Cairns

Cairns #46
End of the Long Days, 2006

The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

It’s been a hard summer. In early June, five days before we were to sign the lease for Chrysalis’s new unified site, the permitting process fell apart and we were suddenly left without a home and only two months to find a place. We scrambled like crazy and were fortunate to obtain two small rentals. It is not ideal. We really want to be on one site. But at least we can carry on. So for the last two months, all of the teachers with the help of many teachers, have been packing, moving, unpacking, painting, setting up. Physically we are very tired. But as a staff, we have really come together and we feel that this could be Chrysalis’s greatest year yet. We are like steel tempered in the fire.

I haven’t had much of a break during this summer and school year starts in five days. But here is a story I took the time to flesh out over the summer. A few paragraphs are from the last chapter in Seeng Nature. The story is much longer than my usual Cairns but I hope you enjoy it.

“So that’s the way...”

In the middle of the high desert of Central Oregon I met them–the two traveling teachers who gave me a lesson that took me decades to learn. An hour earlier, I had been let off in Lakeview, a small road junction town. Traffic was light. The short December day was ending. I’d probably be camping the night here so I walked out past the north end of town to better enjoy the view and, if a car happened by, stick my thumb out. My backpack leaning against a signpost formed my backrest. With legs stretched out, I played my harmonica as I watched the evening take on colors. It’s big country out there and I enjoyed the big view. Home lay north along this road just a couple of hundred more miles. Tomorrow evening I’d be having dinner with Mom and Dad after a long bath, telling them of my adventures. I felt good. Good to be almost home. Good to be playing the harmonica in the midst of this vast land. Good because of that amazing year.

That year is the most important character in this story so I must take a long detour to tell you about that year. A year ago I had been hitching home quite lost. All my life, I had been taught that the path to success was to get good grades so that you could go to a good college. I had done that and I had graduatedcum laudefrom one of the best colleges in the country - only to discover I had no idea of what was supposed to happen then. I had just somehow naively assumed that going to college would seamlessly lead to success. I explored the possibility of the Peace Corps but finally decided that the best thing I could do for the world was help replace Nixon with McGovern.

It was the fall of ‘72 and I accompanied my girlfriend back to her last year of college and threw myself into the campaign, regularly working 70 hour weeks. I knew we were going to win, despite what the polls said. I was driving voters to the polling places on Election Day when I turned on the radio and heard, at five o’clock Eastern Time, that three hours before any polls in the country closed, the networks were already declaring Nixon the winner by a landslide. I came back to my girlfriend to discover that because of my campaign zeal, I had not taken the time to stay in touch with her and our relationship was over. Doubly depressed, I had hitchhiked home alone with no idea of what I should be doing. That return home had been almost exactly a year ago.

That year had started with me helping my dad with his one-man business, making a vitamin-mineral supplement feed for cattle and delivering it to ranchers throughout eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and northern California. We would mix a couple of tons each morning, load the truck, and then I would deliver during the day. One afternoon on my way back over the Blue Mountains, imagining the empty truck was a race car, I realized I had been driving far too fast for several weeks now and wondered whether I was unconsciously committing suicide. The word “suicide” immediately drew to mind a thought I’d naively/arrogantly had during the glory days of high school. I had thought that no one should commit suicide because if you were willing to end it all, then you should take whatever you have and at least go do one of the things you’d always wanted to do first. That remembered thought led me to thinking, “What is something that I’ve always wanted to do?” I really wasn’t sure.

But one thing did come to mind. I had always wanted to climb to the top of the cliffs at Wallula Gap. I had driven beneath them hundreds of times and looked up wondering what it was like on top of those dark brown basalt cliffs flanking the Columbia River, thinking that one day I’d climb up there. But I never had. So one day, after deliveries had taken me past those cliffs, I parked on the return amidst the sagebrush and started to climb. A side valley led me behind the cliffs. Small alcoves of intimate beauty nestled within the contours of this steep, arid, lovely land. Ascending the valley led me to the vast rolling scrubland on top. The grass-covered soil thinned to bedrock as I walked out to the edge.

The cliff edge was sheer, dropping several hundred feet to talus slopes that slanted the rest of the thousand feet. I gazed out over many miles of land that I had driven through for years but never seen from this perspective. Eventually my attention drew closer to the cliff itself. The cliff was not smooth like granite or sandstone but was a sheer mosaic of tiny ledges, crannies, and nubbins caused by the erosion of cooled basalt. After many minutes, my eyes noticed a flitting motion on the cliff walls a hundred feet away. It looked as if the ledges and nubbins were rearranging themselves. As this sphere of rearranging energy gradually moved closer, it resolved into a flock of small birds the rich color of the brown basalt They were foraging for seeds upon the cliff itself, fluttering from one tiny ledge to another.

