Twenty-One

Hiking to the Top of the Ridge

I think again of how a footprint communicates the way thought and language do, that a single track or footprint is like the subject of a sentence, but to be a complete sentence, for thought to emerge, you need action, a predicate. For a predicate, for meaning to emerge, one foot has to make contact twice. There has to be movement.

Sometimes I like to go one step further—to think of my body as the subject and my mind as its predicate. Together we make a sentence where meaning emerges. But when my body and my mind are both in action, then we’re really cooking with gas.

Walking has always been one of my greatest pleasures, and not just on the trail, though I feel the pleasure of it there most keenly—to be on my own, free of the demands of the pack string; a camp day on which, if the weather is good, I climb up through the buckbrush where Bucky gets squirrelly, prepared to bolt, because he can’t see over the briars, up to where the vegetation grows thin and the shale bares itself, scrambling up a scree slope where no horse would ever go and where it’s best if I don’t look down, to the ridge where I walk along, zigzagging as I make my way steadily higher, amazed at how much distance I gain in ascension, how the camp’s blue overhead tarp dissolves into the trees, the place I’ve been an Alka-Seltzer tablet fizzing away, all the details, the grit of the day, and what I have is panorama, a point where I can see over every mountain range, and the view gives rise to an ache in my belly.

To walk is to act on an insatiable hunger for more, and when I stand at the top of a mountain I can see so much more. I can see places I have never been and also places I have—there’s the lake, the Gataga, the strip of burned trees, the landscape loosening its limbs with each distinction: the sandbar, the marsh, the path to the creek, each part phosphorescing like lamps turning on, wick by wick, inside me.

They say that charting the Milky Way is like mapping a crowded city from within its midst. If we could travel outside of it, then we’d see the place more clearly. I’ve tried to picture the Earth as though I weren’t on it, to imagine the spin and tilt of an object parted, but I could never detach from my body’s weight. I’d get as far as imagining myself looking down—always looking down, never up, which may have something to do with my relationship with gravity. But even if I get to the imagined up there, I can’t break free of Earth’s tether. I can’t get my feet off the ground, outside of its midst and frame of reference, from the place where thought takes shape and matters.

Sometimes I think I walk to escape myself. I can imagine walking so fast I break free of my body. I think that I write for the same reason.