Trauma
“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is
mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they
become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust
with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.” Fred
Rogers
I am teetering on breaking at times over this vacation as I
surf, paddle, drive, and camp across the Pacific Northwest. It’s nothing new
really. Emotions are like waves. Cold and yet exhilarating, they can be clean
barreling waves you long for in salty dreams, but sometimes they are rough wind
swells, choppy and confusing. The beauty of the ocean versus the river is the
waves wash over you and they relent. Rivers rage or run dry, but those time
spans are longer than any breath you can hold. The ocean doesn’t keep you down
forever. Things pass from tide to tide, from swell to swell, from storm to
storm; the ocean is ever-changing. Sometimes a wave will hold you down, tumble
you to the sandy bottoms, and those fractions of seconds pass like eternities,
and some don’t make it out of the surf, but it isn’t common. Usually, I follow
my leash upwards, my surfboard a balloon back to sanity, and the gasp of air an
opening back to the world above water, the darkness quelled. But if you stay in
the ocean, then the waves will come again, they always do. It is a rare day to
see the ocean glassy calm.
There has been no surf this whole trip. Again there is no
swell as I stop to camp on the Salmon River in Oregon. I have been here before
for a friend’s wedding. I pulled into the parking lot late last night, and
pirated my campsite right there. The morning tide has almost completely backed
out to ocean. I jump onto the inflatable stand-up paddleboard and ride the
outgoing tide to the ocean. We glide on the shallow brackish water with ease.
On the other side of the lagoon is an old YMCA camp my friends rented for their
wedding a few years back. It was a rough time for me then and it is strange the
way emotions become embedded into places, even ones you only visited once, but
I remember my emotions from then, and I remember the long solitary beach here
and I look forward to walking it again, a different person at a different time,
washed by a different emotion, but still the same too. We ride the tide out to
the edge of ocean and lagoon, surprising a few young otter pups and then some
seals again as we coast the swell to sea. I carry the board above the tide line
and we run down the beach together and yet alone.
Lately, I can’t help but think about what it will be like
when I don’t have Chico with me anymore. I joke about wondering what will
happen to the voice I use when I speak for Chico. People ask me if that is what
I think he sounds like, but no it doesn’t. He seems a much too serious of a dog
for my cartoon voice I give him. His voice is only mine and I wonder if I will
walk around the house talking to myself after he is gone. It is almost too sad
to think about. He, too, loves the ocean.
He loves the ecotone, the soft wet sand, the smells of distant far off places,
objects washed to shore. The freedom of the open sand, the coolness on his
paws, he runs down to the waves, careful to never get too far in.
In Guatemala I would try to lure him into bigger shore
break to wash over him. His precious head soaked, dripping as he looks at me
indignantly. He hates to get his head wet. He bounds along the shoreline in certain
dog bliss. I run after him and act like I will get him. He prances along like a
puppy with his front paws galloping into the air. In Guatemala, he would chase
the sand crabs down to the ocean, pawing at them, pouncing on them. Sometimes
he would crush them and then almost feel bad when they wouldn’t move. Sometimes
they would clamp onto his beard or lip or paw and he would shake them off with
a quick whimper, and as usual, look up at me with indignation. All pain seems
to be my fault.
We sit down behind a rock to block the wind coming off the
ocean and to write for a bit. Chico finds a post from where to watch. He is
always on guard, always watching. I make a lot of my decisions in my life
thinking about my dog, making sure it is something he can do, or somewhere he
can go. I figure, he lives his entire life just for me, and maybe the food I
give him, it is really nothing for his dedication and loyalty. He’s not brave,
and will usually bark and then run next to me, but he is loyal. Maybe that is
more important. Chico sits with his legs spread out, nose to the wind, an
extension of my own senses, he reaches out beyond me.
Eventually, another dog runs up to us, no owner in sight. He
is a rambunctious young dog running circles around Chico, but that doesn’t stop
him. If he was a mountain lion or bear, I think we wouldn’t have fared too
great. Thanks Cheeks.
His tags read Percy. He wants to join our clan, but Chico
keeps pushing him away. Chico sits closer to me, watches to chase off Percy;
however, Percy is undaunted and sneaks behind us, crawls through the grass
until his nose touches me. Chico jumps up and runs him off again, but Percy is
too fast. I think dogs often want to join our clan of two, to hit the road, the
paddle, the boat, the airplane, the canoe, and adventure life with us. Can
other dogs smell the adventure and freedom through Chico, the scent in his ass
and beard? Eventually I call the name on the tag and find the owners are
staying at the nearby YMCA camp. They are preparing for some sort of day there;
staff is on with their shirts. A few young kids come running to get Percy.