I lay on my belly and hung my head over the edge for a closer view. Soon they were close enough for me to study them individually. Strange little birds - brown with gray heads, but when they fluttered, I saw... pink? Such an exotic bird mundanely foraging in such a spectacular place. They would encounter little competition on these unreachable tiny ledges.

One of them landed on a ledge just a few feet below me. I watched as it searched about for wind-tossed seeds. All my attention became absorbed in the few-inches world of this ledge and this individual bird. The few flakes of basalt that had fallen onto the ledge huddled away from the edge and the great void beyond. The bird’s head kept turning so that an eye could look up at me or look down for seeds, look out for this cliff’s pair of prairie falcons, look out at others in the flock. Pinkish feathers occasionally peeked out from beneath brown feathers. With wings completely closed, the bird casually hopped off the ledge and dropped from sight. Without warning. Something in my belly moved. I hiked down the slope without the depression I had carried up. I was out of my eddy and back in the current of life.

But what happened on that clifftop? What I think happened was that the bird showed me what faith in life looks like. Without even looking down first, it had simply hopped off the edge, wings folded, because it was sure it could fly. Something in my belly responded and followed, hopping off the ledge I had been clinging to fearfully. But this explanation is an explanation of words that came days afterward. If the explanation is true, the communication had nothing to do with thoughts or words. It was bird to belly, not bird to head. A small bird has the power to alter my life by moving some powerful part of me that our culture doesn’t even talk about. This is the world we truly live in, one that can alter our lives with the drop of a bird. Mystery fills this world.

That hike reminded me of other things I had always wanted to do. I had always wanted to ski around Crater Lake in the winter. So a feed delivery to California set up that opportunity. The ranger recommended a shorter hike for a solo hiker. So figuring that I might be hanging out in the winter forest for a few days, I went to the visitor center bookshelf to buy something to read. Curiosity about that brown and pink bird was led me to buy a field guide to North American birds.

Lying in my tent in the snow, I found in the book the birds of my childhood: robins, red-winged blackbirds, house sparrows, mallards, and pheasants. I learned that my juncoes, chickadees, and quail were actually groups of birds containing many species. To tell them apart required looking more closely than I had ever looked. But there were so many others, too. Exotic ones I had never heard of like long-tailed jaegers and swallow-tailed kites. When I got back home, I started walking around looking more closely and, yes, some of these species really did exist. They had been part of my world all my life and I had never noticed. I climbed back up the cliff and identified “my” birds as grey-crowned rosy finches, high-above-timberline birds down for the winter.

Birdwatching became a mental focus that led me to look more carefully. The world grew more interesting. Range maps in the book sang of different regions having different birds. I learned that one of the crown jewels of bird watching, Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a vast series of marshes in the high desert of central Oregon, was supposed to be spectacular during spring migration. So Dad (I never appreciated until much later how he accommodated and helped me through this searching period) arranged another feed delivery down that way.

I went to Malheur with high expectations and arrived in the waning afternoon of a freezing, gray March day. The biting North Wind forced all the birds down, out of sight, stopping migration. It also kept me in the truck cab most of my time. But on my last day at Malheur, the wind shifted to a strong but warm wind from the south and hundreds of thousands of birds rose into the blue sky and rode the wind north. I had never seen white V’s of swans, never heard the rising-energy clamor of snow geese migrating north. Big flocks. Small flocks. They were flying, they were flying and I felt as if I was walking on a small piece of a huge earth that was laced together with a trillion wing flaps. V after V faded into the blue sky’s northern horizon.

I was hooked. I liked walking the land, listening for unfamiliar songs and scanning ahead for any flutter of movement. I wanted to see new birds every day. I wanted to see exotic birds. The pictures and range maps in the book beckoned me to the southwest. I said goodbye to my Mom and Dad and started hitchhiking.

I had been hitching the on-ramp in Needles, California for several hours. There were six or seven groups of hitchhikers ahead of me so I knew it could be a long wait. Good hitchhiking etiquette dictated standing further along the ramp so those there first had first chance. After many hours, I had to go pee so I went to the gas station. On my way back, one of the hitchhikers ahead of me came searching for me to let me know that two girls in a VW bug were waiting to give me a ride. I was the only solo hitchhiker. Everyone else was traveling in twos or threes and the VW could hold only one more person.

