In my life there have been a few things — outside the arena of the most intimate of interpersonal relationships — that I’ve enjoyed so deeply that they have, over time, come to be ingrained, have come to be mythologically archetypal, in my brain’s comprehensive sense of “pleasure”. Of late I have been thinking a lot about hiking and all that surrounds that activity. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my father, who managed to get his listless, moody, youngest son out of the city and into the High Sierras and other places far removed from the concrete and tar of suburbia’s everyday world. Were it not for his insistence, I might well have never learned what it’s like to climb steep mountain trails for mile after mile to reach, at last, some forest bounded lake; to sit beneath the whispering, creaking pine trees at night, warming hands and feet beside a crackling fire as crickets sing and night-birds call from near and far; to wake up in a tent, nestled into a warm sleeping bag, with the bright morning sunlight highlighting the nylon wall and spangling it with the silhouettes of branches and pine needles; to breathe the chilly, seemingly pristine air while eating re-hydrated scrambled eggs (made from a mix purchased at the backpacker’s supply store) and drinking hot cocoa — both made using fresh mountain water; to munch on gorp (”good ol’ raisins and peanuts”) while exploring the wilderness.

Time has softened the complaints I levied against those trips. No mosquito or freezing night, no switchback or strained climb, no lack of TV or shortage of electronic entertainments ever annoyed me so much that I would forget, in the end, that I had the opportunity to see this primevally beautiful side of the world that most people, I’d guess, will never see in person if at all. Time has given me an ache for those vacations spent hiking and camping. I miss the dust on my heavy boots and the smudges of trail dirt on my face. I miss seeing the myriad, crystalline stars through the boughs of the trees — trees whose heady, living scent seemed a balm to succor the fatigued traveler — as the silent, immovable, sentinel mountains, guarding nature’s sense of eternity from the invasive light of so-called civilization, cut imposing blue-black swathes into the clear night sky.

To watch the trout plucking insects from the surface of a lake early in the morning, while the mist yet lay upon its far bank with its flowered meadow, as I washed my face with the lake’s cold, cold water: — this was joy unbridled and larger than me. From time to time in years to come I would ascribe this sense of joy to what is usually called Providence, saying to myself that “God” was surely revealed among the rivers, lakes, trees, mountains and creatures of such distant places as I then stood. Although I have long since abandoned the idea of such Providence as achingly sentimental at its root and needy in a childlike way, I nonetheless feel a very real atheistic reverence in me for such places and the journeys that lead to them. I am grateful for my ability to appreciate the beauty and power of nature without superimposing some sort of story or motive upon it. Nature provides to any open-minded person a seat in the front row of its ceaseless chautauqua.

And I know that someday I must return to hear it again… or else always know some extra burden, however small or easily repressed, of genuine loneliness in my existence.

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The above portion of this entry has been sitting in draft limbo for a couple of days. Fact is, I’ve been thinking about more than just my experiences, and I feel I should confess that my dreams go well beyond simple hiking and camping.

A day or two ago I finished John Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams. Today I watched the MacGillivray Freeman film, Everest (originally shown in IMAX theaters, now available on DVD), which was filmed during the notorious 1996 climbing season — a season when eight people (unrelated to the IMAX expedition) died tragically during a horrendous, surprise storm high on the formidable peak. Krakauer was caught in that storm and found himself in the midst of the unfolding tragedy. Four members of the expedition Krakauer was with were killed. His expedition’s leader, Rob Hall, died from the intense cold and lack of oxygen. Hall spoke to his wife, Jan, via satellite phone in his final hours. She was seven months pregnant, and he helped name their child, Sarah — a daughter who would never get to know her father. According to Wikipedia:

During this last communication, he reassured her that he was reasonably comfortable and told her, “Sleep well my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Shortly thereafter, he died, and his body was found on May 23 by mountaineers from the IMAX expedition.

Krakauer, devastated and changed by the experience, wrote one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read, Into Thin Air. It was that book that touched something in me that had lain dormant since my childhood visits to the High Sierras. Eiger Dreams has only served to exacerbate that something within me.

Well into my 41st year of life, I know that it is unreasonable for me to think that — all things considered — I will ever test my mettle on some high mountain climb. Even were the monetary costs not completely prohibitive, my lack of experience and merely average health would serve as dire warnings against indulging any foolish ideas I might have. But of course that means next to nothing where my yearnings are concerned, and I know that it is a true desire I feel, one not done in by the practical world with its humdrum typical concerns.

If I am to be totally honest with you — whoever you are, reading this — what I know in my heart of hearts is that I will never belong to the daily mucking about, the fucking around, the much ado about nothing, the rat race, the game. What I know in my heart of hearts is that I belong only to me, — yet, to myself I am the greatest unknown in the end. And I think that it might always be so, if I don’t actually do something beyond what I perceive to be the norm. And I don’t want to die like that; I don’t want to ebb into nothingness, borne along in the boat of “What if…?” on the tide of self-ignorance, realizing that death won’t be so very different in the end than what I had all along.

I know that it is unreasonable for me to think that I will ever test my mettle on some high mountain climb. But mountains like Everest and K2 are to me no less symbols of my inner hunger, my internal yearning, for that, and I must somehow, some way, sometime come to approach them, humbly, earnestly, and with the understanding that of necessity I shall make the ascent. And perhaps it is, that in the years to come I will find my way to some real peak — my mountain, as it were — and find myself with goggles, crampons, ice picks, ropes, cams, carabiners, and all the rest, climbing for my life up some improbable face of granite and ice, wondering how it is such great fortune came to me. Or, looking further ahead, perhaps I’ll be stunned silent for a moment by the memory of this or some similar blog entry of mine, as I sit beside a campfire far off in the distant wilderness, younger eyes trained upon me as I recount my first real climb in light of my first hiking experiences in the High Sierras.

You never know until you know. What I know now is that we have to have dreams to get us to that next, mightily significant, wakeful knowing. We have to have dreams, have to have the yearning to see them come true, have to have the chutzpa and focus to find the way to realize them, have to know in ourselves that those dreams fulfill us like nothing else could, so that when we stand atop whatever kind of peak it is we ultimately climb — we know ourselves (to be) there, where nature’s ceaseless chautauqua names us.