Percy doesn’t want to go. They try to carry him away, but he struggles lose and
runs back to Chico and me…twice.
In Portland I stay with some really good friends and we
paddle the Willamette and the Sandy River. Most of my friends have children now
and they all raise them different, or maybe the child raises them differently.
Their 20-month old recently stepped into hot coals and badly burned her hand
and foot. Their child was handling it as only a child can…barely stopping her.
The parents seemed a bit worse off, but the wounds were healing fast for all of
them. The mother is a trauma therapist and we talked briefly about how trauma
happens and what might come of this from their child. Trauma always happens. She
says it doesn’t have to be something that gets locked away in the body, but the
important part was the love and support there for the person after—that they do
well.
When I leave, I drive up the Columbia River. The heat of the
day is coming fast, but the mighty river is unfathomable. This river has
carried so many people, fed so many people, and captured the imagination, spawning
salmon and migrations. Water seems to connect us all. I have hiked many of the
mountain headwaters of rivers that dump into the Columbia. We often think that
a river stops when it reaches the ocean and it starts on the mountaintops from
winter snowstorms. I have an image of the way water attacks land. Water sends
storms high above like drone attacks, rains down like chemical warfare, erodes
land like terrorism, and carries bits of the dead to sea to wash on the beaches
littered like plastics. The dams of the Columbia are terrifically horrifying. I
think about dams every time I drive up out of Boise towards my father’s house
as I pass along Arrowrock and Lucky Peak dams.
Arrowrock holds my imagination because of Wallace Stegner’s
book Angle of Repose. An angle of repose is the amount of materials one can
pile before slumping off due to gravities pull. The only way to go higher is to
go wider also. Stegner’s book is loosely, if not controversially, taken from
the life of Arthur De Wint Foote, a man of vision for the American west, but
who seems to have been too far ahead in his thinking. Foote saw promise in the
Boise Valley and purchased the water rights to the Boise River hoping to run
irrigation ditches all around the valley and turn the almost desert-like Boise
into a fertile growing valley. Foote failed, but the idea was moved forward by
the Bureau of Reclamation and finished exactly 100 years ago. At the time,
Arrowrock Dam was the largest concrete arch dam in the world. 225 feet thick in
concrete at the base, angling to 15 feet thick at the top, the dam is 348 feet
tall. The 580,000 cubic yards of cement hold back 286,000 acre-feet of water
for irrigation to Boise farmers. I drive pass this water often going up the
mountains to my Dad’s place.
At my Dad’s house, I can breathe. Maybe, the ocean is so far
away, that call of the sirens is muffled. While salmon once reached all the way
up Grimes Creek, they don’t anymore. While sometimes I feel like the ocean is
attacking land, salmon and steelhead are my meditation. It is hard to imagine
the historic, or maybe, prehistoric salmon runs. Millions upon millions of
salmon from the ocean spawning up rivers, hiding behind rocks, resting in
eddies, a thousand mile journey towards death and rebirth. In Alaska, I would
get glimpses of this past, in days when nets weren’t cast in front of the
river, the salmon would push with the tide. I miss those days. I don’t like how
I long for the past sometimes because longing doesn’t bring it back. I can’t
let go the past. The brain loops like seasons and tides and movements of the
moon, and migrations of animals, and blossoming of flowers, and the spinning
earth on the axis, and my own migration to see friends and family and to hold
onto love that seems to constantly slip away, erode out to ocean, spawn and
die. I am still slipping.
“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path.” Buddha
My Dad and I go with some of his hunting friends to hike
into a basin to fish. One of his friends told us about a lake he found that was
filled with 18-inch trout. My foot is hurt and hiking is painful, but physical
pain is nothing. It is hot and we hike into the Frank Church River of No Return
Wilderness to Island Lake. The hike is exposed and suffocating because a fire
burned through the wilderness a few years back. The summer has been hot.
