On small rocks
Over the head of the other man in the hot spring, the man with the soft skin and expensive haircut, a column of white birds ascends from the floor of Long Valley. A vertical undulation, circling tightly at the bottom, dissipating at the top. Flashing in the winter sun, like a torch. A torch of gulls.The man and his wife and their daughter are talking about a vacation they once took to Las Vegas. One of those stories that are part of a family's founding mythology —The Time Mommy Got Too Drunk and puked in the white sand lot of the Mandalay Bay resort. The man is much amused and drains his champagne glass with a chuckle. His wife covers her face in embarrassment. The bottle of champagne flows, but they do not offer me any. It is their daughter's seventh birthday. “I went bowling! In Bishop!” she exclaims.
“Was it,” I ask, “the regular kind or the glow in the dark kind?” “Glow in the dark!” “Did they have one of those ramps, to help you roll the ball?”
“Of course!”
She splashes with excitement. Her parents ask her to stop but it is her birthday, I do not mind. Let her jump around; my own placid musings can wait.
Before they leave, the father tells a group of arriving boulderers (rock climbers who specialize in scaling short, difficult, but unroped rock climbing problems), “Take my advice. Wait ten years before you have a baby. Maybe fifteen in your case.” The family pile on layers of clothes in the rising wind, the high desert cold. Both of the adults don fashions that would seem to be made for younger people. He a straight- brimmed baseball hat and baggy pants, the kind of wigger garb favored by snowboarders; she dainty Yoga sweats with earnest floral highlights. They pack their champagne glasses in an insulated cooler and mom and daughter skip arm in arm back to the parking lot. The father scouts another group approaching the springs. “Dudes, you're in luck,” he shouts back to the boulderers. “All girls. And you guys don't even smell that bad!”
The boulderers and I compare travel notes. They are Texan and Bavarian, traveling across the West from Hueco Tanks to the Happy Boulders. A trail of small rocks. I should remember their names but they are a kind of barely differentiated quantity to me: one speaks German and does not smile, one looks like a surfer, one wears pink Wayfarer sunglasses. Some boulderers.
Were it not for their raw, taped fingers and bulging arms we probably look to be the same sort of tribe to most passersby. But in the way that subcultures endlessly divide themselves into more subcultures, I am an apple and they are oranges. We are all dirtbag athletes in some sense, living out of our cars and climbing and skiing, but I am a generalist and they are specialists. I am probably the only one who sees some minor dichotomy between us.
I like to push out into the backcountry as far as I can; they are rarely far from a parking lot. I am a mediocre climber and skier, but I have spent many months in the high mountains. Only one of the boulderers has ever been more than one pitch, about 165 feet, off of the ground.
My heroes run toward people like Smoke Blanchard, the whimsical Buddhist truck driver and deceased Bishop local. Blanchard invented bouldering down in the Buttermilk, between the Owens Valley and the high country, and liked to read poetry in the original Japanese. My companions are disciples of a sport epitomized by Chris Sharma, the freakishly talented climber who turned the Buttermilk into a proving ground for elite wunderkind. You might have seen him in clothing advertisements, hanging from steep little cliffs all over the world.
“Is that frostbite on your fingers?” the Surfer asks, when I have finished describing why I am here. I had planned to spend three or four days skiing between Virginia and Twin Lakes, a ski tour made feasible by roads plowed unusually high into the snow deprived backcountry. But I was turned around nearly mid-route by single digit temperatures, twenty mile an hour winds, a moderate amount of accumulating snow on the avalanche slopes ahead. It was not really a bad storm, but it gave me an excuse to wimp out. My fingers are fine, though the sparkly green nail polish is rather the worse for wear.
In the Sierra, when the conditions turn less than ideal, the usual practice is to head for a hot springs and drink beer. It doesn't, as they like to say around here, suck. That is why I am here in the front country.
The boulderers do not understand the appeal of suffering in a storm, of sleeping in a clammy bivy sack with the cartridge stove between one's knees to keep it warm for the morning coffee. “Do you have to carry all your water?” asks the Wayfarer.
No, the snow can be melted.
They also ask, “Have you climbed any Big Walls? Do you like being alone?” No, and yes, though I admit that I partly go alone so often because few people are interested in the nature of my travels—not strenuous enough for climbers or thrilling enough for skiers, too dangerous and technical for backpackers.
I do not really get the boulderers and they do no get me. They are like high school jocks, albeit ragtag ones with physical skills that I find alluring in the way of basketball players or roller derby girls. The Wayfarer shakes his head in repulsion when I describe for them my big trip last summer, a free form traverse of the central section of the high Sierra. Twenty eight days of hiking on trail, hiking off trail, scrambling up low angle ridges, occasionally pushing hard on moderate faces with a heavy pack. “I like,” he says, “to be able to sleep somewhere warm at the end of the day.”
