1978 (4) – The Mistakes That Don’t Kill Us

As the late afternoon put a gray lid on the Little Bear Lake basin, we were contemplating the unappetizing contents of our saggy, baggy backpacks.  The first spatters of raindrops dampened our spirits as well as our firewood.  This was not good at all.  In overconfidence we had brought no shelter – no tents, no tarps – and had no idea how to make a lean-to.  We also didn’t know about the cave… but that’s another story.  Being young and impulsive, we decided to pack up and hurry back down the trail, following the retreat of the prudent Boy Scouts and their adult guides.  We were too impatient to just sit under a tree or overhanging rock and wait it out to see what might happen.  The sky had turned a sultry dark gray, sucking the light out from the air itself, so that the fading rocks and mountain walls fairly shuddered with dejected anticipation.  It began to rain harder, and our querulous commiseration transformed into action.

We hastily threw items carelessly into our packs without any planning or cleaning, and tied all the loose things on as best we could.  I used the plastic garbage bag to cover my sleeping bag, emptying the trash into my backpack in my zeal to leave no trace, but leave quickly indeed.  In less than 10 minutes we were taking long strides down to Wee Bear, without even a goodbye or glance backward to our ungracious Little Bear host.  Going around the front of Wee Bear, we could see sheets of rain to the north and west, where the Boy Scouts had disappeared.  Curtains of mist obscured the trail, streaming angrily down from Saw Tooth ridge like the tattered banners of an attacking army.  Amazingly, to the south and southeast the sky remained well lit, as the granite facets in the high cliffs were scanned by patches of sun that moved swiftly with the randomness of colossal searchlights.  Peering down longingly at the clearly defined trail 1,000 feet beneath our boots, it seemed as though we could step off the ledge and float down on misty drafts of air like the hawks.  This led to a hasty discussion about short cuts, which completely ignored the conventional wisdom regarding their foolishness.  The bold audacity of youth and male competition won out over prudence and circumspection, and down the giant stair steps towards the valley we went, methodically navigating the rain spattered ledges and clefts in the bluff.

Like ants crawling down the side of a bumpy sphere, we found with each ledge downward that the way was getting steeper and steeper.  By the time this became a serious impediment, the ledges had broken up into a hodgepodge of jutting boulders and channels that were now gushing with water.  Looking back up, many of the ledges we had just descended were now spouting pretty little waterfalls and sheets of slick gray wash.  To our left, preventing us from angling towards the trail to the north, a crumbling cliff face offered no reliable footholds.  Gravity prevailed as usual, pushing us down – rock by rock – as the waterfalls became more frequent, and began to hinder our progress.  We were beyond soaked, and our backpacks sagged with the slipperiness of dead fish, and shifted with each change of direction.  At one point, after I had crawled gingerly down a promising crack, it petered out into thin air, literally, at the edge of a 50-foot drop next to a widening waterfall.  Dave and Rob were closing in behind, and I turned to yell at them to go back.  Just then Rob dislodged a rock the size of his pack, and it noisily slid down the rock face, toppling over the waterfall with a vibrating roll, a falling silence, then resounding percussion as it smashed below.  Many smaller rocks followed in its wake, shifting and tumbling in the streams of water, as Rob lost his footing and slid hard into Dave, who punctuated the perilous moment with profanity.

“Fuck! Godammit Rob, What the fuck are you doing?”  Dave sputtered as if his hair was on fire, and began to lose his grip with the added weight of Rob, who was screaming half in terror, and half in relief that his slide to the cliff edge had abated for the moment.

“Shut up!  You’re saving my ass!  Shit!”  Rob’s pack strap broke, and the sopping, leaden mass rolled off his back and into Dave, knocking both of them tumbling, flailing and spreading their legs to stop the slide.  They were skimming right towards me in just a few seconds, and all I could do was brace my boots for impact in the shallow crack at the edge.  First Dave, then Rob’s pack, and then its owner slid into me, with slippery arms grabbing, fingers clawing at cracks, and shifting loads of soaked camping gear.  Our desperate peril was peppered with explosive, hysterical cursing like a tangled swarm of sailors being smashed into the scuppers by a rogue wave.

