Crater Lake

Several times I have heard people call my trip a pilgrimage, and once I was called a prophet. I don't agree with the last and find little in support of the first. Whenever I thought of a pilgrimage it had always involved travel to a holy site, or perhaps several, where one could see the preserved remains of some saint or stand where ecstacy had occurred.

 As I approached Crater Lake the trip took the feel of an approach to the sacred. I left Oregon Caves National Monument, where my friend Marie "Moose" was working, after staying there for some days to make my way to the lake. The route was not direct, taking me over trails and forest service roads, leading me first to high alpine meadows where in July the first of the sprin flowers pushed thru the snow. To the south, where the blue of the sky mixed with the blue of the land, the ragged cap of Shasta hung, present as moonrise.

 For days it haunted me as I walked. While I never got close enough to see the rock that lofted the ice skyward, I did not need to get closer to feel the power of such a mountain, solitary and monolithic. Three nights I would watch twilight keep the peak lit till last. Somewhere near Lake Hyatt I would see it last, as I followed the Pacific Crest Trail into a long tunnel of fir that emptied to a lodgepole forest in the midst of insect bloom. Forty miles of mosquitoes that made shadows thick as your own around your head that breathing seemed equal parts air and insect. Then snow, then a burned out landscape of ash and blackened stump, then the pumice desert, a last curtain of mosquitoes, and the final three thousand feet to the lake itself. 

I arrived at the perfect moment, when thunder threatened but never came and no wind blew that clouds drifted harmlessly over a five mile wide reflecting pool of the purest clarity. There was hardly a ripple on the surface that the lake was as pure as a blue hole. The water was so perfected as to make the sky seem the immitation. Looking eastward from the western rim, the rim opposite did not seem so much the completion of the caldera that made the lake, but an arch, placed on its side, thru which one might pass to a different world, or else fall forever into sky. Whether or not that would be better or worse than to be on this earth, it would for sure be a damn lot bluer.

For those who have not been there, it may be difficult to understand the intensity of color. The lake, being five miles wide and 1949 feet deep, has no streams to feed it. Snowmelt and rain are the only sources of water. And so no silt to muddy it up. This means water so pure a white disc can still be clearly seen forty two feet from the surface. It is so startlingly clear that blue is not only reflected from the sky, but refracted and magnified with incoming light that the lake becomes a vast eye many times bluer than anything over it. So blue that it is a color that seems alive, and to look at it feels an act of worship, like contemplating a mandala, or the Madonna and child, or the rose window of Chartres (itself blue, but good, hopping, glory, not blue like this!). It feels so satisfying to consider it that looking away afterwards leaves one feeling insufficient and hungry to look again. This is a place of greatness, and of healing, another place where the power of the world is felt. 

I climbed Mt. Garfield, an easy peak on the southwestern rim, and then kept going after the trail stopped, following the rim to a small knot of pines. Under them I made my camp. No people, no roads in sight, just I and the lake. My tent window faced the phantom ship, an eroded pinnacle island near the lake shore. The drop a few feet from the door was steep, but still the lake did not look so far away. There was much pumice around from the explosion that made the lake. I threw a stone as hard as I could. After more than five seconds it landed far short of the water. A drop of more than a thousand feet. Probably as far above the water as the lake was deep. 

I had the sensation of the two principle characters of the motorcycle diaries. Having traveled far and learned much they reach the lonesome peak of Machu Pichu, there to contemplate the lonely holdout in solitude. I have never been there, but the words they said I remember. "How is it possible that I can feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?"

While I have wished to have been born earlier, i am glad I did not come to this world any later. This is a world I am knowing. The knowledge isn't complete. The wind picked up as thunderclouds rolled it, stirring the lake. Hailstones came down. I howled, I roared, I yodeled, I whupped. And then I sat in silence. 

The word prophet comes from the ancient Greek prophetas, "one touched with divine madness."