September 26, 2016 Mile 2271.0-2292.4 21.4 Miles At 5:30 we begin the noisy, thrashing ritual of packing up. When I emerge from my tent into the dark, I am struck again by how free the darkness makes me feel. While the rest of the world wards off darkness with artificial light and retreats into their stale homes, I get to smell the fresh air and feel the expanse of thousands of miles of atmosphere around me. I get to stand alone in the world, facing it as it is. There is nothing that makes darkness inherently less safe, unless it is our own tendency to panic in the face of the unknown. The means with which we seek safety and security are prisons of our own devising. We trade a little more time for a little less life. Sometimes the tradeoff is worth it, but if we’re not careful, we may spend our entire lives in a cage, free from danger but cut off from the richness of the world. Rainbow is still asleep, or at least not stirring. I am sorry to leave her behind. Her cheery disposition warmed up our camp and added life to our conversation. How many people have I left behind this way, now? I’ve lost count. Only Roadside remains. Faithful, quiet Roadside. I wonder what he gains from our partnership. He remains a black box. We set out in the dark, traversing a narrow catwalk along a steep slope by the dim light of our headlamps. The trail turns around the side of the mountain, the slope becomes less precipitous, we enter a dark forest and begin to climb. The air is cool but still this morning, and I begin to work up a sweat. The forest falls away and I find myself climbing a wide barren bench, Roadside trailing somewhere behind. A purple twilight fills the sky slowly and I switch off my headlamp as soon as I can muster it. Adams and Rainier glow like bright gold above the horizon, two dots in a volcanic chain that encircles the Pacific Ocean. Up here, it’s easy to forget the hard, local existence that we try to scratch for ourselves in the dirt; up here, one can almost see the turning of the planet on its tracks, sense the galactic order as it floats noiselessly through space in great circles of time. I can see Roadside’s headlamp climbing below, a pinprick of light in a dark expanse. It reminds me how empty this landscape is, how much space we truly have to move about without bumping up against anyone else. I turn and look back uphill, at the tall slope I still have before me. I climb. The first glow of light appears to the east of Mt. Adams, already distant in the south. It flows in slowly like water and pools at the edge of the volcano, as if filling in behind a dam. I check again from time to time as I continue to climb up a steep rocky slope. Pink and orange gradually fill in the other side of Adams and reflect off the glaciers. It rises far above anything else on the horizon, monolithic and kingly in stature. Off to the southwest, Mt. St. Helena protrudes only slightly above the horizon. It appears to have been lopped off at the base, an unfair illusion that belies the powerful eruption that stole its cap. A junction leads either north or up. Both ways will reconnect shortly, but I choose up. The steeper, more difficult climb will afford better views. It also avoids an ice patch along a very steep slope that often forms in the shadows of the mountain. There’s not enough light yet to see whether the ice is there, but I want to take the higher path anyway. I begin. Steep, tight switchbacks on loose talus fight me on every step. I’m still wearing my down jacket, and now it fills with sweat. When I finally near the top, it’s full light. I look back to see Roadside at the junction. Will he take the shorter, easier, and potentially more dangerous route? He starts up after me. At the top, a wind whips from the west. Strange, since the mountain has been on my eastern side all this time and I never felt a wind below. I sit in the lee of a rock pile and get stuff ready for breakfast. Then I record a video for friends back home. The microphone catches more of the wind than me. “We’re at the top of the knife’s edge. [wind sounds] hiking up. Mt. Adams…” I pan across. “Mt. St. Helens…Rainier… there’s Roadside,” I sweep back over to the ridgeline extending miles in front of us. “And here’s what we’re about to hike down. Goody goody.” When Roadside arrives, we stop and look around for a bit and fawn over the view, but it’s so windy that we quickly huddle down behind the rocks to cook breakfast. Still, not a bad place to eat a meal, I think. We check the maps during breakfast, wondering what time we’ll get into White Pass. After breakfast we start down the knife’s edge. The trail is built on large chunks of talus with tricky footing and sharp dropoffs on both sides. Strangely, I find that it’s not nerve-racking at all. I have become so used to these heights and narrow paths that I even feel comfortable enough to take out my phone and record part of my walk down the path. It’s a stunning walk. The slopes extend all the way down to the valley floors, thousands of feet below. The ridgeline is strung out before us for miles, like a skyway that leads all the way to Rainier. Snow patches dot either side of the path. Across the valley to the left, the mountains are purple with striated rock above, and green with patches of forest below. The valley itself leads out to a shimmering blue lake at its north end. It takes us a couple hours to cross the whole ridge, during which I want nothing so much as to stay fully present and engaged. This is a peak moment, I think. Something I will remember forever. Even as I’m hiking it, I imagine how I will remember it. On the northern end of the ridge walk, we turn off to the right and cross a broad tundra. There’s a small rill where we get water, then we wind down, back into the forest. And just like that, I’m back in my wandering thoughts. I’m trying to puzzle out how one of those large meme structures, like the economy or government, self-replicates and gains resources. There seems to be some sort of symbiosis between the two. I think it comes back to measurement. Measurements are a form of information that are clear and easy to spread. Before money, an object’s worth or someone’s wealth were largely a matter of personal values. If you thought your ten cows were worth more to you than my twelve sheep, who was I to tell you any