Spider Gap

“The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.” 
-Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

In his book, The Necessity of Empty Places, Paul Gruchow describes alpine flowers: the way they bloom all at once creating a “blaze of color for six weeks or so of the growing season.” Gruchow writes, “Alpine plants do not have the luxury of blooming in succession…everything hugs the thin Earth for protection from the drying, chilling wind.” In early September, when I ascended to Upper Lyman and Cloudy Pass, lupine, yarrow, gentian, Indian paintbrush, and Western pasque flowers brushed the mountains red, white, pink, blue, and violet. Now, less than two weeks later, bright red leaves replace green ground cover and only a couple gentian and pasque flowers remain scattered in the high altitude meadows.

The names of peaks and the names of plants are still new to me here in the North Cascades and I hesitate to say words like “gentian” and “lupine” because they are terms I know from only guidebooks. I haven’t had anyone help me through the nuances of Railroad Creek Valley the way I walked kids through the temperate rain-forest where I worked last year, explaining each tree and shrub by slowly saying the name, telling stories, and sharing identifying characteristics. A couple days ago, at coffee break, I asked the people at my table if they knew what "the puffy plants that grow high up in the mountain are?" When this question (understandably) confused everyone I added, “They look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.” After several minutes of bumbling, I described the plant enough for Janice, the village gardener, to identify the “Dr. Seuss plant” as the Western pasque flower, a member of the buttercup family that blooms soon after the snow melt, budding into a tiny white pedaled flower. Janice told me that when the pasque flower seeds in a puff of feather-like hairs. I pictured the downy billows I had seen scattered in mountain meadows, floating on their stems like something out of a cartoon: pasque flowers.

I learned recently the leaves turn red in mountains is a result of the terrain: the scrappy soil, sunny afternoons, and cold nights.  In rich lowland soil, the leaves turn yellow.  Summer light decreases, leaves stop producing chlorophyll, and carotene and xanthophyll (the leaf's other pigments) kick in, painting the foliage yellow or orange.  Unlike carotene and xanthophyll, anthocyanin, the pigment that turns leaves red, has to be produced and requires additional energy.  Trees only produce anthocyanin in landscapes where the stress of mere survival would otherwise cause them to drop their leaves too soon.  Like the burst of wildflowers I witnessed in August and September, the red that has started to cross the mountain is a symbol of survival in an ecosystem that makes nothing easy.

~

Yesterday I went to Spider Gap, a slope above Lyman Lake where you can scramble the scree and snowfields and see into the next valley.  It was a twenty-five mile day that I had to pace, in both time and energy, so that I had enough stamina to scramble up the gap after the ten mile trek to Upper Lyman Lake and enough daylight for the hike back after the descent from Spider Gap.  I hiked fast to Hart Lake and the switchbacks at Lyman, then slowed.  I filled my water bottle at a river near Lyman, where I knew the current moved fast enough to make the water safe for drinking.  I sat in the meadows by the lake, scanning the changing horizon for autumn orange and red.  I lay on my belly to photograph the leaves and tromped off trail for better views of Lyman Lake from the trail that snaked above it.  I lingered near Lyman and Upper Lyman Lake, because (1) to me, nothing is prettier than the Lyman Lakes, turquoise pools pocketed by mountain peaks, and (2) I wanted to let my body rest before I had to scramble up the gap.

Spider Gap is no mountain summit.  I don't possess the technical skills to climb any of the peaks that surround Holden Village.  However, I had to bushwhack between the Lake and the gap.  I looked for cairns, stacked stones left by other hikers marking the safest way.  I pressed my palms against the scree when the climb got steep, I toed the snow to test iciness.  I listened for the sound of ice cracking and scanned the cliffs above me for cougars or rock-slides.  When I heard stones skitter on the other side of the slope, I froze, scanning the horizon before I continued my trek.  

In upper elevations color becomes clearer. The thinner atmosphere refracts less light and the decreased dust and moisture captures less color pigment. The sky looks bluer and the yellow and oranges in the stone seem more intense. As I climbed, my senses prickled with a heightened awareness of touch and sight and sound.

It took me about an hour to ascend from Upper Lyman Lake to Spider Gap.  I moved slow and safe.  I climbed scree, crossed a flat snowfield then ascended a slope of shallow snow.  As I moved toward the top, Upper Lyman started to look like a river, weaving between rock and glacier.  The snow shadowed the rock below.  I could see the way the mountain peaks contained the valley, walling Railroad Creek in Cascade cliffs, and the way Lyman Glacier fed the lushness: the mountain meadows and turquoise lakes.  From Spider Gap I saw a sign warning of fire danger in the next valley and the way the rock sloped down into snowfields that descended into Spider Meadows.  I saw both Lyman Lakes and Cloudy Peak.  I scurried from overlook to overlook before settling in the middle of the gap and wedging myself against the rock to eat granola and chocolate and drink from my water bottle.

