Monday, June 13, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
East of the Mountains
This country looks best at the fringes of day. Mornings and evenings I'm slunk low in the sagebrush of some coulee - the word for it in the wheatlands. I would have said gorge. The landscape is more Utah than Washington. High stone pinnacles, flat bottomed coulees, circling hawks and tormented lizards. Rock bluffs slink off to the mountains, hiding their streams like relapsed addicts. I followed one till it exhausted and gave out its water, then promptly dropped its sides and I came onto the plains of Eastern Washington, as bewildered by the change as tho I had lately popped up from a hole.
There was around me a vast Nothing in one of its more desolate incarnations. I had been warned as much while still in the towns on the slopes of the Cascades, but realized then that my interpretation had been vastly more populated. Acre beyond acre of sage, raked earth, and sprouted wheat like a cloth on a tabletop, and so much sky overhead it could never be drunk but must swallow the world entire. From where I came out of the coulee, I could spot a grain silo eight miles distant. It held the horizon till I arrived and passed it and found it to be just that: a lone silo with no house or barn or shed to accompany. Tho, mercifully, an outhouse. And then again, the emptiness of wheat, earth, and sage.
It is a hard land. The soil so parched it must be irrigated 2 years before it can grow grain. Packed stiff against graves and not a tree to burn. None that got there by its own power, anyway.
There are towns - clustered around a silo even when they have a church - but they are minute, utilitarian, and infrequent. And in the space between there is often this: a house with no one to fill it, the windows in pieces, and outside, trees dying for water.
My shadow has woken before me, waiting quietly for the rest of me to rise so we can go on looking for wherever that sun keeps coming up from. Together we are just about the only things to walk across the plains. Everything else moving has wheels or wings or is the wind itself. Larks are great in number, singing so loud that most mornings I am woken sure that one has gotten into my tent. But no, it is the stone some meters distant he is singing over, telling the screeching killdeers to lay their eggs somewhere else. Predatory birds stalk the air: coopers and red-tailed hawks, burrowing and barred owls. Golden eagles. I watched a pair of male red-tails circle each other screaming for dominion of a shelf of sage and lupine. They wheeled and dove and cried, with no determined victor for the while I watched. And then the mystery of a pool of water in all this drought, and ducks, geese, and - strange to see 200 miles from the ocean - sandpipers, California gulls, whillets. How did they know that on the other side of those 10,000 foot crests and another hundred miles of desert there would be this?
This is not a wilderness, and marks of man abound. For starters, there is the wheat, whole square hectares of it coming up. Then the road. Then the lonely towers of the silos, and the rails where trains once carried people. Now that function is performed by the pickup truck, packed three to a cab.
Swinging across the fields, like Cervantes' giants, the pylons stride. Quixote would recognize this place, a new world Estremadura, where the land is a smoothed vellum that smells of dust and stale seeds and the inhabitants know there is more beyond the plains, but pretend that nothing could be better than to live where no feature can interrupt either sunrise or sunset. ("Not the middle of nowhere but the center of everything," brags the town of Hartline.)
The image of the elder knight in my head, I find it hard to think of anything else. I see the same mirages. I turn the electrical lines to gargantua and the combines to mirrored adversaries. A book I have never read but mean to. It must be time. Ah, but the la Manchan is unknown here. I ask the librarian of Davenport for a copy of Quixote, but there is not one in stock. ("Did he write fiction or non-fiction?" she asks.)
And then the sunset comes, and my shadow has gotten to my resting place before me, but I will outlast him. I still have my dinner to cook, which may be done at the same time as his shadow meal. But likely he will retire before, and I will be alone beneath the stars, boiling my rice on a fire of sagebrush. An owl may fly over.
There was around me a vast Nothing in one of its more desolate incarnations. I had been warned as much while still in the towns on the slopes of the Cascades, but realized then that my interpretation had been vastly more populated. Acre beyond acre of sage, raked earth, and sprouted wheat like a cloth on a tabletop, and so much sky overhead it could never be drunk but must swallow the world entire. From where I came out of the coulee, I could spot a grain silo eight miles distant. It held the horizon till I arrived and passed it and found it to be just that: a lone silo with no house or barn or shed to accompany. Tho, mercifully, an outhouse. And then again, the emptiness of wheat, earth, and sage.
It is a hard land. The soil so parched it must be irrigated 2 years before it can grow grain. Packed stiff against graves and not a tree to burn. None that got there by its own power, anyway.
