Tag: Stanley

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Alone

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone.
–Orson Welles

The breeze slipped through the tops of the beetle-weakened conifers and headed east. The light from the setting sun cast its rays through the phalanx of dying trees illuminating spots here and there around the parking lot. Three pickups sat like abandoned hulks.

I walked left and right and back and forth, kept looking at my watch, listening for the sound of anything besides the zephyrs in the pines. Nothing. No birds, no coyotes, no squirrels. Nothing.

I plopped in my old camp chair and turned on my battery-powered lantern and tried to read a short story from Rebecca Lawton’s, Steelies and Other Endangered Species. I kept standing up, peering into the darkness. I searched for a place to sit where my back wasn’t exposed. No large rocks close by. No thick trees. I sat back down and picked up the book. The approach of night chilled my back. Like something had sneaked up behind me. I stood up.

Finally I escaped into my bedroll, covered my head and tried to sleep. But sleep proved elusive. I thought about home and work I needed to do and about what might be out there sniffing around the car, my gear, my bedroll. I thought about tomorrow’s hike and I thought about the possibility of rain and I thought about Vietnam, and Arizona, and California, Illinois, Seattle, Boise. It seemed I relived my entire life as I rolled and tossed and turned. I kept sitting up, looking around.

I recalled a fable by Edgar Alan Poe that I read when I was a kid titled “Siope,” about a character who cursed the noise and horror of a storm in the wilderness, and the noise and storm then became silence, and the character cursed the silence for it was more frightening than the chaos of the storm.

And then I fell asleep.

I awoke at 01:45. Wide awake. I wondered why. I wondered if something was prowling around my campsite. I wondered if I should look into the black of night or if I should stay buried inside my sleeping bag. I listened. Nothing. Not even the breeze in the treetops.

Hell Roaring Lake © Ken Rodgers 2014
Hell Roaring Lake
© Ken Rodgers 2014

I threw back the tarp and sat up. The night chill hit me and I shivered. Nothing except the Milky Way spread east to west like a raging mountain river surging between the snaggled treetops. The galaxy was bright and white and yellow with hints of blue and red scattered around. A satellite blinked across the night and shooting stars rocketed from the north and the southeast. I saw a plane fly over.

I laid back and folded my arms behind my head and watched the magnificent stream of stars and galaxies that thronged the black heavens. I retraced my thoughts, the earlier ones. And then the stream of stars led me to think about something I’d heard years before. It was from the motivational guru Earl Nightingale and about personal security and by inference, fear. I am paraphrasing here:

You want security? You are living on a piece of rock that is spinning around at about one-thousand miles per hour. The earth orbits the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. The Milky Way, our galaxy, travels at the speed of five-hundred-fourteen-thousand miles per hour. Our universe is expanding at a rate signified by an almost unimaginable number. And you feel secure? You are not secure.

As I looked at the amazing patterns of galaxy upon galaxy and the flash and sputter of dying asteroids, I thought, this is what you are out here for. Security. Or your need to overcome your need for security and your penchant to let fear (fear of what…suppression, failure, rejection, death?) depress your drive to do what you must do.

I thought, I am out here. Alone. By my choice. Not a choice I normally make, but that’s why I’m here, lying on the ground, unable to sleep. Overcoming my fear of being alone and all the fears I wish not to think about. I am overcoming my constant need for security.

Then I went to sleep again only to wake at 04:30 to the sound of tires knocking over rocks. I rose and climbed inside the car and watched. Headlights blared into the stillness. The rumble of the engine destroyed the silence. I listened and watched and wondered who would come into this place this time of night, or morning. They parked and a door creaked, then slammed. What did they want out here? I heard the sound of steps and looked in my rear view mirror. Nothing. Again, a door creaked open, then slammed. Then the sound of feet shuffling off in the direction of Hell Roaring Lake. I wondered if it was a good idea to hike in the dark. It seemed like whoever had arrived came as a single person. I heard no voices and soon I heard nothing at all. Whoever had arrived hiked alone, at night.