~

According to Paul Gruchow, until the late eighteenth century no one visited mountains on purpose. Travelers who had to cross the Alps wore blindfolds and philosophers believed that before the flood and the fall, the earth had only flat smooth surfaces, filled with soil, rich enough to farm. It’s a luxury to love a landscape where "everything hugs the thin Earth for protection," where existence involves struggle, where even the trees turn different colors in their strain to survive.

This summer in Michigan, my brother tried to teach me to rock climb.  I knew I had a decent strength to weight ratio.  I knew knots.  I’d belayed hundreds of kids and taught rock climbing classes at the YMCA where I worked, but the first time Keith belayed me at the rocks at Grand Ledge, I barely ascended the easiest route.  I bruised my knees and banged my shins and held onto the rock so tight that my arms shook till my muscles pumped out.  One day, a man named Dave stood behind my belaying brother to watch me climb.  Dave watched with crossed arms, nodded, and told me in an even voice, “You have to work with the rock, not against it.”  Then he scrambled up beside me, pulling his body in toward the stone, feeling the creases in the rock with his fingers.  “You’re fighting the stone,” he told me and I imagined what climbing might look and feel like if instead of trying to muscle my way up rock I could move more like the ledge itself: gracefully sloping upward in a series of sharp steps and smooth reaches.

It's a different way of thinking: working with the rock.  As a short girl who spent her childhood in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula trying to keep up with stronger more coordinated boys, I learned to rely on speed and scrappy tenacity. I've had to get stitches half a dozen times and had two concussions. Purple scars shadow my legs, elbows, and hips. I broke my collarbone playing football during seventh grade cross country practice. I fractured my shins running too many miles on a cement track during high school.  I know how to barrel forward but I'm still learning how to live in a place where toughness requires sensitivity and fierceness means accommodation.  I'm learning to listen to the crumble of rocks and to feel my way through snowfields.  I'm learning to move slow enough to see the cairns from other hikers.  Sometimes I wonder how my time in the mountains will help me when I go to Ledges with Keith next summer in Michigan.  Will crawling through scree help my hands feel comfortable lingering on dusty rock long enough to find the good holds at Ledges? Will scrambling on snow aid my feet in trusting the small holds I need to lean into in order to work with the rock?  Will I eventually make my ascents with the smoothness of the lanky climbers I love to watch once I' m out of the harness, barefoot on the banks of Grand River?

After descending from Spider Gap, I rested on a boulder beside Upper Lyman Lake.  I scooped my legs into my chest and wrapped my arms around my knees.  I thought about taking off my shoes, rolling up my pants, and wading into the glacier-cold water.  But instead I sat.  I looked up the the cliffs and down at the pebbled bottom of the lake.  I felt the wind brush my sweaty skin.  I don't know when the trails I've walked each weekend will be buried in snow, no longer navigable.  I tried to memorize the way sun beamed off the lake, making the ripples in the water gleam.  I tried to memorize the shape of Lyman Glacier on the peaks.  I focused on breathing and didn't think about the hike back.

Spider Gap, September 2012

Miner's Ridge

“I have spent my life trying to understand why this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds…why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same day, why (often) leaving seems like the only solution to loving.”-Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

Miner's Ridge lookout with Glacier Peak in the background, September 2012

In 2003 my family went skiing in Winter Park, Colorado.  I don’t remember the names of any of the runs where we skied.  I don’t remember a single meal we ate.  I couldn’t give you details about our accommodations.  What I remember is taking the lift up to the top of the mountain with my friend Eric and skiing off the lift to a place where nothing but the thick cover of clouds crested above us.  Instead of skiing down, Eric and I collapsed into a heap of powder, which felt soft around our bundled-up bodies.  Snow cradled my legs and shoulders.  Cold reddened my cheeks.  I spread my arms wide, snow-angel style.  Eric and I lay there for minutes, watching our breath swirl in clouds around our bodies before I leaned to look at him.  “Can’t we just live here?” I asked.  We silenced.  I tried to hold onto that moment.  That moment: of being buried in powder on the top of the mountain--wanting to stay--even as I knew that within the next five minutes we would start skiing down toward lower lifts, our families, and hot chocolate at the mountain’s base.

In one of my favorite Stuart Dybek stories, “Paper Lantern,” a man and a woman watch a building burn along a river in Chicago.  The man snaps a photo of the woman at the exact moment the flames burst forward, capturing the glow of the blaze on her face.  Later, when the woman remembers the photo, she says to the man, “[Most] of the moments in our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them.  It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives.  Those moments are our lives.  Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives of the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves.”  She tells the man if she hadn’t met him, she wouldn’t have been on a bridge watching a fire and notes, “Maybe that’s what falling in love means: the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.”