There are towns - clustered around a silo even when they have a church - but they are minute, utilitarian, and infrequent. And in the space between there is often this: a house with no one to fill it, the windows in pieces, and outside, trees dying for water.
My shadow has woken before me, waiting quietly for the rest of me to rise so we can go on looking for wherever that sun keeps coming up from. Together we are just about the only things to walk across the plains. Everything else moving has wheels or wings or is the wind itself. Larks are great in number, singing so loud that most mornings I am woken sure that one has gotten into my tent. But no, it is the stone some meters distant he is singing over, telling the screeching killdeers to lay their eggs somewhere else. Predatory birds stalk the air: coopers and red-tailed hawks, burrowing and barred owls. Golden eagles. I watched a pair of male red-tails circle each other screaming for dominion of a shelf of sage and lupine. They wheeled and dove and cried, with no determined victor for the while I watched. And then the mystery of a pool of water in all this drought, and ducks, geese, and - strange to see 200 miles from the ocean - sandpipers, California gulls, whillets. How did they know that on the other side of those 10,000 foot crests and another hundred miles of desert there would be this?
This is not a wilderness, and marks of man abound. For starters, there is the wheat, whole square hectares of it coming up. Then the road. Then the lonely towers of the silos, and the rails where trains once carried people. Now that function is performed by the pickup truck, packed three to a cab.
Swinging across the fields, like Cervantes' giants, the pylons stride. Quixote would recognize this place, a new world Estremadura, where the land is a smoothed vellum that smells of dust and stale seeds and the inhabitants know there is more beyond the plains, but pretend that nothing could be better than to live where no feature can interrupt either sunrise or sunset. ("Not the middle of nowhere but the center of everything," brags the town of Hartline.)
The image of the elder knight in my head, I find it hard to think of anything else. I see the same mirages. I turn the electrical lines to gargantua and the combines to mirrored adversaries. A book I have never read but mean to. It must be time. Ah, but the la Manchan is unknown here. I ask the librarian of Davenport for a copy of Quixote, but there is not one in stock. ("Did he write fiction or non-fiction?" she asks.)
And then the sunset comes, and my shadow has gotten to my resting place before me, but I will outlast him. I still have my dinner to cook, which may be done at the same time as his shadow meal. But likely he will retire before, and I will be alone beneath the stars, boiling my rice on a fire of sagebrush. An owl may fly over.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Cascade Mountains, Part II
Snow fell the night of May the 2nd.
On April 29th, I had started east from the Skagit River Valley up highway 20. Though the road was closed did not matter. I had thermal tights. I had snowshoes.
It was elder bloom along the creeks as I began, till I came to where spring was younger and the old of winter crouched in the shade of cedars, where the Skagit River breaks into streams that flow from glaciers, and these I followed up into the snow. This was the 1st.
Along the way, my mind and body had been very separate. As I went thru the wash-outs of a worn-out and little used trail along Canyon Creek, I was thinking about glaciation, and how the whole of the North Cascades was once under ice. When I ran out of trail and began boulder hopping on Slate Creek, somewhere around 3,500 feet, I thought of how the Yahi natives of the Sierra had avoided detection by the government of California for decades by using creeks to travel. As the creek narrowed to a slot between two rising peaks, I began climbing the shale side, pitched at about the angle of a pint glass, the shale scattering under me like cherry pits.
Passing one hand above the other, gaining fingerholds by inches, musing on how long it must have taken the creek to wear thru the basalt of the peaks to get to this sedimentary stone, I gained about 70. Then, I came to a cedar that had pitched over the ledge, yet continued to grow prostrate, creeping along the slant, and I wondered if it might be a krumholtz, a form of growth trees assume in severe alpine environments where wind and ice keep them prone and tortured.
My arms were outstretched, clinging to the snarl of exposed roots. My feet pushed away the potato-size jut of shale that had kept me up and I felt it crumble from under me and shatter.
There is a famous Zen story, where a man dangling from a cliff sees a strawberry and eats it, having found a joy in the limitations of his predicament. I didn't look for any strawberry. I considered no joy. The enormity of where I was and what I had done finally caught up with me. There was no way down, and still another 40 feet to go, and no space to rest, or even take any sort of position that might relieve a single muscle.
I didn't curse. I didn't say any words. I just put my head into the roots of the cedar tree and screamed. I screamed like a burn victim denied morphine. I screamed like someone being disemboweled with table cutlery. I screamed till I tasted blood.
