The Measure of a Mountain, page 2
Things went wrong from the start. The night before I set out, my father and I ferried my equipment south in his pickup. A heavy rain opened up as we drove down Interstate 5 listening to Dave Niehaus talk the Mariners through a loss to the Orioles. We sat like hillbillies watching the wipers slap when it occurred to me that we were riding in a truck with an—Oh Christ!—open bed. We had forgotten to cover it with a tarp. “GET OFF! THE FREEWAY! NOW!” I said, mustering enormous restraint to keep myself from yanking the wheel from my father’s hands. By the time I pulled it from the flatbed, The Renegade had gained two pounds of liquid weight.
The next morning I joined the trail, my spirit nearly broken with fright. The dampness of The Renegade pressed against my back. The buckle that snugged the pack to my chest and performed some unknown but doubtlessly crucial function in The Renegade’s acclaimed load-channeling operation had disappeared in the open-bed truck fiasco. Twenty minutes into the trail the clouds knit together and wept. By nightfall everything except my sleeping bag had accepted the cold weight of water.
That night I tossed between fear and failure. I had two choices: Admit defeat and turn back, preserving life and abandoning dignity, pride, and honor; or press on into a mountain storm without a partner, experience, competence, or a phone to call the Tacoma Mountain Rescue squad. My notebook still held the promise of crisp, trim pages. During the night I flipped it open and registered my situation. “Pissing rain. Wet everywhere. Misery.” A few hours later, at the high tide of vinegar, I recorded a final assessment: “This sucks big wang.”
The morning arrived with sound, not light. A bird flew over my tent, and from the sound of it the thing had beaten wind straight out of Jason and the Argonauts. Fwuff fwuff fwuff. The sound of a Persian carpet being shaken. I could practically feel the air compress beneath its wings. I peeked out in time to see it clamp onto the bicep of a cedar twenty yards away. Furry and black, it let out a guttural awwk-grawwk to which every town crow aspires: Raven.
“A very intelligent bird, the Common Raven seems to apply reasoning in situations entirely new to it,” writes Miklos Udvardy in the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds. “Its ‘insight’ behavior is comparable to that of a dog.” Comparable to that of a coyote, actually. Raven and Coyote are the great protagonists of Pacific Northwest Native American mythology. They are the heroes and goats, tricksters and fools who prepare the world for the coming of the people. When I lived in Alaska as a child, my mother sent my sister and me trudging over the snow to the Sand Lake branch of the Anchorage Public Library, where a librarian would entrance a circle of moon-booted children with local Indian stories about Raven stealing the moon.
Although I’d seen plenty of coyotes, ravens had always eluded me. I’d squinted at crows in downtown alleys, on coastal beaches, clattering around trash cans, looking for the fat beak, furry throat, and muscled wing that set the legendary bird apart from its scrawny cousin. Nothing.
Until that morning. Unzipping the tent flap, I pulled on my boots and crouched in a stew of hemlock cones, needles, moss, and mud. The bird had none of the crow’s glossy flash. Its blackness sucked light from the air, creating a vortex of night centered in an eye that fell gleamless into the void.
When Edgar Allan Poe was casting the lead in the poem that would become “The Raven,” he looked for an animal that would set a tone of death, longing, and melancholy. He drew upon a European tradition that saw the raven as a symbol of darkness, an intermediary between the temporal and spiritual realms. The bird had earned its reputation by ruining crops and pecking at the bodies of the battlefield dead.
But Poe’s ominous raven never flew into the imagination of the Pacific Northwest. Here the bird has always been a creative force at play in the land. Squatting on the bog before sunrise, I had to choose my totem: harbinger of doom or creator of magic and myth. Pack it in or push on.
One of the most enduring tales among Puget Sound tribes is the story of Raven bringing light to the world. It begins with Raven stubbing his toe. Fed up with all the stumbling in the dark, he conceives a plan to steal light from an old man who keeps the dawn in a cedar chest. One day Raven sees the old man’s daughter scoop water from the river. Acting quickly, he transforms himself into a hemlock needle floating on the stream. The daughter catches the needle in her bucket and drinks. Inside her, Raven becomes a fetus and emerges some months later as a newborn son. As the son grows, he discovers the old man’s secret cedar box. The son asks to see inside, but the grandfather refuses. The son asks again, and again is denied. The boy puts up such a fuss that eventually the old man opens the box. Inside is another box, and inside that another. Over time the boy pleads, whines, and badgers his grandfather into opening one box after another, smaller and smaller. Catherine Feher-Elston concludes the story in her book Ravensong:
“Finally, Raven had been given all of the boxes except the smallest one containing the light. A glow emanated from this box, and Raven-boy demanded it, too, as a gift from his grandfather.
“‘Absolutely not,’ Grandfather said. Raven-boy started crying. He howled and yowled.
“‘Give it to me, give it to me. I want the box. I want to see inside,’ he squawked.
“Finally, the old man relented. He opened the box and tossed it to Raven-boy. In an instant, Raven transformed into his old self, swooped down upon the light, and taking it in his beak, flew up the smokehole and out into the open sky. Raven the Transformer lit up the world.”
In the deep forests of Mount Rainier, the sun doesn’t rise, it leaks in thin bands through the trees. As I watched the raven that morning, brilliant shafts pierced the woodsy gloom. They struck a hemlock trunk, turned a black branch brilliant green, electrified a patch of chartreuse moss. My attention drawn by the sun, I turned back to find the raven gone. An icy drop surprised my neck and ran south. I rose, wiped it away, and began packing.