For me, the moment on the mountain with Eric was not a moment of falling in love with a person but a moment of falling in love with a landscape, one of many moments scattered throughout my childhood and adolescence when I knew I wanted to move west.  I grew up in Metro-Detroit and didn’t see my first mountain at until age ten in Missoula, Montana.  On the flight to Missoula I saw silhouettes of the Rockies but it wasn’t until morning when Dad opened the hotel mini-blinds that I first saw a mountain in full form: rising from the earth cloaked in prairie grass and fir trees, less pointy and snow-covered than the peaks I’d seen in pictures.  The same day, hiking up to the “M” shaped out of gravel in the foothills above the University of Missoula, I tripped and fell.  My parents had to ask the hotel we’d already check out of to let us use the pool shower to wash my scraped up arms and legs, and my skinned back, knees, and palms with soap and warm water.  Mom sprayed canned peroxide on the places on my back where rocks pocked the skin raw.  Even bloodied and battered, I knew I wanted to move back to a place like Missoula.  I pictured myself serving coffee in the diner where we ate breakfast or gardening in the bungalows that lined the neighborhoods near the university.  Later, when we drove north to stay at a ranch in the Mission Mountains, I imagined doing farm-work or baking bread for tourists.  I wanted to be a University of Missoula college student, a ranch hand, a cook, or a cowboy.

In August of 2011, during my first move to Washington, I stopped in Missoula.  I stayed at Hutchins Hostel: a backpackers’ boardinghouse owned by a man who studied environmental science at University of Missoula with a vegetable garden in front and chickens in back.  I placed my duffel on the bottom bunk of a cedar bed, slipped on sandals and a backpack and hiked toward the same “M”-marked foothill I’d fallen on as a child.  I hiked switchbacks in the August heat, sun beating down on my un-shaded body as I moved high above the city.  I crouched in the thistles and looked out at the river and the stadium, the library, and the city center.  I felt myself growing surer of my steps as I moved up and then down the trail.  When I reached the trail’s bottom, I picnicked on the university campus, eating tomatoes and goat cheese on whole wheat pita bread I’d made back in Michigan.  There I was: a foot taller and fifteen years older than I’d been my first trip to Missoula, my car packed with clothes and backpacking gear, mason jars, prayer flags, and paperback books, ready to move to a state cut by mountains, streaked by rivers, and bordered by Pacific Coast.

~

Missoula, Montana, Summer 2011

~

I saw Glacier Peak for the first time in June of 2011, on a hike to Cloudy Pass.  I was traveling with friends who knew Railroad Creek Valley well enough to find a path through snow which started at the Lyman Lake Switchbacks, four miles from the top of the trail.  We skidded out onto an ice-covered Lyman Lake and passed fir trees blanketed by ten foot snowdrifts.  At first we moved uphill in a line, testing the slipperiness of the snow, but as we neared the top, we scurried and slid, sledding on our snowshoes when the trail sloped down.  We picnicked at the pass, angling our bodies so we could see Glacier Peak, sprawling above the rest of the Cascades.  Unlike the other Cascade composite volcanoes you can’t see Glacier Peak from any major metropolitan area.  Despite the fact Glacier Peak lies only seventy miles northeast of Seattle, its smaller summit (at 10, 541 it’s still 4,000 feet shorter than Rainier) and its place in the center of the Cascades make it a mountain best seen from trails and valleys you can only hike to.  I’d never seen a mountain so sprawling and remote, and after I finished my sandwich I strapped my snowshoes back on to scramble up the trails above the pass for a better view.  Despite my wet socks and the glare of the sun beating on the mountain snow, I couldn’t sit still in the presence of that peak. 

Until this past weekend, I’d never hiked past the point in Cloudy Pass where we’d scrambled that day.  I’d never taken the hiker’s cutoff down the steep slopes behind Cloudy, crossing the county line into the Darrington ranger district.  I’d stuck to hikes I could do in a day and stayed in or above Railroad Creek Valley. 

~

Miner's Ridge fire watch tower, shortly after sunrise

~

We started our 38-mile (roundtrip) trek to Miner's Ridge last Saturday at 8:30 am.  Sally, Scott, Seth, and I met in front of the Holden Village Hike Haus and started on the trail toward Hart Lake, Lyman Lake, Cloudy Pass, and Image Lake.  We wrestled our packs onto our backs and re-adjusted our waist straps.  We joked about camping in the village or at the ball field right next to the wilderness area to spare our backs, shoulders, and hamstrings the (almost) forty miles of hiking with a pack.  It took us till lunch to reach Cloudy Pass where we ate sandwiches and oranges on boulders that overlooked Lyman Lake.  We whistled at marmots.  We chatted with hunters when they passed us dressed in blaze orange, hauling their backpacks and rifles. 