Then, I climbed up the cedar. A shard of root stuck me in the ribs and scraped me down to navel as I crawled up the rest of the ledge on my belly, moving my hands as deliberately as a seastar. Never hastening, but never so careless as to stop.
When I got at last to a place where I could fall no great distance, I didn't look back over what I had just escaped. I collapsed, my forehead to snow, not even bothering to stand up as I crawled to the bell of a hemlock tree and camped beneath the snow. I drank no water. I ate no food. Too tired to even stand. That was the 2nd.
With the dawn, I continued along the ridgetop, maybe some 4,400 feet up. I found a set of blackbear tracks and followed them, till they led me to where the creek rose up to its source. If it has a source, then there is a pass, I assured myself, and let the bear lead me there.
But I never did. I wandered the Okanogan National Forest till somewhere around Sky Pilot Pass, some 6,000 feet. The creek was frozen over. There were two meters of snow beneath me. I carried no map, but knew that even if it were a pass, it would bring me to the wrong side of the mountains. The compass confirmed it. I was heading NNW, further into the Pasayten Wilderness, rather than ESE, towards the remainder of Highway 20, Mazama, and Winthrop, where I would resupply. I had a day's worth of food left.
I realized it then, with a gentle apprehension. Lost. I was lost. I have never used the word seriously since I have never been uncertain enough of location. I have been on the Earth, and that is enough for me. But then there is the more final meeting. I was not confused. I was irretrievable. Solitude begins where the scavengers will scatter you before anyone knows you're gone.
Snow began to fall again.
This was the 3rd.
My legs were black and bruised. I could not move them without pain. My ribs were scored from rock and root. There was blood beneath each of my nails and slices on my palms from where I had gripped the shale. I had wanted then the mountain to feel the pain and frustration and make it bleed as it was making me. I had no idea I could be so adolescent to ignore what I knew to be a bad idea and to get myself so far as to be beyond knowing or care of others. I felt so ashamed.
Slowly, I let myself to my feet, brushed the snow from my pack, and set out in a direction that seemed promising. It led me back to where I had left prints earlier.
I made no words on the day of the 4th. I found a prospector's cabin and rested. By the 5th I was out of the Okanogan and back on the road that would lead me again to the valley where I had started. I had turned another year older, but was not sure if it was in fact the 5th. But it was, and I was now 27.
On the afternoon of that day, I came to the town of Newhalem, the last town west of the Cascades (or the first) and sat beneath a cherry tree, all in bloom, and watched the Skagit River flow out towards the Sound. A woman of the town offered me a cup of coffee. I thanked her and counted my blessings. They came down to this: I was drinking coffee beneath a cherry tree.
I have never been in a fight, yet I don't think I have ever been so soundly beaten.
On April 29th, I had started east from the Skagit River Valley up highway 20. Though the road was closed did not matter. I had thermal tights. I had snowshoes.
It was elder bloom along the creeks as I began, till I came to where spring was younger and the old of winter crouched in the shade of cedars, where the Skagit River breaks into streams that flow from glaciers, and these I followed up into the snow. This was the 1st.
Along the way, my mind and body had been very separate. As I went thru the wash-outs of a worn-out and little used trail along Canyon Creek, I was thinking about glaciation, and how the whole of the North Cascades was once under ice. When I ran out of trail and began boulder hopping on Slate Creek, somewhere around 3,500 feet, I thought of how the Yahi natives of the Sierra had avoided detection by the government of California for decades by using creeks to travel. As the creek narrowed to a slot between two rising peaks, I began climbing the shale side, pitched at about the angle of a pint glass, the shale scattering under me like cherry pits.
Passing one hand above the other, gaining fingerholds by inches, musing on how long it must have taken the creek to wear thru the basalt of the peaks to get to this sedimentary stone, I gained about 70. Then, I came to a cedar that had pitched over the ledge, yet continued to grow prostrate, creeping along the slant, and I wondered if it might be a krumholtz, a form of growth trees assume in severe alpine environments where wind and ice keep them prone and tortured.
My arms were outstretched, clinging to the snarl of exposed roots. My feet pushed away the potato-size jut of shale that had kept me up and I felt it crumble from under me and shatter.
There is a famous Zen story, where a man dangling from a cliff sees a strawberry and eats it, having found a joy in the limitations of his predicament. I didn't look for any strawberry. I considered no joy. The enormity of where I was and what I had done finally caught up with me. There was no way down, and still another 40 feet to go, and no space to rest, or even take any sort of position that might relieve a single muscle.
