“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say”
— J.R.R. Tolkein
By August, I was still alive, but really starting to pace the cage. I was still working way too much, in an effort to make enough money just to get by for another year so I could see if things might get better. The plan wasn’t working, and I was drinking more and more to numb the (mostly psychic) pain. I couldn’t see a doctor because we had a huge deductible, and not enough money to pay off the medical bills we already had. We were still making monthly payments on the medical bills for Joy’s bout with cancer three years earlier.
My loss of control over my financial picture heightened my obsessive-compulsive disorder for advance backpacking preparation. What I was really doing was charting my return to sanity… with gusto! I printed fresh lists, and attached them smartly to clipboards. I sharpened my pencils, and set about weighing and cataloging all my gear. I had accumulated a lot of camping junk over the years, and little of it was purchased new. I prided myself on frugality, and reused items as much as possible. I was still using plastic Ziploc bags that had stored previous years’ dehydrated meals to carry smaller items! You see, I like to minimize my impact on waste by reusing things instead of buying new ones. Mine is a frugality of consumption; not money. For example, my last big backpacking purchase had been a clever JetBoil stove about 10 years earlier, on the pretense that it was more fuel efficient. I had never used it; the old tried-and-true stove worked just fine. Hell, I even had the original fire-blackened aluminum pot I used before I got any kind of stove, and I might use it again! I usually preferred to throw a collection of familiar “I might need thats” and “what ifs” into my backpack and haul it up the mountain. This time, I had a strong young man to carry the heavy stuff, in order to save my own underused and rapidly deteriorating body. I instinctively felt I would need to keep my pack as light as possible to make it this year.
The last time I was on the Bear Creek trail, I vowed to get one of those “pack goats” they have up there, but alas, now it seemed I was the goat. My body has always been a pack animal, or beast of burden for my soul. The more I took care of it, the longer it lasted to carry the load. Oh, how much I have asked it to carry over the years! I have overburdened it tremendously, and it cannot convey as much as it used to. If I overload it for too long, I risk making it worn down and lame, and then it will cease to be a useful goat, and I’ll have to put it out to pasture. Nobody likes a useless old goat with a bleating heart.
It’s interesting to see how camping gear has changed over the years, but has mostly stayed the same. The most dramatic changes have been technical items like GPS replacing the old compass and topo maps I deployed as a Boy Scout. But the broadest and sturdiest changes were the materials from which camping gear was being made, and the relatively lower cost of good quality, lightweight gear. I still had some artifacts from my very first independent trip with Rob and Dave. They were unreasonably heavy, and covered with a thin patina of grime, soot, and mold. What I was after were the most sensible items to bring, and in every case, the lightest ones that would still do the job.
What do we really need to survive? When having to carry the items you want on your back, this becomes starkly evident. Everything you think you need is laid out on your living room floor before you stow it in your pack. In a basic context, many items could be considered “luxuries,” or “modern conveniences.” All that is really necessary to take care of our physical needs on this planet are food and shelter. This is demonstrated a trillion times over by animals that survive (and even thrive) by finding food and protecting their bodies from harsh elements. The otter protects itself with an efficient fur coat, and learns to enjoy raw fish because it doesn’t need to carry dishes, pans, a stove, and condiments on its back everywhere it goes! I paused my internal rant to remember that there used to be otters around here. The local human tribes lived in balance with the otter tribe, and with gratitude they hunted a sustainable population of otters and used their fur for protection from the elements. My tribe greedily massacred all of them for the money their fur would bring, until they were gone.
Our vanity is so profound that it colors the way we see our own “inconvenient truth,” as Al Gore called it. Just about all the damage we could possibly do to the earth, in the form of litter, pollution, deforestation, global warming, and other scars of our passing will be gone in 25,000 years; which is but a grain of sand in earth’s hourglass. This planet will survive long after we self-destructively remove ourselves from its biosphere. The Earth is a self-correcting system. It created us, and it can eliminate us if it perceives we are causing more trouble than we’re worth. We arrogant humans like to think that we are destroying the planet; not the other way around. Is our slow suicide just a failure to rise to the purpose for which we were created? What if we die out as a misguided experiment of evolution? It would be left to other higher forms of life to carry the torch of creation.
All biological entities are striving to evolve to higher complexity. That is the nexus of evolution in action. However, the interesting thing is not the evolving, but the striving. Why struggle at all? Why not just live and die passively, and rest in eternal peace? Whence comes this need to constantly push the envelope? The need to strive is the expanding force of the universe in action, which is the Creative Consciousness, or God as we call it. Animals feel this as an urge to thrive and propagate. Intelligent beings seek to influence and improve. Many humans feel it as a compulsive mania for consumerism or owning things, as a result of living in the material world. We have forgotten that the only right application of striving is to seek God, and when we remember, we will finally arrive at the creative center of the universe.