We descended down the hiker’s cut-off after eating, dropping hundreds of feet on a rocky trail which snaked between boulders square enough to roll your ankle or bruise your foot if you stepped wrong. We caught glimpses of new mountains, mountains whose names I didn't yet know, as we walked through sub-alpine forests which smelled crisper than lowland woods. After miles of curving through trees and moving up and down slopes, we came out in a field with full view of Glacier Peak. The openness of of the grassland punctuated the craggy cliffs and glacial fields above us.

"It’s so pretty,” I said, then stopped, “that’s not the right word.” 

Scott called it “sublime”--the kind of pretty that makes you terrified, a beauty which takes your breath away then makes you laugh.

When we hiked toward Image Lake and Miners Ridge, Sally, Scott, Seth, and I sometimes silenced.  Sometimes we laughed or swore or jumped up-and-down.  Once or twice, I sank to my knees, stooping to take in the land all around me.  I imagined how glaciers scraped the mountains into chiseled rock and snow rising above fields lush with late summer flowers.

As we pressed forward, we got nuzzled by horses that grazed in mountain grass.  We laughed as their noses brushed our cheeks and their necks jostled our backpacks.  Every corner I turned, I wanted to stay.  Sally and I wanted to sit, to roll down the hillside with our arms spread wide, to linger for photos and conversation and dinner but Scott, who had hiked to Miner’s Ridge before, pushed us forward, “It gets better.”

We picnicked by Image Lake, a small pool of clear water surrounded by mountain summits, eating homemade granola and peanut butter sandwiches and dark chocolate my friend Liz sent from Ashland, Oregon.  We watched the early evening sun streak the foothills gold and saw the first reflections of nightfall in the lake-water.

Miner’s Ridge is almost exactly a mile from Image Lake.  We hiked switchbacks that ended on a thin strip of land surrounded by mountains.  We dropped our backpacks and unrolled our sleeping bags below a historic fire lookout tower.  From where we set up camp we could see Glacier Peak’s snow-covered summit looming above the rest of the Cascades.  We could point out trails and lakes and landmarks as if we were standing on the top of a topography map. 

Sally, Scott, Seth, and I climbed the fire watch tower where we met a volunteer ranger named George, who slept in a room at the top of the tower with windowed walls and a wood-burning stove.  We took pictures from the tower’s balcony.  We made small talk with George about hiking and conservation and fire-watching while we stared at Glacier’s Peak’s glacial fields.  Later, we climbed the tower again to see the sun set.  We watched the sky go from blue to gold to pink as the sun dipped below the mountain.  The colors beamed off the rock and snow.  The winnowing light shadowed the valley.  I thought of a line from Pam Houston's memoir Contents May Have Shifted:  “If I die tonight it will be with every single thing unfinished (like, I suppose, any other night), and yet, what a gift to die on the verge of tears.”  That is what I thought, sitting on the Miner’s Ridge fire lookout watching the sun set on Glacier Peak.  That is what I thought, lying in my sleeping bag with scrubby mountain vegetation below me and stars blanketing the sky above me.  That is what I thought, the next morning when I woke at 5:15 to the first rays of sun kissing the cliff-tops.  What a gift.  What a gift. What a gift.

~

Miner's Ridge, September 2012

Holden Village

“This counting of steps. This counting of scars
in the bark: the warty burl bulging low
on the trunk, the black-scratchings left
by the bear learning to climb. This counting
 of sleeps between this country & the next country
we call home.”
-“Bell”, Cecily Parks (read in Orion magazine my first afternoon in Holden Village)

Holden:

I live in a village you cannot drive to--a village with no cell phone reception and one satellite phone used only for emergencies. A village with no grocery stores, no hospitals, no shopping malls, no restaurants, no liquor stores, no drug stores. A village that produces its own power using a hydroelectric plant. A village that receives its mail by boat. A village with one church, one school, one dining hall, one ice cream shop, one coffee cart, and one gift shop. A village edged by Cascade cliffs and wilderness areas so remote and well-preserved that the forestry service requires crews to clear trails using long saws rather than chain saws.

In Holden Village, you arrive by water. It’s a ritual: parking at Field’s Point landing, buying a ticket, boarding the boat. The first time I made the trip I camped in the parking lot with friends. We set up our tent on the asphalt and slept side-by-side on the pavement. We woke with oily skin and stiff backs and drove to the closest gas station we could find to buy donuts, granola bars, and individually packed bowls of cereal for breakfast. We washed our faces and brushed our teeth in the public restroom then funneled down to the dock with packs on our backs, duffels on our shoulders, and wheeled bags rolling behind us. We bought tickets at a booth set up beside the dock, tucking our ticket stubs into the safest pockets of our wallets. We snapped photos when we boarded the boat, climbed the ramp from the dock and then the stairs to the top deck. We sat in the open air, bundled in mittens and jackets and watched as the mountains went from sparse and scrappy to craggy and lush.