Later as the morning hinted at showing up, I ate and dressed in layers, put on my ball cap, my bright blue day pack, laced up my hiking shoes and took off up into the wilderness area. Nothing but a squirrel on a tree trunk and a buck leaping across the meadow. Nothing but beetle-killed trees, and rocks. A chipmunk skittered across the trail. Then the sound of a woodpecker. A Cassin’s vireo landed in a tree and flitted from one branch to another. So, I thought, I am not alone after all.

But who was I kidding? I was. Not a human being in sight although there were tracks in the mud from other hikers, one of whom must have been the person I heard arrive so early in the morning. What if a mountain lion stalked me? I kept spinning around in three-hundred-sixty-degree pirouettes trying to catch a glimpse of what might be behind me. What if I encountered a mother bear with cubs? At my age, could I run fast enough and climb high enough in one of the skinny, dying trees?

I reached Hell Roaring Lake. The morning sun etched audacious patterns into the craggy spires of the Sawtooth peaks to my west. Fish jumped. I saw a snowy plover and some kind of grebe I could not identify. I looked for bald eagles or osprey. But nothing else appeared except a jumble of black storm clouds lowering over the peaks to my west.

The sullen charcoal color of the clouds alarmed me so I started back down the trail. A sudden summer bluster blew right up behind me. Lightning and thunder suddenly filled my mind and I hurried along towards the car. But the storm caught me. I thought about all the things I’d learned. Don’t get beneath a tree because lightning might hit it. Keep yourself as low as possible. I halted and yanked my poncho out of my daypack and found a rock to lean against. What would happen if I got struck by lightning? Bright flashes and thunder stabbed at the land and at my eardrums. I squatted low and let the rain run down the poncho and onto the ground. Blinding blares of lightning caused me to flinch and shut my eyes as I waited for the sound of the thunder. You can get a pretty good estimate of how far away from you the lightning is striking by counting the seconds between flash and boom. Some of the lightning got pretty close. What if lightning split a thick tree and it fell on me? Crushed me? Who would help me?

Ken Rodgers
Ken Rodgers

The rain squall blew east and I started out again towards the car. Another storm hove into sight and I started to trot but that was not sufficient either. I ended up squatting beneath a thick conifer as hail peppered everything around me. I thought of those hailstorms in the Great Plains where hail grows so large it can pummel a man to death. I feared that might happen as the hail came in the teeth of a more serious blow. What would happen to me if the pounding balls of ice knocked me unconscious? The hail ganged in the sunken boot tracks on the hiking trail, but it did not harm me.

I finally got back to the car and shucked my gear and tossed my pack and wet poncho into the back and eased my way down the rock-strewn road that leads to the pavement. I stopped in the town of Stanley and treated myself to a thick, greasy cheeseburger. As I headed home, I metaphorically slapped myself on the back. I had done it. Not that I had any illusions about conquering fear. We are born alone and we live alone and we die alone and fear of all kinds of things is perched on the shoulders of our consciousness like red-headed vultures. But for the moment, I’d gone out alone and slept alone and hiked alone. Alone.

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Leaf Peeping

I am a desert rat and have since childhood mouthed dialogue about the beauty of the mountains vis à vis the desert. The mountains generally have no sand and wind that drives the sand and pits the paint job on your new Mercedes Benz, no short-legged plants, no spiny cacti, but trooping phalanxes of spruce and fir and pine. But here I am after a life lived and I’m still in the desert. The mountains are close, but I still hover around the roots of the big sage, the bitterbrush, the winter fat.

Once it was mesquite and palo verde and saguaro and Indian wheat. The names have changed but the milieu remains the same. Relatively dry, relatively warm. Big open vistas, a certain beauty to the landscape, even if it is harsh, or its ambiance is harsh.

Yet the harsh nature of the desertscape is no more dangerous than what one encounters in the pine-clad high country to the north of Boise, Idaho, where we live. I’d say fifty below is harsh even if it inhabits the pristine beauty of a winterland of ice crystals and frozen mist and miles and miles of spear-point spruce sheathed in an armor of ice. Maybe that is why I stick to the lower extremities of earth.

