Yanayacu River Journal, Part V - Things Are Bigger Here

The Piraha, a tiny tribe living in Brazil along a remote tributary of the Amazon, have no words in their language for past or future. Psychologically, linguistically, and conceptually, they live entirely in the present.

This isn’t so surprising after you’ve experienced the Amazon jungle. My journals are out of order, my internal editor is at a loss. My memories are a mobius strip, tautological and endlessly fertile. The difference between “it happened this way” and “it didn’t happen that way” are so slight as to be irrelevant. It’s not that I’m lying – it’s that I can’t prove I am. However vague or flexible my memory is, and however incomplete my journal – sometimes the sum of a butterfly outweighs the equation of an entire afternoon – what remains is a mirage of incomparable imagery and meaning so vast that it means nothing.

That endless split second in a car accident when you know you’re going to crash – that’s what I’m talking about. Moments that encompass the entire world.

Things are bigger here – snail shells, teeth, venom, spiders, trees, species diversity, leaves, thorns, insects, butterflies, storms, vines, hallucinations, appetites. The jungle is elemental and unforgiving, and it asks nothing of you except survival. Long term, I’m sure it’s hard to adjust. But I love it now and I wish I had more time to find out.

Spent some time watching a blackfronted nun-bird, a flock of parakeets, and a brightly colored bird, a barbet, its head brilliant red, with a yellow throat fading to a green belly. Wearing shorts, no shirt, barefoot, smoking a cigarette, in a hammock. Time like the river. In the crook of the nearest tree, a red-flowering bromeliad.

Thunderstorm moved in quickly; grew dark, a strong breeze through the lodge. The birds fall quiet. Thunder crashes nearby. I feel electric, my heart thrashing wildly like an animal in the bush. I hope it rains and moves on quickly so I can go on the next hike. Rain to clear the humidity, clean the air, bring the temperature down. The wind has really picked up, and still the storm moves closer.

Air slides through the mosquito netting and passes around and through the buildings as if the lodge wasn’t there – a wind tunnel wouldn’t show the air breaking around the walls, just a slight perturbation in the movement of the wind as it follows paths through the trees and down the myriad rivers. Follow the wind, is a good Amazonian expression. I just made that up, but it’s apt – surrender to the flow, let things go, don’t attach too much to any one thing or things. All life here is natural, including decay. The Amazon is a zen koan teaching patience, and the movements are calligraphic brush-storms representing acceptance.

A fish-eating hawk has found a seam in the air the exact dimensions of its wings, and silence follows filled with thunder. Birds clatter at every gust; leaves and fronds clatter against the thatched roofs. The air is charged, scented with the heady aroma of the jungle, a heavy loam flavored with bark and water and damp soil. Now the rain, easy cymbals riding the snare and kick of thunder. The sloths in their acacias ride it out with infinite wisdom.

As the storm moves away, rain, and a sweet fragrance.

The fragrance of blood – mosquitoes are out.

***

Kerosene lantern, cup of coffee, moldy book – Birds of Peru, Clements and Shaney, Ibis 2001 – cigarettes, headlamp. Outboard running against the noise of the toads. Thunder ceased, maybe it won’t rain and I’ll get to go hiking in an hour.

Squirrel monkeys, Hulber tells me, travel in troops that may number between one and two hundred. I travel alone.

After the storms passed we went upriver to look for owl monkeys. Birds filled the forest: bright orange troupials chasing off hawks, yellow kiskadees with black and white striped heads, tiger herons and cocoi herons stalking muddy banks, wattled jacana poking around lily-pads, kingfishers, Couvier’s toucans, flocks of festive parrots and noisy short-tailed parrots, yellow-headed caracara perched on river-bank branches.

We put in and walked down a dark leaf-strewn path under overcast skies – Hulber and myself, the French/Peruvian couple, and Moses – he who caught the caiman the night before, who parted the waters. Ten minutes later, Moses stopped us under a tall tree covered in vine and strangler fig and laden with bromeliad fronds. About 40ft up, a small monkey sat in a balcony formed by a twist in the wood. It took me a long time to spot it – the light was dim and the monkey very well camouflaged, and I kept looking for a different shape. All I could see was its head, but it was unmistakable when I finally saw it. How the guides locate these animals sometime verges on magic, but in this case, they knew the monkeys lived in the tree and never strayed far. The trick is to look for movement, especially with monkeys and birds. I’m getting better at it – I spotted several sloths and pointed out the parrots on the boat ride in. I missed all but a flying silhouette of the toucans and their long beaks, and the sheer angle of looking straight up at the owl monkey meant we didn’t stay long.