different? Our status in the community would depend on other things, like what relationships we built. Monetization gave us a way to say specifically how much something costs, and to compare different types of wealth and value. It led to a direct comparison between different objects, and now we could measure wealth with a sort of certainty. Relationships were still important, but it was much more difficult to talk about the quality of relationships than it was to talk about how much money someone had. If our culture is propagated by the ideas we spread, easily measurable ideas have an unfair advantage. They spread more quickly and easily, and they are bound to take up more and more of our psyche as we see examples proliferate around us. As money became more universal, it also led to greater optionality. The more people who were willing to trade goods for money, the more options you had to spend your money. Eventually money could buy just about anything, including power. Our governments today are filled with millionaires and billionaires, who use their power to protect and grow their wealth. They reinforce the power of the “measured wealth” meme, because it benefits them. Well, it’s a start. I can tell there are a lot of other memes that reinforce money and help it spread as an idea, but they are all tangled in my head and I’m not ready to pick them apart yet. Besides, I’m back out of the trees and this climb is about to kill me. A couple day-hikers are trying to bushwhack up to the ridge to get a view of Rainier, just a little ways from the trail. I tell them that there’s a good view that we just passed five minutes ago. Then Roadside and I finish our climb and stop at a pass right above Shoe lake, which is shaped like a horseshoe. A lone mountain goat crosses back and forth over the pass while we eat our lunch. A couple of friendly dogs and their owner come up the trail and greet us. Roadside finishes lunch first and starts down the hill while I pack up. It’s a long, fast downhill that starts to hurt my knees by the end, and I can’t seem to catch up to Roadside. I start the road walk to White Pass, stick out my thumb, and get picked up almost immediately by a guy in a white honda.
“Where are you headed?” he asks. “Just to the store up the road,” I say. “You PCT hikers are getting lazy,” he says with a smirk. I don’t understand, but I smile and chuckle as if I do. There’s Roadside walking along the side of the road. I’m about to ask if the driver would mind picking him up, but then I see the store just beyond. We’ve driven less than a half mile. “Oh, I didn’t realize we were so close,” I tell him. I grab my pack from the back, thank him for the ride, and turn to wait for Roadside to close the last few steps. The store is a gas station convenience store. They have some fried foods that look like they’ve been in the glass cases for a while. The only thing vegetarian is a fried bean burrito, so I get that and a beer. The cashier tells me he feels bad charging me full price for the burrito because it’s getting old, and gives it to me for a dollar. He tells us there are picnic tables in the back of the store for hikers. The businesses along the PCT do this so they don’t have to say “you guys smell bad, please don’t stay in here and drive off our other customers.” I don’t blame them. I’m happier outside anyway. The burrito is overcooked and stale, and I can only make it about a third of the way before I give up. I go back in for something else, but convenience store food never offers much. I settle on some Oreos and a bag of Doritos. Convenience stores all offer the same foods, because those are the foods that people buy. People buy those things because it’s what they know. The culture is shaped by us, but it also shapes us. I call my parents to check in. We buy a couple more beers, then head over to the lodge nearby to see if we can get rooms. We can. Shower, call Lindsey, text with friends. Boredom. We got into town too quickly, and now I need to fill the time. I turn on the TV. There’s a presidential debate going on, between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. I have trouble believing this is even reality. Is this even reality? Everything seems so detached from the life I used to know. The wilderness is clearly real, the principles that govern it are clear, easy to read. But this world of politics and television and talking heads, it all seems constructed, artifice upon artifice until we can’t even recognize the principles that the house was built on. That’s not to say it’s not important. Just like the convenience store aisles, the culture is shaped by us, but it also shapes us. Sometimes I think we are too passive about it all. After the debate is over and I am sick from the talking heads, I knock on Roadside’s door. “Hey man, what are you up to?” “Nothing. Just watching TV.” “I’m bored as hell by my TV. You wanna sit on the patio and drink some beer?” “Yeah, sounds good. I’m bored too.” And it’s better, doing nothing. We don’t talk much, mostly just look out and sip our beers from time to time, but at least here I have my thoughts, and a little camaraderie, and a whole lot less nonsense. I ask Roadside questions about himself. I’ve been hiking with this guy for over a month, and I still barely know him. Born on Christmas, never knew his dad, mom died when he was nineteen. What do you do with your free time at home? I just work a lot, usually come home and drink some beer and watch TV. Where do you go for vacations? This is the first vacation I’ve had in years. He talks about Vegas again. He wants to take a week there after we’re done with the trail, just lay by the pool and eat and drink. I know there has to be more to him than this, but I can’t figure out what it is. I tell him as much, but he chuckles it off. I give up trying to pry information out of him. If he wants to stay private, he can stay private. He doesn’t seem mad about the attempt, though. If anything, he seems flattered, like no one has asked him about himself before. Eventually we head back to our rooms to go to sleep. Mine is stuffy and hot, and I toss and turn for a couple hours. Finally I open the sliding door and let the cool air in, and then I quickly drift off.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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