granted and
poor Americans are like Kings in Mexico and the Third World.
Railing against elites has a bittersweet tone, as
traditionally they have what you want, power or resources. Today however, with
material needs basically satisfied, old impulses of clannishness and
parochialism still persist, a holdover perhaps, an instinct that keeps people
fighting amongst themselves when the need for that is really past. Modern
elites are just transposed forms of enemies and oppressors and their only real
difference is a trumped up façade of higher culture.
8/25 Swampy Creek
It’s around 1 mile after our ride back to the trail from
Davis and Jacob, from Portland. We arrived here about 2:30 PM, left Portland at
9:00 AM; we had a fun time with the boys, a good visit. Now, next to a strong
creek, lots of noise, cold, a bit of rain, a cedar fire, fancy Superfeet
insoles hurting my feet, need to lie down and read.
Kim’s latest epiphany: there is no official truth because
everyone’s memory of the same event is different.
8/26
Kim sat alone by the fire last night. It is understandable
she would miss her sons. She’s OK today.
Viewpoint camp, 15 miles, just below Adams Gacier
Man do we got a camp, a smashing view of Mt. Rainier to the
north, Mt. Adams directly behind us, with glaciers present and evident, a huge
panorama of the Cascades down to Mt. St. Helens which is just barely showing
above the clouds. We’re well off the trail, private, and are at a permissible
elevation to have a fire. On the downside, it’s cold even in the sun with all
my clothes on. A weather system is due tomorrow. All that remains now is to
spend the afternoon enjoying the vistas and the location.
Rainier towers above all, above the clouds, floating,
snow-capped, full of latent power, not far from the recently exploded St.
Helens and for now all is placid but for some wind. The spruce and fir wave and
whisper; wildflowers still grace the meadows. All speaks of what is known but
not said; the party will soon be over. Fall will come, quickly followed by snow
and winter and then this space will be but a summer memory. The moments here
now will be lost like summer wages, only memories left.
From here it feels like I can see 1/10th of the
state of WA the view is so expansive. That Rainier and St. Helens are both
within sight of each other, both Cascadian subduction stratovolcanoes, means
that Rainier could just as well blow too.
8/27 Midway Creek, 1.8 miles
And then there came the rain, knock, knock, knocking on our
tent’s cover; windy it was with spats of rain and the day broke with a thick
fog where once our views of Rainier and St. Helens had been. Out I went into
the cold dampness to make coffee, bringing back the booty, with sugar, to Kim
in the tent, she was covered momentarily with 2 sleeping bags as it was cold.
After a bit of packing we were off into the mist, crossing
some rugged glacial milk creeks.
To me those mountain
mists are an indelible memory. I have forgotten other things. Feelings of
affection and of animosity, acts of kindness and expressions of disdain; these
things are gone, leaving not a trace. But my spirit was transformed by those
mists; they reside within me now; never will they leave me.
Pio
Baroja, Fantasias Vascas
For dinner: a smashing mac-n-cheese with Gallo salami, olive
oil, grated Parmesan cheese, crushed Doritos and Frank’s Red Hot Sauce. Oh my
God was it good, probably one of the best of the whole trip. Then, peanut M
& Ms for dessert followed by Reese’s Pieces. Kim made another rip roaring
fire and in spite of the recurrent drizzle and rain, we got sox and other stuff
mostly dry, and now, at a lower elevation, we may get to be warm tonight and
able to use more clothes for pillows. When it is really cold we have no pillows
as all the clothes are on our bodies. Kim is crazy for the fire tending,
totally consumed by it.
8/28 Sheep Lake, 15.7 miles
Two days of complete fog with no views and today a fair
amount of rain while hiking. The underbrush drenched our footwear and rain
pants. The fog is always mystical and even more when you know it is hiding Mt.
Rainier and Mt. Adams. We did have our one day of views; some may not get any.
It was raining, windy with fog and mist blowing through as
we got to Sheep Lake at around 3:00 PM and set up the tent, made coffee and sat
in the rain with our warm drinks, deciding to have dinner early and get in the
tent. Grey jays came and boldly snatched fallen crumbs and stray globs of
potato. Before getting in the tent we took off our soaking wet shoes, revealing
horrid old lady toes and wrinkled, pink feet.
There is the question about horseshit on a multiple use
trail. Some don’t mind, others are adamantly opposed to horse uses mixed with
hiker use. Is horseshit a giardia vector? Why do hikers have to side step miles
and miles of shit? It is big shit at that! Should horses have a poop bag? Shit
is such a big deal for people to have to manage and bury and be careful of yet
horses just lay giant crap all over the trail and right in streams and lakes.
It is obviously a grandfathered use, honoring the animal that was everything
before cars and machines. People with horses as well are going to do search and
rescue for injured or lost hikers. I don’t mind it so much, the horseshit, as I
see the hypocrisy of one use being “higher” or more pure than others. I have to
suck that up.
I have more questions concerning market pressure and hype by
outfitters concerning wicking fabrics,
waterproof breathable materials and water purification products. These are
Fred’s 3 Pillars of Backpacking Hype. One, wicking hype, when you are all wet,
with high humidity, nothing wicks anywhere and when else would you need wicking
if not when wet? You also sweat out clothes from the inside faster than any
material can breathe, so to me the
whole notion of wicking only really applies to how fast something will dry once
it is not raining or getting wet from dew or sweat. Salespeople try to create a
fear of being wet, and that certain clothes are like a silver bullet, but
really it’s just about how fast something will dry after it is wet. If you are
wet, you are cold, you are in trouble and need to protect your temperature, no
matter how much you paid for that shirt. Wicking is mainly effective in
removing (wicking) money from your wallet. Two, waterproof, breathable stuff
like Gortex is total hype, nothing stands up to solid rain, sorry. You get wet
feet. So why did you pay $50.00 extra for Gortex in your boots? And then you
get sold pricey wax and other stuff when the Gortex is supposed to be
waterproof already. Is a consumer and user not supposed to question the
absurdity of this? Many hikers have ditched the waterproof boot totally in
favor of quick drying sneakers. With jackets you can’t hike in the rain without
getting sweated out anyway, unless it is cold and you have features like
underarm zippers to open up and let heat and moisture out. Even then high
activity creates more internal moisture from sweat and when the humidity is high,
the sweat wicks nowhere, it can’t go anywhere, there is no place for it to
evaporate to, so it is really useless in the situations you are being sold on.
The one-layer waterproof/ breathable laminates soak through too, water gets in
there and in the end you get wet. Along the way you get sold some spray to put
on the outside or some wash to treat it with. These fabrics do not seem to be
able to perform without buying other products, so you end up hooked on this
high dollar merry-go-round and you get sucked into the vortex because it is the
only game in town, versus realizing that when it rains you get wet, and you
just deal with it. Three, water treatment: if a high number of people are
immune to giardia and many people never treat and don’t get ill, the level of
risk seems low and the price of the inconvenience factor to treat is high. You
can spend a lot of time per day pumping water and then the filters get clogged,
it costs $50.00 or more anytime you need a new filter. There is chemical
treatment, which tastes bad no matter what method, but iodine seems to taste
the worst. We use 1 drop of household bleach per quart when treating. The
bottle of bleach we carry is very small, an eyedropper, and light, and has the
same active ingredient as other chlorine-based treatments which are very pricey
and hard to get. How’s that for cutting through the hype!