The forests are beautiful – many of the trees have wide buttressed roots and are covered in other plants. Roots extend and hang everywhere, waiting for high water, intertwining and plunging like curtains in a drama of unending decay and rebirth.

I can’t believe how interested I’m getting in birds. They’re easily the most commonly seen and most varied of all animals in the jungle. I understand the ecology of trees and flowers, but I always saw birds as secondary and uninteresting. All my photos are of plant life and insects; the birds and other large animals are too hard to photograph with a small point-and-click digital camera. I really want to return in the rainy season and see more, see what it’s like when the Yanayacu floods 15ft higher than it is now and all the animals are pushed into smaller parcels of higher ground.

Strangely and unexpectedly, the rainforest has been the most relaxing part of the trip. Cusco was bustling and active; the Inca Trail was physically challenging; the travel and logistical aspects were stressful. But I am “in” nature here and it is wonderful. I thought the mosquitoes, insects, rain, threats of sickness and disease, and heat and humidity would add up to be more discouraging than the other parts of the trip. Not so.

I have one and a half more days here. Tomorrow I visit a village, and then relax for a few hours before going out in the evening to camp overnight at a nearby cocha (oxbow lake). It sounds exhilarating and tough. Overnight in a tent in the jungle. It doesn’t get much more authentic than that.

***

Writing by kerosene lantern is quieting and somehow right, as long as the night is filled with crickets. An outboard announces the return of a boat to the little dock with the thatched roof, reached by wooden stairs lit by homemade torches smoking in the languid night.

I may be the only guest still up. Activities here do depend on sunrise and sunset, on high water and low. It’s only 9pm and I’m not at all ready to sleep. I have a 6:30am expedition so I don’t need to get up before 5:30 at the earliest. I don’t need a full night’s sleep; I can nap between the village visit and the camping. I hope the staff hasn’t crashed and that I can get a beer – I’ve been looking forward to it.

***

Tonight’s night hike was about an hour long, down a trail behind the lodge. A tarantula darted into a deep seam in a tree, and we turned off our flashlights to try to lure the spider out. The night was still, almost subterranean, a nuanced perfect dark with just a few hints of lighter sky. Hulber took a drink of water and I heard every action, though I couldn’t see a thing – the bottle cap twisting, the water splashing, fabric rustling and the gulps as he drank – and the night insects chirped, sang, whistled; water dripped from vines and fronds; and the haunting, almost human grunts of a tree-frog resonated in the forest darkness.

The rainforest is spooky at night. It feels like a room with high ceilings. The beam from a flashlight only penetrates twenty feet or so before a wall of vegetation blocks it, and if pointed straight up, the light dissolves into darkness through successive layers of canopy. The rumors of the jungle filled with snakes and spiders are only partially true – we found only one snake, a harmless sharpnose coiled on a palm frond, and the spiders – tarantula, whip, and wolf – ran from our lights. The most dangerous animal here is the mosquito – I’ve just been bit all over my hands and neck, my only exposed skin.

I wasn’t nervous about the night hike, though Hulber said most guests aren’t willing to do it. I don’t see why not – the forest is so different at night, interesting, full of unknown potentials. Depth changes. Trees and vines twist and loom in a limbo of darkness, and the understory adopts strange shadows and shapes and forms. Color depends on light, and light only comes from a narrow source whose power to penetrate is limited against the dense dark.

I got pretty lonely sometimes, in Cusco and while traveling. Not so much in the jungle, or on the Inca Trail, where there has been activity to distract me from thoughts of home. Perhaps cities foster loneliness, while wild places replace loneliness with a sense of actual place – you do or you do not fit in, and you’re challenged every moment, unlike in cities where you can easily find someone who speaks your language, or return to your hotel and shower, or find a hot meal. And once that wild sense of place is established, you want to share those experiences. I beginning to remember that I’m a guest here, and that guests return home.

