“Another glorious day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long not short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees or stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.”
— John Muir
Still Saturday
Later that morning, I bid good day to my new companions, and set off to pursue my own agenda: a sort of pilgrimage to my favorite places. I fervently hoped that, like a tour through a familiar museum, the re-exposure to nature’s masterpieces would elevate me to former heights of exquisite appreciation. I gathered a few things and took Dante down to see the Beater Cedar, which was still perched on its lonely pedestal about a hundred yards below the eastern shore of Wee Bear. I approached this solitary tree slowly; in reverent supplication, as if it were a holy man on a mountaintop. The dog was decidedly unimpressed, and frustrated by my deliberate pace. If he’d had anything left in his bladder, he probably would have just peed on the trunk. The poor little squirt had wasted all the ammunition he’d brought marking the trail on the way down from Little Bear Lake; especially in the places where chipmunk scent was most prevalent. I cupped some water in my hand, and he lapped it up gratefully, glancing around anxiously as if trying to decide where his next target would be.
Beater Cedar was right where I’d left it, about 100 yards down the rock bluff from the Furniture of the Gods: those absurdly appropriate pieces of exterior decorating. This unique knoll could aptly be called “God’s Parlor,” for this is where He welcomes guests, makes them feel at home, and does His best to ease the weariness and burdens of the journey. I thought all these years that Beater Cedar was the sole specimen of Calocedrus decurrens for over a mile, but I was wrong. It looked so lonely and complete there, majestically perched on a granite knob like a king on his throne, that I fancied it was the solitary representative of its species. Standing in front of that regal Incense Cedar and facing Mt. Shasta, I saw for the first time there was another small, stunted cedar tree at about 8:00. It was less than 5 feet tall and appeared to be a young tree that had had its growing top snapped off in a fierce storm. That trauma transferred its youthful energy to the branches of the remaining, gnarled trunk; no thicker than a skinny old man’s ankle. This support was twisted and wavy, with much thinner bark than the Beater Cedar. With its 4 living branches erupting in pom-poms of needles, the little tree displayed the exuberant character of a sinewy cheerleader celebrating in the glories of the Big Game. The Cheerleader Cedar danced in the gentle wind, waved her brilliant green pom-poms, and the trees on the stadium wall of Sawtooth went wild!
Then I found another shy, wee thing: a precious cedar sapling, sheltered in the lee of a curved stone. She was safe for a time, but soon would have to poke her head above the sheltering edge, and might have it broken off the way so many trees up here seem to do. At the time, she was barely 2 feet tall, and as profoundly adorable as a bonsai tree. Those saplings were surely the ambitious progeny of the great, gnarled Beater Cedar – a precocious passing of arboreal generations at my feet.
Just upstream from the Beater lay the remnants of another large cedar that had decomposed enough so I could see the swirling, wavy grain of the wood that used to be hidden underneath the thick bark – now long gone. This had fallen into (or had grown up around) a stand of attractive young Ponderosas that must have benefited from the sudden increase in sunlight when the giant fell. The great trunk smashed at a 45-degree angle across a truck-sized boulder, making a nice little shelter. Parallel to this fallen column were the remains of an incredible cedar burl, where the main trunk had thrust sideways at 90 degrees for a while before it returned to vertical growth. From the forensic evidence, it appeared that this giant crooked piece must have been 20-30 feet from the ground, which would have made a very nice picture 100 years ago if someone had been stupid enough to lug some of that antique photographic gear up the trail.
Scanning the area below, where a virile young forest had grown up in the sheltered cleft of Wee Bear’s overflow, I saw no more cedars as far as I could make out any details. Across the way, there was a strange red-headed tree at the base of Sphinx Rock that seemed to be a mutation, or a very different sort of specimen altogether, but I’d bet it wasn’t a cedar. So, at that time, close to the dawn of a new millennium, Beater Cedar was the only real cedar tree up there. As I’ve speculated in the past, its seed must have been transported by a bird of prey that captured a chipmunk with full cheek pouches. For a tree, this was tantamount to an orgasm – a sheer exuberance of primal procreation – when its purpose was fulfilled in a spectacular achievement of seed dispersal. The intrepid Incense Cedar species had serendipitously extended its territory.