Drought is everywhere. Even the most devout climate change denier whispers
about the changing seasons. During a long uphill section, there is no shade and
we power past it all, longing for the water. The mosquitoes seem relentless,
but we reach the lake with ease. I didn’t bring a fishing pole; I don’t have a
license. I haven’t in a while. Something broke inside of me with fishing many
years back. I tell my Dad I just want to watch. Chico and I circle the lake,
and see along the banks the trout mulling about. A mayfly hatch is dancing
along the shores and the fish dart from shadows to the surface, pull them down,
and disappear back. The explosion into the calm excites me. It is commitment
and purpose. I can feel the animal inside of me, the desire to hunt. I love the
soft feel of fish in my hands. I hate the death. There isn’t a gem in the world
that can capture the colors of fish. Rainbow, cutthroat, bull, dolly, brown,
golden, brook—salmo, onco, char. I am enamored by fish, my past schooled with
them, the stories I tell are those I share with fishermen, and yet, I don’t
anymore.
I walk to the far end of the lake where the rocks waterfall
into mirrors. Marmot peak over rocks, the pika carry tufts of grass deep into
the crevices. A slight breeze pushes all the mayflies against the rocks where I
take off my clothes and dive into the cold water, hoping for baptism, hoping
for release. I pull myself out onto a flat rock and take in the sun, look out
down the canyon to the scarred hillside where fires followed wind up gullies
and across ridges. It bulldozed right over the lake; about half the trees were
spared. I am fascinated by those that remain, how many fires have they endured
or been spared.
Slowly my Dad and his buddies fish their way around the lake
towards me on the rock. I can hear the hollers of success and the exasperation
of loss as sounds echo across the flat water. One is younger, he told me a
story about his girlfriend and how her ex-husband called her one-day at work
and shot himself on the phone for her to hear. He has always been giving and
welcoming and I can see it sometimes leads to pain. It is his cabin we stayed
at and I biasedly scoff at the collection of Bill O’Reilley books about Killing
Lincoln, and JFK, and Jesus. He rarely talks politics, but chooses to talk
hunting. They all talk hunting. He walks
past me and continues to fish along the lake.
My dad comes and sits down for some snacks with me and tells
me about what he caught and what he lost and the photos he took so people would
believe him. His other friend approaches. He has caught and kept the largest
fish of the day and it is a prize specimen. He takes off his shirt and fishes
with his pistol tucked behind him. He was a police chief and left California
for a job in Alaska running a prison and retired back to Idaho to a small cabin
next to my dad. They are becoming good friends. I also frowned at the FOX news
homepage and the stack of Ann Coulter books tucked onto the shelf when he
graciously let me use his computer to complete some work. He tells my dad he
wants to get me hooked on shooting and we’ve gone before. I’ve always enjoyed
shooting. He thinks of me as “liberal” and therefore with certain assumption
about the world, and I do the same surely. He is teaching my dad to load his
own bullets and they often exchange beers, as they both can’t stop talking
about bowhunting for Elk this season together. He comes over to my Dad’s house
and they swap ideas and theories and help each other as people who live in the
mountains do. My Dad gets along with almost everyone.
The Bosnian neighbor across the canyon stops by often,
usually brings his own slightly warm beer, and is always there to help with any
chore. He has assisted my Dad on his truck; he was a mechanic back in Bosnia
and believes in fixing everything. He tells me stories of the war, horrific and
honest stories. He tells me about asking a doctor for pills for erectile
dysfunction because he can’t have sex with his wife and his fellow soldiers
make fun of him, but they fight in their villages, for their villages, and
their family and life right there with them. The other soldiers eventually ask
for pills too. They were all terrified of dying and loss. He talks about
crapping his pants once when he was driving a car with ammo and an airplane
started dive-bombing them and they were swerving to get to shelter.
His stories remind me of my martial arts teacher’s stories
of what it was really like to watch communists come into his country and to
lose everything. I tell him stories all the time of what is on the internet and
what is on the news and what friends say and he laughs at most of them. He is
the only person I know who really prepares for a tyrannical government while
others puff chests and argue on the Internet, he makes real plans that involve
the people he loves. His plans aren’t what you think, but once you know them,
you know this comes from a person who has lived it.
When we leave for the day, it is hot, but the hike is all
down hill. My foot hurts, but I take
ibuprofen and power down the hill. My injuries make my body feel heavy. I try
to remember how to feel light again. I like how the body can almost fall with
gravity; each step is just a brake as the body collapses down the broken rock
ravines. Chico is hot, and I don’t stop much. I hike in my head, thinking too
much about things too big and yet too real. I think about climate, and water,
and war, and death, and family, and weapons, and religion, and guns, and
ecosystems, and fish, and hunting, and political parties, and rhetoric over and
over and over—as if the solution is somewhere deep inside of me, and I can’t go
deep enough to find it. We get back to the truck and I fall asleep in it,
listening to my father and his friends talk hunting and fishing, and spot
ridges where they might return, and techniques they could use. The hunt and the
hunted.
