("Profound thoughts, or whatever…")

 

 
       These days-- I have a hiking partner. Which is good, but seems a little odd. I have to think about the pace a little more, and plan the trip a little more. Actually, I have to share the planning of the trip— which (as nearly as I can figure out) is some kind of modern notion. I have to occasionally converse. And maybe it's best, after all, that I suppress those inexplicable bursts of scat singing while traversing the ridge line.
         Most people I happen to know don't really understand the attraction of backpacking, and they certainly don't understand going alone. We are talking someone's vacation here.  Precious days that shouldn't be wasted. Days that should be spent in Las Vegas or Reno, where all the fun is, and where the sun is. Not in some sodden rain forest alone.
         But there's another group of acquaintances who also fail to understand-- in a different way. This second group believes I must be gliding through the wilderness absorbed in "profound thoughts, or whatever."  Like that guy "Wordsmouth, or whoever," who lived in that cabin in the woods.
         Now I could explain that the cabin guy was Thoreau and that Wordsworth lived in a cottage in the village with his adoring sister and that he had an illegitimate daughter in France and that some of his best pals were opium addicts… but then they might get interested-- and I've really got to go hiking.

                              (Rock trucks and bad looks)

        The last time I hiked alone, I drove from Portland to the Washington Coast, and headed north for the East Fork of the Quinault River in Olympic National Park. I wasn't having profound thoughts right then, that's for sure. I was studying the sky-clotting rain clouds that crawled-in off the ocean, full of threat and darkness. I was looking out the window at Aberdeen and Hoquiam, towns exactly like the one I grew up in, lumber-less and lumbering, bombed-out and beaten up, trying to hold up their heads after the age of timber. And the logjam clouds kept floating in.
         Heading north, a rock glanced off the hood of my truck and hit the windshield, sounding like a gunshot, scaring the hell out of me, and creating a spiderish star of damage directly in my vision. (Consider having profound thoughts, and the world will stone you.) I saw the culprit, a rock truck, careening southward in my rearview mirror, disappearing into the city limits of Hoquiam. I drove on, trying to see around the splotch. I took the South Shore road around Lake Quinault, leaving the pavement and bouncing through the potholes and mud puddles.
         Just before the road to Grave's Creek, I came upon road construction. "You'll have to go back and take the North Shore road," the flagger said, "the road's closed." I asked: "There's a sign back at the highway telling me that?"  "Nope," she said, "Don't think there is one." I renewed acquaintance with all the south shore potholes on the way  back, and then was introduced to the equally impressive competition on the North Shore road. The cracks in my windshield began to explore their new environment.
 What do you do when a backpacking trip is plagued with bad omens? At the trailhead I unloaded my pack and walked up to the signboard to get a backcountry permit. Two hikers were preparing to start out. I said hello, but they just glared at me and said nothing.  Glowering weather, broken windshield, glowering people. Maybe they still had too much residue of the civilized world on them, the modern suspicion of the street.
         I'm not very loquacious when meeting other hikers. I enjoy discussing the trail, the country, or the weather if they seem willing-- I’ll always say hello-- but I want to respect their privacy. Yet, I've also noticed that a solitary hiker seems to make people nervous. And if you're a little older, it bothers them even more. Maybe you've got a little too much trail dust on you. Maybe your hull is a little barnacle-encrusted and you don't move quite as trimly through the water as they do, in their godly youth. Maybe you're some traumatized Vet or have some perverse agenda-- there must be a reason you are way out there alone. Is that what we would think if turning a corner on the trail we met Muir or Thoreau?
         Still, the woods have been a place where people go bad. Where I grew up, lousy things happened up logging roads. Good citizens dumped their garbage over embankments.  People looked both ways, then started fires and drove off. Sexual assaults. Something about being out of sight of civilization-- if it brings out the best in some people, it brings out the worst in others.
