June 8
As I write this, my greyhound bus rolls north towards Vancouver without me. The bus left from Palmdale today while my boarding pass lays in a garbage can and I am camped at 5000, under a grove of sprawling black oaks, overlooking the vacant Antelope Valley.
I have abandoned my decision to bypass the Sierra. After much vascillation, I have decided to push through whatever snow and ice may lie on those high passes. Although I have chosen the most dangerous of the two alternatives, I am happy because I am answering the call to adventure. Despite my fears, I will go out into the snow, I will cross the swollen rivers, I will jab my axe through the plates of ice. This was an opportunity that I had to accept: the opportunity to engage the real world at its highest frequency and its most immediate intensity, the greatest challenge that has ever been offered to me. To refuse the offer is to refuse life. Fear had been the strongest emotion guiding my decision to get a bus to the northern end of the trail and to walk south, allowing the snow to melt in the Sierra. My fears were fed exclusively by my imagination of a ruthless and murderous landscape, but the truth is that I dont know what the Sierra will look like until I go up into the high country and see for myself. I must at least try.
The decision feels right. I will get to experience the thrill of walking out of one world and into another. From chapparal and parched air into cathedral granite and torrential rivers. The land will shape-shift right beneath my feet, the drama of transformation. In a way, taking a bus up north would have been giving up on the whole idea of continuity, walking in a single direction. The experience of a flowing landscape: the scrubby chamise disappears and the foxtail pine comes spiraling out of the ground, the dessicated basins of sun-bleached gravel turn into alpine meadows flooded with snowmelt. Until then, more monotonous chapparal and tomorrow: the Mojave.
Chapparal is my least favorite word right now. I dont feel very eloquent tonight.
As I write this, my greyhound bus rolls north towards Vancouver without me. The bus left from Palmdale today while my boarding pass lays in a garbage can and I am camped at 5000, under a grove of sprawling black oaks, overlooking the vacant Antelope Valley.
I have abandoned my decision to bypass the Sierra. After much vascillation, I have decided to push through whatever snow and ice may lie on those high passes. Although I have chosen the most dangerous of the two alternatives, I am happy because I am answering the call to adventure. Despite my fears, I will go out into the snow, I will cross the swollen rivers, I will jab my axe through the plates of ice. This was an opportunity that I had to accept: the opportunity to engage the real world at its highest frequency and its most immediate intensity, the greatest challenge that has ever been offered to me. To refuse the offer is to refuse life. Fear had been the strongest emotion guiding my decision to get a bus to the northern end of the trail and to walk south, allowing the snow to melt in the Sierra. My fears were fed exclusively by my imagination of a ruthless and murderous landscape, but the truth is that I dont know what the Sierra will look like until I go up into the high country and see for myself. I must at least try.
The decision feels right. I will get to experience the thrill of walking out of one world and into another. From chapparal and parched air into cathedral granite and torrential rivers. The land will shape-shift right beneath my feet, the drama of transformation. In a way, taking a bus up north would have been giving up on the whole idea of continuity, walking in a single direction. The experience of a flowing landscape: the scrubby chamise disappears and the foxtail pine comes spiraling out of the ground, the dessicated basins of sun-bleached gravel turn into alpine meadows flooded with snowmelt. Until then, more monotonous chapparal and tomorrow: the Mojave.
Chapparal is my least favorite word right now. I dont feel very eloquent tonight.
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