They were two nursing students on spring break heading to go hiking in the Grand Canyon. I had hiked there a couple of times and so I recommended some neat hikes to them. They had never hiked in the Grand Canyon and asked if I wanted to join them. I said sure so we drove through the night, arriving at the park in the middle of the night. We went to get a backpacking permit the next morning and learned that, it being spring break, there were no more permits available. So we made reservations for a few days in advance and set off to explore further east where none of us had ever been.

There was a national monument called Canyon de Chelley none of us had ever heard of. We arrived with no expectations and sat long on the overlooks, stunned by the still beauty. Horses grazing peacefully down in the flat canyon bottom, a few hogans, all down in a different world separated by and framed by vertical sandstone walls of deep reds. The peace of that place brought out one’s inner self and we three travelers came to know and trust one another. As friends we returned to our hiking reservations at the Grand Canyon, only to discover it snowing heavily (and pouring lower down within the canyon). The storm was forecast to last several days. So we pulled out the map, counted the days they had left for their spring break, and decided to go south then turn west to Joshua Tree National Monument. We dropped over the Mogollon Rim and entered the lower Sonoran Desert.

Big Pink Flowers. They were so big and bright, you could see them a hundred yards off the freeway. It had been an El Niño winter, lots of rain, and now the desert was full of the radiant flowers of cacti. I had always heard of the desert in bloom but I had never seen it. We arrived at Joshua Tree in the middle of the night. Early, early in the morning, I walked down to one of the park’s few oases. A Gambel’s quail, a new species for me, called from the edge of the small canyon. Flowers everywhere. Bird nests with baby birds in the bushes. So much life within such beautiful peace.

We spent the day wandering slowly through the park. Flowers everywhere. That afternoon, Beverly and I climbed Ryan Mountain. Sheila stayed behind. Beverly and I had been growing close during our days together. She had a good heart and an open spirit and an enjoyment of the wonder around us that attracted me. We hiked to the summit together. On the way, I was aware of two forces pulling me apart. One force was a growing attraction and affection for Beverly. Realize that I had been lost a few months ago and I had just emerged alone into a whole new world, sensitive to new beauty and a kindred soul is beautiful indeed. Bev had invited me to ride with them back to Santa Rosa. There, this relationship might grow. But there was also another force, the beauty of this incredible desert. Fate had led me to a place of incredible beauty that was nourishing a new me that had the freedom and power to choose to stay here longer if I wished.

By the time we got back down the mountain, I had decided. Thanking them very much, I told Beverly and Sheila that I had to spend more time in this beautiful place. We said goodbye. I walked out into the desert to an outcrop of rocks and set up camp. That night, I settled into my sleeping bag for a good night’s sleep. I heard a scurrying sound. I looked out and saw a mouse. Oh my God!. A mouse might attract a rattlesnake and what if the rattlesnake then slithered into my sleeping bag to stay warm. In the middle of the night and desert, alone, a vague fear of rattlesnakes loomed into a terror, drawing energy from a part of the brain I had never experienced before. There was absolutely no sign of a rattlesnake, only a mouse. But just the fact that I was sleeping within a place where a rattlesnake might also occupy agitated my mind with too much fear to relax into sleep.

I spent the next day sitting on the rocks, just looking out at the desert, soaking up the space. During the day, I decided I wanted to return to that oasis of the first morning. It was forty or so miles of warm, April temperature so I had the idea I would start that evening and hike the road through the night and then hang out in some shade during the next day, and then complete the hike the following night.

I set off in the evening. When the rare car passed, I would step off the road and turn my head away to preserve my night vision. As I hiked into the middle of the night, traffic ceased and I was alone with just the sound of my feet and the creak of my pack. At some point in the late night, I felt myself sliding into a sleep cycle I couldn’t walk through. So I propped my pack against something, leaned back against it and dozed off until I awoke from a dream in which I had been given the Book of Life. The book contained the answers to all the really important questions of life. It was a beautiful book with a golden aura that was so incredibly real as it was handed to me. With wonder I held the heavy book and with a sense of blessing I opened the pages. And there it all was, all the truths of the universe, written right there—I could see and feel it—but it was written in a language I could not read. You might think this was frustrating but no, the feeling was,“the book is real. The answers are there to be read. I just haven’t learned its language yet.” The realness was the important thing, not my inability to read it.

I walked on and in the faintest first light began hearing the most amazing, nonstop bird song I’d ever heard. “Who is that?” As the light grew, I could see it hanging out on tops of bushes. With binoculars and bird book and astounded ears, I kept working through the identification until I was certain I was listening to my first mockingbird. Whenever I hear a Mockingbird, I remember that bird. Or, more accurately, I remember that moment when my walking through the night led me to that moment of early light, a vast desert basin stretching out below me, and the only sound in the world, a coyote of a bird singing upon the spinning earth.

