Trinity Alps 2008, Words
Dec. 31st, 2008 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
summer_jackelSo, here's some stuff I wrote while in the woods back in October. I'd debated whether to post, but a few of you may enjoy it and I feel like I need to post it now or have it feel dated.
words brought back from a mountain
A trail in autumn
that I have walked many times, in summer.
Now red berries swell on thorny bushes
and the grasses have gone to gold and scarlet,
waiting for the snow.
I have looked at this lake many times on the map, and desired it. But I have not seen it before now.
Taste its coldness.
There is an old bone on the pebbled shore
bleached white.
The clouds blow gray under sharp mountains.
Familiarity with a place breeds mystery.
*
I am sitting on a rock, staring down into Lake Anna in the Trinity Alps, all lit and gilded with afternoon sun. Its depths are still, a clear and vivid blue, and wind chases fractal patterns across the surface in little plays of light and motion. A solitary hawk glides in slow spirals above, the sun making her wings pale and translucent.
And I think, what am I? What creature am I that I am permitted witness to such beauty?
No wonder we created God.
*
Jezebel has learned that if she curls up quietly behind me while I am eating and does not, for instance, immediately snap at the food the instant I set it down, I will probably share a little bit of it when I’m done. Otherwise, she’s banished.
All I’m saying is that training dogs isn’t really so hard. And time improves them.
*
You, lady, are the one I want holding my leash. Shame you aren’t much for canines.
*
Take your heart, and let it bleed into the mountain. In the mountain, all stones are broken, glacially tilled, all cut through with tiny, secret rivulets.
Love is a beautiful wound, and happens unreasonably.
*
Dogs, if you have the right ones, are ideal trail companions. They share your delight in being free and out of doors, and backpacking trips make them much better dogs: wiser, more thoughtful, more responsive and loyal. As you walk beside a dog, you grow together. Your stories entwine.
Cats are there to welcome your return with a purr and a rub and a ‘where were you?’ Cats will be warming themselves upon the hearth, content and satisfied. Cats make home.
*
On the third day away from all people, I became silent. It began to happen almost immediately; now, I said nothing, calling my dogs only when needed, with a short whistle or a movement of my hand. Even the written word seemed obtrusive.
*
Last night, I saw Canis Minor rise above the mountain. The stars here are so bright, and there are so many of them. The Milky Way is a pale haze. The constellation and the stars surrounding it suggested the form of a woman to my tired and half-dreaming mind, bright points at eye and breast, her outstretched arms.
I wonder if I want to love a woman who will come with me to this place. Perhaps; if she came into my life, I might welcome her. I am, however, no longer seeking her. I am content to be alone, and it is not unlikely that I am happier.
*
Pryde doesn’t move, even when I tickle the hairs between his pads with a pine needle. Now that’s a tired dog.
*
You get bored and read things. Examination suggested that the dog treats contained fewer and less suspect ingredients than my beef jerky. If I was at home, I would probably not have tried this, but after all, the unexamined life is not worth living. They actually weren’t that bad. I ate almost two of them.
*
A one-person tent comfortably accommodates one person and one Shetland sheepdog.
*
But that’s what life’s like, isn’t it?
You start out with a sniffy little puppy
And end it with a tired old dog, who you love.
*
On my third night in the wilderness, a great windstorm came up. It shook the tent so badly that I feared the poles might snap, and I lay awake listening to gusts of wind roaring down the mountain before they came to me. I became aware that I was not afraid, though I was grateful that this storm did not bring rain.
I realize that I am more comfortable here now, alone, two weeks past the autumnal equinox, than I have ever been while alone in the wild. I do not feel so much a sense of questing, of journeying, as a calm, vaguely sorrowful sense of being, of presence.
*
How did I not remember how beautiful Luella Lake is, seen from the summit? Take the great, gray, jagged cliffs of granite sweeping gracefully into cold and emerald-colored water, which is almost flawlessly clear. The patch of ice at its rim, which will last until the coming of this winter’s snows. The nearly vertical seam where a blue-white mountain meets iron red. The still drama of it.
Perhaps great beauty, like great pain, can only be remembered in vague shorthand, never with the vividness of the imminent.
*
The western sky is thick with clouds, and long strings of grey move quickly over the mountains. Diamond Lake is mirrored and expectant, home at the moment to a small flock of common mergansers. All around me, the lush green of this lake’s surrounding marsh is tipped in gold and brown and brief slashes of red.
It may rain tonight.
*
Pictures don’t describe the place. When I attempt to form a mental image of heaven or Fiddlers’ Green or what have you, it’s this: the view seen from the lip of Diamond Lake, staring down and out into what seems like an impossible vastness. The small lake sits in a bowl of scree at the base of two peaks and a long ridge, and is surrounded by thick grass. The water is emerald-colored and full of trout. Its far edge is a lip of granite that curves steeply into a heavily wooded valley far below, the soil’s toothy sharpness softened by acres of meadow and marshland, dotted with still, black, secret pools. Lower down, you can see it transition into forest.
Directly opposite you, in all of its pure and unobstructed glory, rises the sharp, gray, granitic heart of the Trinity Alps. I’ve walked trails in that part of the mountain and, sitting here staring at it, mesmerized by its sharpness, I wonder how.
To see all of this, you sit on an outcropping. It unfurls below you. There is a place where the sun-warmed rock will hold your back like a chair. Sitting there, I watch a long, textured resplendence of black and grey stormclouds move quickly across the sky, watch the sun stain them salmon and pale gold as it sinks, and consider that there is nothing to say about this place. The truths here. The mountain simply is: it humbles, awes and defines any human person who has been witness to it.
words brought back from a mountain
A trail in autumn
that I have walked many times, in summer.