After that, I head out with my Dad’s neighbor, to my Uncle’s
farm across town to the agricultural land by the Snake River. My Dad’s neighbor
jokes that he is petitioning to join the Millard family and become a brother.
He likes my uncle and my uncle likes him. They all had a recent bonding
experience fishing trip together in Montana. Today, we are all going to float
the Snake River together. My Uncle doesn’t get out as much as I wish he would.
There was a time in my life when I laughed harder than ever each night over beers
after working construction with him. We would linger around the shop and he’d
tell me stories and probe for some too and teach me about life in ways only
uncles can. All of my uncles are such amazing people, so honest and open to me.
My Uncle was in Vietnam and I know the war still haunts him. He’s told me some
stories and some have come from his brothers. I don’t know it all, but I know
the killing hurt him. I know his job was to kill people. I know he has a good
work ethic, and I know it hurts him now. I think he wishes it had been
different. He used to tell me a story about how he would dump out his grenades
from his pouch and fill them with mangos.
We don’t talk about any war. We float the river together,
tell jokes to each other, and make fun of each other. When my uncle is going,
it is often aggrandizing and sometimes self-deprecating, and always witty. I
love and respect him with all my heart. My aunt is equally remarkable, and
filled with energy. The river is slow moving; catfish and suckers dart around the
shallows. I think I see Sturgeon too, but I have never caught one before. I
have read about them. They are an ancient fish, unchanged in the fossil record.
Some varieties can grow to be 12 feet long, and some live upwards of 100 years.
They are bottom feeders, threatened by habitat destruction like so many of our
fishes.
Chico and I sometimes just float on the paddleboard, and I
think about this river, and how often it has been in my memories—memories of how
I used to sit above the Bonneville Shoreline and imagine and the ancient lake
breaking the borders and rushing down the Snake River and out the Columbia. The
lake breaking was my own failing relationship. My interpretation of nature
blended into the interpretation of my present, emotions embedded into places. I
think about my grandpa on my mom’s side and how he would ride train from Twin
Falls to Shoshone and up to Ketchum, how he fled a life of working on the
trains like his father did and his family all did, and ran away with my
grandmother to California. Perhaps I romanticize how they both escaped their
pasts to make a future together.
I miss my grandmother, the matriarch of the family, the glue
that held us together, slipped with dementia into childhood memories and into
death, and we seemed to scatter like her memories, as if we each have bits we
chase like litter in the wind. No key to know how to put our family back
together. Her past was never gone. Those are the deepest memories, the things
we return to, even when we think we escaped them.
My Dad’s dad, my grandpa Millard, is getting old. At 98 he
had to go to a nursing home for the first time. I hear he is ornery there and I
can only imagine. He has tried to leave many times, told people to call him a
taxi, and tried to walk out the door. My dad, my brother, and I head over to
visit with him. I bring Chico with me. It is dinnertime and all the residents
are in eating. Chico can’t come into the
dining hall, but as soon as I walk into the entrance, one lady sees Chico from
a distance. She instantly stops eating as if by instinct, she turns her
wheelchair and rolls directly towards Chico, her expression changing to joy and
memories. She loves Chico and tells me
stories of the dogs from her life. I don’t want to be this person. I don’t want
to leave Chico to just a memory, but I know it is inevitable. She had a dachshund
she loved and she went everywhere with her. We are informed my grandfather is
on the second floor, but I can’t just walk away from the lady. I try to listen
to her stories. I try to take in her memories as if I must be a container for
them. I can’t stand the thought of memories pouring from you, percolated deep
into water tables beneath us, lost into the giant underground lakes. I think
about fracking and how we are contaminating ancient water, Bonneville water,
and Sturgeon water.
We go up to the second floor and my Dad gets my grandpa from
his dinner and wheels him out to us. His demeanor lights up when he sees Chico.