I drifted down towards the Pinto Basis and sunrise. Breakfast found me at Cholla Gardens. Wasn’t any shade around and when someone offered me a ride, I abandoned my idea of hanging out all day and rode the last 15 miles to the oasis. I wandered in its beauty during the day. I learned there was a less visited oasis several hiking miles away. More intriguingly, according to the tiny park map, the drainage of that oasis might lead me out of the park and close to an I-10 freeway interchange. So I filled up with water and that afternoon I hiked out and spent the night in a beautiful desert canyon. The total aloneness was sweet. I slept wonderfully in the soft sand of the dry streambed.

The next morning, I set off down the drainage. No trail. No certainty that I would end up where I was hoping. Every step was my decision, my responsibility as I followed the way of water. All the bushes were in bloom. You probably have heard translations of the Navajo Blessingway,about “In Beauty may I walk, with Beauty before me, and Beauty behind me...” That was the nature of the walk. I saw my first (and only) Varied Bunting—a purple bird. Eventually, the drainage emerged from the mountains and I saw the freeway interchange just a few miles off. In retrospect, this hike was a watershed moment. I had committed my life to a route that was untried, possibly dangerous, possibly beautiful. Every intent and step was of my choosing. How vast the world stretches with possibilities at such times!

The next three rides took me through Los Angeles and up to San Francisco. But more importantly, I spent those rides in the company of good women. I probably had a radiant glow that burned away years of conditioning about men and women. My conditioning had been a mixture of awkward shyness and sexual fascination. But there was a whole vast realm stretching beyond: the realm of being alive in this vast universe with a consciousness that is learning amazing things from the world. Part of this world is other people and half the people are women who are people like me in a fundamental way and yet with a different perspective in a fundamental way. To be able to shift from my conditioned focus on the female as a body to female as a spirit and talk together with a focus on this world and the wonder of our being here within it was a new, very satisfying delight. Those three rides were like the universe saying, “Paul, you are ready for an important lesson. Here’s a neat, self-assured woman to ride with for awhile. Here, let’s repeat that lesson. Here is another neat woman to ride with. Did you get it that time? Just in case, here is a third opportunity to learn this lesson. Have you learned it?”

More rides took me up wondrous Highway 1, sensually hugging the cliffy coast. One driver wanted to share a beach with me. We walked out across a golden brown grassland towards an oak tree on the horizon. The horizon turned into a cliff edge and a trail descended to an amazing beach where waves had cut into a bedrock of nearly vertical tilted strata of browns and golds and grays. The clean beach with this cliff backdrop felt like a curtained stage on which each step was a ceremony. Purple pink gleams of wave-smoothed abalone shell fragments livened the surf zone. I filled my pockets with this nascent jewelry.

A couple of days later, I got off in Redding, California. With absolutely no awareness that this would be the place where my future wife and I would raise our two daughters and create our school, I bought some groceries and headed out to the freeway but got picked up before I could get there by some young people out for a drive. They asked me where I was going. Just as I had always wanted to climb the cliffs of Wallula, I had also always wanted to climb up and walk among Castle Crags, a romantically rugged upwelling of gray rocks overhanging I-5 south of Mt. Shasta. I had driven by several times when delivering feed, taking quick glances up, but never having the time to pull off. So I told them I was going to Castle Crags. They thought that was cool; they, too, had always driven by without stopping so we all drove to Castle Crags. After they left, I followed the trail up as high as I could and when the trail faded, I kept bushwhacking through manzanita and over rock outcroppings until I was truly up in the crags where I intended to camp. As evening approached, a thunderstorm appeared to be forming. I had no tent; only a plastic sheet. I nestled it down between two crag fins, holding the sides down with rocks. The thunderstorm grew more threatening. I put more rocks on the plastic; drew it lower to present less wind resistance.

The thunderstorm came and oh, it was a dramatic one. Thunder and lightning, of course, and rain. Lots of rain. And I snuggled down in my little plastic cocoon, out of the wind, rain sheeting off just inches above me. The lightning passed but the rain was still falling when I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning fully alive. The air was electric. My sleeping bag was completely dry. I felt so competent to have passed through that thunderstorm with just my plastic sheet. I was ecstatic all day from that night. I glided down off the crags, under the freeway overpass where I watched my first cliff swallows swooping about just like my spirit. It was May and I wanted to see Malheur again. The migration was over but now it was nesting season and the refuge would be full of exotic summer visitors.

