When I was last =91here=92 I mentioned that I was going feral for two
weeks (finally, hurray) and as such would be =91there=92 and not
=91here=92=
..
In typical ^,,^ fa****on those 2 weeks accidently became 4 or 5 weeks.
In this variation on my small theme, this =91there=92 was a little visited
corner of Yellowstone, one best approached from Idaho. (that=92s all
I=92m ever going to give on the gps coordinates, as the thing I love
most about it is the =93little visited=94 part.)
This wasn=92t a climbing trip, it was a fi****ng trip. For while there
is some genuine vertical on the path I took, you=92d have to be nuts to
actually try to rock climb the local FBS (Fossilized Bird****). Well,
more nuts than me (which is really saying something).
But to me the two, fly fi****ng and climbing, have melded in my head
into essentially the same thing. Back in the day when I was climbing
everyday, often in odd places that most people could not find quickly
on a globe, I was often asked why I was so passionate about it. I am
certain that most all of you, certainly those I have come to know,
have been asked the same question many times -- by 'earth people' who
haven't given themselves the chance to learn for themselves. My
answer depended on who was asking. If it was some moron insisting
that people climb only for the adrenaline rush of scaring the poop out
of themselves (you know the type), I would say =93if my goal was to
scare myself ****less, well, I accomplished that rather soundly
withing just a few months after I started climbing anything. and,
with that accomplished, i would have of course simply walked away from
it and tried something even scarier, like, oh, say jumping out of a
plane, or (for a claustrophobic like me) spelunking.
If they continued on down the Dr. Ruth/Dr. Freud vision of why I loved
what I loved, I=92d just give them my =93go away=94 answer: I=92d say
=93Mallory said that he wanted to climb everest because it was there.
Me, I like to climb mountains because you are not there=94. With that I
would disappear in search of someone actually worth talking to.
Now for the intelligent and genuinely friendly people who asked the
same question, I thought long and hard trying to come up with an
answer to a question I personally never felt the need to ask myself.
In the end, I came up with this: I told them, =93for me, climbing is
like dancing on the beach =96 it is an ecstatic movement in a beautiful
place=94
To date that is the best I can come up with. And for me, personally,
fly fi****ng is precisely the same thing. It is like dancing on the
beach. It is an ecstatic motion in a beautiful place. Of late, I
have mentioned this to those who approach me (and bring me cra****ng
back to earth) to ask me what I am doing with a fly rod casting at
dawn onto a little tuff of grass at a very urban city park in DC. And
with that I say, thanks for asking, you have a good day (and now
disappear) and try to fall back into dancing on the beach.
Um, yeah. So anyway, I was out in an odd corner of Yellowstone with
my fish whip in hand. And oh, what a beach. It is a place that I
have been to many times, almost always at the very end of fall just
before the brutality of a west Yellowstone roars in. this time, as is
usually the case as the largely unmolested trout (mostly cutthroats)
who know what is coming going understandably nuts and chomp hard on
anything that drifts by which just might have some caloric value=85
well, I just couldn=92t miss. The first 5 or 10 casts I made were
hammered by a cutthroat of significant size. I, of course, told
myself that this was because I was so way wicked good at fish whip
tricks. By cast number 20 (and the resultant beastie cutthroat number
20) even I realized that a 5 year old tossing a snickers bar off the
end of a broomstick would have had precisely the same results. These
fish had simply gone insane. And having skied into the same zip code
in the jaws of a west Yellowstone winter, I could understand why. The
rivers freeze over, deep and hard, for a looong time. And the local
trout get to starve and just hope that they might have enough fat
stored up to survive for 4 or so months without so much as a French
fry.
there is an ancient joke among fly fisher... anglers, about an angler
dying and going to what s/he at first thought was heaven and soon
realized was hell. it goes like the above...
Well, with that moment of trout epiphany I pretty much stopped fi****ng
and focused instead on the other thing that draws me back exactly
=93there=94 exactly =93then=94 =96 any year when I am not off in some even
=
more
jaw dropping location. And that is the great ***. Not that any was
offered specifically to me, but I find it rather life affirming to
watch all of nature other than me go absolutely silly in search of
***. True, I can watch most of your species do the same most anywhere
most anytime. But your species, while especially fascinating to me,
are only a part of the big picture. Watching the resident (and
visiting) moose, geese, elk, mice, et al do the same is, well,
entertaining and life affirming. Well, to me.
