I got halfway up the mountain today — Becky gave me the cherished gift of a day to myself while she watched the dog — and halfway up the mountain I realized I didn’t want to go any farther.
I wasn’t tired, or at least I wasn’t any more tired than I’ve been the last twenty times I’ve hiked past Deer Flat. It wasn’t hot, and it wasn’t too cold. Rain was looming and I wasn’t precisely dressed for it, though I would have been fine in all but a torrent.
I just didn’t want to go to the summit.
It’s tricky, this balancing of determination and perspective. The Mount Diablo landscape is rugged, but it’s my interior landscape that gives me the most trouble on hikes. Steep switchbacks come and go to the accompaniment of schoolyard chiding from people I have not seen in forty years. One ought not pay too close heed to those memories but being stubborn is often a fine thing, and promising myself I can rest and start descending at the very next tree has gotten me to the summit a dozen times.
And the summit becomes the goal, and a stupid goal it is. You can drive there. The actual summit is inside a building where you can buy stuffed animals. The last half mile of Juniper Trail before the summit is an uninteresting slog through parking lots. I arrive, find myself a spot out of the wind, and watch the tourists sidle away from me. They are coiffed and perfumed and they wear high heels, and that’s just the men, and they wander away from the one actual hiker, the one who’s earned the summit with the same sweat that curls their sneers, and they identify the cities 4,000 feet below, incorrectly.
That much smug erodes the soul, if you cultivate it.
It has never been about the summit, to be honest. The summit is the to-do list, the job description. The summit is purgatory, and I both Sisyphus and stone. The gracenotes are the true reason I climb, the white stripes of dry falls down the west face of that knife-edge, the manzanita bloom or brake new freshened by sparse rain, the spider silk across the creek that flows all the way off the mountain for the first time in months. I rub up against the mountain, a snake with a stubborn old skin, the summit a mere convenient protrusion to speed the sloughing off of keratin.
And so I sat, and thought of other things to do.
There is a trail that heads back by way of a knife-edge ridge, a sublime hike. I have not been there since 2004, but a group of 18 boisterous hikers passed me as I sat and asked directions to that very trail, and I crossed it off my list. Another trail uphill and to the west leads back to the truck past a set of springs, and I have taken that path precisely never. But I had no map and a late start, and the clouds got darker as I deliberated, so next time. Donner Canyon? Possibly. It’s steep, though: hard on the knees in descent.
I ate a thick slice of rye bread I’d baked, finished it, closed my pack, thought a moment, opened the pack and got another slice of bread, and ate it.
The gracenotes are the true reason, the unreal green of new miner’s lettuce and the thrum of an unseen hive overhead somewhere, an acorn woodpecker in one or another of those snags. On reaching the summit one starts back down. I returned the way I came, and the rain caught me as I slid my key into the driver’s side door.
I try to remind myself as often as possible that the Journey is the real goal and purpose of life. The Destination of any moment is secondary.
...
Chris, I wonder what that hike would be like on a night with a clear sky and a full moon?
We should find out.
You can climb four or six beautiful pitches up Cathedral Ledges in New Hampshire and top out to a parking lot. It’s anticlimactic, but it’s nice to get a ride down from the tourists. And there’s something wonderful about people limited to cars or wheelchairs having a few summits they can enjoy. As long as we don’t pave all of them.
On a totally unrelated topic, does anyone have any idea where the term “lunatic” originated?
Peter, I was just yanking (well, trying to) spyder’s chain.
Actually, before my knee deteriorated too much, I loved cross-country skiing in the moonlight. Magic.
And now I wonder where the idiom “yanking his chain” came from.
One of my best memories of the Sierras is the full moon. At 8,000 feet and above, especially when there’s snow on the ground, the moon is bright enough to read by.
I once skied down from the top of Mammoth Mountain (11,052 feet ASL) to the base lodge (about 9,000 feet) by the light of the full moon. You can see everything, but the moonlight flattens the depth and kills the shadows of the terrain, so you can’t always detect moguls ahead of you. It was one of those things that turns out to be more fun to tell about than it was to do ... but I still treasure the memory.
It was one of those things that turns out to be more fun to tell about than it was to do
Yeah Hank, I’ve had a few of those - “Let me live long enough to have grandkids, and I’ll tell ‘em about this”.