Some of the gear may have features that really do perform,
but I can’t buy the hype hook, line and sinker. I have to discover it first
hand. Show me. Unfortunately this stuff is very expensive, revealing advanced
back packing to be a basically yuppie, elite enterprise. You do want to get
weight down, but in order to do so it is maybe $300.00 a pound.
It is easy to be sucked in by the inertia of hype, of whatever
flavor the hype is, to consume this, to believe this, upgrade that. I feel that
when I see hype, I need to be wary, as I am dealing with a parochial interest
selling itself. I need to ask, is this what I really want, or what somebody is
trying to convince me to want? And of course, the technology now, of
lightweight gear, fast drying, it is still preferable to cotton, wool and
rubber, yet I don’t need to be bamboozled by endless upgrades and specious
claims of high end technological silver bullets to simple psychological issues
of enduring some discomfort outside.
The whole spectrum of upgrading hype is a transparent effort
to wick money away from those that can pay for higher “quality”. Keep putting
out carrots and see who will keep on paying. But then you are out there
fronting for major snob appeal, as you sport the names of the most expensive
stuff, it isolates you, you are not one of the people then, if your gear is the
equivalent of a Lexus or BMW. Never mind that all secretly want the Lexus gear and
that high tech hiking is an elite endeavor, and that the old heavyweight,
blue-collar, universal access approach is hopelessly primitive in its
discomfort, and it becomes an issue you have to navigate, just the gear itself.
8/29 no name alpine camp, 10.5 miles
Hiked from 7:30 to 4:45, pulled in after being in serious
wind and set up the tent, made dinner, munched out big time, cleaned up, in
tent and then 10 minutes later the rain starts, wind howling and buffeting the
trees and tarp. We had a sunny day after 2 of rain and we stopped and looked at
all the views and flowers and talked with tons of people. Unbeknownst to us, it
was Labor Day and we saw 35 or more people. Goat Rocks Wilderness is pretty
darn nice and popular, close to the Seattle metro area.
We stopped at a sunny spot to dry out the completely sopped
tent from the night before. There we met Ridge Walker and Accent. Accent is
from Quebec, with a great accent. They said thru hiking was mostly about being
able to say you did it; do the exact miles, get it done; it’s an athletic
competition thing versus appreciating the woods. Then we all pulled out, after
meeting Seven, and went up to the crest. We took a wrong turn as did Seven and
we ended up underneath the peak of Old Snowy Mtn. instead of going across some
glacier. Seven had gone and scouted some but came back up to a sign that said
nothing. He was studying his maps, baffled. He was scared to go down there. The
ridge we found ourselves on separated one valley full of fog and wind from another
valley that was mostly clear. We looked down into our own private abyss, which
we had to enter one way or another. It was a gauntlet. Any way you went would
be trouble.
So Seven and Kim put their heads together and decided to go
the way that Seven had turned back from. It was daunting, straight down into
the fog and wind, lots of rubble, steep slopes all around. Here came my high
moment of the trip, of letting the game come to me, not planned or expected, I
just stepped up and knocked down the shot. I led the way down, feeling as if I
could not make a wrong step. “If this turns out to go nowhere, we’ll just come
back.”
We were quickly enveloped by fog and the trail became steep
and narrow and full of rubble. The mist and wind became menacing and thick to
the point where Seven doubted we were going the right way and Kim then stopped
and read the text, looked at the map and I scouted more downward and it
ultimately turned out to be an alternate route and we met up again with the
PCT. We just couldn’t orient to any features with the fog obscuring any
reference points.
After rejoining the PCT we walked along a narrow ridge where
we got slammed by high winds from one side of the knife edge ridge. Periodically we were treated to smashing,
outlandish, dramatic views, revealed as the clouds would suddenly shift and
pull up, and voila! The artist put on a fantastic show for us, really
tremendous. I had never seen anything so wild, so full of outrageous drama; the
adrenaline flowed and I was excited. “This is fan-fucking-tastic!” Now the wind
comes through like a freight train, like big surf on the ocean and we are dry
and inside, full of noodles and sweets.
8/30 same site, morning
We had rain, wind and then it froze, a very cold night; I
can barely write now. Overdose came in late, wet, frozen with crazy adventures
coming through the Old Snowy Mtn. area too. Now the descent down into the
warmer layers of life, into the friendly embrace of biology, down from the
level of ice and snow, warm wind, flowers, succor.
More on horses: they really are hard on the trail,
destructive; they should be prohibited when Republicans are in power as
Republicans always cut land management agency’s budgets and thus there is
little trail work done. When every passing horse kicks out the trail sides and
makes deeper gullies, you need constant trail work. Yesterday I was in the
zone, couldn’t make a wrong step, everything was right until the cold and wind
started to sap my energy.
Here’s a thought, you have long distance hikers, thru
hikers, section hikers, weekend hikers, how about the transformational hiker? I
don’t need a patch or a piece of paper to validate my many experiences in the
woods. What I’m looking for is not outside me as an exterior validation. It is
not a material thing to be possessed. It’s inside me as a simple state, to be
gained by stripping away extraneous clutter, to the core; I seek to surrender
to it, go through it, not conquer it but be it. There’s the idea that, since it
is inside, it may already be there waiting to be found. Bringing the whole
hyper competitive, success stuff to the woods with the hurrying, the racing and
athletic aspect, it is not substantially different than any other competitive
endeavor. The woods then become nothing really special other than a foil for
athletic conquest.
This competitiveness grows out of our primate, social
ancestry. That we are focused on status and hierarchy and thereby, success, is
part of our fabric as a species; this is a default automatic pilot type pf
approach. It is a lowest common denominator. It is evolved to transcend that, and they who serve that evolution, that
transformation, break the mold of the automatic pilot. Perhaps by not trying to
dominate, not trying to win or conquer, then the field of possible versions of
humanity opens up, and diverse expressions can be appreciated more. Who knows?
As “diversity” stands now in popular usage, it means having
people around with different skin colors but it has not much to do with diverse
opinions or lifestyles. It is a code word for race and gender quotas. Yet the
whole underlying stream, the mainstream from which “diversity” is allowed to
exist, is run by old white men who enforce a Leave It To Beaver type of bland,
middle class white sensibility with no spice or heat allowed. The inclusiveness
only goes so far as that you don’t offend any white mainstream sensibilities.
Motto for a transformational hike: the journey is the goal.
That puts the moment ahead of the future. You make a plan, a framework from within
which spontaneity can unfold.
It was COLD today, all day very cold, with wind. We met more
friendly people, a hunter who gave us a Cliff Bar. He was a major camouflage
guy with all the elk calls, a chiropractor from Gig Harbor. The overwhelming
majority of people out here are friendly and open and over time you develop a
sense of a humanity not jaded and cynical. People generally try to bring
something good forward when you meet them in a face-to-face encounter and it is
just you and them and the woods.
We decided not to go to White Pass today because it was too
late and it was Labor Day weekend, camp spots would be taken, camp was a mile
from the store anyway, there wouldn’t be enough time to savor it all. So we
pulled up along side of the trail after having gotten full water to dry camp
and set up quickly, cooked dinner and cleaned up. It was around 12 miles to
camp near Hail Lake, rain threatening, cold, WA weather is just what you’d
think, grey and rainy. Tomorrow we do it all up right, laundry, resupply etc
with plenty of time for everything.
8/31 same camp
What a luxury toilet paper is, pure luxury that we take for
complete granted. The fully adapted outdoors person can easily do without it.
There is always something around to deal with your brown recluse. And then,
when you get unlimited rolls of TP, wow, what a treat! And mirrors too, vanity,
opening the door to narcissism. The identity floats free in the
transformational woods and then back in society, social control and social
pressures reel you back in, the center gets obscured, superficial concerns are
transposed for those which are genuine.