East of the Rainshadow: The Deschutes River Trail

With rain in the forecast, I debated Monday night whether to go hiking on Tuesday. A long pull from a bottle of Deschutes Black Butte Porter gave me an idea…

The drive to the Deschutes River was more a surfing contest than a drive, and it seemed like every truck I passed drove the exact wrong speed: too slow to stay behind, too fast to pass safely. But towards Hood River the rain slackened, and when I arrived at Deschutes State Park campground, it was drizzling lightly from thinning clouds. I pulled over at the first pay station, and chatted briefly with the camp host. I admit a fondness for those rugged people who sell bundles of firewood to hordes of summer campers and off-season RV wanderers – they’re American in the biggest and best sense, unapologetically individualistic and yet big-hearted and welcoming, and eager to share their odd ideas with colorful language, and in this case, a whole lot of spit.

But I digress. After parking at the back lot (per the Portlandhikers.org field guide), I strapped on my pack and crossed a long lawn filled with Canada geese and slippery droppings to the start of the river-side trail. Three other hikers set off at the same time on the upper trail and I didn’t see a soul until I was almost back.

The river trail is described as infested with ticks, but that didn’t bother me much as I strolled through little stands of trees and listened to birds sing above the river’s constant rhythm. My approach startled mergansers from bank-side thickets, and the hillsides glowed green and gold as the sun broke from the clouds. A few bouldery sections were starkly beautiful, with grey and brown stone covered in brilliant green lichen, red moss, yellow desert parsley, and carpets of grass laced with tiny pink and red flowers. Walking further, I passed an increasing amount of balsamroot in flower, accompanied by lupine and phlox. Wandering, with no real intentions, I soon found myself among large numbers of wooly-bears at Colorado Camp (3.3 miles).

From there, I became concerned with ticks. The trail disintegrated into an unmaintained game trail, crisscrossed with fallen limbs and marked only by flattened grass. At every step, I sank into the waterlogged ground, once into mud over my ankle, and the vegetation was tall and dense and encroached over the narrow path, rubbing against me at every step. I gave up after a mile and hiked up to the road, where the river was quieter and the ground more solid, and my attentions shifted from the small and beautiful to the large and grandiose.

Past Gordon Creek, the gravel road runs under a long cliff blasted from the hill, and the violent history of this area is cross-sectioned to make a geology-lover’s heart swell. Where the cut is highest, basalt columns radiate immense spokes in strange wheel-like patterns, and where the hill slopes more gently, it soon rises into jagged ramparts with rock arches overlooking grassy bowls where balsamroot blooms.

Because the road follows an old railroad bed and doesn’t gain any elevation, staying about the same elevation above the river, I didn’t notice how hungry I was until I passed a campground under powerlines (Gordon Ridge Camp, 5.3 miles). I stopped to eat and was surprised to find it was almost 2pm – my turn-around time. I’d read about a lot of cool man-made artifacts on this trail – railroad cars, bridge remains, an old homestead – but I couldn’t remember how far up the canyon those artifacts were, so I headed back and continued my meditations on life and death other and “big ideas.”

Big ideas, as in, the Deschutes River canyon is freakin’ massively big when you’re trying to leave. I’d round a bend and see the next bend ahead, and give myself 10 or 15 minutes to get there. Then I’d plod along, and plod along, and plod along some more until 30 minutes went by and I wasn’t any closer. Distances lost their meaning, compared to the depth of the sky; the seemingly barren, rocky landscape lost its emptiness as the sun composed plays of light and shadow on the grass; and the afternoon lost its warmth as terrific gusts of wind roared up and down the canyon and ravines. The wind was insane – it tore my hat off my head, shook the photo opportunities off the fiddlenecks and sage, and disassembled the songs of meadowlarks like a tone-deaf grad student studying music theory.

The canyon can be a lonely place when the wind blows hard and you haven’t seen anyone for hours. I’m starting to understand why those camp hosts are so weird.

