18.5 miles. 3707 ascent.
Dear Trail Friends
The short answer is no: My sore feet did not keep me hiking Tuesday or Wednesday.
The long answer is that a dinner date with friends Bea and Cindy (not to be constrained by nationality or season, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with Bea’s traditional sauerbraten - practically a week in preparation and totally delicious) kept me from blogging Tuesday evening. Then I returned from my hike so utterly exhausted Wednesday/yesterday that i couldn’t blog. So I decided to take a rest day today - and finish the hike Friday. (My commitment for Friday, like so many future plans, was cancelled. It feels as if the future, as something plan-able and foreseeable, has been cancelled. It is strange walking around without a set of future plans and expectations. They definitely create a room with a view in the dimension of time. Strange to have the shade pulled down on that view I am grown so accustomed too. )
Meanwhile, here I am. That feeling of being present in one moment, in one place, that I so cherish on the trail. I may not be able to quite feel it - but I do hope to conjure the memory with my words. It is late Thursday morning and I am beginning to write my belated blogs.
I drove over to the north entrance to Turtleback preserve in the predawn dark and started walking at 6:40am. The moon, now a crescent, was shining through the trees as I left the parking lot. I can feel my chest relax and my mind settle into a still quiet feeling just in response to the simple act of writing that sentence. It’s as if I am back there, beginning the day again.
As I walked the sun began to rise and the dawn colors appeared between trees. I remembered another hikeathon - I must have started earlier that time - when I reached Turtlehead just at sunrise and I could see the dawn colors on one side of the sky and the moon setting on another. This time sunset was pretty much over when I arrived at Turtlehead (1005 ft) but in that magical moment when I reached the top and the view spread open before me, I had a strong bodily response to the tenderness of the new morning light touching the water and the islands. It came in the form of a musical memory, Stevie Wonder singing Isn’t She Lovely, the song he wrote celebrating his first child’s birth. I wanted to hear it and was surprised it wasn’t in my music collection on my iPhone. But I found it YouTube, played it on speaker phone, and danced to it up there on that knoll that at that moment felt like the top of the world, celebrating the birth of the new day. (Photo 1)
I’m not sure how much more I want to write though it was a beautiful hike and a beautiful day but in some ways I want to let that dance and that music be the days blog.
As I danced I sensed myself - a small part of the great music-dance-design that makes the earth and sun move. Stevie Wonder sang “I never thought through love/ We’d be making one as lovely as she/But isn’t she lovely made from love?” There I was - dancing my part of the love that gave birth to that lovely new day.
As I went on hiking I was struck several times by the beauty of dead trees, and the love I felt for them. I compared it to the way I imagine god/wilderness loving me - indifferent to my life or death, or preferences. It helped me imagine indifferent love as a way of accepting the loved one’s own being, its destiny. Not needing to fix it or rescue it. Letting it be.
Photo 2 is a collage of lovely dead trees. (Or deciduous trees I mistook for dead?)
Not much later I was walking along and looked up at the morning light on the trees and saw my first budding green leaves of the spring (photo 3).
Of course after that I realized they were all around me. So little of the hike thus far had been about spring - it was more ice, cold, wind - and now I realized the song was about spring too and the rebirth of the seasonal cycles. I started seeing little green leaves everywhere and then I noticed them on “windblow” - a branch torn loose from its tree and beginning the process of dying. (Photo 4).
This broken dying branch with its budding green leaves reminded me of the abandoned gold mine. All the hard hopeful physical labor poured into a dream that never came true. The gold never found. I thought of the life energy poured into all those tiny green leaves that will never fully come to life. I liked thinking that the great dance, the great music, views the broken branch with the same dispassionate love with which it views the branch that goes on living. Broken branches or dreams, successes or failures are all the same in its eyes (as I imagine it) - all part of the great design. I find this very consoling as I reflect on my life and the immense amounts of energy I poured into dreams that never came to full fruition - whether political dreams, having children, or my many unfinished writing projects. I feel a deep peace just as I did on the trail when I paused to photograph and honor the broken branch and so to honor the unfinished fragments of my own life. And let me consciously expand that to include the broken parts of others’ lives and the lives that end prematurely and all the gifts and talents that go enexoressed and unrealized. Maybe this is part of my prayer as I walk - may all of us broken ones with our broken dreams be seen (and see ourselves) with love. With a song of celebration: Isn’t She Lovely?