          It had taken me over half the day to get there, but now I had the backpack on. I crossed the footbridge and made myself stop and look at the creek. All those days that creek had been running, bringing that water out of the wilderness interior, and I wasn't there. Where was I? I started climbing the hill and I was breathing hard under the heavy pack. Without that weight, I would have been almost running. Almost running. The untouched timber was passing by. I thought big stand but just kept going. Couldn't stop right there.
         So it had nothing to do with profound thoughts then, only mileage. It concerned how many miles you needed to put between you and the highway and the job and the beleaguered towns-- how many miles before there were enough trees, streams, brush, ferns, ridges, and gullies behind you, and hiding you, so that you could finally make camp in the shelter of the trees.
         In the night, rain began to splatter against the fly of the tent, but by morning it had stopped. It was still dark when I got up, boiling water for coffee and drinking it while I broke camp. Alone, I can break camp quickly-- skipping breakfast-- because where I want to be is on the trail--moving. Today, I thought I might get far enough away to slow down. The river plunged down the canyon as I went up, and I began to get a second wind.
         Yet, what a disappointment the mind is! And how obvious that fact is-- here in the spectacular forest along the churning river. The mind is full of inanities, wreckage, and litter-- more like a river that is dammed, backed-up, choked with logs and muddy sticks.
         Some of it is just overly-rational calculations: if I'm making 2 miles per hour then what time will I be at Pyrite Creek? However, if I'm making 2.5 mph... If the elevation gain is x between point A and point B and y between point A and point C, then the stretch between point B and point C must be easier-going to a degree that is imperceptible and irrelevant-- right?
         And when I can get no further along this line, then the civilized world, the world I'm on vacation from, reveals that all this time it hasn't gone anywhere-- the faces and issues from job and city have their endless say and make their endless claims. And if I can quiet that down, then the Past begins following me-- all my mistakes, disasters, guilts, tragedies, and lost opportunities trailing behind me like some kind of ghoulish, Tyrolean hiking club.
         Song lyrics. When everything else is evicted from the mind, song lyrics are always ready to fill the appalling vacuum. Songs that I hate, usually, but can't escape-- the greatest hits of the Carpenters or Tony Orlando, etc. If I'm lucky, maybe some Hank Williams: "You're nice to me when there's no one else around/ You only build me up to let me down." If I had as much great poetry committed to memory as I do song lyrics, maybe I'd be a tenured professor of literature at Yale or Harvard.
         It's not a pretty sight. Most of the time, the mind needs to hosed out like a stable.
         But some time into the second day, an improvement began. The pack seemed to belong more on my back. The light made it through the heavy clouds, the thick-leaved canopy of the river-trees, and the trail curved ahead architecturally. I became aware of zones of air, balmy on the turns and cool by the streams in the draws. Fresh air. Two river ducks skimmed by, rafting on their own buoyancy, dipping and diving, surfacing, splashing up on rocks to look around, plunging again, drifting, disappearing.
         I reached the suspension bridge leading to Enchanted Valley. This time I lingered on the bridge, concentrating on the water rushing beneath, and trying to dissolve myself into the sound of the water and the greenness of the cloaking woods. And when I walked into the open meadow of the valley, I felt a lot less on the lam, less like the jail breaker I seemed to be at the start, and more like Odysseus returning to Ithaca.
         The main thing you do different in the valley is lift your eyes.
You take them from the roots and rocks of the trail and raise them to the cliffs and peaks and the braided waterfalls. Didn't that used to be the idea: that nature makes you lift your eyes? After Darwin, after Freud, after the 20th century, is anyone anachronistic enough to believe that? It seems like nature is just the only thing that doesn't demand anything from us. Nowadays, nature gets points for being indifferent.
         The weather kept darkening as I made camp. A ranger came out from the chalet. He said that he had checked the log and that last year on that date there were 22 hikers camped in the valley, and this year I was the only one.  No Penelope on this Ithaca, but no suitors either. We agreed that the weather had probably scared people off. However, an improvement was in the forecast.
         It rained in the night. I broke camp early, shaking off the tent fly. I could dry everything later, when the sun came out.

                                    (The Sun... Doesn't Come Out)