I sat on the gnarled and twisted roots of the one and only Beater Cedar. It wasn’t a comfortable spot, but I wanted to experience a sensation of the tree’s tenacity and incredible stability. Mind you, the winters up here are severe – like all temperate mountain climates – and life has many challenges. The great, hoary roots curled and grasped at a minor lateral crevice in the massive monolith of granite between Big and Little Bear Lakes that seemed to be carved from a single enormous block the size of a city. The bottom of the trunk rested on a ledge of solid granite, in the casual manner of an elbow on a table, with no roots that could be seen under the downhill side where the rock is impenetrable. All the roots flowed uphill into the crack the way an octopus becomes part of a coral reef. The ponderous rust-colored column of the trunk, 4 feet in diameter, balanced on its granite fulcrum and thrust its many tons straight upward: a forearm is raised in victory. The top of its crown was at least 80 feet off the ground. This feat of gradual, adaptive leverage defied human description.
The magnificent individuality of this great being called to mind one of my favorite passages about trees from Hermann Hesse, author of Siddhartha, in a collection of his notes called Wanderings. What follows in italics is from this rare and magnificent book:
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.”
It was appropriate that I had come alone to this solitary tree. I had isolated myself from society by my transgressions, and was irrevocably separate and apart. Like the cedar, I could observe the rhythms of daily life, but I could not wholly participate ever again. We both knew the loneliness of having to lift ourselves up from unfortunate circumstances. The difference was that for the tree, it was a natural twist of fate that had brought it to its high and lonely seclusion. For me, there was no detail of my destiny other than that which I had brought upon myself.
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”
We are born perfect in God’s image, and yet we are all sinners. How can this innate paradox be reconciled? Our common experience is that we all enter this world stainless, and as human beings we somehow choose to mess things up over and over again; by our own free will. Ascribing to this point of view means that every person in the world has willfully defiled a perfect creation of God. We all start out as divine beings, and by our deliberate thoughts and actions we blemish that sanctity until it is unrecognizable. How depressing to think that billions of humans since the dawn of creation have been doing their utmost to destroy the purity of the divine! Is that the purpose for which we were created? What is one to do, then? Is it appropriate to take that which one has ruined, and throw it away as irredeemable trash? When one makes a mess, one cannot just hide it or get rid of it. There is an implicit responsibility to restore things to their authentic condition. I had a long way to go to clean things up, but at least I had stopped making a bigger mess.
“A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
“A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.”
Then again, who among us is free of sin? How many people do you know who are completely devoid of wrong behavior? We rationalize our wickedness by comparing it favorably to the greater mistakes of others. The one disadvantage of being a saint is that there is little room for advancement. Where sin is present there is always commensurate, intrinsic opportunity for growth. To the degree that wrong behavior is recognized, repented, and corrected, progress is made for the individual soul, and also for the collective human evolution. Erroneous impulses and actions are natural, concomitant byproducts of growth. Mistakes are evolution in action. They are the steps by which we may ascend a stairway to heaven. Incremental gains of higher consciousness result from not being afraid to face one’s inner demons, and through intelligence and compassion, striving to overcome them. Just take another step upward! Especially when the demons get the best of you! That is when you must not give up, ever!
“When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.”
Dante interrupted my Divine Comedy to ask for another drink. He was too lazy to go 15 yards down to the outlet trickle and get water for himself… it was much easier to impose upon his servant. Or perhaps the opposite was true: to him, I had become a god; the alpha and omega of everything the mendicant needs to survive. No matter what his perspective, he wouldn’t last three days out here by himself. He would pine away inconsolably until some predator put him out of his misery. He soon learned to drink from the bottle’s nipple top, and as I tried to pour water into a clean, bowl-shaped depression in the rock, he suckled on the spigot like a lamb on a teat. He flashed his puppy eyes hopefully, as though he was thinking I might cradle him in my arms and bottle-feed him a while, with perhaps a nice lullaby as an accompaniment, but I wasn’t falling for it.
“A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.”
“So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
It was time to leave the Beater Cedar in peace. No doubt having a smelly biped straddling its roots for an hour had been discomfiting… or had it somehow enjoyed the encounter? Given the sorry state of my ass at the time, I highly doubted it. Standing up and stretching my tired muscles, I could see up and across the gully to a pretty gray-green ledge over 20 feet higher, where I had stood earlier while Dante and the chipmunk had been locked in their mutual tango of torment. I returned there gently, negotiating one of the many natural ledges of stone that invited one to wander aimlessly all over an enchanting layout seemingly constructed for that purpose. The natural pathways allowed me to wander purposefully, and reflect on the wisdom of Hesse.