I noticed on the Turtleback Walk - such a beautiful day in such a beautiful place - how often the moments that woke me up to the “Here I am” feeling - of realizing I was in the presence and included in what I am calling God - were moments of high contrast between opposites. Night and day, life and death, beginning and ending, light and shadow.
Two such scenes of contrasting light and shadow - where I just gasped as I lay eyes on them - are in photos 5 and 6.
I also love the play of light on the shining surfaces of leaves (sometimes the light seems to dance on leaves almost as much as on water) as in photo 7.
I’m ready for this blog to be done. But there are a couple more things I want to mention. There is another stone circle beside Ships Peak in the Turtleback preserve. Nobody has ever told me it is an authentic stone circle built by native people, but it feels holy to me. I walked around quickly addressing the spirits/musicians/dancers/designers of each of the four directiobs just saying “Greetings. Gratitude. Blessings.” I thought of how East can mean sunrise and morning, and spring - new beginnings. How south can mean midday and summer and warmth. How west can mean sunset and fall and endings. How north can mean winter and hardship and night and darkness. I also prayed to the underworld (thinking of worms and roots and gophers, as well as the spirits of lava and volcanic eruption and seismic shifts) and the upper world (thinking of sky and clouds and wind, and of planets and stars and galaxies in their huge beautiful spiraling dances). I had just seen a vulture (sky dancers, my friend Laura used to call them) riding the thermals, it spread-open wings utterly motionless. Photo 8 is the stone circle.
I noticed I was gentler with myself about appropriating the spiritual ideas and sacred site of native peoples. Reparation I decided I’d a political issue and I hope someday it will be addressed. But in the realm of spirit we are all part of the great dance and design, all related to the massacred and massacre-er. And it feels to me as I approach this time of change and uncertainty and unknown, as our whole world does, it is such a kindness to connect with whatever offers itself as a sacred presence to which or through which I can pray. I guess I offered myself and my ancestors some forgiveness for our part in the whole beautiful tragedy of the human world.
One more small note. I found myself happily violating many of the rules I have created for myself for hikeathons - returning I skipped a part of the trail and my goal in curating these hikes has been to include as many trails as possible - but this funny 5-day hike I decided is just for me, not for my dream that others may follow these hikes and find similar healing (a dream that may well turn out to be yet another abandoned gold mine or broken branch). But I noticed that the 100 miles was still sacred to me. I laughed at myself as I thought about alternate courses and tried to reach exactly 18 miles (I hiked two miles extra, actually almost three, because I realized it would be impossible first to put together a 20 mile hike of the Turtleback trails and second to complete it in time for my dinner date). What amuses me was the attachment to the number in this case 100. It reminds me of the little girl who fell in love with mathematics because it was invisible and perfect. Because there was no uncertainty. Things were right and wrong and they could be proved. Some people think that is true of science but when I studied science I found it far too approximate. Once you start mucking around with the actual world, and this is even more true in social science, you lose the pristine perfection of numbers. When I imagine the great music and dance though I imagine an order beyond logic and human thought that embraces the whole contradictory business of being alive and dying, living and hating, longing for peace and making war, being greedy and wanting justice. And so on and on.
Enough my friend. Thank you for walking with me all this way. I’ll be back with day 4 later today. Happy (and healthy) trails until then.
Ps. Oops I forgot to include the track of my hike. Basically north entrance to Turtleback to each of the overlooks then to Turtlehead then Raven ridge trail and back to west side of loop trail and to ships peak. Down main trail to southern entrance then back lost oaks trail to ships peak then down lost oaks trail and back up on morning ridge trail.
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