Sand Lake, 5 miles
It was cold but mostly clear this morning and after coffee
we walked quickly down to the resupply, a gas station with a store at White
Pass. The weather remained quite cold and blustery. Lots of thru hikers had
holed up at the motel, multiple bunking. We met Drive Through, Oasis,
Scratches, and Irish and Flop again and a young man Jothi who had put in at
Crater Lake and his feet were tore up bad with blisters and cuts. He was off
the trail for a week at least, very nice guy. We did laundry, made calls, ate
junk food, mailed packages etc and were gone by 2:30, around 5 hours there and
then a few miles and change up to here at Sandy Lake.
Many horses, trail torn up, some horsemen pretty juiced on
beer, a bunch came and drove the horses right into the lake in front of us,
fouling the water with urine and feces, some llama packers came through too. I
guess horse and llama people don’t get along, go figure. So many different
users have trouble reckoning each other on the scale and scope of things. Lots
more grey jays, very bold for little birds, they fly right next to you
practically. Drive Through said one ate out of his hand. Tonight looks to be
cold again, no Rainier since Mt. Adams viewpoint camp 3 days ago.
9/1 Fish Lake, 12 miles
I woke and was up in the dark, started a fire, made coffee,
packed, talked etc and we were out of camp by 7:30 whereupon we met Hops (Phil
Yoder) coming up the trail and we hiked with him for 3 or so hours with a
wide-ranging discussion, much about our Mennonite ancestry. His people live in
Ohio. He lives south of Eugene, simply, built his house with timber from his
land; his family came and helped out. He is not a practicing Mennonite and in
many ways is similar to me, spawn of the Reformation, Swiss/ German ancestry,
dealing with modern, secular Pandora’s Boxes while looking back on the
traditional, agrarian past. We talked about evolution, time, all sorts of stuff
and the miles passed quickly and at a break, Nimble Will Nomad showed up, 70
some years old and he told us how he got hit by a falling rock in the howling
storm of a few days ago in Goat Rocks and how the stone knocked him down a 60
degree slope of scree and rubble from which he barely escaped. He was camped
with Overdose right near us that night but we didn’t meet. I told Will of some
of my dumpster escapades in White River Junction and how I got my rain suit
free from EMS after getting the old suit out of the dumpster and he anointed me
with his hiking poles as nobility, he was impressed with my gleaning. We had a
good talk about beat up penny collections and key collections and then we all
went our separate ways, a nice morning on the trail, nice folks, food for
thought, friendship.
I liked talking with Hops about evolutionary psychology and
science etc, he is somebody who could get right on my wavelength, fun, fun, fun
and then Kim and I put in a few more miles to Fish Lake here to make our 12
miles by 1:00 PM. We enjoyed the sun and open meadows and warmish breeze to dry
out, play house and relax in the warm glow of our forgotten friend, the sun. WA
has been wet, cold, windy with the promise of more of the same, but for now,
the lake portends a million sparkles of flickering light, the grass bows and
bends, the water laps the shore and life is good. Nothing enters our day except
the simple pleasures and pastimes of the hiker, to let time trickle past on the
wind, dance on the sparkling lake, float on the puffy clouds above, hide in the
shadows of an old tree trunk, revealed in the quiet mystery of nature.
Nice tent spot by the lake, not too cold now, maybe comfy
tonight.
9/2 Dewey Lake, 11.7 miles
We have a smashing view of the glaciated top of Mt. Rainier
over the horizon beyond our lake. Had a great fire this morn back at Fish Lake.
I set the fire last evening and Kim got up at 3:30 AM and lit it, enjoying a
warm, starlit early experience with The Brothers Karamazov. We enjoyed our
first look at Rainier in 5 days; we are within 12 miles of it now, as close as
we’ll get. Kim has planned out the rest of this leg and the final leg as well
and we talked about how we’ll keep our weight off now that we are slender. The
lake was just beautiful and tranquil here today, everything looked perfect, the
trees, the waves, the sand, the ripples, the warm sun, just the beauty of
nature, placid, quiet, silent, hard to put in words. The appreciation grows as
you stay out longer; it deepens.
We had a good morning discussion, different types of hikers
as analogous to ecological types in evolution. What is a cult? We opened up all
the crossover meaning with cult and club, the social meanings and significances
of groups. Anything can get cultish. All the categories are on a spectrum of
social groupings, clan, tribe, chiefdom, secret societies, age set,
professional guilds etc.
9/3 Dewey Lake
It was a great sunrise on Rainier with reflections on the
lake. Kim had her poetry come to her and she read some by Emerson. I noted he
was an Agrarian and started to remember stuff about agrarian philosophy from my
last history class, about Thomas Jefferson, that values grow out of living
simply and in harmony with nature and the land, through producing you own goods
you create the context of a wholesome lifestyle and values system. Mennonites
are well known agrarians. I made an analogy of this sort of milieu concept,
that by immersion in the agrarian lifestyle you are effected by it, similar to
the deepening of appreciation of nature through simple living and time
immersion in the trail and how this is further similar to current political
argument over stuff like family values, which is a descendent of agrarianism, a
red state thing, rural, while modern secular life seems godless and value-less,
gay marriage issues etc and Kim then got stuck on finding an exception to
sexual orientation being a problem in a small town and started to press
disputation of my general idea here and we had a fight. I thought she wasn’t
hearing me. She thought she had to agree with everything I said. What I was
actually driving at was that the trail produces a mind set similar to what
conservatives advocate as family values and small town simplicity values. We
had a big discussion on politics yesterday and we differ on how we see the
whole thing. Kim doesn’t want to classify people based on party affiliation.
She doesn’t want to paint everybody with broad, categorical strokes. I am more
in the trenches ready to argue policy issues and rationales; I’ve taken sides.
This morning I had wanted a creative exercise of connecting the dots of the
concept, expanding, improvising and I felt my whole notion got disputed from
the get go, so it blew up.
We’ve had the same pattern of this fight over and over again.
It’s either me or her disputing the other’s insight and idea and then it blows
up because the originator doesn’t feel heard. The fight gets to be about
feeling heard and not about any content relating to the original idea. So we
got the idea of a Quaker Moment, that the other would just listen and not
derail the creative impulse from our respective home channels. I should have
called a Quaker Moment. What happens with me is I get a flash of insight, a
revealing of deeper patterns and I want to share this epiphany and what happens
is that I have to encounter disputations just to be able to lay out my idea. I
can’t say everything at once and I get cut off from being able to share the
whole thought. And I do the same to Kim;
we both do it.
Milieu therapy or immersion therapy is not a new idea.
People are plastic and when you hem them in and indoctrinate certain values, it
works to a certain extent. It’s enculturation; it is active soft ware
replacement. Yet to actively manipulate a milieu concept consciously risks
garbage in/ garbage out; you can get a cult, something not agile or nimble,
inflexible, not adaptive to change. Modern life asks for flexibility and
openness to change. The agrarian stuff pulls back from that, as it is the
solid, staid, simplicity that is the milieu from which simple, homespun values
have grown.
It is very interesting to me that on one hand I find the
simple lifestyle to be really great; I can clearly feel the effects in my
psyche yet at the same time I value being able to juggle complexity and the
dissonant issues presented by modern life. At the same time I am sympathetic to
agrarian values, what the Republicans have co-opted as “family values” and yet
I refuse to be limited by that alone.