At the south end of the refuge is a campground, full of birdwatchers. One old man could whistle the songs and calls of 240 birds. He whistled a yellow warbler song and in 10 - 20 seconds, a male yellow warbler was in the branches overhead looking for the intruder. He told me that the western meadowlark had over 30 songs that changed subtly through the nesting cycles so he could hear where they were in their cycle by the song they sang.

Each morning I would fill my daypack with some food, a gallon of water, and bird book. Then with binoculars slung around my neck, I’d go walk 15-20 miles along some dirt road and by the end of the day, as I walked contentedly tired back to my campsite, I’d have added 8 to 10 new species to my life list. Life was so easy. Just walk and when I tired, sit on the earth and rest;and as I rested, the animals relaxed and start moving again and I found myself sitting within a fascinating world. One time as I sat watching ducks, a weasel popped out of a hole near my feet carrying a dead mouse. Another time as I rested long amidst the sagebrush, I heard a snort behind me. An antelope was standing about ten yards behind me, drawn silently in by its curiosity. And once, in a remote sagebrush region, as I watched a golden eagle through my binoculars, it flew over me and for a split second, I looked directly into the intent, intense eyes of a hunting eagle at a distance shortened by binoculars to five feet.

But my main memory of all those walking days was a melodic sound floating down from a vast sky overhead. It was such a part of the sweet spirit of the place that it took me who knows how long to even become aware of it as a specific part of this world. Many times I would look skyward, assuming there must be some bird up there making the sound but I never saw one. Day after day the sound floated down. One day, my binoculars finally spotted a bird way, way up there diving and with each dive, the sound floated down and so I had my first magical encounter with the common snipe, a bird many think is just an old camp trick. No, they are real and the winnowing of the vibrating tail feathers of the snipe floats through blue vast skies.

It was mid-May when I left Malheur. I got a ride with a veteran bird-watcher. He asked how many birds I had seen. I told him how I was just starting with birdwatching and how hard it was sometimes without anyone to tell me the names of the birds. Sometimes I would watch a bird for ten or fifteen minutes and still not even be sure of even what family of birds it belonged to. The man responded by saying how lucky I was. That’s how you really come to know a bird, he said. If someone identified the bird for you, you wouldn’t have to wrestle and sift through the whole body of birdness of that particular species. This remark heartened me and now, after thirty years of teaching, I salute his wisdom.

That day as I headed towards the Oregon coast, the universe decided to line up three more rides to teach me a life lesson. Three rides in a row, all with people who had been pursuing a successful life path that wasn’t their path. In all three cases, the people had chosen to leave the known path to step onto their own path and now reported how important and right that decision had been. One of these rides was with a couple who had traveled to Alaska and written a book about it. They said, “If you love birds, you have to go to Alaska in the summer.” Before they said that, Alaska had been a place in the bird book full of summer residents but never a place I imagined I would be. But after that ride, Alaska became the plan and two weeks later I was saying goodbye to Mom and Dad after a short visit and I was on my way to Alaska.

It took awhile to get there. As I hitched up through northern British Columbia, we would cross some large river whose name I had never heard of before. Then we would drive through forest for a couple of hours until the road crested some gentle pass where we would look out over forests stretching to the horizon. Then the road would begin a barely perceptible descent until a few hours later, we would cross another large river whose name I had never heard of and begin the gentle ascent to another pass. Vast drainage after vast drainage, day after day. I realized this land was more immense than my imagination.

My northern migration culminated on a pass in the northern Yukon looking out over the most heart-pulling country I have ever seen. I was on the edge of the tundra of the far north. It was around midnight twilight—a vast orange sunrise/sunset glowed for hours in the north. Around us we heard the strangest conversations. People jabbering with emotional intensity so uninhibited it was funny. The language was unintelligible but the sentence structure of the patter held together. The talkers were Willow Ptarmigan, singing mind-bending verses in a mind-bending land. As at Joshua Tree, I had to leave my ride to just sit there a few days in the most incredible space I had ever encountered.

I was staying at an orange-painted hut beside the road. The trapper who had driven me here said it was part of his trap line. It was an 8 x 8 foot plywood box with a bed frame and small wood stove. There I hung out for days. The land was so incredible I would simply spend hours gazing, feeling something flowing into my eyes and mind that I had never experienced in such pure form. To the east, there was a low gentle pass about a mile away. The trapper had told me that beyond that pass lay the headwaters of the Wind, the Hart, and the Bonnet Plume. What names! Just over that rise. It called to me. I wanted to hike out to that pass and gaze over into those immense roadless drainages. Oh, how they called!