My Dad asks if he recognizes me, and he says he does, and I can’t hide behind a
beard, but his eyes seem to search and he focuses back down on Chico and pets
him over and over again, smiling a toothless smile. He isn’t wearing his
dentures and it ages him drastically. I was already warned about this, but I
hate to see this. My Dad tells me my grandpa never wanted to whither away in a
nursing home. He made him promise to just drop him off in the woods, let him
die with dignity. However, it was his decision to go to the hospital. He woke
up from his house with fear of death, fear of something wrong. He does not want
to go gently into that night. He has been slipping back into memories of World
War Two. He talks to people as if they are in the army or if they are civilians
in a war zone. War must lodge itself so deep into the body it never leaves. We
have been at war too long now. Whole generations of people reared under wars,
but wars most never even acknowledge are happening—wars so distant and foreign,
wars we forget we are fighting, or forget why. We only know the word “terrorism.”
To be at war must damage us all, to think whole nations of people want us dead,
and to hear our own people say the same back, to live thinking about enemies.
It must still be there, lodged into the communal conscious. Our land is filled
with people always returning from war, millions of veterans seek release. The
VA covers my grandfather’s stay at the nursing home. There have been so many
wars since WWII.
My grandfather doesn’t hear well. He says it was all the
shooting of guns, both military and hunting through his life. He once told me
that a great regret of his was that he didn’t take better care of his ears. As
we talk, another older guy shuffles up staring at Chico mumbling about a past
dog he once had. Although he never says his name, it is written across the
Velcro tabs on his shoes next to dried spaghetti—Allen. He begins to tell me
about his deceased wife. She died from smoking. He said she would smoke in the
car and flick the butts out the window and the wind would carry them back and
land on the back seats and burn holes. I chuckle at what he remembers and he
chastised me for laughing. She could have burned up, he says, it isn’t funny.
Seats back then didn't have fire retardant. He then tells me about his father
and when he died there was an open casket and his aunt spit on his fathers open
grave. He told his aunt he would snap her neck and he explains to me that he
could have back then because he hauled 100-pound sacks of potatoes around and
he was in shape. I want to let go of all the wrongs people have done to me and
me to them. Take those memories away.
We hug my grandfather and let him return to his food. I want
him to live forever and yet this isn't the way he lived. I worry I may not see
him again.
I think of my other grandfather, how far away he moved, and
the pain I know it causes his kids and us grandkids and the great grandkids
too, but he is seeking happiness too. I understand that. I want to pull
everyone I love together, buy property for them all to live close to me, and I
wish I could catch them all. They say the path of enlightenment is about
letting go. I don't ever want to let them go.
My boss told me that Buddha named his only son Fetter before
climbing the wall and leaving him forever. I wonder what chains bind me, which
walls do I climb, and which paths do I strike out towards. Isn't the more
difficult one to stay and join?
My Dad, my brother, and I pack up for our annual backpacking
trip. This year we are leaving the Sawtooth Wilderness and returning to the
Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. We arrive late at the night and
sleep at the trailhead. The hike the next day is long and exposed because a
fire burned through the area. We wake up early and hit the trail the next day.
All day, clouds threaten the skies. When we get to the lake, we quickly set up
tarps and tents to protect ourselves. I walk back to the rocky point of the
lake and watch the clouds expand across the open skies while my dad fishes. My
brother, recovering from a cold, sleeps. My dad and I day hike up to the next
lake. The lake appears sterile for fishing.
We walk around the rocky shores and see no movement. We look back out
across the watershed, I can see where the fire ravaged up ridgelines, jumped
rivers, and ran up the valleys. Fire isn’t an exception in the high
country. It is part of the norm. Fire
creates new growth. I know this
technically, but the destruction looks devastating. I can see the new growth, the fireweed
emerging from even the most scorched earth, and yet, it feels sad to me. I
think nature is a reflection; the metaphors we create are how we see at that
moment. I want to see the beauty of the fire.
I walk off to poop while my Dad waits for me. When I return,
he says I pushed a bunch of Elk out from the trees and they headed up over the
ridge. We hike around trying to find them again. My dad is a hunter. He sees
terrain like a hunter, thinks about how he would work the cirque, where they
might bed down, where they might push through. I know the Native Americans used
fire. They were the first managers of this land. They used fire to open up the
understory, to open up hunting grounds, to be able to see the game move better,
and they created a healthy forest ecosystem that thrived off the fire. They
say, most of the European settlers walked into a vastly empty America. But it
wasn’t always empty, disease spread like wildfire across the plains and into
the mountains. By the time Cortez reached the capital, most people were
dead. Before Lewis and Clark reached the
Pacific, disease had already crossed the lands. The land felt ghostly empty
because it was. And the few that remained weren’t listened to. We didn’t stop
to ask them how they lived, or what they did. We killed and slaughtered and
took. I remind people often that our national parks, and national forests, the
places where humans don’t live, but visit, were once inhabited. They are
monuments to the successful massacre of the people who once lived here. So
little is left when the victor tells the stories of victory. Am I complacent in
a revisionist history of the world?
