Day 5. Tues. Dec. 17. Water

Day 5. Tues. Dec. 17. Water. Hiked 17.49 mi, ascent 1549 ft.

I started at 6am at Cascade Lake, hiked along the lake on the road, then the trail,  then took the lower trail to cascade falls and up along the stream to Mountain Lake, around the east side of Mountain lake and up to Twin Lakes, around both twins, back along the west side of Mountain Lake, back down along the stream to the falls and the lower trail to Cascade Lake, then around the west (and south) side of Cascade Lake and around the south side lagoon to the trail to Rosario, then wandered around Rosario grounds especially along the shoreline, and back up to the north side of the lagoon and around Cascade Lake back. 

Dear Trail Friends,

I am wondering how to summon the energy I need to write this blog. It isn’t quite the same as “just out one foot in front of the other” on the trail. The feet are already there, I just have to move them. The words have to be found - discovered - plucked out of thin air. 

This reminds me of the morning thoughts about darkness and being unable to see. Speaking of which, would you please remind me to change the batteries on my head lamp to see if new batteries might make it brighter? Is it growing dinner or am I? On the trail this morning I seemed to slip and stumble a lot on unseen roots and rocks. Maybe it was just a root-ier, rockier trail? I also got lost twice in the hike up from the falls - both times must have turned down side trails leading closer to various falls, and once walked right into water.  Turning back, retracing the trail, once seeing where I went astray and the other time not seeing but by pure luck choosing the correct way. It was so easy to see, coming back in daylight, where and how I had gotten confused. 

I wondered if it was wise to hike in the dark and risk falls. I stepped carefully and persuaded myself it was worth the risk. If I wanted to experience the intense immersion of the hikeathon/pilgrimage in winter, I had to risk walking in the dark. It was as simple as that. And there were rewards. As I approached Cascade Falls, the tallest in a series of waterfalls along Cascade Creek, I expected to be able to glimpse the white of the falls. I could see only tree branches and darkness - but my other senses were so awake - I noticed the sound of the falls grow louder as I got closer, I felt the air grow cooler and moister. It was exciting to “see” the falls with my other senses and reminded me of stories of people who are blind developing keener use of other senses. 

Just as I left Cascade Lake I was moved by the dark shadow of the mountain in the dark lake. I tried to take a picture, but on my camera the whole scene was black. The first photo I could take, an hour and a half into my hike, was this predawn glimpse of Mountain Lake as I arrived. 

It was amazing as I walked around Mountain Lake to watch the world change from a black and white works into a world of colors. Even though the sun never came out, so the colors were relatively subtle, the contrast between the black-and-white world and the world of colors was dramatic. Here’s a photo toward the end of Mountain Lake, a little more than a half hour later. 

When I was hiking around the smaller twin lake and thinking about looking down on the lakes from the top of Mt Constitution, I wondered if I would be able to see the stone tower at the top of the mountain from down here at the lake. (Sorry I didn’t take a photo of the tower or write about it this time - I think I probably wrote a lot about it last year since I had just met and fallen a little in live with the man who restored it, and who was very much in love with the tower and its history). Anyway, you might just barely make out a blurry shape a bit taller and rockier than a tree. 

Look along the crest to the right of the big tree and about half way between the tree and the right edge of the photo. 

I thought a lot about this experience of seeing myself from different points of view. Today seeing yesterday’s self up there near the tower. Yesterday looking down on some other former self down here by the lake. Over a lifetime, I’ve gotten to see the high points from the perspective of the low ones, and vice versa. This is all sounding pretty abstract. Right now what I am really thinking about is how tired I am. And I just learned Chris will be home from her drive from Santa Barbara a lot earlier than I expected. I was hoping to have time to complete my solitary hike and blog and then welcome her. But she will be home before I finish tomorrow’s hike. 

I’m feeling a little downcast - let’s use a weather metaphor: overcast - about that. So what I need is a little humor. There was a photo I meant to share from day 2 - a bird with a green feathered tuff. Here he is. 

So I imagine Green Bird saying “Enough  about  hiking and blogging and Chris — What do you do for fun around here?”

So I explain about winter and aging, and darkness and cold, and losing abilities - and how it’s about facing them and being conscious and making peace - and he’s ignoring me, looking around the room saying “those cats of yours seem to know about having fun.”

Now having fun has not been my greatest skill set in this life. Don’t get me wrong - I have a lot of fun hiking - but a lot of the fun comes from facing stuff that’s hard and uncomfortable and finding that I can do it. The euphoria of the little engine puffing up the hill “I think I can I think I can” (if you remember or ever knew that story). 

What if I were to ask myself - or you - what would be fun to do with this blog right now? That reminds me of a moment on the trail was I was Trung to brake a photo to convey the deep quietness I felt all around me at the lake. I imagined you saying that you wanted more than a photograph, you wanted to know about my experience. And I mentioned the cold air on my nose and lips and in my nostrils, the feeling of softness on the trail under my feet and poles. And the quiet presence of the lake, the soft ripples, the ducks floating. I compared it to a gathered meeting in Quaker/Friends silent worship when we sense ourself gathered up into a larger presence. It’s like I and the trees and ducks and lake are having a gathered meeting. One day recently on the trail a deer stopped and looked at me. I stopped too, and looked at her. We gazed at each other for a long time in silence. It’s like there is a silence in the woods that hold me and I feel I am meeting and being met by the place. 

Sometimes I think about how I am breathing in what the trees breathe out. Molecules that touched the inside of them are touching the inside of me. And they breathe in what I breathe out. All of us do. 