Regardless of my obvious preference for desert climes, for six years I lived in the high mountains of southern New Mexico and the legacy it left me, among other things, was a love for the turning of the leaves. Once I read an essay in The New Yorker Magazine by Stephen King about “leaf peepers.” When I saw the title I was curious about leaf peepers and what kind of insect they might be that sat on leaves and peeped their lives away in search of sex, breeding and compliance with the ultimate command to all life on earth: survive. When King described the leaf peepers, I was surprised to find out they are the people who come to Maine to watch the colors of the maple trees change from green to red and gold. As I read that article, I knew right then that at heart, I was a leaf peeper. I admit it. I am a tourist of foliage, a consumer of ripe reds, and orange tones that look like phosphorescent tints, and rusty hues that are redolent with memories of old Caterpillar engines left out in the rain for ages.

Two weekends ago, Betty and I, along with friends, ventured to Sun Valley, Idaho for a number of reasons, one being to take part in leaf peeping. We arrived on a Thursday evening and were disappointed with the color, but it was spitting a mixture of rain and snow and there was snow in the high country and I figured as soon as it cleared off, the frost would arrive and then the color change would accelerate.

On a Saturday morning that broke clear and fresh, we pulled out before sunrise and headed north out of the Wood River Valley, over Galena Summit and down into the Stanley Basin. As we broke over the summit, the Sawtooth Mountains on the west of the basin and the Boulder-White Clouds on the east reared up with their high shoulders, their peaks covered with fresh snow. The sunlight was just breaching the dawn and lighted up the peaks of the Sawtooths snaking from south to north. Sawtooth is an apt name for the peaks that remind one of the saws lumberjacks used to employ to knock down the big trees, long before chain saws showed up. Saws with large, sharp teeth that could bite into live wood, or flesh.

Fog and mist and nary a hint of air pollution hung in the air. Pronghorns grazed in the pastures of cow and sheep outfits with names like Busterback Ranch and Stanley Basin Ranch and Sawtooth Mountain Ranch.

I love aspen and learned it I suppose from the huge groves that cape the cold sides of the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico. Aspen grow in huge gangs there, and love places where the snow gets deep and stays deep into the spring. Elk and deer and black bear seem drawn, as do I, to the groves.

When autumn arrives, the trees know (do they know like we do on some epistemological level?) that they need to go into survival mode to make it through winter. The green color in the leaves vacates and leaves the underlying golds and reds behind. The sugar in the leaves gets trapped and the frost, when seared by sunlight, reacts with the sugar and the leaves take on even more brilliant hues. This is what I adore, this chemical reaction turned into art….art….art.

When I was young, I went on camping trips with the Boy Scouts up to Holly Lake in the White Mountains of Arizona. It was usually August, so the leaves had not changed by then, but I still wondered at the way the Rocky Mountain Maple leaves reminded me of Picasso-like hands and how the sunlight caught in the dimples of the aspen leaves and shimmered as they quaked in the alpine breezes. (The locals called them “quakies.”)

One summer as we loaded vehicles to head out of the high country, we discovered a porcupine climbing an aspen. Since porcupines tend to be nocturnal, I suppose it was climbing up to find a notch in the limbs to sleep the day away, or maybe it was headed for an aspen leaf breakfast. I watched with…with…with what….horror? as some of the bigger boys bombarded the creature with stones, then large rocks and big rounds of aspen we had cut down for firewood. I recall the porcupine fell to the ground and I refused to look at it as they laughed and finished it off. I walked away and got in the back seat of an old green Chevy Suburban and we drove out of the mountains, back into the Sonoran Desert.

But on this latest leaf-peeping trip of a couple of weeks ago, the violence of humanity was not so readily apparent. Nestled in the coves, the rincons, the draws of the mountains and foothills lining Stanley Basin were stands of aspen in varying degrees of leaf peeper heaven. Yellow, gold and a red tints that seemed to capture all the glitz of Times Square as they shined at us, neon-like, as we drove the road toward Stanley. And they shined something else at us, a promise…a promise of more color to come.