The next day, we load of daypacks and hike out of the one
watershed over to the next one to check on some lakes we see on the maps. No
trail is listed so we contour the rocky cliffs hugging the tree line for
passage over the ridge.
We hike off trail to a small peak below Roughneck Lookout to
get a glimpse of Finger Lakes. What I would do to see a thousand-year old timelapse of a mountain growing, breaking, collapsing, and washing down ravines.
Able to stand so tall when united, but once cracked, the individual rocks
spread out, repose is lost. Mountains are always in decay, always relenting.
However, I read that the Sierra Nevada actually gained in height recently
because of loss. With so much water lost, so many lakes running dry, so much
land without moisture, the weight of the entire mountain range has lifted up
off the lake of molten lava on which it floats. The mountains are floating
higher without the depressive weight of water, and yet, life dies from this.
We pass along the scree field beneath the lookout platform
high above on the peak, and in the jumbled mess of rock, paint cans, and tin
cans, and garbage. I doubt it was tossed from the top, but instead, has slowly
cascaded down with the crumbling rocks. Rust stains mark rocks where they sit,
but nothing stays still. Mountains are not still. Trees are not quiet, life
never stops, and we just can’t see it. Life is going so fast for humans, we
breathe in seconds, and give up years. Decades wash away and centuries are
dust.
We jump a dear and push two goats of the scree field; we
hear them before seeing them. The sound
of falling rocks in a quiet life of mountains; the goats bound up over the
ridgeline and disappear. We are not in a place where humans typically go. We
are off trail and aim for a small promenade that looks out over the southern
side of roughneck peak, out to a different watershed above Finger Lakes. We
stop and trundle rocks ourselves, as if moving mountains makes us feel bigger than
we are. The explosion of rocks thunders up the canyon and the rock tumbles
down. Do we hasten the mountains demise?
I stop to write as I look out across the burned forests. The
same fire crossed watershed and moved around mountains. But in my time-lapse of
mountains, a fire is the passing wind that churns a lake, and life settles back
down. I like to see the pockets of survived forests. It needn’t burn so much
and so hot, but neglect works that way. Doing nothing isn’t always the best,
suppressing rarely is, but a few survive, the stalwart ridgeline trees, the
loners escape the torture of fire, a few small families ride the storm like a
farmhouse in a tornado. I know we tend to deify such events, and why not? What
others words work better to tell the story of survival—chance seems too abysmal
and infinitesimal.
Rain falls off and on, thunder rolls, the sun spots the
mountains. We are thankful for the showers and clouds making the hike cooler,
but whom do we thank?
I used to tell people that I would never commit suicide; I
would disappear. I would walk away from it all and reinvent myself. I have been
drawn to such stories of Everett Ruess and Chris McCandless, to the mountain
men traumatized by a Civil War who left, most never to be seen again. I
sometimes long for such reinvention. Some say you can’t walk away from who you
are, but that isn’t it. It isn’t me so much as it is the world around me. I break away from my Dad and brother, tell
them I want to walk around this peak and I will meet them on the other side. I
walk an area I am sure few people ever have been. Often I find little clearings
in the woods and wonder how long one could live right there without being
found. How many places in our wilderness are there to disappear still? I am
sure people do this. I don’t think it is difficult. The hard part of life is
staying and fighting. To look at a broken world and how it is mirrored inside
of you and everyone else and how we mend each other through relations and
through talking and sharing and loving.
And as you put yourself back together, parts are missing,
and as you try to glue yourself to another person, both fractured and missing
parts, we leak, we leak over and over again and those parts are crucial to
living a whole life, and so we apologize, as we chisel the glue that once bound
us away and crumble and cascade down mountains into water. Is the only way we
can be back together to dissolve into nothing, to melt into water, to subduct
deep beneath the ocean into molten lava and burst back forth anew, spewed into
the world? I know my atoms keep leaving me. Everywhere I go I leave bits of
something that once was me and I rarely get that back. My connection is too
tenuous. And yet I keep seeking new places in the world. I long for adventure
and relations and learning and each one takes some part of me away, and gives
back something different. I have no ownership over the atoms and yet I do have
some amount of choice, the food I eat, the places I live, and the people close
to me. We share a space and share atoms and share the air I only partially
breathe and give back to you. Sometimes I want to hold my breath and not let
anymore of me escape. I want to hold on to this right now.