There was just one problem, the problem that kept me by the hut all this time. Somewhere out there were grizzly bears. Just the possibility of grizzlies formed a paralyzing wall of fear rising impenetrable just a few feet off the road that confined me to walking up and down a half mile stretch of the road. To the west was the most incredibly wild-shaped mountain I had ever seen. It lured me with its siren shape but it was many miles off the road and I knew I would never walk that far into this country. But that nearby pass to the East! That lured me with the romantic unknown over its horizon. Sometimes I would take a few steps towards it but the fear grew palpably stronger with every step away from the shelter so that within 10 or 20 steps, I would come back shaken from its encounter. Two immensely powerful, primordial, soul-stirring forces:The pull of this land and the fear of grizzlies. The balance point was sitting on the road, sitting on the doorstop, gazing into the space. This pull of space. It was a new, strange thing that my education never mentioned. But it was so powerful, so satisfying. To simply sit in space like this is to experience life as a great blessing.

The pass kept calling. I couldn’t walk to the pass but I couldn’t leave the area either until I had seen over that edge. Books said one should make lots of loud noises to alert bears to one’s presence so they have time to run away. But what if a bear was sleeping out there? This tundra was composed of dwarf birch three feet tall. A bear could be sleeping in that stuff and I’d never see it until a few feet away. Better to not wake it, I thought. I finally decided I would sneak quietly to the pass. If a bear was asleep, I wouldn’t wake him. If he was awake and moving about, I would hear him ahead of time. With this resolution, I crept towards the pass, taking four or five quiet steps and then stopping and listening. Then four or five more steps and listen again.

I reached a point where I believed that, even with a head start, I had no chance of outrunning a bear back to the assumed safety of the shelter. That point stopped me for a long time. It was still a long way to the pass. I struggled to keep my courage uppermost. On I crept, all senses alert, feeling like a prey animal. Every so often, I’d startle as yet another redpoll flushed from its cup nest in the birches.

Eventually I did crest that pass and looked out over its horizon. Turning back, I encountered a different form of fear. Going to the pass had been a closely balanced strain between the pass pulling me forward and the shelter pulling me back. But now there was nothing holding me back. My destination forward was my shelter back. I felt this growing panic to just run like crazy back to the shelter. And the disciplined part of my mind kept saying “No, if we run we won’t be able to hear anything and might wake the sleeping bear. We will return in the same careful way we advanced.” But the panic to bolt and run grew stronger. I felt this panic rising further with every step. “You’re close enough now. Just run and get it over with.” “No. Walk quietly. Stop. Listen. Walk again.” The closer I drew to the shelter, the stronger the desire to run rose. Eventually, I crossed that line where I thought I could beat a bear back to the shelter. The panic subsided and I walked back to the shelter, satisfied.

A week later I was in Denali National Park, falling even deeper in love with the tundra. Every day I would ride the shuttle bus system, gazing out the window. The National Park Service had ranger-led walks and I went on every one of them—partly for the safety the ranger offered from bears and partly for what I was learning. I went on one nature walk and asked a question about a feature I noticed on a tree. The ranger replied, “I’m not sure” and started looking around making observations, connecting them together until he came up with an explanation involving the fall of another tree, now almost rotted away. “Ah,” my mind realized, “the world is more than facts. They fit together into a logical story that can be read by looking for their connections.” I was starting to learn the language of that golden book in my dream. And I really came to admire the young seasonal ranger-naturalists. They radiated a zest and groundedness. I went to their every campfire talk and felt the effect they had on their audiences. During my month in Denali, I realized this what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a seasonal naturalist in Denali National Park. It might not be what I would do my entire life but I was learning to hike cross-country where each step changes one’s view of the path ahead which then changes where one takes the next step. And this unexpected next step of becoming a naturalist had just emerged strong and right and Radiant. That lostness succeeding college, that “what am I supposed to do with my life?” had transformed into a exhilarated Yes.

In Denali’s backpacking campground, I met Andres Finstedt, a Swedish birdwatching hitchhiker my age. We were both intimidated by grizzlies so we paired up for strength to go hiking in the true backcountry of Denali. Our first hike was up the East Fork, periodically making loud bear-scaring sounds. This country was less terrifying than the Yukon pass because we hiked on the gravel bars of the silt-heavy glacial streams. These gravel bars were a half-mile wide and relatively open so you could see all around you. Suddenly, in the vegetation a hundred yards off to the side, a mother grizzly and her cub were running away from us through the brush. What a great first encounter—to have your first awareness be of the bear already running away. Our confidence soared. We had met our bear and the world was ours. On we strode. The next morning, we walked up my first glacier. Mist over the glacier expanded this foreign space:white and blue glacial ice with curving roads of medial moraines composed of the same dark rock of the enclosing cliffs. Streams of meltwater flowed along smooth channels they were melting into the ice until, suddenly, they would drop through a hole into some deep crevasse and disappear. Cold, subterranean water sounds echoed up from the darkness.