For all those species know, as my trout buddies know, what is coming
fast and hard. Yellowstone winters are ferocious. And this,
understandably, leads to all manner of silliness. I saw a young male
elk, an adolescent, last years calf, chase around a very large (easily
twice his size) and very mature lady moose. The very mature, almost
elderly, matron moose of course wanted nothing to do with junior=92s
shenanigans. You could all but hear her grunt =93oh pahleeze, time for
you to disappear you silly pre-teen.=94 But junior didn=92t get this, so
he kept slithering into her space, and, eventually, she sent him a
message he could comprehend, even in his youth. He got too close, she
dropped her head and mighty rack, with which she charged him hard and
knocked him ass over teakettle (as my beloved grandfather used to
say). I mean she knocked him down so hard he did a complete roll and
then another half a roll =96 ending up on his back and scared ****less.
He flipped and flopped and when he finally got to his feet he bolted
due north at full panic speed. I am certain he is now somewhere deep
into Alberta, if not further.
I sat and watched a deer mouse do back flips on a log I had squoonched
my bivi sack alongside. True back flips, like an Olympic gymnast. At
first I thought it was just some trick he had developed to seduce me
into throwing him a piece of my, well, whatever I was eating at the
moment. Pasta, likely. But I thought about (after watching his
acrobatics for at least half an hour) and realized that I was far
enough off the beaten track that such a trick (anyone who has been to
camp 4 has seen it, surely) was, most years at least, entirely a waste
of time that far out =91there=92. And deer mice only get so many years.
Eventually I looked hard enough to see his true audience -- a lady
deer mouse. She was close by, watching his antics as I was. Had I
not been so caught up in trying to figure him out I would have likely
noticed her far sooner. Typical. Eventually, she apparently decided
=91well, I guess that=92ll do=92 and they had their moment. I can=92t
tell
you more as I am polite, if not especially smart. I simply looked
away and gave them their privacy.
I saw the same in so many, many species. This year even a pair (if
only for a moment) of mountain lions ( a first for me =96 it played out
much like the deer mouse prom). Bison, elk, various raptors, ground
squirrels, chipmunks, ****cupines, marmots. Pretty much every creature
(other than me) got laid.
Another kind of beach=85 another kind of dancing=85
I learned, albeit accidentally, on a previous trip to the same general
local, that catching it at samhain (pronounced =91sah-ween) =96 the celtic
word for the last full moon of fall is especially magic. A huge full
moon so close I could (and have) read by it. with the symphony of all
the world=92s creatures singing, howling, and begging for *** so loud
that even after a 20 mile day, sleep was out of the question. It is a
magic cacophony, a sound very special and very dear to me.
~~~
um, yeah.
So anyway, my topic was (back when I had a topic) I praise of bad
weather.
And well, as I have done more than once before, this gig was so magic
that I extended my stay and wandered ever deeper into oz (and with
that ever further from the road head). And with that, of course, the
force of nature that was inspiring my neighbors so actually arrived =96
and massively. Sure, I woke most mornings with a little rim frost
around my face and bivi sack. And a couple of days with a light
dusting of snow. Then one morning, I awoke just before dawn (I think,
that day there was no discernable dawn) laying in 4 or 5 inches of
snow with more coming at me hard and sideways.
And I quick got up, packed up my minimal booty, and bolted for the
road head =96 which at this point was at least 40 miles away (probably
more, but I don=92t know, my generation was spared gps).
And I can assure you that I hustled. No, I never quite hit panic
mode, but was surely in GO GO GO MOVE IT ^,,^ mode, for I had crossed
a couple of mountain p***** that, while not especially large in my
personal experience, and hardly hard with no more than a distinct
frost on them, well, I knew enough to know that very soon, that day in
fact, they would fast become post holing nightmares. As such, my much
repeated mantra of GO DOG GO. I hustled.
As I roared (well, to the extent that this mouse roars) out, even then
I looked up long enough to see moments of profound beauty. I could
tell you a dozen, but I will (uncharacteristaly) limit myself to two.
The first was when a mountain lion =96 by orders of magnitude the
largest I have ever seen (even in a sad zoo) came cruising from behind
my and blew by me at a jog just after I crossed one of about four
major(ish) p***** as I hustled back to the road head. This dude (or
dudette, I didn=92t inquire) was _ huge _. Not so much bulky like
schwartzeneger, but oh so long. I swear s/he was six feet long from
snout to butt, with another six feet of nothing but tail. Perhaps I
was hallucinating, but I doubt it as it was only on my second of four
major p*****. (the hallucinations started later, in the flats in the
dark about 35 hours into my escape, when I was post holing up to my
waist).
The other encounter I will note was with a very elderly male bison.