Last week I immersed myself (literally) in a rainy and snowy Salmon River hike, surrounded by old-growth and steep timbered ridges. The Deschutes is the polar opposite – so empty it begs the imagination to fill it. When at the last bend the campground and the interstate bridge came into sight two miles away, I decided to take the trail to Ferry Springs, a few hundred feet higher up the rolling hills. Ferry Springs itself was anticlimactic, but the views were great, and a well-placed bench surrounded by trembling shooting-stars kept me from the worst of the wind and let me savor the view to the rain-caressed hills across the blue Columbia, the wind-turbines and crackling power-lines, the big empty spaces that seem tailor-made for road trips and exploration, for a Dean Moriarty to converse about them, for just sitting and looking and filling up on sun and sky and powerful land in every direction.

Eventually I descended, passing the first hiker I’d seen since starting out, and encountered a trailside plaque that made my day. I’d been disappointed that I hadn’t hiked far enough to see any of the historical artifacts along the trail. I never considered that the Ferry Springs trail itself is an artifact, built in the 1860’s for wagons and stagecoaches. The grades and wall-like piles of stones leapt out of the landscape then, and too quickly I reached the road and my truck, and the long drive home – but not before snapping a photograph of a large pipe, inscribed “Calm” at the end pointing into the canyon, and “Drama” at the end pointing towards the highway and the towns and cities.

All told, I hiked 11.3 miles and gained just 800’ elevation. Spring is in force along the Deschutes, and it’s worth every minute of the drive. Virtually complete solitude for six hours, lots of sun and flowers, expansive views, ample meditation, and thankfully, no ticks. I couldn’t have asked for more for my first trip here. Well, maybe that last third of a mile to the railroad car, but I’ve heard that burned down. I’ll have to go back to find out.

Giving Back - $1 Per Mile

Early this morning I slipped out to the Gorge and hiked up Multnomah Creek. The sun shone down on the rapids and honeyed the moss draped over tree limbs and boulders. As I climbed higher, a mossy talus full of fir opened up to the sky and the snowy shoulders of Silver Star mountain graced the hills across the river. I smelled the scent of pine sap and damp earth , and welcomed the touch of wind and warm rain. My plan was to cross from the Multnomah drainage over Wahkeena Creek to Angel’s Rest, for a 9 mile loop with a few thousand feet of elevation gain. I love this hike – it’s one I’ve done many times, in all seasons. I’ve seen carpets of spring wildflowers, tapestries of autumn leaves, barren winter stands of fire-scarred trees. There are many hikes on my list yet to check off; today, I chose an old favorite.

But there was a time, just a year ago, when I couldn’t go hiking.

Last April, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer and had surgery. Since then, I’ve been undergoing regular blood checks, CT scans, and x-rays. In fact, I have another appointment in three weeks. I don’t know if this means I have cancer or not. I think not – and I don’t let it stop me.

I stay active by hiking. It’s physically challenging, mentally clarifying, and spiritually lifting. I’m fortunate that I can hike about once a week. Many are not so lucky.

Try walking into the Cancer Center. It is a messed up feeling. It isn’t right. There’s no good reason for being there. It could be you or someone you love, but whatever reason brings you through those doors, you always, always, always wish you didn’t need to be there. Every three months I walk past the receptionist to the elevator and hit the button for the sixth floor. When I get out, I walk down an empty hallway and enter a waiting room filled with huddled, silent people who don’t make eye contact and who read months-old magazines while waiting for their name to be called. Even though the secretaries remember me, they still verify my insurance. And after my doctor has seen me, while I wait for the scheduling nurse to tell me when to come back, I try to ignore the hairless men and women reclining in chairs with chemicals flowing through their veins.

Many people have to walk through those doors far more often than I, and many of them will never get to go hiking and experience the beauty of Oregon’s outdoors. That’s why at the end of 2010, I will donate $1 for every mile I hike during the year to Providence Cancer Center in Portland.

Providence treats more cancer patients than anyone else in Oregon. They have excellent doctors and treatment centers, renowned researchers and diagnostic facilities, and superb outpatient counseling and care. If worst comes to worst, you want to go to Providence.

Last year, I hiked 163 miles after having surgery. I’m up to 43 miles this year, with a goal of 250. If I don’t make it, I’ll donate $250 as a minimum. If you hike with me, I'll donate a dollar for each mile you hike, too. It may not be much – my riches are measured in friends, family, and experiences, not in dollars – but every dollar matters. Because walking through those doors is something that no one should ever have to face.