Most people who live long enough have a brush with death that is felt in the bones.  A near-miss on the highway or a turbulent airline flight can reveal the utter lack of control one has over one’s destiny.  A long battle with cancer or other illness can awaken reservoirs of willpower and vitality to fight an unseen enemy that is insidiously deep within.  With all these horrors taken into consideration, few people on land endure prolonged combat with the environment outside the body, in a situation where tenacious life itself is pitted against the indifferent, hungry wilderness that seeks to reclaim the minerals of the body.  Sailors on the stormy seas know what I mean, but it happens even less frequently on land.  For three soaking wet teenagers, clinging desperately on the edge of an unnamed cliff that had become a surging waterfall, that moment of bone-chilling awareness of mortality had come.  We all managed to hold on, and ever so carefully extricated ourselves from the brink, gaining precious toe holds and balance points gratefully; grasping for control of our limbs and wits.  Rob’s pack had gone over the edge to who knows where.  We gasped in dismal, wet breaths until speech returned.

“Oh shit, my Dad’s gonna kill me.”  Rob was thinking of his Dad’s Italian fishing rod, which separated into neat segments and deftly nestled into a little case like a clarinet.  He was inspecting his forearm, which had a nasty scrape, and he morosely picked off small bits of skin and gravel and flicked them at Dave, as a metaphorical token of appreciation for having saved his hide.

“That cliff almost saved him the trouble,” I laughed nervously, as we ever so delicately moved away from the flowing water, and shivered uncontrollably until the shaking stopped enough for us to make our way back up the crack.  Spurred on by a primal will germinated by our close call, it felt as if we had to keep moving or perish alone and ignominiously, miles from our families.  It would probably be years before anyone found our bodies in this remote, off-trail wilderness, in a path of travel that no sane person would attempt.

We found a better way down and around the escarpment to where Rob’s pack lay splayed apart like a crushed tomato.  The fishing rod was safe in its protective case, but not much else was intact.  With agitated defiance against all the gods who conspired to smite him, Rob lashed his nylon rope around and around the frame, binding bits of ripped nylon, soaked clothing, and twisted gear like a maniacal spider trapping a nest of squirming cockroaches.  When he finished, he slid his scraped and bleeding arm through the good strap, and thrust his other arm through the rope.  Then he turned and growled defiantly in challenge at the cliffs, the trees, and most of all the water, which now seemed to be flowing less vigorously.  Looking up the way we had descended, the sky was lightening and it appeared the worst of the storm was over.  Going back up was out of the question, so we angled towards the bottom, where massive white boulders were tumbled with the disarray of mobile homes and trailers blown before a hurricane.  We were all waterlogged, thoroughly exhausted, completely fed up, and emptied of even expletives.  Our silent, determined scrambling among the boulders was broken only by guttural grunts, snapping brush, and scraping boots.  Not even a cave that could have sheltered 20 people drew much interest.  It was formed by a colossal boulder that had split like a building in a devastating earthquake, and toppled over to make a spacious crawlspace beneath it.  Its dubious charms were lost on us, as we no longer coveted mere shelter… we wanted home, my truck, our beds.  