Friends who have seen my slides of the area often ask if I am afraid
of the resident grizzlies. My answer is no. to date, all of the griz
I have met personally have been exceptionally polite. Well, there was
that one sow with babies in tow my buddy B and I met in Alaska=85 but
that is another tale for another time. In the tri-state area of
Yellowstone, all of the griz I have encountered have been absolute
gentlemen and gentle ladies. And so have i. I come cruising around
some big glacial erratic and POOF, there is a large griz. The large
griz says (in a language I can=92t speak but find easy to understand)
=93hi, I plan to go this way, I think you should go that way.=94 And me,
being a polite guy, say (in a language we both understand)
=93absolutely, sir/madam, I think that way is an excellent way for me to
go.=94 And with that I do it. calmly (to date) but in a deeply
resolved manner.
So no, I don=92t fear griz =96 certainly not in the tri-state area that is
(at least on the paperwork) my home. In that neighborhood, I fear
only two creatures: your species, and old male bison. So, returning
to my escape march, while crossing a large alpine meadow I encountered
at the far size an especially large, especially elderly, and
especially solo male bison. I was so busy staring at the sky trying
to guess the weather I stupidly all but bumped into him. Oopsy. And
he, admittedly rightly so in response to my poor form, charged at me
hard. I should say false charged me, for if he really wanted to hurt
me, well, I wouldn=92t be writing this and they would find my desiccated
and freezer burned carcass perhaps sometime in june =96 though likely
later as few wander off into that neck of the woods.
So my big old bison elder f(false) charges and I drop face first into
what is now two at least two feet of snow, minimalist but still heavy
pack on my back. And my mighty elder bison stops about, oh, 3 to 5
feet from my scrawny and now prostrate self. At which point he starts
scraping and licking for breakfast. And I wait, as still as a ^,,^
can be. And I wait. And while I am waiting my nose and soon my face
go numb with the cold of lying in the snow. And then I start to
****ver all over with what I have learned through harsh experience and
many EMT courses is the onset of hypothermia.
So I wiggle (oh so slowly) out of my back and try to (oh so slowly)
retreat. But my elder brother bison is not at all happy with this, so
I get some snorts and stomps =96 all so close I can feel it even before
I can hear it. so, well, run-on, now what? Do I slowly freeze to
death, or do I bolt upright and run for my life. At first I bank on
the former, but as I begin to loose the feeling in my arms and legs I
decide on the latter. At what I deemed the last possible moment of
freezing to death, I suddenly sat upright, then stood (weekly) and
then back peddled at full tilt. This garnered a especially loud snort
and a head drop and shake from brother bison, but in the end he
apparently decided =93fine, disappear you skinny flea) and let me flee.
My pack of course was still just a few feet from his massive head. So
then I got to hover at the tree line some 200 or 300 yards away =96 at
once both happy to be alive but also really wi****ng I had what was in
my pack. For I had at least 20 miles to go, and the snow was coming
from the sky like an avalanche. Sheet.
Eventually (seemed like hours, but was probably just a fraction of a
single hour), brother bison wandered off in search of more of whatever
last yummy he had been finding under the snow. With this I crawled
(burrowed would be a better word) through a couple hundred yards of
snow and then slithered back to the tree line with my pack in tow.
Brother bison was gracious enough to let me do this.
With these images much in my mind, I continued to scurry back to,
well, your world. And in the end I made it, as of course you guessed,
and as I was at least 97% certain I would.
And that was the big magic of it. this =91enthusiastic retreat=92 brought
to mind, then and now, the best climbs in my personal inventory.
=91best=92 defined not so much as hardest, or most newsworthy (and that
only in a rather small pond) =96 but defined as those that I most enjoy
closing my eyes and walking back through.
Those most special climbs, for me, almost all involve =93bad=94 weather.
Now I could mention examples, but having spent those many hours of my
escape=96 and many many more hours since flying back to DC and back into
the world of your species, I have come to realize that my small
specific details of such climbs would end up (if for no other reason
than my own small world) sounding like chest thumping tales =91oh yeah!
Well I was =91there=92 =91then=92 AND the weather fell apart.
I don=92t want to go there. For two reasons. The first is that the joy
I wish to share with you would get lost in the details, in the
specifics of one small dog=92s take on things. The second reason is
that I=92m not especially interested in hearing my own small stories in
my own small world of climbing. For all I need do is sit quietly in a
quiet place, and I can close my eyes and see, hear, and smell those
moments any time I wish.
No, that=92s not where I want to go with this. For I already know all
of my own stories, better than any of you could ever hope to know them
--.even with all of my endless words. If all I could hope for was my
own stories I might as well be abandoned, alone, on some desert
island, where I might be alive but my life would be oh so very small.
What I want is to hear your stories on this topic (or any topic, for
that matter). That is why I keep coming back, =91here=92. Perhaps this
vague general compass will inspire you. I certainly hope so. For,
now, today, I am back in a place with too many of your species and not
a single mountain in sight.
Ok, enough. (and, as usual, far more than enough=85.)
ok, be well.
canis fidelus est,
^,,^
|