Yanayacu River Journal, Part IV - Before an Altar in Deep Worship

Lounging between hikes through the jungle in the hammock hanging from my bungalow’s back deck. More guests are here – the boat has just arrived from its daily three-hour sprint from Iquitos. The Frenchman and his Peruvian friend left earlier, so for a while there were only three of us. Arriving here is like arriving in paradise, although you don’t recognize it immediately. The speedboats are cramped, and when I arrived my left arm was burning from the sun. I craved a cigarette, needed a stretch, and as the boat tied up to the dock and I stepped out into the slow humid heat, heavy with a thick, vegetative smell, the lodge looked like a cheap Disney facsimile designed to impress more than to provide an authentic experience. But that was post-Iquitos, and I was in no mood for anything resembling that frontier town. Thankfully, Muyuna is an oasis in a living desert – how much more remote can you get than a several-hour boat ride from a city that can only be reached by traveling thousands of miles by air or river? So to the new arrivals – welcome. There are things here that can kill you and things here that can drive you mad. And there is great beauty as well.

This morning’s hike was just Hulber and I. I overslept – last night I felt like I was moving on the sea when I laid down, but the cacophonous selva put me right to sleep and I rolled over again when my alarm went off. At the breakfast bell (a loud ringing cowbell), I leapt up, dressed, brushed my teeth, and ran to the main hall and downed a cup of instant coffee with a cigarette. I was in rubber boots by 9, and Hulber led off into the jungle behind the lodge along a series of trails, showing me various plants and animals and sharing ethnobotanical knowledge along the way.

I said that the lodge is paradisiacal – if so, the jungle behind it is hell, slick with deep mud and decaying vegetation, and tangled and overgrown. We need machetes to cut through the vines and limbs that grow far more rapidly than the rate the annual floods obliterate the trail. Giant bees and wasps skirt through down-hanging vines like annoyed bombers, mosquitoes buzz and whine constantly; and ants – fire, army, bullet, leaf-cutter – crawl and haunt the leaf litter, the leaves, the branches, the trees. Hulber has been bitten twice by bullet ants – 24 hours of the most intense pain possible in the insect kingdom, with blistering fever, delirium, nausea, diarrhea – and only then do the effects lessen. We found them in two places – a nest in the roots of a tree, and a few on the end of a vine that Hulber cleared with his machete before I swung around like Tarzan.

It isn’t hard to find ants in the jungle. Streams of army ants, blind and following each other single-file, cross the trail and forest floor. A specific species of tree has developed a symbiotic relationship with a species of ant; the tree branches are covered in ants, which prevent epiphytes and bromeliads from growing on the tree, and the tree has thorns to deter predators from eating the ants. The path skirted a colony of leaf-cutter ants: a pile of dirt more than twenty feet by twenty feet, devoid of vegetation. Hundreds of soldiers carried pieces of leaf like tiny battleships with green sails unfurled. In the jungle, watch where you step, where you put your hand, and where you sit down.

Throughout the hike, Hulber pointed out termite nests in trees, massive bulbous growths that resemble dark brown tumors at the intersections of branches and trunks. One of them was low enough to study. With his machete, Hulber scraped open the papery surface and as termites appeared like ghostly ants, he told me to put my hand on the nest.

I declined, the first time I’d declined to do anything since arriving in the jungle.

Hulber told me again, and I thought, “He wouldn’t tell me to do it if it were dangerous or painful. I can do this.” Nervously, I placed my palm against the nest, and tiny whitish termites crawled all over my hand. Hulber started to tell me that natives burn termite nests to ward away mosquitoes, and burning termite nests seemed like a really good idea to me just then, with my hand covered in them. It tickled more than anything else, and I acted immediately as soon as Hulber told me to rub my hands together rapidly and smell them. Turpentine – termites contain a chemical that smells like turpentine, and is a natural mosquito repellent.

Lesson learned, again. Experience is the best teacher; trust yourself and others. The worst that could happen is you end up with smelly termite guts coating your hand.

We continued on, our boots sticking in the mud and decaying leaves, my feet and calves sticking to the inside of the boots, my shirt sticking to my shoulders under the straps of my pack. My forehead held a line of sweat under my hat. My skin itched with sweat, with insect repellent, with the crushed termites and tickling mosquitoes. We hacked at vines and long whip-thin branches, stumbled over roots and ducked under twisting aerial cords of vine, passed through beams of yellow-green sunlight and through wide shadows falling from the immense trunks of ceiba and maquira trees.

