I'm a Day-Hiker

"It is not the mountains we conquer, but ourselves."  -Sir Edmund Hillary

I learned things yesterday.

The hike to Cedar Ridge, well, that's never hard.  A mile and a half down the South Kaibab Trail from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Steep, sure.  Winding, crowded, and yesterday, threatening rain.  Stepping to the side to offer uphill hikers more room affords more time to not believe the incredible views so dynamically enhanced by the shifting clouds.  I wished every photographer I knew could be with me in the short descent; I don't have the talent to capture the aching beauty of that sky, creating that light on those rocks.

I have hiked down the S. Kaibab to the bottom dozens of times, and up perhaps twenty.  I've passed Cedar Ridge altogether over fifty times, and every time I do, I glance to the west, consider the trek to the end of the butte, and decide I don't have time.  It's not far; less than a quarter mile from where I usually stop to the tip and that huge panoramic view.  But even that distance seems too much of an imposition to me, when I either have come so far or still have so far to go.  So I haven't seen it - there's no time; there's never any time.

There was time, this time.  Feeling strong and sure, I hopped boulder to boulder, followed a narrow trail and climbed short shelves, and finally made it out to the last few feet of rock overhanging a twenty foot drop and, below that, a steep slope ending abruptly in air.  No fear, in me.  I crept to the end, swung my legs over and reveled in the dizziness.  What if?  I thought.  This rock could crack away at any time - it's probably been wanting to for yours, and maybe it takes 190 pounds of pressure to force it off and I'm putting 191 pounds of pressure on it and in the next second it will surrender to gravity after billions of years and come crashing down. If that happens, I am absolutely dead, no question.  Accepting that, imagining it, sitting there despite it, is what makes me feel strong and young and alive.  There is wind pushing me from every direction; a weaker, smaller person would have more to fear but I sit and I laugh aloud at the exhilaration.  A young guy is sitting on a boulder near me; he catches my eye and grins - he must feel it too, though he is not so close to the edge; I am the edge.

Lesson One:  Do not pass up the short side trips, for they surely build that path for a reason, and that reason is something you've never experienced.

So now the hard part.  I creep back from the edge, buckle on my waist-pack and start back.  The uphill doesn't start until I'm back at Cedar Ridge, but once moving I run out of breath quickly.  Seriously?  This was so easy a year ago!  Twenty steps, break; twenty more; break.  This is why you're doing this, I remind myself.  Because it's so hard. 

People pass me and smile sympathetically; it's obvious to them that I'm having a rough time.  But I feel more sorry for them; I've done this enough to have my mind trained to keep pushing.  I know, after a 100% success rate, that without a doubt that there is always an end to the hard, a triumphant moment at the top of the trail.  And maybe some of them know, too, but for most the first time seems endless.

I don't take any pictures on the way up; the difficulty of focusing my breathing and pinpointing the next goal and straining to reach it is all I can concentrate on, and the aesthetics are lost on me, for a while.  Just below the Chimney, I see two young women tiptoeing their way down the switchbacks.  They reach me as I'm ascending the first, and I notice one is wearing a pair of expensive sandals that clasp delicately around her ankle.  Unprepared, uninformed, and complaining about rocks in her shoes.  I think, what shoes?  She would probably be safer barefoot.  But they turn around soon after, which was probably the best decision she made about the entire experience.

There is an Indian couple keeping a slightly faster pace than I, and I dismiss all discomfort and race to beat them.  Small victory:  they likely have never hiked the Canyon, they're not in a hurry (as I shouldn't be), but I have to prove, it seems, that I'm faster than someone.  I beat them by one switchback.

Lesson Two:  If you don't do something for a while, something you once excelled at, something which is difficult and requires constant effort, you often find upon returning to it that you must start from the beginning.

I've missed the Canyon; I dare not suggest that she's missed me, but I feel more at home with her, and she must feel my love and respect and devotion.

I wave goodbye to her; she does not wave back, but I feel it.  See you soon!

And September comes sneaking...

A copy of a copy from three years ago, from one of my favorite blogs, A Tidings of Magpies.  

Fireflies
by Cecilia Woloch

And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,
a hunger that isn't hunger
but something like fear, a staunching of dread
and a taste for bitter gossip
of those who've wronged me—for bitterness—
and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart
to children whose names I don't even know
and driving too fast and not being Buddhist
enough to let insects live in my house
or those cute little toylike mice
whose soft grey bodies in sticky traps
I carry, lifeless, out to the trash
and that I sometimes prefer the company of a book
to a human being, and humming
and living inside my head
and how as a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt
at twilight across the lawn
and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,
to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering
onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.

First Mud

"I forgot about the awesome thing you can do in a Jeep," Robin said.

"What's that?"

"You can stand up in it!"

We bounced and bumped along a muddy forest service road just outside the Grand Canyon National Park gates. She held on for dear life, and I scanned the horizon for as many mud puddles as I could splash my way through. I needed dirt on my Jeep, or it wasn't a Jeep.

I had just bought it, just come home that same day. First car in years. It was old-ish, eleven years old, with 100,000 miles on it and it didn't come with a top - soft top, hard top, any top. I didn't care.

Each mile along the dirt road, it seemed, unveiled a new forest. First, tall, black, burnt pines on bare, flat ground; it looked like a fairy or faun should come tripping through the trees at any moment, or a dragon. Then, the road carved through steep hills topped with ponderosa pines, little yellow wildflowers and brittlebush. There were softly sloping shoulders that ended abruptly in sheer cliffs leading to broken shelves; and close forests with no underbrush at all.

My favorite was the meadows. After all the heavy rains, they were lush and so green, dotted with mountain lupine and Indian paintbrush and some fiery orange thing I couldn't name. Trees at their edges standing tightly ranked like soldiers, perhaps a small lake or shallow puddle with grasses growing through it.

The sweetest thing was that we didn't see another soul for over an hour. Just driving, we stopped to pick flowers or to top a hill for a new view. I dropped her off on the side of the dirt track and reversed, so she could get a photo of the wicked dust trail I was kicking up. My homemade bouquet grew to include purples, oranges, reds and whites, yellows. No blues, today.

When we saw the green slate roof of the Grand Hotel around the next bend, some magic was lost. When the sky opened up and soaked us twenty miles from home, the rest was.

 But this was only the beginning.