In our plural society where so much change has happened
naturally as the result of technology, transportation, civil rights laws,
economic policies, of advancement in many areas, people struggle over who gets
to write the official line. The official line is supposed to be the cultural
standard but in our society there is so much diversity of opinion that there
really can’t be just one standard line alone; that won’t work as all those who
disagree are then disenfranchised. This writing of the official line is a power
struggle of ideas, of relative truths, of relative morals. Yet if freedom is a
major ideal, how can we ever be free if partisans are writing a partial line
and seeking to control how others think and behave? Is it even a real choice,
between purely biased party lines?
The struggle is over deep stuff, control of minds and
behaviors. If you deviate from the putative mainstream, if you are secular, gay
etc in contrast to a red state homeboy, then the judgment has been made. How do
we pull back from that judgment and allow people to live and to be free, to
think and act as they will? It harms no one that people are gay or don’t
believe in god, it’s just a refusal to tolerate dissonant views that makes the
trouble. People who are gay or atheist go about their daily business much the
same as anybody else, work, chores, eat and this causes no harm to anybody
else. The harm really comes when you try to yoke somebody to mandatory controls
to which they disagree.
If Hell is the consequence for choosers of modern thought,
so what? That’s God’s business, not the business of men. In my opinion the
world is not black and white, with us or against us and others have to be
allowed to be free and to be able to choose their own path. Freedom seems to be
the prize; it is won by fighting for control to get to write the official
cultural line. This was the American Revolution and yet ironically freedom then
is reserved only for those in power. In a way, freedom just means the winners
get to say how things are.
The stuff I am talking about here is right down in there
with what the whole world is fighting about; it’s the same thing, a power
struggle to control the official line. All those outside respective lines are
heretics or deluded. This is a larger version of Kim’s and my patterned fight.
A paradox is reached though, the god paradox, how can one god be absolutely
true and then all people who believe in another god be heretically false? That
is just too absurd. There has to be a point where diversity of opinion is
allowed to exist; the notion of these opinions as absolutely true has to be
adjusted, because all opinions can’t be absolutely true. Truth is a problem as
it is inflexible and life demands flexibility.
Perhaps what I am illustrating here is that the benefits of
simple living can be had without a particular milieu of certain gods,
structures etc. If on the trail, simple living results in basically good values
and respectful behavior among people, then it is the simple milieu itself and
not the content of it that matters.
We met a real nice older (63) thru hiker, Damp Dan from
Boston. His base weight was 13.5 pounds with a total of not over 25 pounds. He
uses 2 pounds of food per day and carries 2 pounds of water. He cooks with
Esbit solid fuel tabs. He pours boiling water into a 2 quart Zip Loc freezer
bag, onto his dry dinner mix to hydrate and then covers the Zip Loc bag with an
insulator from Antigravity Gear. He recommended a video on hiking light by
Lynne Weldon. We liked Damp Dan a lot; his face showed that, like Let It Be, he
had become it. He was transformed.
Basin Lake, 14.5 miles
Kim and Damp Dan compared regional phrases and accents. Kim
saw a bear. We saw a herd of 25 mountain goats. After Chinook Pass we started
to gain elevation and got some towering views of Adams and Rainier with really
steep, clefted valleys and rock outcroppings.
We met a 26 year old manager from the Fred Meyer store in
Renton and had a great chat for 5 miles or so. It was a chance for me to ask a
lot of questions about the retail world.
We had a nice, respectful exchange between conservative and liberal
viewpoints.
We got to Basin Lake and it was windy and cold. It was a
long mile downhill off the trail to get here. We set up in a windbreak of
cedars at the far end of the lake and made a very tasty dinner of Costco
instant mashed potatoes and garlic olive oil, stuffing and Knorr chicken gravy
from Mom. Now it is tent time, dreading being cold all night, but I put
windbreaks of logs around the tent and hopefully we’ll be OK. I set a fire for
the morning.
Basin Lake, morning
A nice, crisp sunrise and pre-dawn with the winter sky out,
Pleiades, Orion. Bull elk are calling, bugling and whistling all around the
basin. The fire provides warmth and as sense of security after a cold and windy
night. We’ve been cold challenged for a while now with less than adequate gear.
We probably have a chronic hypothermia going, a constant shell/core effect,
with just enough movement and calories to survive.
The sense of wildness has increased here even though we are
40 or 50 miles from Tacoma and Seattle. There seems to be a fairly full
compliment of wildlife, minus wolves and grizzlies. With the top predators
gone, the ecology is fundamentally out of balance in terms of prey animals, out
of balance from the top down. But for us city folk, domestic folk, it still
feels more on the edge than usual. The North Cascades are in view from up on
the ridge and there, at the Snoqualmie escarpment is the boundary of actual
wild lands, with potential grizzly and wolf. You can call it wild when the food
chain could possibly include you for dinner.
And speaking of dog eat dog, the Fred Meyer Kid was making
50 g by age 19 with no high school diploma, as a butcher. During our
conversation he mentioned, vis-Ã -vis prices, stocking and inventory, that he
had to be responsible to the stockholders profit potentials, to keep Fred Meyer
as a top economic player, meanwhile he admitted that the grunt jobs sucked and
were unrewarding and that the dissatisfied grunts needed to be like him, pull
themselves up by their bootstraps and plan for the future, rise out of the pack
of worker bees and become a King Bee. My opinion: the whole system is
predicated on parasitizing the grunts at the bottom, that’s how the rich get
richer, by making it so the workers can’t make a living wage. The Fred Meyer
Kid had plenty to say about Wal-Mart and how poorly they pay their “associates”
and that their managers make twice as much as him, implying that Wal-Mart was
somehow more immoral than the Fred Myer team But in the end they are both cut
out of the same cloth, Wal-Mart just wears its exploitation right out front
while others hide it. It’s the same Third World rip-off type of production,
fueled in part by our unquestioning desire for low prices and consumer culture.
Government Meadows, 13.5
We had a nice walk through the woods, met an off-duty WA
Fish and Game guy hunting, with a special bird dog imported from Germany, and
were able to ask about animals: grizzly and wolf, he said there are breeding
populations only above Stevens Pass. In western WA there is only one pair of
wolves with pups, near Leavenworth. He told us about elk behavior, they are the
best eating, like cattle, when they are putting on and not losing weight. Bulls
don’t eat much during the rut. So you would not then go for a bull during the
rut if you wanted the best eating; you’d be going for the trophy. The bugling
bulls are challenging each other; the big males sequester off a small herd and
defend them etc.
Gov’t Meadows has a Forest Service volunteer couple doing
trail work, the guy gave us apples; we had a nice chat. We covered funny
mispronounced words we had had, like misled, awry, buttered roll, Appomattox,
melancholy etc. The woman said there are mice in the cabin, drove her crazy,
scurrying across her sleeping bag. It was about the only serviceable cabin on
the trail we saw. We are in the meadow and the horses and mules came over to
check us out. Elk are out and about as well and hunters are out scouting. It
will be cold again tonight. We add other good ones, besides Brown Recluse and
Cashew Delight, to our descriptive vocabulary, Mocha Crème, Almond Chunk. Bowel
movements become a lot more public and normal to talk about when for months you
don’t go hide in a bathroom to deal with it.
9/5 anonymous clear cut near Windy Pass
Kim wants to make a note to pack more food for the ends of
our trips when we have full-blown hiker’s appetite. As with other language, Kim
considers terms carefully and had a nice breakdown of the difference between
hunger and appetite. Being hungry and having an appetite are not exactly the
same thing. Basically, appetite has no limit, you can keep eating after your
needs have been met. You give people extra food and they will eat it, above and
beyond what is necessary.