I didn't curse. I didn't say any words. I just put my head into the roots of the cedar tree and screamed. I screamed like a burn victim denied morphine. I screamed like someone being disemboweled with table cutlery. I screamed till I tasted blood.
Then, I climbed up the cedar. A shard of root stuck me in the ribs and scraped me down to navel as I crawled up the rest of the ledge on my belly, moving my hands as deliberately as a seastar. Never hastening, but never so careless as to stop.
When I got at last to a place where I could fall no great distance, I didn't look back over what I had just escaped. I collapsed, my forehead to snow, not even bothering to stand up as I crawled to the bell of a hemlock tree and camped beneath the snow. I drank no water. I ate no food. Too tired to even stand. That was the 2nd.
With the dawn, I continued along the ridgetop, maybe some 4,400 feet up. I found a set of blackbear tracks and followed them, till they led me to where the creek rose up to its source. If it has a source, then there is a pass, I assured myself, and let the bear lead me there.
But I never did. I wandered the Okanogan National Forest till somewhere around Sky Pilot Pass, some 6,000 feet. The creek was frozen over. There were two meters of snow beneath me. I carried no map, but knew that even if it were a pass, it would bring me to the wrong side of the mountains. The compass confirmed it. I was heading NNW, further into the Pasayten Wilderness, rather than ESE, towards the remainder of Highway 20, Mazama, and Winthrop, where I would resupply. I had a day's worth of food left.
I realized it then, with a gentle apprehension. Lost. I was lost. I have never used the word seriously since I have never been uncertain enough of location. I have been on the Earth, and that is enough for me. But then there is the more final meeting. I was not confused. I was irretrievable. Solitude begins where the scavengers will scatter you before anyone knows you're gone.
Snow began to fall again.
This was the 3rd.
My legs were black and bruised. I could not move them without pain. My ribs were scored from rock and root. There was blood beneath each of my nails and slices on my palms from where I had gripped the shale. I had wanted then the mountain to feel the pain and frustration and make it bleed as it was making me. I had no idea I could be so adolescent to ignore what I knew to be a bad idea and to get myself so far as to be beyond knowing or care of others. I felt so ashamed.
Slowly, I let myself to my feet, brushed the snow from my pack, and set out in a direction that seemed promising. It led me back to where I had left prints earlier.
I made no words on the day of the 4th. I found a prospector's cabin and rested. By the 5th I was out of the Okanogan and back on the road that would lead me again to the valley where I had started. I had turned another year older, but was not sure if it was in fact the 5th. But it was, and I was now 27.
On the afternoon of that day, I came to the town of Newhalem, the last town west of the Cascades (or the first) and sat beneath a cherry tree, all in bloom, and watched the Skagit River flow out towards the Sound. A woman of the town offered me a cup of coffee. I thanked her and counted my blessings. They came down to this: I was drinking coffee beneath a cherry tree.
I have never been in a fight, yet I don't think I have ever been so soundly beaten.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Cascade Mountains
Since Cave Junction, Oregon, I had seen the Cascades in file like the lights of watchtowers. First I remember the ragged cap of Shasta, rising, present as full moon. The ice of it shone like cut paper above the horizon, far enough away that the stone had faded to blue and it seemed a cap alone, an ice island in the sky. Then it was Mcloughlan hovering in the distance, high enough to cast glare over the Willamette. Then Hood - which I would not climb - but could see admirably well from St. Helens - which I did. From that summit I could see thrust up thru the clouds the last peaks of Oregon with the first of Washington: Rainier, Adams, and St. Helens beneath me.
Adams I would skirt around until Rainier and the Wonderland Trail. During one week I walked the circumference of mountain, dropping down to cedar forests that lost their tops in the mists rising from glacial rivers, to the glaciers themselves, the greatest single aggregate of ice in the 48 states. On clear days from Seattle I would look out from the 50th street overpass of the I-5 to see the peak, 14,411 feet high, glowing where the last rays of the sun lit the face with fire. Higher than the Eiger. Higher even than Fuji.
Last of all came Baker, whose glare was ever present even as I walked into Canada, and then as I returned.
I had come back from Canada to go thru the North Cascades on my way to Eastern Washington, and then to Idaho.
Rather, I should write it this way, I climbed up Nooksack Ridge, and back into winter. It had taken me 4 days just to get from Bellingham to Hannegan Pass.