I arrived in Holden Village twelve days ago. I took a yellow school bus with the name “Honey” painted across the front up switchbacks for eleven miles from the boat landing at Lucerne. I sat next to a boy from Gabon who was headed to Holden Village as a guest singer in the gospel choir. We watched Lake Chelan disappear beneath switchbacks. We sat on green leather bus seats reading our respective novels until the bus stopped short of the village and the driver turned to give us details about the village.

Holden consists of a collection of lodges and chalets, a dining hall, a school, a library, and church. Some of the lodges serve dual purposes. For example: housing and laundry, housing and hike house, housing and nurse’s office. Each chalet has a flower box full of marigolds, a porch swing, and a flag.  From the place where the bus stopped I could see Chalet One’s Canadian flag, slumped in the still air.  My friend Ben sat on the Chalet One porch swing playing guitar with a pink-haired girl stooped beside him. The sun beamed off the mountain peaks behind Chalet Hill.  Villagers sat on the sloped grass near the Village Center waving.  Ron, a friend from last summer, greeted me with a button-shaped sign painted with the words “Rachael TA.” Later, when I arrived in my room I found a white card with the words “Welcome Back to Holden” written inside, propped on the desk beside my bed.

Hiking:

 Last year during my first few weeks in Washington, I kayaked the Puget Sound every night. I splashed through salt water, provoking the cove’s bio-luminescent phytoplankton to sparkle around the wake of my paddle. I paddled toward the mouth of Henderson Bay where moonlight-dappled Mount Rainier dominated the horizon. I waited for the water to still with my legs propped up on my kayak. I sat beneath the stars until my damp jeans sent me back shivering toward the dock. I climbed into my bed each night smelling of saltwater.

The view of Lower Lyman Lake, hiking down from Upper Lyman
Lake, 9/8/12

My first day in Holden Village I hiked twenty miles by myself. I woke at six, ate oatmeal in the dining hall, and bagged two sandwiches from the hiker bar. I carried a backpack with water, food, and field guides, and checked out at the village’s Hike House. I moved fast, covering the first five miles in less than an hour and a half.  I felt the swell of lactic acid rising in my calves. Sweat dampened my t-shirt. When I started up the switchbacks toward Lyman Lake and saw the shape and snow of Dumbbell Mountain come into clear view, I set down my pack and stopped to photograph the cliffs combing the blue sky. When I arrived at Lyman, I sat for a full twenty minutes, staring at the mountain lake’s Disney-blue water, before mounting the final miles to Cloudy Pass, switch-backing through wildflowers toward mountain ridges which traverse the Pacific Crest Trail at some of its prettiest points.  I listened to the screech of marmots, scrambled up rocky crests for views of Glacier Peak, and dropped to my stomach to photograph flowers recently sprung from the melt of high-country snow.

As my body tired, my mind cleared.  Mountain ridges rose on either side of the trail where I trekked. I thought, one day I will ache for this landscape¬Ache. The thought felt as defined as something I’d read in the book.

 ~

I’ve hiked over sixty miles during my first twelve days in Holden Village. That doesn’t count the miles I run in the morning before breakfast or the two mile jogs to the Glacier Peak Wilderness area my friend Ben and I (sometimes) do at night after he gets off work. It doesn’t count the miles I trek back and forth across the village when I run errands or the short nature hikes I take with children at the school where I work. Those sixty miles are weekend hiking miles, covered over three long treks--all-day trips which tested my legs and back. Next weekend, when I backpack to Image Lake with friends, I’ll add forty more miles onto my mountain tally. I like to think I’m getting stronger--that by the end of my year here, I’ll move through the Cascades with the mountain-goat ease some of my co-workers exhibit.

Martin Ridge, 9/1/12

“I don’t know why I like hiking so much,” a friend said, during a hike on my third day in Holden, as we stood with our palms on our knees, breathing thin air, downing gulps of water from the bottles we carried on our backs. “It’s something masochistic. It can’t be just the views; we live in an age where I could stream this stuff on Youtube.”

We hiked Martin Ridge that day, bush-whacking and scrambling over 7,000 feet above the valley.  We felt the hardness of the landscape in our weathered hands and aching muscles.  We walked narrow paths bordered by scree slides.  Rocks skittered beneath our feet, highlighting our height above the valley.  We arrived back at Holden Village thirteen hours after we began our hike with sore backs, swollen knees, and cotton-dry mouths.  When we got within a half mile of Holden we flicked off our headlamps and let the lights from the lodges light our way into the village, leading us back to glasses of orange juice and leftover pie in the dining hall.

