Note: For those of you who are here for my PCT journals, this is not that. But I think you'll enjoy this too. I'll be back with PCT journals in the next few days.
I. It was like a baptism. It was like a baptism or spilled paint, the way the light transfigured everything at once, irrevocable. The lake before me glittered teeth and revealed cavernous depths. A premonition, beautiful and terrifying. I stared nervously down the lake’s gullet, hypnotized, searching my memory for a lost fragment that held some relationship to this moment. The mountain I had come to climb would have to wait. When I was young, we took a vacation to Lake Tahoe. I loved the place, but my dad had recently developed a passion for kayaking and now my sister and I were confined in a two-seated plastic tube, prisoners of my father’s enthusiasm, worried that we were paddling poorly, that we were going too slow, feeling tired, hungry, and most of all bored. I would have preferred to be back at the beach, where we could build sand castles and jump in the freezing water and run and play. Looking overboard, I saw a fish suspended, small ripples of light playing over its body. It was a thousand miles below, just drifting in invisibly clear water. I held it in my attention gently, afraid to break the thread that held it dangling in thin air. Without warning my awareness shifted from object to background—I was no longer focused on the fish, but on the emptiness between our kayak and the rocks far below. The surface we rested on was only a lacy membrane, a slip of a thing so sheer it was barely there. There seemed no reason it should be able to support our weight over all that empty space, except by the force of our belief. And now that I had burst the illusion, I felt my belief begin to jerk away from me in short fits. I held on with fervor, feverishly. I wrestled with all my mind to keep my faith in the laws of physics intact. My dad yelled to hurry up and I jolted into reality. The fever passed, the surface held. Today I was at the western end of Twin Lakes, eating semi-congealed instant oatmeal at a picnic table. The cold aluminum bench seeped into my thighs and a cool flow of air slowly penetrated my layers, patient as only nature can be. The sun spilled over the lake and stained the surface a platinum and bronze foil. All except for the small opening that lapped the shore next to me. I flinched, perched on a precipice as I stared again through the sheer membrane of the surface into the caverns below as I had so many years ago. I forced down another bite of oatmeal and tried to convince myself that there were some things that hadn’t changed. I turned my attention to the peaks above to see how the sun painted the Matterhorn. I was near the town of Bridgeport, California, looking up at an imposing peak just north of Yosemite National Park. This wasn’t “The” Matterhorn, it was Matterhorn Peak. An imposter. It was given the title by dint of a passing resemblance from a certain angle. It held no glaciers. Nor was it particularly famous—its most notable claim to fame was that Jack Kerouac once tried to climb it and wrote about it in The Dharma Bums. I was told it wasn’t even particularly difficult to climb. A class 3 scramble at best. I had seen the Matterhorn for the first time two years ago while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. A week ago, I read Kerouac’s account and decided I had to give it a try. It was exactly what I needed: a chance to get my head straight, feel a little freedom, and stretch my legs. Now that I was here, though, I was tightly wound. It had been a long time since I had been at altitude and this was a mostly trail-free, 12-mile, 5000 ft. climb that I would try to day-hike, but I loved that type of challenge. I had done very little planning and research before this trip, but that was also fairly normal for me. If Kerouac could do it so could I. I had driven out across the spine of the Sierra Nevada the day before. I listened to interviews to fill the time. When I was full of noise, I listened to my thoughts instead. They were noisy too. My route crossed the Pacific Crest Trail and I stopped to pay homage. Some of my fondest memories flooded me before I even pulled over the car. Memories of life ritualized, untainted by civilized responsibilities, free from planning and choosing and deciding, they were my sanctuary in a world gone mad from overstimulation. When I stopped the car, I found some thru-hikers who needed a ride to South Lake Tahoe. I reveled in any chance to repay the innumerable generosities that I had experienced during my own PCT hike. As they piled into my car, I already knew that I would feel their loss when I inevitably had to set them free. This was my sangha, my trusted tribe. I might have responsibilities to face, but I could participate in some small way in their hike, and by so doing, some part of me was free to travel with them. Drunk with that spirit I shared a secret that I wasn’t supposed to share yet. I was in the mood to share it with