nevada

Looking for rattlesnakes and finding none

No switchbacks—the trail is relentless, angled straight for the sky. I can’t breathe and I can’t stop either.

Even my mind is cloudless today. No present, no past.

When I reach the saddle, my body and the tall grass are washed in a strong and steady wind. Lupine and paintbrush too. Grasshoppers and fence lizards too. Litter and dog shit too. Unconditional as the attention of God.

A kestrel climbs and dives, climbs and dives.

I’ve said it before. I can’t separate the two—the wind as God or God as the wind.

The water birch

It’s the shortest day of the year and I want to spend every second of daylight under an open sky.  The morning is not so much grey as silver. Sunless, but bright. Mountain chickadees flit from tree to tree. The Clark’s nutcracker stays uncharacteristically quiet. I only hear her wings thumping the air.

It takes four miles for my mind to clear. Eight before my hip begins to ache. I’m just outside the wilderness boundary, lurching and sliding. Graceless on the icy slope. In the shade of titanic Jeffrey Pines, I wonder if I’ll make it back before dark.  

At the place where the trail crosses Whites Creek, there is a rough bridge—just a pair of logs thrown across the gully—which is winter-slick and bows considerably under each hesitant footstep. The water is fast and loud coming down out of the Sierra. It feeds my uneasiness.

A water birch juts from the opposite bank, young and at an angle that approaches forty-five degrees. From the near side of the bridge, I lean out far as I can. My wingspan comes short and there’s nothing to do but jump. A moment of moving through the air too fast for fear, then I grasp the water birch, glean its balance and composure. As I step to the other side, I notice the spot where my hand touched the bark was stained oily and dark. Any notion that I was somehow special in my little adventure is erased. The tree has been marked by hands of many hikers who have held on in just the same place. Folks who abandoned the city for the forest and found they still can’t get by without something to lean on.

The tenacity of life

On a trail through an aspen grove, a stranger and I stand shoulder to shoulder.  We are witness to miracle.  We are witness to exquisite mundanity. Hiking separately, we stop together to watch a doe and her fawn lap water from a mossy pool.

I have never had a church. As a child I had the old orchard at High Meadow. I met God there once and never again. God was the wind and the wind was so strong—I got scared. From that point on, I looked in at religious communities from the outside.  I was always outside.

I am from a part of the country where we don’t smile and we don’t say hello. We don’t make eye contact and we don’t strike up conversation—unless we’re on a hiking trail. The trail is the only place I’ve ever known people to come together and genuinely extol the beauty of life. The goodness of humanity overwhelms.

A Jewish mystic once told me we are walking through the consciousness of God.  On the streets of Jerusalem, it was easy to believe. Here too, eyes locked with the curious doe.

A few years ago I was working and living in Rocky Mountain National Park. On a Sunday morning, I made a little pilgrimage to the alpine tundra.  Above treeline, the wind whips relentlessly and wildflowers grow very close to the rocky ground. I noticed a woman on the side of the trail with a hand lens and knelt beside her to ask if I could see what she was looking at.  Dwarf clover and alpine forget-me-nots. “Isn’t it incredible,” she asked me, “the tenacity of life?”

In my memory now she is nameless, faceless, but her words have stuck to me like sap to skin. I think of her when I see bristlecone pines, fireweed, or scar tissue. Millipedes, pale and minuscule, crawling across a cave floor. Pronghorns in the snow. A mother surviving her own grief.  These words echo in every moment of awe.