School:

I’ve worked in the Holden Village School for five days. The entire village celebrated the first day of school with a parade that lasted most of the morning. A school bus with “La Paz” painted across the front picked up the school’s eleven students from their chalet homes that dot the hill less than a quarter mile from the building where they attend school. Villagers in costumes interrupted the bus with mock emergencies: A fire drill which required the students to exit the bus, a leaky toilet rigged to shoot water in the air while operations workers (men in their early twenties wearing jean shorts and tie-die) danced in circles around the road, and an ice cream shop blockade where employees in medieval costumes demanded students dance for milkshakes and free desert coupons. Our school staff—John, the high school teacher, Jeanne, the elementary school teacher, and me--blocked the bus with a “staff breakfast” of peanut butter sandwiches, coffee, and apples on a card table decorated with lavender in a vase and a checkered cloth. We feigned ignorance about school’s start before hitchhiking our way onto the school bus for a ride up to the second level of the Holden Mine. 

Operations workers (Tim and Taylor) interrupt the school bus
 with a plumbing disaster, tie-dye, and dance. 

I work with seven elementary school students and four high school students. I teach physical education and lead nature hikes. I organize writing activities (check out: my students' writing) and facilitate games. I teach first graders to write their numbers, lead songs, answer math questions and read out loud.  I see my students at meals and Vespers.  I nod at them from my porch swing and wave at them during my morning runs. Yesterday in the dining hall, a parent approached me, and asked about my weekend, “I haven’t seen you in a couple days,” she said. When I said I’d been camping and hiking, she shook her head, “I hear you run every morning before school, work all day, and every weekend you hike. I want your energy.”

I explain to her what my housemates already know: that the urge to hike and walk the valley comes not from a compulsion to move, exercise, or explore, but from the knowledge that soon the weather will make mountain travel impossible.  Two mornings ago, sparkles of snow sent my students barreling from their desks to the window, palming the pane glass while the first flakes fell. “One morning,” my housemate Jericho says, “You’ll wake up, and it’ll look like someone powdered the mountains with sugar.” Snow will cover the trails, making it difficult to move or navigate. We’ll trade our hiking boots for cross country skis and snowshoes, stoke our wood burning stoves and begin winter in the village.

Home:

My housemates and I “warmed” our house two days ago.  Kari made pastries, Cecilia swept the floor, Jericho cleaned the downstairs, I made lemonade and a playlist and brought a tray of glasses from the dining hall.  We moved into our chalet two Saturdays ago, and figured it was high time we had a party. Our chalet, (Chalet Four) came with yellow and orange marigolds in our flower box and a rainbow flag on our porch. We have four bedrooms, a basement, a sunny kitchen, a laundry room, two bathrooms, and a living room with a wood burning stove and a window bench with a heater beneath it. My room has wood floors and wood paneling. My ceiling slants with the slope of the roof and bookshelves and storage hooks line two of my walls. My scarves hang in the hallway leading to my room; my frame backpack hangs on the hook beside my bed. I brought only a couple boxes, so everything decorating my dresser and hanging on my wall has significance and a story: The postcard my former housemate Anna sent me from a writers’ conference in Chicago last year, the picture of Teddy Roosevelt my brother gave me, the prayer flags I purchased at the Ten Thousand Villages store in Ames, Iowa before moving out of the apartment I shared with Anna to go west for the first time, the earring rack my mother made for me when I went to college, the colored-pen etching of a big cedar tree my friend Lauren drew after our first trip to the Hoh Rainforest, and the calendar my father designed out of photos he’d taken on family vacation (September=Bryce Canyon, my high school senior spring break trip.)

At our housewarming party, people from Holden Village and Stehekin gathered in our living room, perching on our couches and chairs and benches with baked goods and drinks. Friends took shifts touring bedrooms.  They admired our bookshelves, our wall hangings, and the quilts we’d chosen from the Village laundry. Unlike a “normal” house-warming where someone might notice the structure of the house, our Holden guests noted how we’d changed a chalet they already knew, how we’d made the space our own: different from the Richardson family who lived in our chalet last year and the visiting teaching staff who’d occupied the house during the summer.

 ~ 

Here we know the names of the mountains—Buckskin, Copper, Dumbbell, Bonanza. Here every staff member has a Polaroid posted in the dining hall with his or her name and job written in pen underneath.  Here we hold parties: weather-themed dances, pool tournaments, karaoke nights, and housewarmings.  Here we break for meals, for morning cake and coffee, for bus arrivals and bus departures.  Here we watch the sun set and rise on Cascade cliffs, sit out on sunny afternoons, and wake to mountain frost.

Last weekend, my housemates and I joked about how difficult it is to explain Holden Village—recounting conversations we’d all had trying to explain the strange place where we live. “Where is it?” “You take a ferry from Chelan to get there.” “Is it on an island?” “No it’s in the mountains--there are just no roads that go there.” “How do you get there from the ferry?” “You take a road.” “I thought you said there were no roads.” “The road has two dead ends.”