I meet them back on the other side of the ridge. We return
back to our campsite right before the sunsets behind cloud-filled skies. I sit
down on the edge of the lake to watch the colors change across the sky. I learn from nature so much. I know this is
about recovery and rebirth. It is about
healing. Even the way a lake moves and calms in the changing winds, the way
insects emerge at just the right moment, how life opens if you listen and
watch. A robin keeps fluttering by, dancing on the water and perching on a
floating snag, something in her mouth, she gives me a sideways look and
consternates to one side of me and then flutters back to the other. I imagine a
nest is near, but I don’t look. Fish boil in the water feasting on the bloom of
insects. At my feet are the luminescent wings of dragonflies, the remains of
demise, and yet on the shores of the lake are the crusted bodies of the
dragonfly larvae where they crawled from the water to emerge from the hardened
skin. The molten skin still gripped to the grass where they left behind the
old. There is no escaping the skin I am in; my transition can only be
metaphoric. Bats emerge on a light wind as the day darkens. I’ve grown to love
the long setting suns of northern latitudes, the way the light lingers, and
fights night off early. It is only part of a perpetual cycle, and each has
moments of glory in them.
My father and brother go to bed and I sit up and watch the
skies move, the water move, the clouds move, and stare out at the burned trees.
Something Rilke once said sticks with me:
“Love your solitude and try to sing out with the
pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write,
and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if
what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the
stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course
you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind;
be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your
doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t
be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you
have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you
yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form
that is not your own…and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a
love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith
that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can
travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet
In the morning, we hike off trail again to another lake on
our way leaving. We hike through the burned out sections of trees, up to
another lake, then back down following the carpet of huckleberry filling the
voids of the burned grounds. They are not ripe yet, but they will be. At some
point, the sweet smell will cover the forests. As we hike back to the car, I
keep stopping to watch the wildflowers filling the burned spots of the
mountains. I stop to see the topography that I would not have seen when the
forest was dense. I stop to admire the
seed trees that survived and the young saplings emerging from rocky soil. I
stop and watch the healing process and try to imagine the next time I come, and
then hundred years from now, a thousand years, and I hope these forests emerge
from the wreckage of humanity. I am so sick of burning. I want to look out and
see the contours of life, to see the fireweed pushing through ashes. I give my
breath to the forest. I breathe my life into this place. Take it, inhale it,
make it something beautiful.
After backpacking, I stop on the Payette to camp with my
cousins for a few nights. I have not camped with them for many years now, but
they were once like big brothers I would come to visit in the summers. They too
have not camped together in many years, but both are going through divorces and
living back home. There kids are with them. We all grow so far apart in life
and yet, sometimes those gaps of time collapse us back together. I am not sure I
have told them I love them in a long time, maybe never, but I try my best to
express this now. We soak in hot springs and sit around campfires and sing
songs. We tell stories about hunting and fishing. We try to be a semblance of a
family, fractured and split and partial, but there together anyways and I am
glad to be there with them for now. And yet, I must head home soon. I often
just want to stay right there next to the river, but I know it isn’t the river,
but the people I am with. The people with whom I try to share it temper my
solitude. Everything can feel so alone at times.
All the hate in this world, all the way people use religion
and politics and ideology and business to hate another person, to get higher on
the mountain by pushing more out to the bottom, to only see your spot on the
mountain, but not realize where you stand. You can’t hate the people who hate
you and expect a different reaction from them. Love is so elemental it belongs
on the periodic table, and yet we try to tell people how to love, whom to fear,
whom to blame, and each time I breathe in, I take some of that into me too, and
I want to get it out. I want to heal. I want to rebuild myself around a world
that isn’t afraid of the scars of life, and doesn’t allow those to control every
decision afterwards. I want a world that can take in the hurt, transform it
into growth and renewal. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “One
of the most difficult things for us to accept is that there is no realm where
there’s only happiness and there’s no suffering…If we focus exclusively on
pursuing happiness, we may regard suffering as something to be ignored or
resisted. We think of it as something that gets in the way of happiness.” His
solution: mindfulness. To be present in each moment. To breathe in and out the
world around you. To not let fear and despair lodge into the dark cavities of
your body and mind. To not make decisions in the world out of that fear. To
take in your suffering and use it to expand out, to open up, to feel compassion
and love for life on earth and beyond. To hold history close but not let it
control your future. To see burned out forests and see the new growth and the
potential. To see hurt and injured people and focus on the ways they are
learning to love again. To see death coming and embrace life and the future. To
forgive by accepting and pulling it closer. To see people in that very moment,
in that very breath, as people to be loved.