There were many things I ignored. For one thing, I do not carry any serious winter gear. My sleeping bag is probably the only piece of good winter equipment I carry, being rated to -20 degrees. But no snowshoes, no crampons, no parka. For another, it had snowed in Deming, at elevation 670 feet, the day before I had gotten there, still some 39 miles from Hannegan Pass (elevation 5,930 feet).
And yet, stubbornly, I got all the way up to the pass itself, over meters of snow, thru the white silence of the mountains, crossing over earlier avalanches, breaking spruce tangles to the very point where the ground sloped down to either side. I had come atop the wall. It was blindingly bright and quiet. A few grosbeaks and a ptarmigan shared the space with me while I sat, panting, in tee-shirt and sunglasses.
A ptarmigan.
Once, in Oregon, when Shasta was still in sight, I had flushed a spruce grouse from hiding. A northern bird, I had thought. There are neither spruce nor spruce grouse in California. Too far south. I had come far.
Now, here was a ptarmigan, a bird I knew only from Jack London and other writers of the Arctic. Snow white. An ice grouse. With feathered feet it stood atop the snow, close enough I could have jabbed it with a pool cue. But it had the advantage. Besides being snow-colored and winged, its feet allowed it to float atop the snow. I had stomped and stumbled the entire way up, a process known as 'post-holing,' punching holes up the pass one and two at a time. I couldn't have captured the bird even if I wanted to. Even if it just walked away from me.
I could get beyond this pass, I thought, even though there were no tracks, nor ghosts of tracks, to lead me down the other side. My body was up to it. But it was not my body that had gotten me up here. My pride had ordered that I cross the Cascades here, and my body had followed. Beyond here were 2 other passes, one of about 5,000 feet and then another of 4,000. Did I even know where they would be? My feet were wrinkled claws from the amount of ice that had come over my boot tops and melted. I had no more dry gear. I could still get beyond. Likely at the cost of a few toes. Maybe just some frostbite.
Or the other way to reach the far side of the mountains would be to backtrack down the mountain, around both Nooksack and Baker, and follow highway 20 to Ross Lake, some 170 miles away. A week's worth of walking.
So, I thought, I have left Seattle April 1st, and I am still on the west side of the mountains. And now I will have to walk again the same 80 miles I took the past four days walking, having to go nearly all the way back to Bellingham. (It is not hard to walk a hundred miles, only to walk the same hundred twice)
But, says my pride - with no one but myself and the ptarmigan to talk to - what about Rainier? There we went up to points well above 7,000 feet, up to glaciers. And St. Helens we climbed to the top. 8,365 feet!
Yes, I answer. But that was in September, after a year of little snow. This year there has been much snow. And it is only April. This pass will not be clear for many months. Had you not realized that it would be this way when it had snowed even at the base of the mountain?
The weather was clear as a bell. A better day than most to admit of a mistake. I do not have to break trail here. Highway 20 has already done that. And still, often passes are made where none ought to be. Trains still get stuck in Donner Pass. My teeth gritted, I turned around and went back the way I came.
There have been many mountains I have climbed thru and gone over, but not such as this. Maybe, not having lived in them as a fact but wandered thru them as recreation, I do no know how to deal with snow as the animals do, as an obstacle to movement and as the clear signal the kitchen is closed for the season. Maybe, not having spent serious time camping at elevations above 4,000 feet, I don't know how to set up a camp above treeline.
Maybe, I don't know much about mountains at all.
Monday, April 18, 2011
I'll say my goodbyes in technicolor
Seattle. There were these instances of beauty in the solitude when it started. I loved the novelty of being unknown and unknowable, of there being so many people who didn't give a damn about me. 
I went for walks to Gasworks, looking over Lake Union, seeing boats go by to the Sound, wondering what I'd be doing and who I'd be if I were on board.
Then, I discovered people...
and people...
and people...
and people...
and people.
And Seattle looked a lot different. Not stone and steel with some nice mountains around, but actually a city in the way it's meant to be. One large ecosystem of fascinating diversion, a sea of color and smell, a vast art gallery. Actually, it had always been something like that. It had felt at first like I had been walking through a house where the halls were full of pictures but not family. Then, the portraits came out of their frames.
And I went back into one.
The world is full of perfectly marvelous things, none of which anyone ever happens to notice.
And all is well, and all shall be well, and all gone singing 'bol Riley, o', 'bol Riley, gone away.
And all is well, and all shall be well, and all gone singing 'bol Riley, o', 'bol Riley, gone away.
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