We stopped to dry out the tent from condensation, frost and
dew. Met 3 hunters who have been very pleasant, changed my opinion of them as
toothless drunks. A 12 year old boy with a hunting tag shot and killed a woman
this year in WA; she had on a blue parka. That gives you a little pause, and
you hear stuff like that nationwide every year. There can’t be all these
accidental killings without there being some problem. We met Ice Bag, a really
nice fellow, had a fun conversation. He said don’t get gators, not worth it,
just deal with pine needles and dirt in your shoe. We asked him who the hottest
thru hiker was and he described his pick in detail. We all munched out big on
huckleberries, a half hour to 45 minutes of pure munching, blue teeth, stained
fingers, now at:
Blowout Mtn. Pond, 12.7 miles
We’re on a bench below the ridge. Going through the clear
cuts was not so bad; the scenery is still tremendous, a massive moody day with
grey clouds and somber skylines, wind, cold. It’s cold all the time! I am getting
used to being constantly cold. You adjust I guess. In the day we have to move
as we have cut our clothes down to save weight. In the night we get in the
tent, sometimes with all our clothes on.
The rain has held off for us, allowing a dinner of massive
proportions of TVP, miso soup and mashed potatoes soaked with Frank’s Red Hot
Sauce, not that tasty but definitely filling. We’ve got a nice fire, a nice
spot here on private, tribal land, a private site about ¾ of a mile off the
trail. As soon as you get off public land in any kind of wilderness, the
motorcycles and ATVs are there.
I thought about how all change is gradual, a bit at a time,
a drop in the bucket and then it accretes over 100s of years to add up to, for
example: civil rights, freedoms, liberty etc. Everyone wants to make a big
splash in life, make a big difference, but for most everyone it will be on a
drop in the bucket scale anyhow, so why sweat it if you are not changing the
world all by yourself!? That’s like the message in Ecclesiastes, all that
exterior stuff is chasing the wind, be content with who you are as all you
really have is Now.
9/6 clear cuts
Some passing thoughts: Profits for shareholders should be
capped at a certain amount. The rest should go back to the workers to be able
to make a living wage. A worker owned company would presumably do better at
distributing profits.
Criticizing clear cuts is a NIMBY type of put down. If your
lifestyle in any way depends on resource extraction, which it must, and you are
a US citizen, shit, you are a top-level consumer of the world. You are life a wolf, and even if you are a
poor, environmentalist wolf, you’re still a wolf compared to rural Third World
people and their level of consumption.
Nirvana, bliss equals being perfectly in the moment. Perfect
means stopped, finished, so to be altogether at once in the moment, in the Now,
is to let it all come to you, no comparing with the past or future. In a way
then, the notion of nirvana is to become unconscious, to be rid of the messy conscious
mind, nirvana is to try not be the conscious beings we are. It is the shepherd
letting loose of troublesome sheep. In this trail inspired metaphor from the
AT, the successful shepherd manages and brings home all the sheep, however
unruly some of them may be, i.e. you don’t toss out the baby with the
bathwater, you don’t excise the ego, reason and the intellect, as they are part
of the flock that you have been ordained to manage.
Lizard Lake, 17 miles, 10.5 hours hiking
We met Loon, talked for a long time; had a few huckleberry
breaks, got turned around in the power line cuts and logging roads, took and
extra hour to find the lake, a nasty lake, trash, swampy, dirty, bullet holes
everywhere, TP litter, but we got in, ate and now down for the count.
9/7 Lodge Lake, 18.5 miles
Another long day, an escape from Lizard Lake, bad energy
around there, many users with low ethics and lack of respect. We did good and
covered our miles, ate our food and went crazy thinking of egg salad
sandwiches, pizza etc. We are HUNGRY!!!!!
As we approach Snoqualmie Pass you can hear the roar of I-90
from many miles away, the droning of civilization, the hum of 1000s of vehicles
taking 1000s of people per minute to 1000s of unknown destinations, all using
tons of oil and gas. What would Americans do without oil and gasoline to go on
all these trips? It seems crazy to see so many people on the move; don’t they
have anything to do closer to home? What a thing, to see and hear such a beast
of technology after months in the quiet woods. The sox and foot smell are
getting really, really bad; food is almost gone, ready to get the eggs
tomorrow.
9/8 Snoqualmie Pass/
Summit Inn, 2 miles
Today was Kim’s Xmas, she was up early, at dawn, packed,
raring and ready to go and we were down here by 8:30 AM, checked in by 9 and
have spent the day eating, getting clean and enjoying the pleasures of
civilization. Meanwhile trees stand silently on the surrounding hills and the
moon shines brightly above, stars peek and twinkle, reminding of the world from
which we have come. Nature waits for us, to make our final leg.
The roar of the automobile drones on outside as a sort of
baffling paradox, here we criticize it, demean it, resent it, yet are dependent
on it to bring all the luxuries. All the electric and gas and whatnot that
fuels the big consumption that allows us to lay around and eat all day and
watch mindless shows on TV, heating and cooling ourselves, a sauna, ice
machine, laundry, elk antler chandelier. You want it all but it comes at such a
cost to the world; it’s so stilted in its inequality, in its effect for so few.
And shit, I’m not even rich yet I partake in this grand consumption as well. I
feel like it is somehow wrong to participate; it makes me feel guilty knowing
the level of waste, the level of stilted distribution of modern benefits among
people worldwide. Shall I flog myself more? What will flogging do for the
modern Greenland Norse, determined to ride the gasoline machine to the bitter
end?
My choice would be voluntary poverty, even poorer than I am
now, go back to the stone age, where I could spend all my time procuring food
and shelter and have no time to burn on frivolous activities like writing this
journal. If I were to disengage from the machine, then I would have none of the
ubiquitous conveniences that have arisen to save time and effort and to boot I
would be an individual devoid of tribe or band, with no working knowledge of
hunting, agriculture, herding. In real ways I have to ride the wave I am on;
this is what I was born into.
I reflect: there won’t be any food drops and resupplies for
long distance hikers if the machine chokes up, our current survival style is
dependent on oil.
9/9 Gravel Lake, 7 miles
We had a grand time on our zero day, with all sorts of food,
internet, restaurant, stores, food, TV, shower, bed. We scored well at the
hiker boxes and ate that bounty tonight, 2 Indian spicy dishes with a tuna
packet in each.
The thru hikers are not a comradely bunch, kind of loners,
not terribly friendly, not a sense of community here as on the AT. The PCT is
more lone wolf, every dog for himself scene. We left Snoqualmie at 11:00 AM
after sending a box to ourselves back in CA and we went straight uphill into
the granite country of the Snoqualmie batholith, very similar to the Sierra
Nevada, heavily glaciated, steep, scenic, a certain feel of the tan, granite
stone flecked with black, the crushed stone sand. Things are good, nice camp,
great view, good dinner, killed Kim in Yahtzee. The sky is dramatic and moody
with big cumulus clouds and we feel good heading into our final section.
9/10 Spectacle Lake
viewpoint, 8.2 miles
Woke up to a heavy dew and frost, pretty cold down in our
little bowl. The cold air from the snowy reaches above drifted down in the
night and settled on us. The rain fly was drenched inside and out, the whole
thing wet, frozen, muddy, a mess to deal with. We packed up and as we were
ready to leave Kim put her pack on and messed up her back pretty good, very
painful across the middle of her back. So we moved up into the sun (back at
Gravel Lake) and sat for an hour, read, dried things out and she felt better
after 4 ibuprofen and we hiked up and around a huge cirque/ bowl, ridgeline
with towering views of Rainier, Glacier Peak and Mt. Adams all at the same
time. The granite is fabulous; it exudes a feeling all its own. The glacial
features are stark and rugged. The glaciers have shrunken substantially from
the sizes shown on the maps, published only 6 or 7 years ago.