the world, I wanted to shout it from the mountaintops, but for now, it was best to keep it to anonymous brothers and sisters whom I might never see again. It was dark when I got to the campground. RVs were lined up like tract homes and were fenced in with pinwheels and streamers as if claiming territory in the wilderness. They missed the point. I chose a spot in a hard dirt lot with few trees and little space between neighbors and set up camp by the light of a weak headlamp. My thoughts turned over the implications of my secret as one fingers a pebble in the pocket. As I finished putting up my tent, shouts from neighboring camps announced a visitor. A bear arrived. She was welcome in my camp, even though I was nervous and her arrival meant extra precautions. She explored the neighbor’s picnic table, searching for discarded scraps and crumbs. I watched from the darkness, detached. The window of the neighbor’s RV framed a portrait of faces, a family of five that stared out in fear. The bear lifted herself on the table with a pull-up that roiled masses of muscle and belied her small stature. A flashlight traveled down the hill from an adjacent campsite, headed toward my visitor. I ended my role as spectator and offered a word of warning. A familiar female replied: she had seen the bear, she was just getting water from the faucet. We watched the beast in awe and spoke quietly in the dark, unable to clearly see one another. She surprised me when she asked if I had just been at the hot springs—I had. In that labyrinth of RVs and dusty lots, I had picked my site because there was another tent nearby, and it just happened to belong to a Canadian couple I had met at Travertine Hot Springs a couple hours earlier. The bear went on her way to pick another camp clean and trespass their pinwheel fences, and I joined the Canadian couple at their picnic table for dinner. We ate by candle-lantern, brief flashes of faces flickering and illuminating in the thralls of conversation. We shared the sort of conversation that flows easiest under a night sky surrounded by pine trees, conversation that spreads like oil and flows freely over various terrain—careers and media, of course, but also philosophy and worries and joys and what we know to be true. It was a conversation unconcerned with status, which left us free to explore each other’s minds for gems, and to share our own treasures freely. It was only a matter of time before my secret came spilling out. Thoughts run like rivers to the deepest channels, and I had one that connected them all. My wife and I are having a baby. After the dam burst, there was only one topic of conversation. My new friends asked a hundred questions which I could not begin to answer and which sent me spinning in a thousand directions. It was all I wanted to think about, but a part of me rebelled, fearful that I would never be able to have a different conversation again. That every discussion of philosophy would be confined to the topic of parenting, every book discussion a conversation on what books I was reading to my children. Parenthood had opened new channels of interest, but now I wondered if the old channels would dry up and wither away, altering the fundamental landscape of my identity. When the eddies of my thoughts began to settle into small reveries, I took my leave and prepared for bed. My wife and I are having a baby. I don’t understand what this means. I am off-trail, in uncharted territory. II. Now it was a morning of spilled paint. I stared into my abyss, and as promised, it stared back. I finished scraping oatmeal from my pot, a Tibetan singing bowl with strep throat. I embraced the terror of the abyss and the sting of the cold. A father and son watched me from inside their parked car, prisoners to warm comfort. Somewhere near here was the trailhead; I doubted anyone else was hiking this early, but already I felt like I was falling behind, missing out on the day. I started to hurry, putting my pack in order before a higher self remembered that the future is an illusion. I relaxed into the task at hand, focused on the feel of each object as I placed it in my backpack, one by one. By the time I closed the hatch on my station wagon, I was fully balanced on the moment’s edge. I knew it wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t have to; I could return again. The sky was an unblemished blue. To the North and South stood enormous silver walls of granite, sealing off secret kingdoms. I started as I usually do, with a destination in mind but no clear idea where to begin except to begin. I made two false starts through the campground before I found an unmarked trailhead that seemed to go in the right direction. I crossed the inlet creek and followed the Southern shore of the lake. A short while later, a set of switchbacks set my blood pumping hot—all adventures, minor or major, should start with a strong effort. The switchbacks lent me a continuous view of the lake as I quickly gained altitude. The sun had finished painting over the surface, sealing off the depths with a reflective sheen. Down along the shore, the business of the campground carried on in miniature, a scattering of tiny people doing tiny things to keep the world moving. I climbed past Horsetail Falls and found myself in a flat subalpine wood. The creek meandered carelessly here, and the smell of damp earth seeped into parts of my mind that I had forgotten. Like a tableau, an antlered buck posed cautiously on the far side of the creek, watching me. I spoke to him gently in the hope that he would stay. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac mentions this glade so briefly that I missed it the first time I read it. I wonder why. Every moment of life that I’ve missed, lost in my own thoughts or my mind muddied and tired, feels like a small failure, a missed opportunity. “Enjoy every second,” goes the advice, “they grow up so quickly.” Sometimes I wonder if the pressure exacerbates the problem. With one eye regarding me carefully, the buck resumed his grazing. I moved closer to take a picture. I hunted, he tensed. I paused, he resumed. In the dance, I felt alive, present. I am here. As I framed the shot, though, the moment of presence ducked away from me. I captured the photo and felt the dopamine hit of another piece of life traded away for a cheap consolation prize. He paused and turned to look at me, then cocked his head questioningly: “are you ready?” I considered what he meant. Ready for the climb? I was always game for a hike, but something frightened me about the Matterhorn. Ready for parenthood? I was even less certain. I was excited and had started to prepare, but parenthood was more consuming, more extensive, than any preparations could be. I stepped into a pocket of shadow and another question sprang to mind, as if the buck was testing me. “Do you have the strength?” Again I floundered, unable to separate the tangled threads of my thoughts. On long, multi-day hikes I ease into longer miles, using the strength built the first day to catapult me into longer days and a faster pace. Would the same work with parenting? It seemed doubtful. Then how would I find that strength? Before I had come to grips with the buck’s second question, a third arrived: “Are you willing to accept failure?” I had no answer, only trepidation. I scanned the forest, unsure of the way forward and already so tired. I considered turning back. My senses came back to me a short while later as I climbed through rocky fields and tried to find remnants of trail in the shrubbery between rocks. It was slow and tiring. Several wrong choices led to heavy bushwhacking. Convention says that it is too soon for us to tell friends and family about the pregnancy, which means that our only guides through this wilderness are clichéd scraps of advice that proliferate like bad music through supermarkets. Not that anyone could give us coherent directions anyway. Talk to any parent about what it means to raise a child, and they’ll give you a mix of hyperbole filled with awe and terror. It’s not their fault. I imagine I will face the same difficulty when I am in their shoes, as when I attempt to explain what Bach is like to someone who has never prepared a performance, or discuss a mushroom trip with someone who has never taken a psychoactive substance: the words will slip sideways and reveal that language is an inadequate substitute for direct experience. The map, as they say, is not the territory. The boulders and bushes gave way to thick grasses splattered with indian paintbrush and columbine. A steep slope into the creek made it difficult to negotiate the uneven ground. It required less exertion, but greater care in placing my feet. A daughter: my map feels especially inadequate. I am supposed to be her guide through this world, to teach her how to navigate and plan her routes and choose her destinations. I can teach her, but as a man, I am familiar with entirely different territory. It is as if, brought up in the mountains of California, I am tasked with teaching her how to survive in the jungles of Costa Rica. The creek slowed, the terrain flattened, and I had a chance to look up. The next climb faced me aggressively with rocks and dirt, eroded and devoid of vegetation. There was no room for a diagonal approach. I would have to climb straight up the face. My wife will have a more useful map to share with our daughter, one that reflects her experience as a woman, but even that experience will be outdated by the time she begins to experience the world. Within our lifetime, shifts in culture and technology have already created a redesign of the landscape that is tectonic in scope. The maps we grew up with are outdated and inadequate. I braced myself and started the sharp climb. It took me most of an hour. When I finally crested the top, I found myself in a large basin where scree funneled from all directions to the edge of the creek. The tip of Matterhorn peeked over the ridge, as if taunting me. Another climb ahead. I crossed the bottom of the basin quickly