Unconsciously, I turned my wrist to look for a watch that wasn’t there. I never bring a watch up to the lakes. Who cares what “time” it is out here? It could be 11:00 in the morning, or 1:00 in the afternoon. What’s the difference? The way humans measure time is arbitrary anyway, no matter how you look at it. We started measuring a “standard time” when sailors needed a fixed point for navigation. This was actually one of the defining moments in human history, when a standard Mean Time was established in Greenwich, England, in the 16th Century. It allowed us to determine our exact location on the great, mysterious oceans of the planet, and establish our objective position in what constituted the “known universe” at that time. But it also separated us unequivocally from the natural rhythms of the earth, our home. Since that uncertain age, science has advanced to the point where the arbitrary Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is irrelevant. Nowadays, we measure “time” by the deterioration of atoms under strictly controlled scientific conditions. Millions of dollars and countless hours of labor are devoted to the metrics of observing the passage of this thing we call “time.” However, we still have not defined what it really is.
Einstein proved, with his Theory of Relativity, that “time” is relative to the subjective observer, and yet we are foolhardy enough to try and establish an objective standard. With complicated arrays of computers and algorithms, humans attempt to impose their puny sense of order to the universe. What an absurd waste of resources! As an example of arbitrary relativity, consider that I was born in North America at about 12:35 am “local time,” which was defined as the Central Time Zone on October 16, 1961, according to the geographic location of some random hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and an antiquated Gregorian calendar from the Middle Ages. Now I live in California, where of course I still celebrate my birthday on October 16, but at the very moment I was actually born in 1961, the “time” in California was 10:35 pm on October 15. So, which is my true birth date? The fact that we have to throw in an extra day every fourth “leap year” illustrates the absurdity of celebrating a “birth day” as an exact measurement of age. I prefer more to think of my nativity as a “birth moment,” being that singular instant in the unfoldment of the universe in which I embarked on my solo biological adventure.
How can “time” be measured at all, really? The standard we have held dear, and on which all of our machinations as a “civilized race” are based, is completely arbitrary. Our definition of time has a fundamental effect on all human activity, and yet we refuse to acknowledge its infinite subjectivity. We spent millions to establish an imaginary line of daylight passing over an observatory in Greenwich, England that isn’t even there anymore. This wave of dawn is based on the rotation of a singular planet in a remote arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which is orbiting a minor star somewhere on the outskirts of somewhere else. When that proved to be imprecise, we created complex algorithms to measure the deterioration of atoms under controlled conditions, and established that as the new “standard of time.” What are we measuring, really? We are trying in vain to objectify the passage of time, which is an inherently subjective experience. Is it possible for time to exist without an observer? The only thing one can ever know about time is that wherever one is in the universe; the time is now. That is all there is. So, what exactly is “passing”? There could be infinite universes arrayed like a house of mirrors – one for each moment since the Big Bang – for all we know.
Anyway, at that point in ‘time’ (ahem), I had reached the top of the viewing platform, wishing for a set of large binoculars like the ones at vista points around San Francisco. Directly below my feet, the charming outlet gully was choked green with a teeming nursery of young and exuberant Hemlocks, pushing and shoving and taking advantage of the ideal sheltered and watered spot while they could. Seeing with my mind’s camera, Beater Cedar stood out like a huge bronze trophy on a granite pedestal, with a felt green carpet of tiny trees far down in the valley providing a background like model railroad scenery. Its charmingly crooked limbs huddled close to the safety of its trunk the way fingers never stray far from the hand. The high angle of the morning sun brought out the rusty red color of its bark, which was marbled around the trunk in a whorled pattern akin to a fingerprint (also not unlike that of its fallen ancestor). Off to the east behind that majestic monument, Mt. Shasta virtually sparkled in amethyst hues on a brilliantly clear day. Many more details were visible on the austere mountain than usual. The departing clouds and their wake of wind had scrubbed the air clean, and the whole scene had the surreal clarity of an enhanced photograph.
Like a falcon, I perched on my rock ledge and saw everything at once. The trees, the rocks, and the sky all blended into a mosaic of splendor that quenched my thirsty eyes. My ledge was actually the crumbled remnants of what used to be one side of a cluster of massive volcanoes that in some ancient epoch must have been close to the size of Shasta and her little sister, Shastina. A similar example is three hundred miles to the northeast, where the rim of Crater Lake reaches about as tall as I am now, but unlike that perfect bowl, the eastern side of this volcano’s unimaginable bulk blew out and formed a valley. And what a valley to behold! (Except the parts that had been clear cut by logger-locusts, which I was ignoring to retain my sanity.)