The mosquitoes made a resurgence. Each area has a different
species or two and they behave differently, so while these skeets were thick,
they were skittish and didn’t bite too quickly but they were thick enough to
drive us into the tent for an hour before dinner, which was a whopping 1 pound
of angle hair spaghetti with garlic olive oil, 2 tomato sauce packets and
parmesan cheese and chocolates for dessert, now in the tent again for another
night, reading, Yahtzee, looking at maps.
9/11 Spectacle Lake, 4.5 miles
Kim finished The Brothers Karamazov today and cried it was
so beautiful she said. I finished The Legend of Bagger Vance as well, a great
little book, a fantastic read. We had a day hike down to Glacier Lake from last
night’s camp right off and enjoyed the early shadows and views and low angle
sun on the rocks and water. Then a short enough hike down here where we swam,
washed sox and stuff and read contentedly in the still quietness of our own
giant, glaciated land. Another stuffed dinner with chocolate for dessert and
the sun slowly slips away. One bold, food habituated chipmunk chewed one of
Kim’s bags and was relentless in spite of me throwing plenty of rocks and
sticks at it. Now as twilight comes, it is gone in a primeval fear of the
night, owls, snakes, predators, have sent the little SOB back home.
There are lots of small Alaska cedars but very few big ones.
It was a very nice day all in all; quiet, still; yet surrounded by the drama of
vast glacial carving. Biology now fills in the gaps as the remnants of the last
glaciers melt away, habitats shift, pikas become marginal; that’s the way the
world turns, once in your favor, now not.
9/12 alpine parkland, 11.4 miles
We started the day with a retrospective of the summer, how
the trip began, got planned, decided on etc, some of it was a little testy as
our versions did not exactly match up, but we did OK. Everybody sees things
their own way and thus reality is plastic, yet inside, reality appears to
conform only to one’s thoughts about it. This little paradox brings trouble
enough to humanity. We met Moonpie and had a nice chat with her; she said she’d
send TYVEK. (And I see later that by
signing her web page, my address is right there on the internet; what I thought
was private communication was actually public.) Over the years hikers promise
to write, send this or that but the compliance rate per promise is about 1% or
less. We also met some short section hikers from Seattle, a chef, with a dog
and dog whole foods and a doggy poo poo bag! How’s this for an ethic: The whole
food doo doo was OK to leave in the woods but processed food poo was packed
out.
After lunch we decided to pull a big hill and we did that,
steep, straight up for 5 miles, all the while getting better views of the
backside of Mt. Lemah, very nice, mighty fine. The clouds really set things
off. We got up to an intimate tarn, had dinner, with Mom’s white sauce
(salvaged from 5 years in the cabinet) with baby clams and Idaho baby red
potatoes, Kim had tuna and tomato soup, salty. It’s windy now and the clouds
are ominous and threatening, a step or two above moody, but I expect not much
more than blowing and posturing from this storm.
9/13
A good frost last night, clear, moonlit glaciers and jagged
rocks. The river and roar of the falls echoes below the glaciers and cirques,
through the whole long valley down to Waptus Lake, an echo of the former power
of ice 18,000 – 25,000 years ago at the glacial maxima. Glaciers provide a
vocabulary for metaphors, the notion of stripping away surface layers, carving
out, the heart carved out.
Which leads me to contemplate simplicity again, inner quiet,
letting the game come to you, serendipity, relating to Bagger Vance and finding
one’s “authentic swing”, the notion that it is already there (7), a self deeper
inside, an authentic self, out of the field of all people. There aint no one way to be human, each self
has its own flavor.
Kim’s thought: memories are like constellations around an
event, eyewitness accounts are the same. The notion of some objective reality
doesn’t seem to hold in the land of culture and non-quantifiable perception.
The best we can do is notice how things work; try to
discriminate the hardware from the software. So, in all seriousness, life is
play, a game, of your choosing, once you realize you are the chooser. Life is a
stage, all perception, memory, intellectual architecture, structural analysis,
self absorption, it’s all relative to the central actor. Central actors are
suns in their own universes, they find what they’re looking for, as it is they
who make the stages and create the rules for the game, nature/nurture, it
doesn’t matter, rules are rules. All this does is show the power of culture
combined with our conscious minds, to be able to create illusions which we can
become trapped by, like a sticky web. The answers are not more webs but to see
inside to who is making them and then take over the controls, become the
captain, steer the ship. One may drift along, play into the grid of the
personal/ culture-made web, that is what Zen might call a trap, only in the
sense that it is a level removed from the maker.
The metaphors we use to describe all this channel the
understandings, so you get classical, modern, eastern philosophy, whatever; it
seems like a house of mirrors sometimes.
I see my shadow on the trees and rocks in front of the
glaciers and cirque. I was here; now I’m gone, the wind, a moment, now a
memory, now gone and then forgotten, as countless thoughts and feelings of
people have vanished without a trace over the long millennia. What marvelous
inner architecture blown to the four winds! So many people come and gone
without a trace! What difference do all those big splashes and success stories
really make? Nothing really, other than to scratch one’s own itches, to pass
the time in ways congruent with your own predilections.
Waptus Lake, 10.1 miles
We walked down into a new valley, a very popular section,
many from Seattle out for the weekend to enjoy the good weather. This is a high
use section. The lake is great, big, deep and not too cold. We met Patrick who
gave us carrots. The trees are bigger down in the bottomlands. Another day
passes as we near the end of the trip, bittersweet. I guess tranquil best
describes what you arrive at after months in the woods, a trance, transported
to a peaceful place of relaxation and inner calm, even though you may work hard
physically, all is in balance, mind, body and spirit, as Kim noted a long while
back, many steps back into the past.
9/14 Waptus Lake
Nature is clear, intentionless. The world of man is full of
symbols, status, hierarchy, intention, complexity. It’s not easy to find calm
in the world of man whereas in nature, it may be windy, cold, icy, wet, hot,
whatever, but the forces are clear and straightforward. A long distance
transformational hike has a lot in common with a meditation retreat. You
extract yourself from the distracting milieu of modern life and enter one
filled with straightforward simplicity.
A silent hillside of trees by a lake, still, quiet, showing
its history, tectonics, glaciation, vast sweeps of time, a weasel runs by, fish
jump, fog shrouds the lake surface; these things are self-evident, independent
truths, independent of the twists and turns of man’s interpretation, such a
messy ball of wax that is, and thus, the possible transformation here is merely
of stripping away that wax (8) and finding a quiet peace uncomplicated by
opinion, stances and points of view. It is just you and nature; allow it to
seep in, to sink in. It refreshes the soul to have all the chatter quieted and
to witness a vast and noble peace, dynamic as it is, to witness nothing less
than the complete marvel and mystery of nature; of life, time and space, of a
world that carries on entirely independent of the world of man.
9/14 Cathedral Pass, 8.9 miles
A leisurely day along to Deep Lake where we had a long chat
with John Morrow, a Forest Service backcountry ranger, nice guy, found out
about the Alaska cedars, they are smaller here because of the soil type, not as
many nutrients. We then climbed up to the pass here for a smashing view of the
surrounding mountains, Mt. Daniel, Cathedral Peak, Mt. Stewart and Glacier Peak
through the haze of a fire. The water runs off the glaciers and snow pack and
echoes down another canyon, in and among a large series of falls, maybe 1500’
of falls, into the Cle Elum river drainage and then the Columbia.