and found a sunny rock to sit on, catch my breath, and eat some lunch. I checked the map obsessively while I ate, matching topographic folds with the actual terrain around me. It was difficult to decide exactly where I was because valley walls closed in on all sides. It seemed like I was close to where I would need to depart the creek and start up the right slope, but if I was too early, I’d end up with a hard climb to a dead end. If I waited too late, it would also add a significant leg onto my hike. I had to choose. As I scanned the valley, I noticed another buck eyeing me from a stand of trees near the creek. It added vibrance to the leftward route, so I continued in that direction. The creek turned and my view opened up to the top of the ridge: I had chosen the right path. I started a long, rocky ascent. My breathing was labored, each breath like trying to pull-start a lawn mower. The altitude was taking its toll. I reveled in the burning in my legs and lungs. This wasn’t a child’s hike. No infant or toddler would be coming this way. My impending responsibilities weighed on me as I struggled upward. Once, when I was too young to be thinking about children, I told my grandmother that I was going to be smart and wait until I was completely ready before I had children. I would make sure I had saved enough money, and put my career in order, and knew enough about parenting that I could be the most effective parent possible. She was a wise, thoughtful woman, and I thought this would impress her. Instead, she told me that if I waited until everything was perfect, I might be waiting forever. To the right of the gully was a small flat area that created an overlook. Kerouac and Japhy probably camped somewhere near here. It was rocky but flat enough to roll out a sleeping bag and have a fire. There was a view down to the basin, which would have allowed them to see their friend Morley as he climbed up after them. Not much else I had seen had fit his description. The creek had all but disappeared, just a thin trickle that appeared sporadically between rocks, to the east of my route. I was carrying plenty of water—too much, really—but I wondered when it might be available again. In the civilized world I find it difficult to stay focused on essentials, but in the wilderness, it becomes second nature. When options overwhelm and priorities get confused, the wilderness helps us simplify. The froth of life rises to the top and can be poured away like foam from a beer. What is truly important as a parent? To keep your children safe from harm, to give them tools to think and process the world effectively, to give them a chance at creating a life that has meaning. What is just froth? III. As I left Kerouac’s terrace behind, the slope steepened precipitously. Each step was accompanied by a miniature rockslide. I wheezed and gasped. My legs trembled. Kerouac decided one day to go climb a mountain. He set off without preparation or forethought. When he wanted to visit another city, he hopped on a train. No need to save, no need to plan, no need to trade one precious hour of life to try to make another hour a little more comfortable. Life like a scroll, passing continuously from one line to the next without end. I was never quite that free, except perhaps while I was hiking. I worry that having a child will collect up whatever freedoms I have had and relegate them to an attic somewhere, to visit once a year. Many of my friends have decided it’s better not to have children at all. In many ways they’re right, of course. The world is too full of people, doing our tiny things as quickly and noisily as we can and demolishing our environment en masse. We decided to have a child anyway. We have a number of logical reasons why it was the right decision for us, but at heart it was an emotional decision. At least we decided with our eyes open. The loss of freedom had been well considered, too, and although I had entered into that contract in sound mind, it had been more of an abstract concept than a hard truth. Now, I was faced with the intermingled joy and heaviness of that commitment. My grandmother had been right. All that planning, all that preparation, and still it seemed as sudden as a landslide. As I reached the top of the pass, I glimpsed snapshots of Yosemite backcountry through notches in the granite. I climbed to the top of a flat, rocky area. Mountain tarns glittered like scattered gold coins among jade valleys and pearl basins. Snowcapped peaks and vermeil ridges defined an ever-changing labyrinth that would require a lifetime to explore; a lifetime I would gladly give, were it mine alone. To Kerouac, life was a scroll to be written spontaneously, a ragged dance tapped out across the boulders. I’d always envied that, tried, if not to emulate it outright, at least to bring pieces of that freedom into my life. As I stared down the deep maw of parenthood, though, life suddenly seemed more like walking a cliffside path. It was the sort of contained terror that one feels lying on