We did a second, longer hike. On the second day, we were working up through the tundra approaching a pass. Suddenly, Andres pointed out a bear ahead. A big, solitary boar bear. A very big boar bear ambling down towards us. We started making bear-scaring sounds but the bear seemed not to hear. The wind was blowing down from the pass so he could not smell us. He kept ambling toward us. I pulled out my harmonica and we sang our bear song, the Beatles’ “Get Back! Get Back! Get back where you once belonged!” We slowly moved to the side, hoping to move away from the projected path of the bear but on he came in his own introverted way. On we shouted. And then he stopped. Stood there looking around. (Bears don’t have very good eyesight.) Sniffed the air. Then, (I’ll never forget this) the bear rose up onto his hind legs. He was big! He swayed his head back and forth, trying to get a depth sense of what was out there making strange sounds. And then he sat down to think about it. We stood there singing. He sat there brooding. It felt like a long time and I think, in truth, it was a long time. Finally, the bear got up and continued with a slightly resentful detour around us. We watched and then hustled up the slope and away. Crossing the pass, we saw his fresh tracks in the snow. They were very big! We tempered our self-confidence with respect and walked more mindfully. But the fear of grizzlies was shrinking to more realistic proportions that opened the land to cautious exploration. And what a glorious land it was.

I left Alaska in early September, with the intention of coming back the next summer to make myself at home in this land. To hike alone to the base of that haunting mountain in the Yukon, to float solo a thousand miles of the Yukon River, to roam all over Denali. When I had done that, then I would consider myself worthy to be a naturalist with the National Park Service.

But now it was time to head home. Nights were occasionally starting to freeze. It had been more than five months of constant backpacking and my gear showed it. A separated boot sole was flapping widely except for the nylon rope I tied around the toe portion of my boot. The rope would fray apart after about five miles of hiking so I would be replacing it several times a day. My backpack’s aluminum frame had cracked and was being held together by tape. I was heading home to Washington state but a van stopped whose driver needed to get to a job in New York. He needed another driver. I couldn’t pass the opportunity to tell my grandkids that I had once hitched a 4000 mile ride. Several days later, I got out of the van in upstate New York in the middle of the night - and was instantly aware of the sound of nocturnal insects. I hadn’t heard crickets for months. What a wonderful, soothing sound.

I woke the next morning, started walking towards the trailhead for Mt. Marcy, the highest peak in the Adirondacks. I started staggering and got only a few hundred feet. I felt awful. Something was horribly wrong. I had no energy. All I could manage was sitting by a creek for most of the day, feeling listless. In the late afternoon, I felt slightly better and I could at least stand by the road to hitchhike. I got a ride up to the trailhead. Massive storm clouds were forming over the mountains. I started walking slowly up the trail. Storm clouds grew darker. Suddenly, a shift in the air signaled my mind that if I rushed, I would have just enough time to pitch the tent before a storm broke. I dashed off the trail a few yards to a flat spot, yanked my tent out of the pack, set it up triple time, dove in and suddenly the atmosphere changed. The temperature plunged. Water poured out of the air. Lightning crackled and all my energy was back to normal. I had come straight from cool Alaska into an East Coast heat wave and was too disoriented to know what had hit me.

I slept with delight through the storm and rose to a restored self and world. Hiked up Marcy, hitched to Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania to watch the eastern autumn hawk migration. But I still needed to get new boots and pack. The best place I knew of for that was in Berkeley so I turned westward. I stood out by the Pennsylvania Turnpike one morning and got picked up by a guy in a big black Cadillac who needed to get to California fast. He picked up us hitchhikers to help him drive nonstop. “Drive fast,” he said. He would pay any speeding tickets. 90 miles per hour across the country nonstop. The following evening, I got out of that car in California. Hitched up to Berkeley and bought new pack and boots. They felt so good I decided I didn’t need to head home quite yet. I had dropped south out of early Alaskan winter into early autumn and the southwest was gloriously hikeable. So I hiked up Mt. Whitney and was delighted to see gray-crowned rosy finches on the 14,000 foot granite summit. I remembered an aspen meadow high above Zion Canyon I had stumbled upon one summer during college that was so beautifully white and green I had named it Lothlorien. What would Lorien look like in October? I hitched towards Zion to find out.