Had a great dinner of mandarin orange glazed salmon steak,
teriyaki noodles, mashed potatoes, stuffing and garlic oil capped with a
chocolate bar and red licorice. We have had good food. We bought good
ingredients; we’ve got protein, and Kim is very good with making a tasty dinner
in any context. Yet we know that just about anything will taste smashing when
you could eat a horse, just have it be salty, sweet or have some fat in it and
you are off to the races.
9/15 Cathedral Pass
Three point buck season starts today and at midnight last
night some inebriated hunters on horse back came through yelling, cursing and
boasting. That will let the elk know who’s in town eh?
The 1500’ cascading waterfalls from the tarn on Mt. Daniel
is just a tremendous sight. The valley fills with the sounds of this creek. The
sun trickles over for another day. The moon slips into the past. The cedars
stir and whisper. We prepare to move on from here.
9/15 Marmot Lake, 12.7 miles
Kim really wanted to come here, to a place off the trail and
so here we are. We were delighted to have a good size glacial lake all to
ourselves, we bathed, made coffee, strolled the shore and then lo and behold a
couple of people show up and camp right next to us when there is a whole lake
to find a place at. “When did you get here?” asked the guy, and a whole bevy of
other dumb, bozo questions: “where are you coming from?”, “where are you
going?”, “how long have you been out?”, “where did you start?”, “where are you
from?” This is the kind of stuff you get close to the trailhead, weekenders,
low people on the totem pole, but what do I expect so close to Seattle? The
bozo factor just goes way up closer to your big urban areas. I guess in order
to be polite one must gracefully entertain the level brought to you and then
interject depending on how much you feel like going against their grain.
Meeting some weekenders feels like coming out of a theology retreat and into 3rd
grade.
Kim also wanted to go to No Name Lake and Jade Lake, which
we did, at 3:30 PM, up and back in 2 ½ hours, a lot of bushwhacking and
cross-country, unofficial trails, with some bouldering, scree slopes, all
doable. Glacier Peak was out and Jade Lake was actually jade colored, a mix of
glacial milk and green color with a backdrop of a small glacier and a few
jagged peaks and patches of snow. It was dramatic and special, a little icing
on the cake of our trip, to day-hike up and see some unique sights.
9/16 Glacier Lake meadow, 11.4 miles
Well, we have nearly spanned the breadth of the active
Cascade volcanoes, now with Glacier Peak in sight and having taken the train
past Lassen and Shasta, we walked past all the rest in between. We survived the
initiation of mosquito Hell and tasted the infernal rain, now we are horses to
the barn, the end in sight, shoot, only 14 miles to go!
We came down out of Marmot Lake to the special cirque Kim
liked where the meadow was filled with huckleberries. We took off our packs and
started to pick, Kim sharing a big cupful with me. Kim takes very good care of
me. Kim found an outfitter’s toaster, to go with the Counter Assault bear spray
we found up by Spectacle Lake. We met a hiker of note, Professor Party Tent, a
fun young man. A lot of these thru hikers have little personality to share,
they pass quickly, so you note the live wires, the ones who engage, who seem
happy and are not simply slogging away the miles.
It occurred to me that since many of the long distance
hikers approach the whole deal as an athletic event, as a potential athletic
achievement, then the moral purity angle gets centered on the gear and
equipment and the brand is the exterior display of that purity. All the while
many may have little idea of backcountry ethics, as evidenced by the large
amount of hiker trash we find, illegal fires, switchback cutting etc. You see
enough bad practice to suspect that not all thru hikers are wilderness
enthusiasts but more on it for a lark.
The ranger felt that 10, 15 years ago there was more of an
ethic of the commons but now he sees people becoming more and more selfish. We
met Squatch who does videos of hikers, walkpct.com, another one glomming onto
the trail as a source of meaning and vitality.
The trail is a unique enough, genuine enough experience that
some are going to be tempted to give their whole life to it. What it boils down
to in the end is that you have a population of outdoor enthusiasts and they go
at it in different ways for different purposes. Kim had an analogy to I-90, you
get on and go fast, and the vehicles that go fast are the long distance hiker
bodies, the secondary trails are slower and more relaxed and so on and so
forth, the use is slower the farther off the main trunk you are, and the bodies
are correspondingly less adapted to the high speeds of the I-90 of hiking. But
now as our end nears, all that stuff kind of takes a background to the essence
of what we have been finding, just a deeper appreciation of nature, a more
profound sense of peace and inner quiet.
I have lately noticed that I see a lot of wildlife, but just
the last bit of it scurrying under a rock or into the bushes. I’m seeing more
now out of the corner of my eye. Give me a few more months and I would be see
much more. The eyes need retraining from a carpentered, angular world.
Kim made a delicious combo of Mom’s teriyaki tuna steak,
craisins and stuffing with parmesan sprinkled on and it was outstanding, much
better than the instant mashed potato filler with chicken gravy and noodles,
the sweets are always a big hit after dinner and even though I stay away from
sweets in general, out here chocolate (thanks Mom) and licorice and M & Ms
are just soooo good!
There was an article about this trail section in Backpacker
magazine and now it is crawling with people. We’re hiking on a tourist
destination, so up the bozo quotient. It makes it commercial, a commodity,
something to consume, to apply that whole ethic to (skeets have made a come
back and driven me to the tent) the whole goal-oriented, driven, no time, too
busy stuff is being transposed onto hiking and this may be where you are
getting food stored in the tent, poor ethics, etc.
9/17 Glacier Lake glade
Food storage can get kind of sloppy, animals become food
habituated, people get holes chewed in their tents, packs or worse. I see a
general lack of adequate food protection. It is difficult to store food with no
appropriate hanging trees and not wanting to carry a 3 plus pound container. The
ethic has switched to a me-first, be as light as possible, athletic type of
focus. The dominant paradigm used to be centered more on wilderness and
conservation values, to respect the habitat, to have it be low impact on nature
and animals and not all about your own convenience and low pack weight. During
my life there has been a shift in food storage habits and this aspect of hiking
seems to currently be in flux, there is not a clear ideal to try and measure up
to. Do I try for the super light style and thereby skimp on food protection, or
do I plan to take the time and effort to seriously protect my food? What is the
right way?
The weather is supposed to turn soon. We are getting out at
a good time, when in the balance, all has been good. Kim just had a Quaker
Moment: don’t ask if there is a god,
but ask is there God, and then: don’t think God created the universe but God IS
creation. She is working on her inner pathways as I work on mine.
Yesterday when Squatch said he was a believer in Sasquatch,
Kim said “Fred doesn’t believe that and he doesn’t believe in God either.” I
was like wow, let’s reveal my scene to strangers! That’s right, Squatch.
Reflecting on that I’d say I don’t believe in consumer versions of God, the god
put up for public consumption but I can wrap around the idea of God AS
creation, then it all just is what it is, a huge system/ entity/ community, so
it’s just a matter of words then to describe All That Is. We came to that we
need to listen better to each other; perhaps all talk should be honored as a
potential Quaker Moment, to be heard and not asking for a response.
Two active and improvisational minds are like two musicians
who perhaps play different melodies at the same time. The trick is getting in
the right key, establishing a timing.