And I am alienated by their bro-dy good cheer, their pursuit of small edges and short walks, their lack of backcountry savy. They are probably next decade's version of the father from Mammoth, whining about the restraints of family life and wistfully remembering aimless months of pulling down on crimpers and camping out of bounds.
Yes, I am a grumpy old loner. I dislike people on vacation; what good is a life that needs to be periodically vacated to be survived? What a lame euphemism. This sleeping in the back of a twenty year old truck, selling bags of weed for gas money, hauling two worn out sleeping bags instead of forking out cash or one good one, getting caught out in storms...this has turned out not to be an escape from anything, to me, but a way of staying close to something. Sometimes it is fun, sometimes it is not. But I do not wish I was still young, or that I was anywhere, anyone else. I wouldn't mind having arms like the Surfer though.
Constant Vigilance!
The wind is going to blow. So says the radio: one hundred miles an hour over the crest, less east of the high peaks. I chose a line through the head high sage and start off at a half-trot, east toward the Glass Mountains. Before long I stumble upon a ranch road and the obsidian fields begin. Shards of dusty black, sprinkled everywhere in the sandy desert soil, mostly the size of marbles or smaller. Just to have an organizing principle, I decide to look for pieces of red.
Unusual, but not exactly rare, I'd guess that one out of every several hundred flakes stands out amongst mostly black palate. Searching on the fly involves a kind of pattern-scanning awareness like that of the mushroom hunter. One's vision goes wide, sifting over the largest possible area, yet filtering quickly for matching colors and shapes. Looking closely, but not focusing too narrowly. I want to coin some easy metaphor when absorbed this way, some summation of what it means to hunt. But giving vent to such pretense ruins the concentration. Thinking about looking is not looking.
I order time in some fashion that is not unlike this. A disjointed meander through the open ground of the past. I have no idea in what pattern the elements have arranged themselves beforehand so I scan for flashes of resonance while trying not to contrive an explanation. It makes for a chaotic, revelatory sense of memory and not for a good, sturdy essay structure. But bare with me; I am peripatetic by nature and just might kick over a few interesting stones before arriving somewhere I did not know I was going.
After a half hour or so, I have a handful of red or rufous obsidian chunks. I hurry up toward the trees rather than back to the car as the wind increases. Balls of cloud, illuminated white with winter sun, bounce along over the weathered caldera of Long Valley. The dust puffs up with each footfall. Even the stiff bunches of sage move in the breeze now.
To my surprise, the trees in the first water course are humongous. Jeffrey pines, one of which is at least four feet in diameter. Thicker underneath are aspens with inevitable graffiti in their bark. A riot of thorny, winter bare rose bushes. I eat some pistachios and carve my son's initials into an aspen. As an afterthought I add his motto: Constant Vigilance!
On the way back to the truck, I gather juniper berries for distilling gin back home. It only takes a few, but I also gather handfuls to boil the flesh off of and string as beads. The wind is building, blowing in through the hood of my jacket. The pocket with obsidian in it jangles against my chest. The wall of the Sierra from near Rock Creek north to the volcanic twins Ritter and Banner is kaleidoscopic with cloud and light, rising four, five, six thousand feet over the valley floor.
Go Wherever
Several days earlier, I crossed a pass near Virginia Lakes for the second time, on skis. The first time was about twenty two years ago, when some friends and I had set out to hike from the Virginia Lakes to climb the Matterhorn. It was spring break—quite cold for soft, coastal kids—and we were eventually turned back by trees downed in a 200% snowfall year. But that is what one does when one reads Dharma Bums at fourteen. One goes out to look for their Matterhorn, drink pine needle tea and readi haiku while shivering in cheap, surplus gear no matter what the weather. It's all Gary Snyder's fault.
On that first trip I was stunned to stand atop the high pass itself. It was not the beauty, per se, but the omni-directional possibility of movement, the sensation that one could just walk off the trail any which way, just go and go along the high ridges and peaks. So different than motion in my home range, the Santa Lucia, where being off trail often means grappling with scratchy, exhausting walls of ceanothus, coyote brush, madrone. Where rattlesnakes and ticks, eye-flies and feral boar, cougars and poison oak abound. There, a trail is not just the line of least resistance, but often the only detente with a vast acreage of opposition. The Santa Lucia is wild, giddy with life, but the walker is not free to roam.
The high Sierra is nearly sterile, but a boundless Rohrshach map of route possibilities. Epic in its sheer, sinewy, granitic scale, but sadly modern in its parklike, simplified ecosystems. It is a range for individualists and idealists, the physically sound and mystically-minded, quintessentially Californian.