Almost to Zion, I got picked up by an older man who needed help towing a truck to a mechanic. I did a good job so afterwards he asked if I wanted a 3 day job fixing rail fences up in the high meadows above Zion. It was hard work but the setting was beautiful. Golden aspens and blue sky. Each evening in his cabin, he’d tell me stories. He had actually seen Hitler, at the Olympics in Berlin. Afterwards, I hiked on down to my Lothlorien all golden then hitched on to the Grand Canyon to hike across from the North Rim to the South Rim.

I was hiking cross-country, dropping down into a side canyon of a remote side canyon down there. I was descending the last few yards into the head of a pink drainage when suddenly I heard a hissing sound that stopped me in my tracks. I looked around and five feet ahead of me lay a coiled rattlesnake, rattles vibrating, its head up and dancing back and forth. A second of terror and then fascination. Such a different reality. My first rattlesnake. It eventually retreated beneath a rock, taking with it the unproportioned because unknown fear I had carried of rattlesnakes. Contact with our fears often reduces them to prudence within this interconnected world.

After a week in the Grand Canyon, I wanted to test myself against the Superstitions, east of Phoenix. They were the mountains of the fabled Lost Dutchman’s Goldmine. The books, possibly hyped, talked of land so wild and convoluted that people easily got lost. So I first sampled the land with dayhikes from the trailhead. Came back one evening to find another guy camped twenty yards away. Older guy - maybe late forties. He started talking. He was there ‘cause he was thinking of hiring on with Big Bart, becoming part of his crew looking for that gold mine. Big Bart carried a .45. It would be hot, hard work but they were getting close. Big Bart had proof of that. The deal was, Big Bart would show him some of the proof—after he had signed on. And once you signed on, that was it. If ever you left the group, Big Bart would have you tracked down and killed so word didn’t get out as to where they were looking. The pay was great—$500 a day—payable after they found the mine. In the meantime, there was food. And Big Bart would bring out whiskey and women for the crew occasionally.

And I was thinking, this is crazy. This is voluntary slavery of the weirdest kind. You work real hard and think you are earning $150,000 a year but are probably just working for food for the rest of your life. Each year you work deeper into a trap. “If I leave now, I’ll be throwing away yet another $150,000 and I’ll always be living in fear that Big Bart will track me down some night.” Why would anyone want to do this? But the guy was contemplating it, talking about it to me, trying to sort it out in his head. The lure of a gold mine. The lure of an Arctic pass. The chorused promise of a college degree. Each life is a unique path through a sea of siren calls and opportunities.

In the middle of the night, a truck drove in and I could hear voices. It was Big Bart of the .45 who will kill you to keep his gold mine a secret. And here I was camped 20 yards away listening to them talk, like Jack Hawkens overhearing Long John Silver. I couldn’t believe this B western movie scenario was real. Life is so strange. When I woke the next morning, the man was gone. I don’t know if he joined up or not. I disappeared into the heart of the Superstitions and found my way around quite nicely. Sat by beautiful dark shaded pools in desert canyons until winter approached the southwest and it was time to head home.

So now here I was sitting just outside of Lakeview playing my harmonica beside the very quiet highway. It had been quite the year. Months spent outdoors, sitting only on the ground, sleeping under the stars, roaming beautiful wilderness alone. Months spent in which every thing I did was based on my own decision. What would I do with each hour of each day and where would I place each step? And on this path, I had somehow found what I was looking for—or at least the next step of what I was going to “be”—a National Park ranger, a friendly, helpful, enthusiastic emissary for the wonder of this world.

On the last night of this journey home, on this lonely highway, I met my two teachers. They came out of the north, driving some kind of big RV. As they drew near, they started slowing down. This was strange because, as I mentioned, I was a mile north of town, basically sitting out in the middle of nowhere. The only possibility was that they must need help with directions. So I turned my apprentice park ranger “May I help you” consciousness their way and watched as they continued to slow down until they came to a complete stop there in the middle of the highway, the RV towering above me. The man rolled down his window and, looking down at me sitting in the dirt or upon the earth (depending on your point of view), he pronounced with a voice sharp with disdain, “So that’s the way you’ve chosen to live your life,” rolled up his window, and drove on.

We need to be careful of judgments. A minister taught me the distinction between judgment and discernment. We can, and should, discern the abilities and intents of others and use that discernment to avoid problems and navigate a good path but this discernment can be done without ever needing to judge others. Discernment invites us in to deeper awareness whereas judgment cuts us off from a world that is far more rich than we can currently understand. Judgment breeds judgment. I know. It took me decades to move beyond a judgment on those two travelers who judged me.

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