This trip for me was all about recording the images for others. Optic technology had progressed to a phenomenal level, and I planned to use it to capture some of the beauty of my favorite place on this planet for future generations. In past years, I had brought pretty good cameras. I had an Olympus OS-X back in the Seventies and Eighties, and a Canon FM-1 SLR a decade or so later. As digital photography took over, I tried a few of those abysmal contraptions, like the one I had brought on my previous trip, but the image quality wasn’t what I was used to. One of the most useful material items Joy and I had recently acquired was a very good Canon digital camera with a zoom lens. This was almost as heavy as the old SLRs, but had so many more features… it could even capture video! I was thrilled at the prospect of taking my first moving pictures of the Bear Lakes. (“Moving pictures”? God, I sound so old…) I was also looking forward to hanging out with my nephew, who was 30 years younger, so I could get back in touch with the vitality and audacity of youth.
Kevin’s mom let us use her big Silverado with a camper shell, so we had an ideal camping vehicle for once. Kevin did most of the driving on the way up Highway 5, and it was a pleasant difference for me to actually see the scenery along the way, especially after we turned west on 299. It had been nearly 40 years since I had been driven all the way to Trinity. We stopped for an interesting dinner in Weaverville, at an ancient Chinese restaurant in an old Gold Rush building. The décor made us feel like we were dining in a frontier museum. By the time we headed north on Highway 3 it was getting dark. Conversation was easy and light between us, and made the time pass pleasantly. Baseball was a big topic, as the Giants were doing well again, and had a chance for another postseason run. They had won the World Series again after I got back from my trip in 2012, but nothing could match the thrill of their first world championship in my lifetime, in 2010.
Suddenly, just before we got to the old dirt road leading to the trailhead, we were startled by a huge buck that darted from the shadows and flashed across the highway directly in front of us; only a few feet from the windshield! How we missed it I’m still not sure. It was by far the biggest deer I had ever seen, with ropy leg muscles, a burly neck, and a huge crown of thick antlers. It was there and gone before we could react, and I can still remember the white of its terrified eye illuminated in the headlights. Kevin had to pull over, he was so shaken. The cab of the truck was thick with expletives, which were the only way to suitably express our shock. The incident lasted less than 3 seconds, but took me back to the time a huge dog died in my arms.
I was driving home at night on the Woodacre stretch of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, when I saw the car in front of me swerve abruptly. Illuminated in the headlights of another oncoming car, the figure of a big black dog popped into the air, and I didn’t immediately realize the car in front of me had struck it. I was wondering why a dog was flying 10 feet in the air, and trying to avoid hitting it or the other cars. The image of its limp legs flailing in the glare like a rag doll tossed from a cliff was burned on my vision for life. I managed to stop the car just after it hit the road directly in front of my car. The guy who hit it stopped too, but about 100 yards ahead. This was a busy stretch of country road, where cars often exceeded sixty miles per hour, but my only thought was for the dog. I hit my emergency flashers, unbuckled the seat belt, and jumped out all in one motion.
When I reached the dog, it was still breathing in great heaves of gasping. It was a chilly night, and the steam from its breath blew out like the spouts of a whale. It was a very large black lab: well over 100 pounds. But it didn’t much resemble a dog anymore, splayed on the asphalt like an octopus at a fish market. With an instinctive surge of compassion, I had the strength to lift the grisly mass into my arms, and carry it off the road before another car came. It was like picking up a waterbed mattress… full. Steam was rising off its twitching ebony flanks. At that moment, the dog’s soul left its body. I could feel its recognition and gratitude as it passed between my arms, licked my chin, and rose up into the night sky. In that briefest of moments, we had met for the first time, and knew one another deeply; instantly. Just as quickly our souls embraced, and we bid farewell. I will never forget that dog.
Back on the side of Highway 3, I reflected that this was one of the few trips to the Bear Lakes without a canine companion. We pulled into the dusty access road that crawled ponderously to the trailhead, following the river back south. We pitched and rumbled past Sunflower Flat, and then civilization was no more. With the tunnel vision of headlights after leaving the power grid, we burrowed our way under the skin of the wilderness. The trees around us were huge and dark, like a Labrador’s coat, and we were the fleas. I gave Kevin ample warning about the washed-out bridge, but it wasn’t necessary due to new improvements in the impromptu parking area where the road ended. Sentinel boulders suddenly loomed in the night, as if they were guarding a checkpoint. There was one other car in the dusty gravel flat, so we pulled off to a likely spot near the forest where I could set up my extra tent before turning off the headlights. I wanted to hear the river and breathe the fresh mountain air, but Kevin took the easy way out and slept in the cab.
“God sent you here for a purpose. Are you acting in harmony with that purpose?
You came on earth to accomplish a great mission. Realize how important that is!
Do not allow the narrow ego to obstruct your attainment of an infinite goal.”
— Paramahansa Yogananda