It was many years before I came back to the Sierra backcountry. Through a process of succeeding obsessions I had filled my toolbox with the skills to reach most any part of the range and move in most any direction. Over the ridges with no trail, up the faces with a rope, down the slopes on skis. Or just to sit in one place drinking moonshine and turning over rocks to find the obsidian flakes of the Paiute sheep hunters. I am not a jock; I move in whichever way is most pleasing and pragmatic and I admit to little ambition.
Returning to the Sierra, though, taught me something about where I had come from. The landscapes of my childhood, how I moved through them, what motions they allowed or encouraged, informed my directions in life. I was a serious young man; I stuck to trails, I prepared carefully, I thought I understood a few things about the flora and fauna, I was alert for danger. I was the product of the Santa Lucia, where a methodical and careful pace is necessary.
But I think I will be an old man in the Sierra. I am learning to play the ukulele and I have been known to burn my maps to start a fire. I sometimes drink too much moonshine at lunch and I like to hum old Joy Division songs as I walk. I get grumpy when I am on a trail. I go wherever.
Stuck in The Ruts
About a year before I stood atop the Sierra pass again, I found myself in the grip of a clammy dread while camping over in Saline Valley, east of the Inyo Mountains. It had been storming for several days and I had confined myself mostly to the back of my truck between bouts of soaking in hot pools. A smothering dankness engulfed me, as if I were trapped inside of a lung. A shrinking coffin lined with the dirty brown carpet of the truck's interior, the smell of unwashed long johns and spilt tuna curry, a mouldering atmosphere of introspection and static gazing. A mesh bag full of pharmacopia to treat the symptoms of something called bipolar disorder, which I mostly try to think of as just a phrase written on a piece of paper and forgotten in a file on the coast somewhere. Sometimes I am wrong.
I pried myself out of the truck and stood in the night air. The clouds were low, feral burros shuffled in the bushes, the mud sucked at my feet. I looked for but could not see the Inyo Mountains and in that moment something occurred to me: I had not slept in three or four days. Before the situation became manageable, I did not sleep again for another week first at Saline and then at the grim, snowbound Sierra cabin of an acquaintance. I would not have slept even then, but for a desperate, whiskey soused drive across the state to a hospital where I was loaded with tranquilizers and left in a quiet room.
What I remember, before my perception became a blurry haze of gloomy thoughts and synesthetic dread of the all that happens in the day, was sitting in the water at Saline looking for a passage over the Inyos. The snow level was dropping close to the elevation of the south pass from the valley, a situation that would have maybe made exit by truck difficult if not impossible. It is not that the road is especially hazardous, but that it is remote and a failed attempt to get over it might have meant running low on gasoline and food before getting back to Lone Pine.
Stormbound in a dirty vehicle, the workings of my mind stove-up, repressed, I waited and soaked. A heightened sense of portent tricked me into imagining each moment as the verge of something—the plunge into sleep, the cusp of revelation. But it was just a meaningless coagulation of vitality.
A year later—at least a year by the seasons if not exactly the calendar—I am still preoccupied by that winter's doings. Permit me to stretch a metaphor to the breaking point and say that it was as if my mind became stuck on a trail. And to be stuck on a trail is to be locked into the ruts. It is my own soggy brain that has most failed me, kept me in the parking lot instead of out skiing in the wind. I am not Californian enough to believe that I can leave everything behind, completely escape infirmity with the enthusiasm of the revolutionary. But I try.
A Map of My Own
The book Dharma Bums changed my life in the way that heroic writing can inspire a fourteen year old: I understood it as a blueprint for my own future. What I learned from it was that the formative trips I was taking in the Santa Lucia could be more than recreational, they could become the basis of a life that need not be re- created because it was worth living in the first place. My backpack became not just a metaphor for how to approach the world, a blithe abstraction, but a platform from which to construct an entire identity. What one carries is what one carries.
I listened to too many Dead Kennedys records to ever really become a Buddhist. But I responded to the goal of a rigorous bohemianism, an irreverent discipline. A walking life. I followed Gary Snyder to Reed College and dropped out, but I still brew pine needle tea and make up haiku now and again. I am something of an erstaz beatnik, and it is better than a sharp stick in the eye. The real Matterhorn, by the way, turns out to be an underwhelming climb.
But I have not bothered with this exercise in sifting the embers to boast of what I am satisfied with. Let the sensation of a winter's day spent rambling amongst rocks that might lead anywhere deodorize the stench of my self regard. Instead, what I want to report is this: how I have moved on foot over the open ground has become how I have lived. That is not a metaphor, it is a map.
That that map has few real trails owes much to having chosen the high steppe, the desert batholith, the sagey bentonite flats as a habitat. Out here, in the land of little rain, there is no vegetative law to impede movement toward something beyond the reach of the trail, unseen from the parking lot. The effervescent, fleeting joys of the self-propelled await.
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