Pausing at a massive maquira, Hulber spoke about the forest. For years, loggers have illegally cut the largest Amazonian trees, and lodges, like Muyuna, have worked to save the jungle around them. In front of a tree 14ft in diameter at head-level, I posed for a photograph. There are no trees this wide in Oregon; there have not been for years, maybe never. The trunk is huge, dark brown and black, covered in strangler fig roots more than foot wide, and splayed out into mild buttresses at the base. Something animalistic happens in my mind when I see trees this big here – my rational mind knows that the living tree is just a thin layer under the bark, and the leaves high overhead, but the sheer bulk, the weight of the tree, impresses on me and I can’t think clear thoughts, as if I’m standing before an altar in deep worship. And maybe I am.

Leaving the shadow of that tree we walked back towards the lodge and lunch. Bright heliconia hung from the forest, which became an abstract tapestry of greens and browns in the growing heat. The thorned pyramidal roots of a walking palm occupied my attention for a while; the straight roots are exposed to a height of several feet, tapering towards a straight trunk. Legend has it that the palm moves up to four feet across the jungle floor each year, as roots die on one side and grow on the opposite. And lore has it that the Oje, another of the Amazon’s large trees, is the source of a milky, alkaline sap, discovered by shamans, that treats gastrointestinal parasites found untreatable by modern science. As Hulber showed me a tiny white-stripped toad, barely the size of a fingernail and almost invisible in the leaf-litter, I decided to believe the stories instead of dismissing them. What are one or two small rebellions against rational doubt when faced with facts as small as a toad, as thick as a tree, and as thickly tangled as the coiled and knotted vines and creepers stringing the jungle together?

After all, it was still morning, and I was deep in the Amazon jungle: above, a pygmy marmoset, one of the smallest monkeys in the world, scurried around its tree unburdened by our presence below, while macaws flew overhead, their cries echoing down through the canopy like falling feathers.

Wind Mountain, February 7th, 2010

Superbowl? May the best team win. I went hiking instead, and I think that Wind Mountain, the sun and clouds, and native vision-quest pits were the real winners on Sunday.

The Gorge was overcast in the morning as I drive past Multnomah Falls, but the clouds began to tatter as I arrived at Wind Mountain. In the parking lot, I met another hiker named Kevin (Kenneth? I don’t remember) who had driven around the mountain looking for the hidden trail – from the parking lot, the trail starts a ways down the gravel road, but it isn’t very visible from a moving car. We set off together behind a man and his two young grandkids.

I'd been looking for solitude, but hiking with Kevin was pleasant enough. Wind Mountain is a steep trail, and our conversation forced me to concentrate on my breathing, and our pace gave me something to test myself against. I weigh about 10-15lbs more than I should, and it isn’t muscle weight. I also haven’t been hiking regularly over the last two months of eating and drinking, so the trail became a workout, and about three quarters of the way up I stopped and gave Kevin the lead so that I could catch my breath and finish the climb alone.

Penny Postcard: Submerged Forest in the Wind Mountain, Washington, ca.1920. Card #321, Published by Chas. S. Lipschuetz Company, Portland, OR. Private collection of Lyn Topinka.

Though Wind Mountain is 1907ft tall, the unofficial trail starts halfway up on the north side, so that the climb is only 1,170ft. Wind Mountain, and its Oregon partner, Shellrock Mountain, are volcanic intrusions that erupted through the Columbia basalts a few million years ago. Wind Mountain stands alone, an isolated cone towering over the small town of Home Valley. At the top is one of the Gorge’s more important archeological sites, a collection of native vision-quest pits in the steep talus slopes covering the summit. Native American men once climbed the mountain and spent the night alone as a coming-of-age rite. To facilitate visions, they forced themselves to stay awake all night in a state of heightened awareness, and built rock walls and pits that are still present today. Once a spirit or guardian appeared, it remained with that person for life. A sign at the summit warns hikers: “This archeological site is extremely fragile. Just walking over it will damage important cultural features. Therefore, the USDA Forest Service has closed the site to hikers. All visitors must stay on the trail or within designated areas shown on the map.”