The ledge’s broad back had a few random boulders just sitting around, like bored little birds on a hippopotamus, except one of them was as big as a Volkswagen. Those solitary, ponderous “birds,” and the “furniture” arranged in God’s Parlor across the gully, were somehow left in place as the glacial ice melted, and mountain slowly eroded and fell away beneath them over millennia. My science fiction imagination produced compelling video imagery of aliens depositing them like starseeds. For whatever reason, they were there, and so was I – all of us with a palpable presence like strangers waiting in a room for a very long time – intensely aware of one another, but not wanting to be the first one to speak.
From that modest clifftop platform, one of hundreds positioned around the rims of long-extinct and eroded volcano shells, I couldn’t miss the staggering bulk of Sawtooth looming in my peripheral vision. It was easily the largest and tallest mountain in the panorama, and it dominated the landscape like that big kid in your fifth-grade class photo who took up half the back row. The yawning crags and talus slopes of the mountain’s three main southern faces ascended in a huge fractal pattern of diminishing triangles all the way to the tips of its razor-sharp summits. Reversing the direction of my gaze, the arrangement cascaded downward to form ever larger facets, which disappeared in the swath of vegetation where the trail inched across its gargantuan, stony toes. Several building-sized blocks of granite perched precariously among the skyscraping peaks, seeming to defy gravity – like a cityscape turned on its side, or a cluster of barnacles on the hull of a ship.
The miniature trees marched up from the valley in a westward trek up the flanks of Sawtooth, then petered out noticeably as fertile spots got harder to find. A few intrepid sorts were beginning to gain purchase on the shoulders of the ostentatious mountain. I perceived that as each new one gained a foothold slightly higher up, it provided shelter for those in its lee, and the little cluster grew stronger and became a forest over time. Of course, there were parts of Sawtooth that would never have trees in this age, even though its maximum height was below the tree line. Too many of the sheer granite facets were vertical or solid. I could see cliffs that rose to nearly 1,000 feet high in at least four places, and although I knew nothing about rock climbing, I guessed those must surely be rated among the most difficult challenges! What would they look like in ten thousand years? Or a hundred thousand?
Off to the west, I could just see the spires of Altamira poking above Dis Butte, like church steeples seen above a city skyline. The attractive shoulder behind Wee Bear sloped up to merge with Dis Butte’s descent to the edge of the campsites. The entire scene was composed in the manner of Cezanne, as if the master’s fantastic imagination had distorted the natural landscape to emphasize form and geometry. The surface of the wee tarn was riffled by wind, but I have often observed it as a perfect mirror, reflecting inverted wonders to double the impact on my sensibilities. With wry amusement, I recalled the one time I had tried in vain to capture that essence on canvas myself. The stultifying stillness of Sawtooth reflected on its crystal surface proved to be too much grandeur to process. I wound up with a half-finished painting and a sprained brain for my efforts.
The wind started to pick up, but the sky was still remarkably clear and blue, as if I were embedded in a sapphire the way a mosquito is encased in amber. I scrawled the last few words in my notebook for the morning, and made ready to retreat from the grand art gallery of panoramas to the more intimate and sheltered glades of the forest near Little Bear Lake. All that time, I had been writing on a granite “desk,” larger than a grand piano, which had obviously been placed there for just such a purpose… with a little butt-grinder of a bench situated just so. My tailbone was reminding me that for all its charm of form the furniture was still made of igneous rock– and it had been grinding into my ass for over an hour. The office-like setup was starting to remind me too much of home, where at this moment I would be chained to my desk and thrashing on the computer all day. It struck me as ironic that my work had turned my home into an “office” from which I could not easily escape, and I had to go backpacking to truly “go home.” That’s one tough commute!
Verily I say unto thee, it was indeed quite surreal to find myself working from home. The abomination of turning my sanctuary into a slave galley had developed out of necessity, when I could no longer find a “real job” due to my checkered past. I was lucky to have the skill and moxie to fashion a sufficient income from independent computer programming that could be performed from a remote location, such as a 10 x 10 sheetrock cubicle. Undeniably, the remoteness was changing my demeanor for the worse. I had withdrawn by degrees to be more and more isolated from society, until I hid away like a pariah, performing my contribution to society unrecognized and unappreciated. On such a magnificent day, basking in the glow of this grand expanse of holiness, I felt connected once again to a system much larger and more vital than the secular “society” from which I had ostracized myself. I knew this was a precious reminder of a greater reality, and drew it in through every pore of my skin, storing up the communion for bleaker times ahead.
“So much of what I’ve learned, so much of what’s good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.”
— Cheryl Strayed