 I headed east and began climbing toward Anderson Pass. White Creek came blasting down the hillside in complete pantheistic abandon. I turned right on O'Neil Pass Trail and broke out into high meadows, dark and wild-disheveled, with patches of drifting fog.  I crossed O'Neil Pass through a wet cloud, and pushed on to Marmot Lake. Not a leaf, needle, or blade of grass anywhere that wasn't dripping, because by then the rain was solid and implacable.
         If it decides to rain in the Olympics, and to keep raining, you can't really stay dry. When you try to get something out of your pack, the rain drops in from the sleeve of your raincoat or the bill of your cap, like seeds. And those seeds sprout dampness. That's why all your important clothes should be in ziplock bags. Even that won't help if it rains three days. The hardest part is setting up a tent in the rain. When you're finished, maybe there will only be small puddles to mop up with a t-shirt or a towel.
         So now I was thinking about the drainage of my tent site, the alignment of the tent with the direction of the rain, the deployment of garbage bags, the storage of wet clothes, the protection of dry clothes-- simply the details of survival and nothing more. And I suppose it could become a serious matter too: darkness falling in a cold rain and wind at 4500 feet, 25 miles from the nearest road or assistance. Hypothermia might be a real threat if I should be unable to keep my essential gear dry. It was all profoundly un-profound.
         After a whole day of that weather, I seemed to exist permanently in rain gear, like a seal in its skin. I ate something, hung my food bag from a bear wire, and walked down wearily to Marmot lake in the last hint of light. The lake was black and cold. The surrounding landscape was all wet and dwindled by the fog. The only sound was wind. Nobody else, for miles, probably--the sharp sensation of being completely alone.
         I didn't want to hide from that. I wanted to stare right into it. For a few minutes, at least: the cold, black lake, the nightfall, the sound of the wind.
         I turned on my headlamp and walked back to camp. The tent was still dry. I'd done everything I could to weather the storm-- no profit in worrying about it now. Inside my sleeping bag, I opened the book I had brought by Joseph Conrad:
 
                    Only the young have such moments. I don't mean the very
                    young. No. The very young have, properly speaking,
                    no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance
                    of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows
                    no pauses and no introspection...

         That's how you start a story. When you are camping in the wilderness alone, you need a book with a voice, a voice both assured and profound.
         The next day, as I hiked up to beautiful Heart Lake and Lake LaCrosse in the continuing drizzle, I thought more about what it means to hike alone. I am more cautious for one thing, especially walking rough trail where you might not see another hiker for a couple of days. I watch my step and avoid bushwhacking in that case. By far the most likely thing that could go wrong would be a fall that causes injury, and I carry wrap and tape that could support a sprained ankle or knee.
         Fear? I don't see much to be afraid of. Before I go to bed, I listen to the sounds around my camp and tell myself that I'll hear the same sounds after dark--only magnified. I'm not really afraid of black bears and take the usual precautions there. Encountering a black bear on the trail is unlikely to be a problem unless there are cubs--they are the first thing I look for. Usually, the bear and I simply scare the bejesus out of each other, and then the bear tears off, tumbling down through the brush like a dislodged boulder, then stopping and sticking that nose up in the wind. I've never hiked in real grizzly country, but I'm not completely stupid-- I am afraid of grizzlies. And as far as bad people are concerned, I think they are probably too lazy to walk this far.
         Loneliness? I suppose that's the real issue in hiking alone. Loneliness, I think, is the other side of solitude. Doesn't "solitude" sound like a 19th Century word, while "loneliness" seems like a 20th Century word?
         When Coleridge and the Wordworths walked together all over the Quantocks and the Lake District, they were enjoying good company and bringing back the message of nature to heal the world, to save inwardness, to renew the spiritual. Yet when I stood by the black lakes in the cold rain, I didn't think I could say anything to the modern world that would save it. I was not trying to save the world. I was only trying to shake it off.
         And yet, on the third day, or maybe the fourth, alone, 25 miles from the road, I started to connect with a small corner of the 19th Century mind: nature began to heal me. I could actually feel it happening inside me. Never mind the debris of a life that trailed behind me-- I was calming down inside. There was the sound of the wind, and my eyes were filling with the natural world.
         On the fifth day, the rain had stopped for a while and the clouds had a slight tint of silver among the heavier gray. The alpine grasses and shrubs were a deep, soggy green you could swim in. The stony ridges knifed down into fog and disappeared up into clouds. I shouldered my pack with its extra weight of dampness and began to retrace my steps back toward the civilized world.
         Not in a hurry then. I stopped and looked at every view of the country as they were altered by a dip of a valley or a rise of a ridge. And yet I made good time, because I felt strong on my legs, and proud of the feeling of repaired strength inside me.