The 1940 book "Oregon, End of the Trail,” by the Works Projects Administration (WPA) of Oregon, describes a native legend: “The Indians believed that the Great Spirit set the whirlwinds blowing in constant fury about Wind Mountain as a punishment to those who, breaking the taboo, had taught the white men how to snare salmon. ..."

There’s certainly no escaping the wind on Wind Mountain. I reached the top and quickly cooled down in the cold breeze swirling around the summit. I went right on the small loop trail and found Kevin at the top of the first viewpoint, looking over the smooth-as-glass Columbia as far west as Beacon Rock. A long train rumbled past on the Oregon side, and the sound drifted up almost 2000ft across the river and above Home Valley. Otherwise, silence, the wind in my ears, and a heartbeat returning to normal after a steep mile climb.

After a quick rest, Kevin and I walked to the eastern talus, where clouds swirled and filled the valley between Wind Mountain and 2,948ft Dog Mountain to the east. Vision-quest pits drifted in and out of the foggy talus, and the clouds lifted, and the sun shot down searching beams over the forest and far ridge. Across the river, Mt. Defiance was swathed in tattered cloud and snow and the dance of the sun.

I cracked open my celebratory beer, and sat down on a rock, enjoying the interplay between sun and cloud, river and mountain, the thin works of man clinging to the river’s shores while pine-clad slopes and rocky cliffs towered a mile above the highways and rail tracks. Against the distance, the traffic on the highway appeared to make no progress, and in front of me were four or five vision pits, updateable and who knows how old, that had withstood the elements on top of an old volcano, and that had harbored the coming of visions and the appearance of spirit guardians who lived lives equally as long as their ward’s.

Kevin left to start down the trail, and for the next hour I sat with the vision pits dappled with sunlight. I walked around over the talus, seeing the slope and the pits and the distant mountains change in the light. I felt as if my own vision had grown sharper – at one point, I thought of my friend who I’d left my itinerary with; my very next thought was that the talus was unstable and that I needed to be careful about loose rock that could shift and twist an ankle. Immediately after that thought, a rock shifted under my foot and I nimbly stepped away. I can’t put too much stock in prophecy, but it happened just like that, and I went back to meditating on the view.

When the clouds rose up again, I wandered around and investigated the patterns of lichen and moss on the rocks and twigs of a small vine maple. Like the vehicles on the highway far below, tiny worlds exist in shades of burnt orange, bright green, silvery gray - in the miniscule, strange and alien life-forms parliament together on twigs no thicker than a pencil, or on the shaded face of a rock. In a space barely a third of an inch across, life blooms in unusual forms, and I imagined it to be an alien city, or an Alice in Wonderland theme park missing the caterpillar (who is out back smoking a joint and taking photos of very small things).

I never looked at my watch, but driven by some inner chronometer, at some point I grabbed my pack, did a quick check for accidentally dropped garbage or gear, and headed back towards the first viewpoint, now dim through a veil of cloud. The upper half of the mountain remained wrapped in cloud as I descended, feeling the strain on my knees grow as I entered sunshine tumbling through the forest halfway down.

As is usual for me, the climb had been a physical exertion, with my focus more on myself then on my surroundings. On the descent, the forest captured my attention, with mossy trees standing over deep green coils of fern, sharp Oregon grape, and jumbled talus slopes. The sun burst through at odd times, and the forest responded with a symphony of browns and greens and darting yellows. I walked through a cathedral of firs, the trail my guide and the sun leading the way.

I cut off the main trail at a very steep spur-trail that lead down to an outcrop with great views east to Augsberger and Dog Mountain. The view was spectacular, but the cliffs treacherous and dizzying – no one would find you if you messed up and fell from here. In the distance, the Columbia ran blue and reflective, smooth as a mirror, and the sun flashed down on Frog Lake and the pointed crowns of hemlock and fir.

I reached my truck as more people arrived in the lot – a busy day at Wind Mountain. I put on music for the drive home, and as a few drops of rain fell from warm clouds over the river, sunlight scattered through the drops on the windshield, and the lyrics synced up with the twisting bends of the state highway, the freight train rumbling on down by the river, and the long interstate curving along the base of the Oregon Gorge, where progress is measured in spirit as much as it is in distance.