I thought about that while I walked today. Most of the walk was beside water. You’re lucky I couldn’t post videos or we would have an interminable video of me walking along beside Cascade Creek - sometimes almost at the same speed as the water, as if we were travel companions. You are going to have to put up with a cascade of waterfall photos - but to spare you a little I will gather them into a collage (or two). 

Speaking of fun - I had so much fun coming back to the falls and being able to see it and hiking to where i could see it from the top and from the side and from different distances. 

There was a little fall by one of the bridges between Mountain Lake and Cascade Falls and I thought if I could catch the way it was flinging water into the air it just might work to give you a tiny bit of the feeling of being there. This is looking down at Hidden Falls from the bridge. 

Earlier walking along the creek I took two photos I wanted to title “Moving water beside baby trees” and “Moving water beside tree with two legs”. Here they are. 

How am I doing, green bird? He says my cats seem to be having more fun. That I am working too hard to have real fun. 

He thinks I should stop and just do nothing for awhile and see if I can have some real fun. But first I wanted to tell you something funny about my hike today. I was looking at a track I made of what I thought was the same hike last summer that recorded it as 18.26 miles. From early on I was thinking there was no way this hike could be 18 miles. Now it doesn’t really matter as my inner voice pointed out. I have more than enough miles - this hike could be 15 and I would still make my 100 for the hikeathon. And even if I didn’t, if it was 98 or 97 instead of 100, would anyone care? But I was so stuck on the numbers, wanting them to be the same or to understand why they were different, it reminded me of a long ago self who wanted to be a mathematician or a scientist. Wanted to be able to prove things. To have them be definitively right, or equally definitively wrong. That part of me loves counting miles and keeping track of things on the trail. 

There’s another part that comes alive on the trail - that is curious about everything. As I follow the water today, imagining it flowing down the mountain from lake to lake, creek to creek, I start to think about the water we have at home. Didn’t I hear once it came from around here? Could it be this same water? If I had my younger self (the 8 year old, say, who got curious about bats and octopuses and spiders and went to the library to learn all about them) I would get her to research our water system and learn where it comes from, how it’s collected, how collecting it impacts these woods and creeks and lakes I love. I’d get her to go to the historical society and learn all about the gold miners and the people who made the stone circles. 

If I had all that youthful energy, I’d be after this stuff in a minute. I’d be like that falling water flinging and splashing itself all over the place. 

Yes, green bird says. And now that you aren’t her anymore, what’s for fun? (Green bird is a little like that cartoon rabbit “what’s up, doc?” Only asking “what’s for fun?”)

It would be fun to end this, wouldn’t it, and just hang out and get to bed at a reasonable time (for someone whose alarm will be set at thr unreasonable time of 4:30am)? But I always like to end with a bit of a splash of o can and to walk away feeling happy about what I wrote. 

And I’m hoping too that I can end with something that makes you feel happy too, that you’ve been on the trail with me, breathing in all that cold, fresh air with the fragrance of the earth and composting leaves, that it had refreshed your soul. 

Okay. I went back and watched today’s photos as a slideshow and I just want to add two photos. The first is the mountain reflected in Cascade Lake. Imagine it starkly black on a dark lake and it’s a little like the photo I couldn’t take this morning. 

The second is a tree whose shake I liked. When I was imagining telling you how it felt to be here I found myself talking about the angles and curves of trees that surprise and delight me as I walk through the woods. 

I may not write much tomorrow. I may just want to say a sweet goodbye then to the day and the hikeathon/pilgrimage and you - and return to my life with Chris. I may not have the time and energy to “tie it all together” (do I ever? And if I did wouldn’t it all come untied again in the long run anyway?)

So let’s end with a poem that I wrote decades ago that seems to want to be the last word here. 

The Woman Who Ran Out of Tears

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known loss:

she knew absence better than her own tongue

and teeth, everything she reached for eventually

vanished, but somehow she thought tears would be

different. Tears were Old Faithful to her, the one

absolutely reliable fountain: the river that would

never run dry, the reservoir never depleted.

As a child, she did this terrific imitation

of the Pacific Northwest: you should have seen her,

drizzling for days, weeks, months: kids from all over

the neighborhood came, it was like having their own

local rainforest, right there in the midst of the city.

They could touch moss and fern, smell pine sap,

hear old wood decomposing. As soon as they 

sensed the comforting drip of her tears, they snuggled

their roots deep into her world of green,

and relaxed. They could breathe.

It was a shock the day the tears stopped.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t heard of the drought:

that year even the grasshoppers joked that the great

Lake Shasta wasn’t knee-high to their kind;

smaller reservoirs cupped nothing but dust,

while the hills, gardens, lawns dried to dull brown

(except where a spray of paint tried

to impersonate the lost living green),

and whole species of trees simply died out.

The absence of tears was a lasting drought in her life,

long after the rain came back and the lakes refilled,

yet she seemed to grow even closer to the missing

tears than to the actual ones that had coursed

down her cheek. Mesmerized by moving water,

she would sit beside ocean, stream, sprinkler

or fountain, and dream: about tears, about water,

how it transforms to fit the container it’s in,

how it catches and tosses back pleasure

from its bright diamond facets, how it washes

away whatever is no longer needed, yielding fully

to the thirst of the moment, how its joy in

movement  is transparent, whether as current,

wave, ripple, splash, foam, wherever it goes,

without needing to stay, it’s completely at home.