Reviving and Old Column

Change what you can…the rest you have to let be.

Once upon a time, a very long while ago, I strode away from my usual world. People talk of folks who were last seen walking away on a trail, and they just got swallowed up by the mountains. Well, that's kinda what it feels like. Jonah was gulped down by the whale. I disappeared into the mountains. All Jonah saw for a while was whale, and I all saw were mountains, for three weeks. For that short period of time, the outside world ceased to exist.

Two deer awoke and tiptoed away in the predawn darkness. They had been napping next to my car in the Camp Curry parking lot. No one else was around. I had checked and rechecked  my backpack the night before, so it was ready. I pulled it out of the trunk. The trick was to balance it on my knee, and then wriggle into the shoulder straps. Once I cinched down the waist band, I was ready to go. The old bamboo ski pole felt familiar to my hand. So did the weight on my back.

An old wood sign listing places along the trail, and the mileage to said places, leaned against a tree alongside the burbling river where the paved world ended and the trail began. Vernal Fall was first on the list, a mile or so up the trail. Then came the summits of Half Dome and Clouds Rest, Tuolumne Meadows, and then several others. At the bottom was Mt Whitney, a distant 217 miles.

The photograph of the sign is too blurred to read. The light was still too faint for my camera, but it was the first I took on the John Muir Trail, so it sits first in the slide carousel. Many photos followed. The last captures Dan and me at 13,700 feet, crouching out of the wind at the trail junction leading to the summit of Mt Whitney, munching on granola bars. We have our parkas on, but our legs are bare below our shorts. Remnants of the previous night's snowfall cling to the rocks. The snow is not melting. We are grinning like madmen.

The scribbling in my journal grew longer as each day in the mountains passed, a futile attempt to capture feelings inspired by such a journey. The little notebook records the anguish of facing all those miles in spite of those leg cramps that arrived on the first afternoon. It recalls the frustration when the bear took the food. And it tattles on a mind perhaps too prone to introspection when left with too little distraction.

My journal also talks of skies so blue they hurt the eye, and the glory of mountains stacked upon yet more mountains stretching as far as that eye could see. And it talks of friends made on the trail and others who walked in to join me and help celebrate the last days of this adventure. It tells of a time and place so detached from my usual day to day reality, that I paused to talk to a tree, and the tree talked back.

The trail took on its own routine, one different from the outside world. Sunrises came, and then sunsets, and always miles to go before I slept. Day, after day, after day. Unlike the world out there, instead of trying to shut down my brain to protect it from overwhelming oppression, I worked to keep it receptive to overwhelming beauty.

This journey, as all good things eventually do, came to its end. Dan dropped me off at my car in the Curry parking lot. It was covered with dust, but it started right away.

I felt I had been out of touch for a while, so I turned on the radio. Nothing had changed while I matriculated in the mountains. Nothing in the world anyway. Crime and corruption, anger and violence, insurrection and war continued unabated. Regardless of what I did, or didn't do, or how good it felt just doing it for those three weeks, I hadn't really affected anything out there. But inside…well that would be a different matter.