We laughed: Cecilia, Jericho, Kari and me.  Here we were, Cecilia: a Grinnell College grad who worked in D.C before moving to Holden, Kari: a Pacific North-westerner who spent her post-college years cooking in an upscale restaurant outside Seattle, Jericho: a Minnesota-native who's backpacked across India, and me: a writer from Detroit--belly-laughing so hard it hurt--drinking beer and tea and wine, sitting in our mountain chalet in a place so remote and off-the grid that Jericho's college friends are still not entirely convinced she hasn't joined a cult.

It’s a good life here in Holden Village. Today, I ran switchbacks while I watched rising sun orange mountain peaks, I ate pancakes topped with berries for breakfast, I read Old Turtle and The Lorax out loud to first graders in a loft above the library, I led elementary school students in poetry-writing beside Railroad Creek, I ate borscht and fresh baked bread for dinner then soaked in a hot tub while I watched the sun dip beneath Buckskin Mountain.  Tonight I'll return to my room.  I'll see my brother's pictures and my dad's calender and my mom's earring rack.  I'll see the card on my bookshelf with "Welcome Back to Holden" inside.  I'll sleep with my window open and my prayer flags from Ames, Iowa fluttering in wind.

The Ground Underneath My Feet

Rocky soil, summit of Mount Townsend 6/10/12

I read on a panel at the Scienceworks Hands-On Museum in Ashland, Oregon that a single scoop of soil contains more microorganisms than there are people on the planet: over six billion tiny lives in a handful of dirt.  I recorded the fact using the "notes" tool on my old-school flip phone, keying in the words "soil," "scoop," and "6 billion plus" using the phone's number-keys.  I wasn't sure why that fact seemed worthy enough to spend five minutes number-typing into my phone.  Perhaps, even then, as a Midwestern vagabond more smitten with vistas than soil, I knew I needed that reminder of the bigness of smallness: the tiny specks of life that surround us everywhere.

wan·der: 

1. To move about without a definite destination or purpose.  

2. To go by an indirect route or at no set pace; amble: wander toward town.

I spent the last year of my life hiking every weekend.  When I moved to Washington state fresh from graduate school in Iowa, I wasn't sure how long I would stay in the Pacific Northwest and, having never lived near ocean and mountains, I wanted to encounter them like a tourist.  I wanted to walk to each view I saw advertised in the gift shops of the State and National Park offices.  I spent work nights flipping through hiking books, thumbing descriptions and photos of my next weekend's adventure.  I put twenty-five thousand miles on my orange Honda despite the fact that I lived where I worked and seldom left the parking lot on weekdays.  I kept a mountain bike, a box of books, a sleeping bag, and a tent in my car.  Every Saturday morning, I left the YMCA Camp where I taught outdoor education with a fistful of trails maps printed from WTA, my GoLite day pack, and two tin water bottles.  I felt calm as soon as I got to my car.  The movement soothed me.  I put on music or podcasts or an audio-book, stopped at my favorite espresso stand for an Americano and a pumpkin muffin (small luxuries I justified paying for because I'd eaten bland camp food or stir-fried vegetables all week), and headed north or west or east toward the Olympics or the Cascades or the Pacific Ocean or Mount Rainier.  I stopped at the farm-stand to fill my pack with carrots and lavender chocolate and spicy meat sticks and let the landscape sweep by until I reached that week's trail head.  I grew familiar with the lactic acid strain of switchbacks and became comfortable hiking down mountains after dark, feeling my way with my feet until night enveloped the trail and had to turn to the illumination of my headlamp to guide me step-by-step back to my car.

In graduate school, my housemate named my little Honda
Fit, "my noble steed," because of the way it accompanied
me adventuring. Once, a man from Belgium who I briefly dated
told me that he couldn't wait to go back to his country and tell
people he had met "an American girl who lived out  of her
car."  I tried to explain that I paid rent, I had an apartment.
I just also had a clothes-filled Honda where I spent most of the
summer traversing the woods.

Wan·der: 

3. To proceed in an irregular course; meander.

4. To go astray: wander from the path of righteousness.

Last year, I taught 4th-6th graders orienteering (along with marine science, wildlife ecology, forest ecology, reptiles, boating, archery, rock climbing, wild worms, and ornithology.)  I walked kids into the woods and passed them compasses.  I taught them to lay the compass smooth on their palm, pressing the flat back of the compass against their belly buttons.  I'd show them the Hugo arrow ("you go where Hugo") and "Red Fred" who always pointed North.  I'd teach them how to turn their dials and quiz them about what each number on the dial means. ("So if you want to go East what do you set your dial to?"  "90 degrees!" They'd shout with their hands pointed skyward, unable to wait for me to call on them.)  I'd turn them into "pirates" and give them coordinates for things that we had to find as a group.  ("There's ice cream at 135 degrees, which way should we sail?")  By the end of the class I'd ask if they felt more comfortable in the woods.  I'd ask how they might find their way without a compass.  We'd talk about landmarks, sunsets, sunrises, the north star, the big dipper.