one’s back, staring out at the night sky and realizing with a jolt: this is down too. The sudden gravity of gravity; the spacious dimensionality; the irrational fear of falling up with nothing to slow or stop you. The ragged dance and the carefully mapped plan were both wrong for me. I needed a different approach. I traced the ridges with my eyes. Clean lines separated snow from sunlight and dark lines of water streaked down cracked granite like an angular Rorschach test. I wondered whether I would ever be able to soar and dance again. When I would tell other parents about my latest backpacking trip they all seemed to agree: they couldn’t do that because they had kids. Was it true? Or had their comfort zones simply ossified into hermit crab shells from which they feared to venture? Would Lindsey and I decide that it was too much work, too much hassle to get out into the wild world? That a two-week vacation once a year, maybe even with a mobile home and a temporary pinwheel fence, was enough life for us? For our daughter? I broke away from the predetermined climb and wandered out on a ledge. I faced the sun and a thousand-mile view and peed off the rock. I am here, now. There’s a line in The Dharma Bums. “Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha.” Equally a coming Buddha. This is what I must give my daughter: everything the wilderness has taught me about emptiness and presence and freedom and love. That these are intertwined: ego and mindlessness are prisons that will snuff out any freedom, but with full attention, even the heaviest responsibilities open to love like a bloom. I lingered for a moment in the glow of awareness, then turned North and began to climb up a long scree-slope. A few bushes hung to one side, and I stayed close in the hope that they would hold some purchase, but the only advantage I found was that they helped me measure my slow progress. I climbed for glacial eons against burning, leaden muscles. The back of my neck tightened as I scanned the endless scree above, again and again, looking for a stabler path. These minor pains are my secret delight. They remind me that I have a body, alive and present in the world, that I am not my thoughts alone. How does one help a child to see the world as it is? If I brought my daughter here, would it be like the beach, or like kayaking? Will my daughter learn to appreciate the subtle pains and joys of the body and the outdoors, or will she reject them out of hand and retreat into civilization’s RVs and pinwheel fences? My father was trying his best to put us in the way of beauty, but I was out of my comfort zone and didn’t see it at the time. Yet here I am. Perhaps I hadn’t missed the point entirely. I continued to climb, and now I knew that I had gone further up the mountain than Kerouac. I had finally reached the top of the ridge. Through a gap between two jagged spires, I viewed a spacious expanse to the North. I could see the basin where I had rested, thousands of feet below me. Horsetail creek curled in a thin dark line through the middle, then disappeared into a mossy forest far below that. Like massive footprints in the earth, the basins stair-stepped down to the valley where I began, so far away now that I couldn’t see the lake where I started, only the mountains that framed it. Dark specks flickered in my peripheral vision until my attention was drawn away from the distant beauty and into my immediate surroundings. They flashed through the gap like black snowflakes, whipped past my head, and disappeared out of sight behind me. It took me a minute to hold one in view long enough to realize that it was a butterfly. They fluttered by the hundreds, each on a personal pilgrimage. They danced and cavorted like drunks and children, heedless and unrestrained, carried on the wind like leaves in a river. Some paused on the rocks, single and grouped, between dances. Each had its own flitting path, yet the stream carried onward in a single direction up over the crest, past my observing body, and out over the majesty of the Sierra. A silent joyful laughter welled up within me as I remembered Japhy Ryder’s advice. “When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing.” As I started the scramble up the final, most difficult portion of the Matterhorn, I remembered something my dad used to tell himself after I was born, but which I only learned about much later: “I’ve only been a parent for as long as you’ve been a child, so we’ll figure it out together.”
2 Comments
Susan Matney
6/11/2019 02:07:32 pm
Beautifully written, beautifully expressed, beautiful tribute to your daughter.
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3/21/2020 07:37:47 pm
This was such a blast to read. I love it when a piece of writing can both make me think deeply and entertain me with such delicacy of language. And I don't mean delicacy like it's fragile, I mean like it's so appetizing I want to eat it up.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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