When bugs are attacking you, then there feels a right to
kill them in self-defense. Who sits around and lets bugs chew them up? Nobody,
you kill them, the gloves are off. Why is it different with people? If people
are attacking you why not fight back? Perhaps like bugs, the differences that
people have will not cease to exist and therefore they will remain grounds and
basis for attacks and counter-attacks and Quakers etc go for a change at the
heart level, not at the level of reason, like me, as it is unreasonable to
allow yourself to be attacked and to not defend. Does a rising above reason,
ego, the superficial, does that preclude any self-defense? How am I relating
agape type love for fellow men to self-defense here? Can you love at this level
and still dislike, kill even?
If you give up the end line then it can no longer be an
athletic event, no longer a standard measure commodity. Giving up the end line
makes you free of measurement and possibly open to interior levels of
subjective only transformation, confined to your home channel. Here’s a quote
from Marcus Aurelius: “In the life of man, his time is but a moment, his being
an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his
soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short all that is
body is as coursing waters, all that is the soul as dreams and vapor.”
Interesting the difference between a pagan and a
monotheistic sensibility, or a mind/body dualism sense. Here’s the end line
question: “are you going all the way?” The transformational hiker’s answer: Why
yes, but in contexts that can’t be measured objectively.
So how could you know me then, when my soul is a turbulent
eddy? How can I be understood and measured if I refuse the measurement device?
For me now, I see that it is the
wind; you have to occupy the same moments, to BE there as the goal and not try
to bring it back as a concrete achievement that is quantified. How can you
measure and quantify a transformational hiker? I don’t know, let the wind push
you some. Let serendipity happen by permitting the game to come to you, go with
an unexpected choice. Like a musician, play that song differently. Conjure it
from a basis in the moment, be prepared to play.
In the end, I like to think that the trail here represents a
special place, but all the types and situations you have in society, you also
find on the trail. You can run but you can’t hide from your own and other’s
humanity and its foibles and inherent characteristics.
9/17 Josephine Lake, 10.3 miles
A relaxed day, our last full day, kind of like a requiem
walk, silent, the end, one big pull up a long steep hill and then down to here.
We bathe in the lake, set up camp, get out the stove, pot and dishes, all the
mundane and routine things now standing out in their finality.
9/18 Josephine Lake
Kim has, here and in other places, packed out hefty amounts
of hiker trash and camp trash. It’s 5:00 AM. There’s a breeze. The moon is up.
Coffee water is on. We are ready to be the masters of two worlds. It will be 6
miles to Highway 2 and Stevens Pass. We’ll give plenty of time, to not hurry
out, to be able to savor our farewell day. Steve is probably still in bed but
soon to prepare to come and meet us, as we prepare now to make this rendezvous that
signals the end of the trip but not the end of the journey.
Regarding the athletic event theory of long distance hiking,
I like parts of that aspect, the discipline, the getting in shape, the losing
of weight, just at a lower level of intensity than pure athletics, that leaves
my door open for other things as well. As Kim said, athletics and use of the
body is a gate, a gate to spirituality. We are now attuned to a channel that is
almost hidden in the other world, the world of man, the chirps of the pika, the
sound of ravens wings flapping, waves gently lapping the shores of countless
lakes, oh the sounds. The smells of cedar and pine, endless wildflowers,
lupine, thick glades musty with the aromas of life and nature, all windows and
gates, pauses for reflection into whole other worlds, whole animals lives, the
whole life of a tree, the smell of a warm September afternoon, a bird flying
overhead, owls calls haunting the night, echoing waterfalls, glacial valleys,
the call of the wild, the elk bugling, barking and whistling.
We’re on a diving board ready to jump out of 1 world and
into another. This hiking is one of the highest quality things we do together.
Quality, that which has depth, substance yet has nothing material to show for
it. Many cannot understand why people would do something like this. Why endure
discomfort and inconvenience and not be working and planning for the future!?
But what have all lives been ever anyway but nothing to show, the wind.
Indians were connected
to nature, as our Cro-Magnon ancestors were as well. This is what we have lost.
That’s why people admire the Indian, or the hiker, but the world is just not
now set up to make this a way of life, every night in the pulse of nature. Too many Pandora’s Boxes have been opened to
go back to the Stone Age. The industrial freight train drags us all along,
regardless of whether we want to be on board or not. Just feeling like I can
see animals more, that I am at peace with a quiet woods, gives a moment’s
respite from the inescapable modern world.
We’re on the brink right now and the diving board of two
worlds will come into focus more clearly, the inevitability of having to jump and I want to jump, to see
my friends of so many years.
I take down the tent and realize it is the last time, this
space we inhabited for so long, shared so much inside and it grows larger, the
zipper seems more than real. I get choked up, the large potential of a deep
trip is now manifested in a tent to be folded up and put away in the closet.
The dynamic changes to the static, just like that. How do you like your blue
eyed boy now?
1A: Later we were able to say that this crossing was the
hardest and most dangerous one we did on the whole trip. We were never this
exposed again. This first big snow field crossing loomed in our minds as the
hardest one of all.
1: story of Professor Nelson,
comes in a dream, a wooden shape shifter, we meet an actual, real Professor
Nelson, we see faces in the patterns of nature, in wood, there the Professor
goes again…
Trail names are a fun aspect of
the long distance hiking scene, you can be renamed, have another brand for your
identity, lots of people go for a trail name, it is fun like being a kid again,
others refuse a trail name for various reasons.
2: Trail magic is easy with middle class, educated people,
who are in need, no nasty homeless people to try and serve; the hikers are an
easy population to serve, is this “feel good service?” The notion of “City
magic”, Kim cooked that up, bring the while idea to wherever you are and do
unexpected, uncalled for kind acts, no need to reserve it only for feel good
situations, a deeper service demands that one endure some unpleasantry.
3: soaking it in, the notion that you are transformed just
by being there, the structure and context alters you, you position yourself to
be open to nature and then nature does its thing and you are touched, all you
have to do is show up, meet the context half way
4: This brings up the issue of food protection, bear proof
containers, food in tents, hanging food, convenience, being tethered to your
pack etc. We have bear proof containers. Any school or organization teaches
major food protection but it seems most thru hikers follow none of it, for them
it is about convenience and weight primarily, they stuff their packs with food
mixed in with tent, sleeping bag, clothes. When food is loose and unprotected
you have issues of mice, bugs and other critters chewing through and coming at
tents and packs to get food. People at campgrounds have notoriously poor food
protection. What happens is that people create aggressive, dependent, food
habituated animals. Food storage practices seem to be following what our ranger
sees as a trend toward selfishness and less towards an ethic of conservation
and respect.
5: The bag is back at the manufacturer now being refilled.
6: Kim planned the whole trip, bought, packed and sent all
the food, as she did for the AT and the John Muir Trail. This is a lot of work,
a lot of detail to master and command. Many maps must be studied and
deciphered. Generally I do more work during the hike setting up camp, cooking,
cleaning up, as well as preparing gear beforehand and maintaining gear on the
way. Kim’s work is by far more complicated and demanding on a daily basis.
7: That an aspect of yourself is already there, is derived
from Plato and classical Greek philosophy, that you don’t discover it outside
yourself but as existing already as an unchanging, pre-existing, perfect Form.
This contrasts with stuff from the Age of Reason, Cartesian mind/ body dualism,
I think therefore I am, that the mind
generates the things you find, it is new and novel, you generate your own
authentic swing from scratch. The whole life is a stage and you are the actor,
the captain and ship metaphor, that is mind/ body dualism.
8: sincere, sin-without, cera- wax
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