Dear Trail Friends,
I am sitting on a rock looking over a sea of mountains. I find this area I've been hiking exceptionally beautiful. Today has been very clear and a very comfortable temperature, not too hot, not too cold. I decided it's time to "cowboy camp" (without a tent) something I used to do often but have entirely given up since falling so in love with my new tent (bought for my Sept 2014 hike around Rainier).
I think I feel very safe and secure in the tent, which is nice, but it also "protects" me from the amazing experience of sleeping under the stars and waking at intervals to see the Big Dipper moving across the sky. I have to nudge myself (gently) to do this, but I think I will be glad I did.
Today's highlight, a first I think for me and the PCT: I left the trail - not because I took a wrong turn, not to follow a spur trail to water, not to go down to town to resupply -- simply because something beautiful beckoned me. I saw this pond full of lily pads and I wanted to be in there in the midst of all that beauty.
Photo 1: the lily pad pond from the trail. There was a trail toward the lake but it petered out and disappeared. I was concerned about finding my way back, but it didn't stop me. I found my way to the pond, stripped off my clothes, waded in. I was approaching the middle and it was nowhere near as high as my waist, and the mud which actually felt lovely and squishy also gave me the feeling I might sink down down down and disappear forever. Moreover there was no possibility of swimming -- I would have been entangled like Gulliver by the Lilliputians in all those lily pad stems. So I splashed myself all over, got out, dressed and (not without some adventure) found my way back to the trail, utterly delighted with my excursion.
Photo 2: lily pad pond up close. Really beautiful to wade into. If it were swimable, if there were campsites nearby, I would have taken a spontaneous zero day here. I am pleased to see Barbara's influence on me -- her complete unconcern about how much of the trail she completes, her choice to go slower than she needs to in order to savor and enjoy. It's kind of fun to see we do that for each other, even in small ways. When I ordered the combo hamburger (hamburger with salad) yesterday, she hadn't noticed it as a possibility and changed her order. and when I ordered blue cheese dressing, she changed her dressing order. I will see her again at Callahans (near Ashland) our next resupply. We are both treating ourselves to rooms and made a date for dinner July 21. They have a deck where dogs are allowed to stay with their owners at dinner.
Photo 3. Beautiful mountain-waves. I think I'd pick the closest one on the right for Bonnie's "Wave of the Day."
Photo 4. My tent collapsed and ready to be folded up -- predawn light in last nights beautiful tent site. I so enjoyed during the night looking down at the lights of Seiad Valley (and thinking how odd that I had just been there, and now was so far away. ) and looking up at the stars. But of the inspiration for cowboy camping tonight. Which leads us to...
Photo 5. My air mattress and sleeping bag spread out on my ground cloth ready for my first cowboy camping in more than a year.
Too tired to write much now. I do want to tell you that my reveries have been a lot on the subject of completions --and unfinished dreams and projects. I've been thinking about why finishing the PCT is so important to me -- and this year if I can for fear I won't come back next to complete it. This led to reflection on the many unfinished dreams in my life (I dropped out of graduate school FOUR times, a doctoral program at U of Wisconsin in math, the doctoral program in molecular biology at MIT, a masters in electrical engineering at San Diego State Univ, and another in Creative Writing. And the books: two novels that never got past a first draft, another just a fragment, a book about therapists and former clients who marry for which I conducted and transcribed extensive interviews, but which never got written). I think I feel sadness and guilt, almost as if they were children I had aborted or abandoned. So that helps explain the push to finish things. But I also remember, in that first summer NSF-sponsored math project how I organized a group to study the Incompleteness Theorem and how I was fascinating by the way in which we humans (with our drive to abstraction and quantification) try to create an illusion of a completeness that is actually logically impossible. Even then I was intrigued by and attracted to incompleteness. And I have loved the idea that my final section might be the part of Northern CA I missed because of the flu: Quincy to Burney Falls, which includes Belden, the official halfway point for the PCT. the notion of ending in the middle seemed to speak to the same impossibility of completion/completeness as Godel's theorem.
It is getting chilly. Time to tuck in and sleep under the stars. Happy trails.
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