                                        (Another Rain-- a Flashback)

         It began to rain again as I recrossed those beautiful high meadows on the O'Neil Pass Trail, and I remembered another rain--a couple of years before, on the Skyline Trail-- when I had come over a slight rise and the bushes began to shake ahead of me and a bear with two cubs jumped out directly into the trail.
         I remembered how I had come to an abrupt stop as the cubs slipped over the bank into a clump of small trees. The sow, however, stood right in the trail looking at me. She stamped her front feet and emitted a puff of gray breath in a harsh, rasping exhale that I could hear. I walked backwards slowly, and when it didn't look like the bear would charge, I turned around and walked quietly back the direction I came. After a distance, I looked back to see the sow going down into the patch of trees where the cubs were. They were just below the trail, too close to pass by, so I climbed up the mountainside and crossed over a safe distance above the bears, stumbling over the rocks and wading through the soaked foliage, and finally descending back to the trail.
         The Skyline trail is unmaintained and a heavy rain turns parts of the trail into a flowing creek. Later, in fact, when the trail intersected a real creek, I temporarily got off trail by following the creek that was actually a creek, instead of the creek that was the trail!
         And I remembered, after I had detoured around the bears, how I had gazed back at the wild-looking meadow behind me. It was profoundly beautiful in the gray wetness with its stiff slants of rain, depths of greenness, and drifting and snarled thoughts of fog. My boots were in water two or three inches deep, and a rivulet of rain poured off the brim of my hat. I knew that this was what I had come there for. It was profound, and meaningful, and all alive with wildness in the deluge. Not me, I wasn't profound. But it was.

                         (Welcomed back by Uncivil Civilization)

 And on this trip-- in case I needed to be reassured that what I had seen on the Skyline trail was not a dream-- the meadows of the O'Neil Pass Trail were just as beautiful. I made it back to the East Fork of the Quinault Trail and descended again to Enchanted Valley. The ranger said he had come out to my camp the morning I had left to warn me that the weather forecast had changed for the worse, but I was already gone. Now, he said, the forecast was for continuing rain-- straight, with no optimism.
         I already had 12 miles behind me but I decided to make for the trailhead, another 13 miles, and see if I could get there before dark. I was insane, in an exhilarated sort of way. It seemed to me that the river and I were pouring down the gorge to the sea, just like we had equal rights to do so. I stepped over the roots of huge, river-bottom cedars and splashed through the creeks that slid down the draws. Hurrying again-- but for completely different reasons than those that drove me into the woods. Not an escaped convict on the run, but more of a colossus, in imagination, some deus machina out of nowhere, marching down upon the bickering world.
         I made it. I outran the darkness. But I had to turn on the headlights driving out the North Shore road to the highway. The potholes-- let's call them road lakes-- hadn't changed much. I turned south on Highway 101 and drove a couple of miles beyond Lake Quinault to where the traffic was stopped dead, cars lined up and going nowhere under the dripping trees.
         There was a hostage crisis in a small hamlet a few miles ahead. People were being held at gunpoint in a house next to the highway. Highway 101 South was closed, and there was no detour around it. No-- it wasn't like detouring around bears in the Olympics where you just keep your distance, just walk around, leave well enough alone, live and let live. And it would take forever to go around by Forks, Port Angeles, Sequim, and the Hood Canal.
         It's funny how women stay in the cars at times like this, but men just have to get out. They have to analyze the situation, stand around in a circle, apply their aggregate common-sense freely to something they really know nothing about-- nothing except the gossip a rather singular chip truck driver was giving us from his CB radio, in between lecturing us on coastal weather, ecology, truck driving, and the War in Vietnam.
         Men have got to speculate. There we were: salesmen, California vacationers, truck drivers and hikers. Someone argued that they ought to let anyone drive on through who was personally willing to accept the risk, and they all laughed when I said, "Sure, but just don't pick up any hitch-hikers." Finally, everything that could be said, had been said, and the rain was increasing. The chip truck driver became fed up with our collective ignorance and rolled up his window.
         We drifted back to our vehicles. I asked the people behind me to honk if I fell asleep, and the line started moving again. I sat in my truck and laid my head on the steering wheel. As soon as I closed my eyes I was storming down that river again: over the roots, through the muck holes, knocking water off the ferns and leaves-- each corner of the trail leading to more trail, more trail, more trail through the woods. The images flowed through my mind like a torrent, and my legs wouldn't settle down. They kept striding out across the floorboard, bumping against the pedals.
         Whatever junk my mind had been filled with when I started this trip had been replaced with these images, these streaming sensations of the Olympic woods. And I was carrying them home with me, along with all that wet gear in the back of the truck. Home? Everybody go home, the hostage has been released.
          A car horn woke me up. The line was moving. I rolled down the windows so that the wet marine air would keep me awake. We drove in parade through the small town where an assortment of police cars, from an assortment of towns miles apart, surrounded a sagging, brightly-lit shack by the side of the road. After that, the traffic gained speed, stretching itself out through the night, and I was once again alone, looking after the headlights as they probed the dark, following the turns of the highway.
 
 
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