Dirt: Steamboat Rock State Park, a wander-y side trip after
a missed ferry and changed vacation plans.   3/27/12

When I talked about teaching orienteering to my friends outside of the camp where I worked, they'd respond, "You're teaching childen how to not get lost" and I'd say back, "Yeah, it seems like a bad idea, I should be teaching kids how to be comfortable being lost, literally and metaphorically, not how to find their way, I'm better at that."   My friends knew how often I'd gotten myself lost: on the way to the blues club in Des Moines, in half-abandoned neighborhoods in Detroit, on the way to the dentist I'd been going to for ten years.  Once, driving back from a road trip to St. Louis, I realized that I'd crossed the Mississippi at the wrong point and no longer knew where I was.  I had been talking on the phone to my father:  "Dad, I gotta go.  I don't know what state I'm in so I want to look at an atlas."  Had I taken the advice I give my students (moving slowly, looking for landmarks, paying attention) I would have stayed found.  I get lost (literally and metaphorically) because I often ignore my own advice barreling forward when I should be stopping the car or pressing my palm to the dirt or lifting my face toward the sky.

Wan·der: 

5. To lose clarity or coherence of thought or expression.

This summer, I started rock climbing, outdoors, at Grand Ledge in Michigan with my brother.  When I climb I struggle.  I want a distinct route and can never seem to find it.  When I raise my left foot I can't find a hold for my right hand, when I try to extend my leg and push my body upward toward my destination I flail at the wall, instead of feeling for crevices in the sandstone where I can wrap my fingers.  To climb well, you have to find ground beneath your feet where there is none.  You have to trust your body and trust the rock.  You have to find small spaces for your fingers and toes and learn how to work with the stone so your body balances.  My brother often climbs barefoot for this reason.  "You can feel the rock that way," he says.  This is what I want to learn, I always think, how to feel the rock.  How to see the life within the soil.  How to find my way.

Erin, my brother's lady friend, rests and rises with an
elegance I envy, palming the rock for finger pockets and
stretching upward in smooth sure movements. 8/01/12

I haven't blogged in more than six years.  I follow the blogs of friends, look at their well articulated pretty lives and struggle to see myself as part of that online conversation.  I write, but I don't bake vegan cookies or practice alternative urban permaculture, or craft found objects into jewelry and home decor.  I love to cook, but make a mess of the kitchen and the meals I make hardly seem worthy of photographing and writing about and usually, when I try to craft I end up with a scraps of magazines all over the floor and glue-gun seared fingertips.  I decided to re-enter the world of blogging because I recently took a job in a mountain school so remote that phone conversation, via land-line or cell is impossible.  I will have no car, no roads, no television.  But I will have (slow) internet and a life of hiking, reading, teaching, and writing that I want to share with friends and family.

The first thing Blogger asks for is a title.  I text-ed friends:  "What should I title my blog?"  I flipped through books of poetry I loved, listened to song lyrics, and created three or four failed blog addresses before heading to bed without any title or template.  The next morning, I woke up, poked around on the computer, sorted through stacks of books and cds and clothing, then headed to the Honda dealership for an oil change.  I dropped off my car and went for a run.  While running, I found myself retracing the last year, the decision I had made to live in a remote community without an easy escape route, my own tendency to get lost, my recent gravitation toward simplicity and soil.  I returned to the dealership and text-ed one of my closest friends.

Me:  "I came up with a title."

Him: "Is it 'Rachael's blog'?"

Me: "No, I'm pretty sure that web address is taken."

Him: "Drat."

(Pause in conversation.)

Me: "I'm calling it "The Ground Underneath my Feet"--as in getting grounded, soil, moss, rocks, sand, putting down roots, searching for home.  As opposed to vistas and travel and running away."

Last year, I learned that the tulip shaped icon on my camera allowed me to shoot photographs in Macro mode in order to catch tiny details: lichen, dirt, buttercups crusted onto mountain cliffs.  When I tried to shoot panoramas in Washington's lush landscape the greens blurred together but when I knelt down and focused the photographs came out clear.  They're the closest thing I have to the type of foot-finding my brother does rock climbing at Grand Ledge or the dirt-sifting science I learned about at Scienceworks.  They're evidence of the places I've been and reminders of the places I want to go and the way I want to stop and learn the landscape when I get there.

Moss, lichen, and kelp covered rocks, Shaw Island, 2/28/12