Eventually, we came upon a spitting and frothing Bear Creek, which had to be crossed to get to the trail running parallel to the creek further up the mountainside.  This was clearly our most grievous misjudgment, because of course the creek would swell up with the rain!  The narrow gorges and great cracks where the creek flowed were filled with foaming gray water, and large boulders groaned and rumbled ominously in the tumult.  Back in Lagunitas where I lived at the time, the creek next to our house surged threateningly every winter, and I slept with only my bedroom window separating me from a raging turmoil.  I wasn’t as respectful of a flash flood as I probably should have been.  Instinctively, we worked our way back upstream a little, where the gorge seemed to narrow through constricting blocks of granite.  We found what we were looking for: a great Jeffrey Pine that had crashed across the gorge years ago, now losing its distinctive puzzle-piece bark in patches.  The crossing was only about 15 feet wide at this point.  Ignoring the raging rapids and rumbling boulders churning below, Rob predictably ran across first without regard for danger, with his outrageous pack bumping wildly like a cowboy on a Brahma bull.  He made it look easy.  Dave followed more cautiously, and the bark pieces shifted and came loose under his feet, causing him to collapse on his belly, straddling the log 10 feet above the furious torrent.  He inched his way the remaining 5 feet or so, cursing sincerely and vehemently with exasperation about the constant challenges.  I opted for Rob’s method and nearly repeated his success, with my shin scraping hard against a branch as I slipped off the other side.

The last 200 feet straight up the ridge to bisect the trail was the hardest part of all.  Utterly spent, with leaden legs, dragging waterlogged backpacks that may as well have been stone sleds, we wriggled up the slope foot by foot, against an impenetrable tangle of young willow, alder, and mountain hemlock that surrounded us on every side.  To our constant, intense frustration, the branches all grew downhill to the creek, and we alternately pulled up, parted the branches, and dragged our bodies and packs a bit further.  At times I had my pack off, dragging it through a basket weave of branches, with neither of us touching the ground.  This ultimate challenge seemed to go on and on beyond our endurance; beyond all awareness of trials or struggles.  I reflected grimly that I should have left my sodden pack behind long before, as I couldn’t think of anything in it that I really wanted.  But like a soldier dragging a wounded comrade to safety, I just couldn’t leave it to “die out there.”  Eventually, we were reduced to simply reacting to the next branch; inching upward only for the sake of life itself, and not giving in to the overwhelming temptation to just give up and sleep, or die, entangled like crabs in a net.  At last I found a less overgrown gully, and we snaked our way under the last alders, stood up in a clearing, and spotted the trail!  It almost didn’t look real in the gloomy twilight, as our residual, burnt out adrenaline compelled us to just keep burrowing uphill through the brush on the other side like blind moles.

We still had enough wits about us to take a right turn on the dimly lit trail leading downhill, and that was the last decision our frazzled nervous systems could handle.  Footfall after footfall, our ragged squishing boots fell down the trail with numb feet trapped inside, and our stiffened legs swung like metronomes to stay on top of them.  None of us remembered the last hour it took to fight the undertow of our ordeal and get safely down the trail in the gathering darkness.  We slept in the back of the truck like corpses, our clothes steaming on our backs in the moonlight.  The morning chill woke us up, stiff and sore with blisters on top of blisters, but we were alive and ravenous.  The sweetest sound I ever heard was my truck’s motor roaring to life when I turned the key.  We could only move by using the energy of ancient dead creatures, but we were alive, and had a heater, too!

The local diner where we stopped for breakfast wouldn’t let us in the door – we must have stunk like gruesome zombies after an all-night brain binge.  With the diner’s location, one would think they’d be used to all sorts of starving backpackers showing up, ravenous for real food after trekking in the wilderness.  It was probably the expressions of desperation and relief on our faces that scared others away, as if those fragrant lumps of scabby flesh and dirty laundry might actually try to hug somebody.  We scarfed down double orders of pancakes and ham like wild animals, using our stiff, grubby hands as shovels.  What a grand, raucous feast was had outside on the flyspecked picnic tables!  The worried waitress kept checking on us from time to time through the curtains, shaking her head in disapproval.  We left dirty smudges on the benches and a big tip.

When we got back to our normal, secure lives, our feats of derring-do grew more dangerous and death-defying with each retelling.  Rob and Dave bragged to anyone who would listen about their brush with death, and I never corrected their over-inflated recollection of their wilderness survival skills.  When I was alone, however, I privately reflected on how very close we came to dying in a remote area where it was unlikely we would ever be found.  I gained a healthy respect for the wild places after that trip, and vowed never to be caught under-prepared or overconfident again.