I load everything back into my truck. I walk down to the
Payette River and jump into it again. I am not seeking baptism. I am seeking to
feel alive. The smoke of the fire washes off my skin, the pores tighten around
the cold mountain melting snow, my breath shortening and exhilarated. I step
out of the water and look up stream, up to the Sawtooth Mountains and give my
gratitude. I hug my cousins, still dripping from the river and tell them I love
them. I load Chico into the truck, double check everything is strapped down,
water bottle close, audiobook ready, and seatbelt on. I look over to Chico and
ask him if he is ready. I reply for him in his cartoon voice, and I think he
looks at me indignantly, like he always does. I tell him I love him. I tell him
that someday I will be in a nursing home telling stories of everything we did
together. I know the day he dies will be one of the saddest days of my life,
but I will temper that with all the great days we have had together exploring
this world. I honk, wave, and start the long drive back home, back to work,
back to a life that doesn’t have a clear path; there is no release, only acceptance
and awareness and love, a mindful path of heart, a wide open forest of
potential, another set of waves rolling in from a distant storm. All I can do
is tell you that I hurt, I hurt like so many of us do, hurt from love, hurt
from suffering, and hurt from being alone, but I am telling you this right now
because I trust you. I love you.
3. Go back. We turn around and start the hike back. I want to stay out here forever. I always do. But the snow is coming harder and faster. My own tracks are beginning to cover up. The famous Himalayan Climber Willi Unsoeld once asked, why not stay out there forever? His answer, and mine, is because that is not where the people are. Go back. Always return even though it isn’t the same place and you aren’t the same person. You can’t be, it can’t be, they can’t be. That is the trick of time. Go back to places just to see how time changed it. Celebrate the phases of the moon (there is a full moon on Christmas and make your family go watch it rise together). Pay attention to the tides, watch a tree change through the seasons. I turn my compost every three months and I know to do this because I choose to turn it on the solstices and equinoxes. Winter solstice is soon. The perseids meteor shower is tonight. Go back. Even when you don’t want to, even when you are mad, they are mad, you were stubborn, and you know she was right, but you don’t want to admit it and your ego hurts. Leave that out there and go back. Everything has changed and will change...allow that of yourself.
4. Seek Quality. We get back to my truck and Chico is a giant ball of snow. He lays down and starts to try and bite them off his fur like he does with burrs and stickers. I call him my little seed vector. I put down his wool blanket, load him into the seat...it is really his truck and he lets me drive. My truck is a mess because of him...OK, I guess that is me too, but if it is his truck then it is his dirt. I try to keep it clean. Take care of things and make them last. Do repairs when needed and don’t put them off. Even when you know your foot is hurt, ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. That knocking sound in the engine, if it stops all of a sudden, be worried. Find experts and trust them, but also do your own research. Seek quality over quantity. The wool blanket Chico sits on is a poncho my mother made me from a used army wool blanket for a ultra-light backpacking trip I did with the Boy Scouts well over 25 years ago. Patch holes, sand down the table and put a new finish on it. I have learned to respect something well-made and well-taken care of. My dad and uncles joke about my grandfather that he wasn’t one to give up on a piece of clothing just because it had a little bit of wear. I respect my step-dad because he has good taste. He chose my mom after all. While it might seem quite anal, he buys quality stuff and takes good care of it. Use a drink coaster.
Everywhere I have lives I have found a place to go and get a vantage of my town and watch the earth spin. All of nature is built of this strange spinning and orbiting and rotating universe. Everything is cyclical and orbital, and it helps me put things into perspective. I have my places: Old Oak Park Road in Arroyo Grande, Dry Canyon in Logan, Utah, Eagle’s Nest in Karluk, Alaska, the southern beach in El Paredon, Guatemala, Upper Bidwell park on the canyon rim in Chico, California. I even have my favorite pullouts on drives I typically do: Just outside Battle Mountain in Nevada, just past Pinnacles National Park in California, alongside Goose Lake at the California-Oregon border. I will drive this soon on my way to see family for Christmas too.