Now red berries swell on thorny bushes
and the grasses have gone to gold and scarlet,
waiting for the snow.
I have looked at this lake many times on the map, and desired it. But I have not seen it before now.
Taste its coldness.
There is an old bone on the pebbled shore
bleached white.
The clouds blow gray under sharp mountains.
Familiarity with a place breeds mystery.
*
I am sitting on a rock, staring down into Lake Anna in the Trinity Alps, all lit and gilded with afternoon sun. Its depths are still, a clear and vivid blue, and wind chases fractal patterns across the surface in little plays of light and motion. A solitary hawk glides in slow spirals above, the sun making her wings pale and translucent.
And I think, what am I? What creature am I that I am permitted witness to such beauty?
No wonder we created God.
*
Jezebel has learned that if she curls up quietly behind me while I am eating and does not, for instance, immediately snap at the food the instant I set it down, I will probably share a little bit of it when I’m done. Otherwise, she’s banished.
All I’m saying is that training dogs isn’t really so hard. And time improves them.
*
You, lady, are the one I want holding my leash. Shame you aren’t much for canines.
*
Take your heart, and let it bleed into the mountain. In the mountain, all stones are broken, glacially tilled, all cut through with tiny, secret rivulets.
Love is a beautiful wound, and happens unreasonably.
*
Dogs, if you have the right ones, are ideal trail companions. They share your delight in being free and out of doors, and backpacking trips make them much better dogs: wiser, more thoughtful, more responsive and loyal. As you walk beside a dog, you grow together. Your stories entwine.
Cats are there to welcome your return with a purr and a rub and a ‘where were you?’ Cats will be warming themselves upon the hearth, content and satisfied. Cats make home.
*
On the third day away from all people, I became silent. It began to happen almost immediately; now, I said nothing, calling my dogs only when needed, with a short whistle or a movement of my hand. Even the written word seemed obtrusive.
*
Last night, I saw Canis Minor rise above the mountain. The stars here are so bright, and there are so many of them. The Milky Way is a pale haze. The constellation and the stars surrounding it suggested the form of a woman to my tired and half-dreaming mind, bright points at eye and breast, her outstretched arms.
I wonder if I want to love a woman who will come with me to this place. Perhaps; if she came into my life, I might welcome her. I am, however, no longer seeking her. I am content to be alone, and it is not unlikely that I am happier.
*
Pryde doesn’t move, even when I tickle the hairs between his pads with a pine needle. Now that’s a tired dog.
*
You get bored and read things. Examination suggested that the dog treats contained fewer and less suspect ingredients than my beef jerky. If I was at home, I would probably not have tried this, but after all, the unexamined life is not worth living. They actually weren’t that bad. I ate almost two of them.
*
A one-person tent comfortably accommodates one person and one Shetland sheepdog.
*
But that’s what life’s like, isn’t it?
You start out with a sniffy little puppy
And end it with a tired old dog, who you love.
*
On my third night in the wilderness, a great windstorm came up. It shook the tent so badly that I feared the poles might snap, and I lay awake listening to gusts of wind roaring down the mountain before they came to me. I became aware that I was not afraid, though I was grateful that this storm did not bring rain.
I realize that I am more comfortable here now, alone, two weeks past the autumnal equinox, than I have ever been while alone in the wild. I do not feel so much a sense of questing, of journeying, as a calm, vaguely sorrowful sense of being, of presence.
*
How did I not remember how beautiful Luella Lake is, seen from the summit? Take the great, gray, jagged cliffs of granite sweeping gracefully into cold and emerald-colored water, which is almost flawlessly clear. The patch of ice at its rim, which will last until the coming of this winter’s snows. The nearly vertical seam where a blue-white mountain meets iron red. The still drama of it.
Perhaps great beauty, like great pain, can only be remembered in vague shorthand, never with the vividness of the imminent.
*
The western sky is thick with clouds, and long strings of grey move quickly over the mountains. Diamond Lake is mirrored and expectant, home at the moment to a small flock of common mergansers. All around me, the lush green of this lake’s surrounding marsh is tipped in gold and brown and brief slashes of red.
It may rain tonight.
*
Pictures don’t describe the place. When I attempt to form a mental image of heaven or Fiddlers’ Green or what have you, it’s this: the view seen from the lip of Diamond Lake, staring down and out into what seems like an impossible vastness. The small lake sits in a bowl of scree at the base of two peaks and a long ridge, and is surrounded by thick grass. The water is emerald-colored and full of trout. Its far edge is a lip of granite that curves steeply into a heavily wooded valley far below, the soil’s toothy sharpness softened by acres of meadow and marshland, dotted with still, black, secret pools. Lower down, you can see it transition into forest.
Directly opposite you, in all of its pure and unobstructed glory, rises the sharp, gray, granitic heart of the Trinity Alps. I’ve walked trails in that part of the mountain and, sitting here staring at it, mesmerized by its sharpness, I wonder how.
To see all of this, you sit on an outcropping. It unfurls below you. There is a place where the sun-warmed rock will hold your back like a chair. Sitting there, I watch a long, textured resplendence of black and grey stormclouds move quickly across the sky, watch the sun stain them salmon and pale gold as it sinks, and consider that there is nothing to say about this place. The truths here. The mountain simply is: it humbles, awes and defines any human person who has been witness to it.
