September 20

By the end of the day, climbing yet another 1,500 up to Suiattle Pass, I threw my body in a pile against a boulder and looked out at everything. A crow gliding over the tops of trees. The forest spreading in all directions like a sea, its waves throbbing against the shores of mountains. It occurs to me that all my old concepts of wilderness have fallen away. I no longer understand this picture using phrases like "landscape ecology" or "meta-population model" or "competition versus mutualism". I am too far submerged in the land to regard it with the vocabulary of an outsider.

No time to contemplate the meaning of this. All the better because there is no meaning outside the landscape itself and my sweat and my ruined muscles and the clouds attaching themselves to peaks like long banners. Meaning is a product of repose, detachment, distance. I am too deep inside the action of travel, too consumed by crossing that river or that pass. I have been going at this for too long. A landscape is something to be confronted not contemplated. We cannot think or discuss our way into wilderness, we must endure it and then disappear; action is the only route. Risk, silence, pain. Danger, joy, light. Some folks have criticized this: 25-30 miles per day is too fast, you cant see anything. Stop and smell the roses, they say. My answer is that I see everthing all at once, because I live here. The bigger point is that I have a job to get done. I have to make it to the border before the big snows come. Look at the piles of dismantled fir cones on the ground the squirrel has its job too. Look at the geese pushing southward. I have to make it to Stehekin before my food runs out. I have to race with winter. This is not a fun little nature walk, this is a migration. There is nothing profound or meaningful about it, other than the fact that there is a world at all, that there is such a thing as a mountain. Mountains to be climbed, rivers to be forded. Stop and smell the roses? The roses are dying because winter is coming. What fool tells the southbound flock of geese to slow down?

I "read" the vegetation as I walk: elderberry, devils club, western hemlock, lupine, fireweed, doug fir, pearly everlasting, alder, rose, spirea, cedar, etc.