With my soggy homestead slumped on my back, I began walking. One step, two, three. Further into the mountain. Where storms and rain, fear and magic await. Where Raven brings the sun.
PRESSING THROUGH CLOUD
When I told friends I intended to walk around the mountain, they worried. “You sure you’re gonna be all right?” they said. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” they meant.
The night before my departure a friend told me the story of a hiking companion stung by bees. “Got him right on the neck,” she said. “He felt fine for the first half-hour—hurt like a bitch—but then his neck started swelling up so much it was tough to breathe. The Medevac guys said if they hadn’t reached him when they did, he probably wouldn’t have made it.” I resolved to give the bees a wide berth.
My parents suggested I take a pager, a cellular phone, a walkie-talkie, a radio, a homing beacon. I considered a phone but rejected it as un-Thoreauvian. At the trailhead, where I couldn’t refuse, my father pressed a vintage signal flare into my hand. I stashed it in a pocket and took comfort in knowing that if I went down I could light the torch and take an entire national park down with me.
What could go wrong?
Sprained ankle, strained back, broken leg, dislocated knee. Fall into a river. Fall into a glacier. Fall off a cliff. Bear eat your food. Bear eat you. Foot blisters. Shin splints. Food poisoning. Berry poisoning. Hypothermia. Hantavirus. Tic-borne fever. Bee sting. Flu. Lose map, lose way, lose life.
It could rain.
It rained for days everlasting, unending, without cease. Fog socked in the Tahoma Creek valley, moving among the treetops with the creeping opacity of breath on a winter’s morning. Near the top of Emerald Ridge I paused and leaned on my walking stick. This is what we come to see, up high in the world: the respiration of forests.
Walking around Mount Rainier is like hiking a circle of gigantic Ws. It’s all up one ridge and down the next, losing and gaining the elevation of two World Trade Centers in a day. Bette Filley wasn’t kidding. When the sun shines, the Wonderland Trail is an exhausting but not unrewarding trek. When it rains, the Wonderland’s a downright bitch.
One day out, I found the mist keeping my pace, over one ridge and then another. This wasn’t the ground fog that sent Buicks pitching into ditches along the roads of my native Snohomish Valley. A mile above Puget Sound I pressed through cloud.
On a high ridge I slumped off my pack and ate a handful of trail mix. I added a cut of pumice to a cairn and rested against a nearby boulder. Mountains are well known as environments of extremes—extreme altitude, weather, coldness, discomfort—but nothing had prepared me for Rainier’s moments of radical silence and senselessness. It was so quiet. Sitting in the dewy grass inside a womb of cloud, I felt at once lost and perfectly secure. My senses strained to engage the world. The cottony puff swallowed the earth and sky and my own voice as well. No wind. No birds. No mosquitoes whining for blood. The air held the fragrance of water. My eyes, searching for a focal point, found only the dim dish of the sun. I gazed at it as directly as at the moon. Everything was wet; nothing dripped.
I followed the trail through the wet grass of the meadow. A scattering of scrubby firs acted as guideposts barely visible in the ambient gauze. Their presence indicated firm ground; their absence meant I’d run out of earth. Near a high mountain pond the meadow fell away, cut clean as a cliff. I narrowed my eyes and looked harder into the illusion. The water so mirrored the haze that they were indistinguishable. The lake had become cloud.
The world’s religions share a belief in mountains as places of spiritual significance. Buddhists hold a number of mountains sacred; they are the abodes of deities and spirits. The Mongols buried their leaders in high places, the better to let the dead draw upon the power of mountain spirits. In Hindu belief, Mount Meru sits at the center of the world between heaven and earth. The popular mythology of twentieth-century America continues the tradition. Who lives atop mountains? The Wicked Witch of the West and the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Passing through this place of spirits, I began to understand how those legends were born.
Mountains aren’t just convenient symbols, the nearest point to heaven from earth. On days like this they are truly spooky and epiphanic. The clouds like ghosts slip between hemlock trunks dripping with beards of lichen. When the trees dissolve into alpine meadows and the path climbs into higher clouds, it’s easy to imagine yourself approaching the gates of heaven. It would take but a moment to leap into the whiteness and become one of the people who come to Rainier and vanish. For a moment you think you understand why they do it. Walk off: It would be so easy. The absence of others makes the idea oddly comforting. There would be no screaming and weeping, no rescuers’ lives put at risk. Just one’s own life held in the balance. A friend once told me that the availability of death consoled her when life’s terrors seemed overwhelming. On Rainier’s high ridges I came close to understanding her.
The people native to Mount Rainier are uneasy about the supernatural aura of high places. To them the top of Mount Rainier is a place of powerful spirits. The son of the Yakama chief Kamiakin once described how the world began. In the beginning all the world was water and the Great Spirit lived in the sky. When it came time to make the land, the Great Spirit scooped up handfuls of mud from the shallows. He deepened the oceans and raised the soil and piled some mud so high that it froze hard and became mountains.
It’s sometimes said that the Indians who live near it worship Mount Rainier as a god. This isn’t true. The Nisqually Indians, who established villages along the Nisqually River from Puget Sound to the mountain until the government forced them onto reservation land in 1857, believe every manifestation of the natural world is imbued with a spirit. The mountain is no more or less a god than the river, the cedar, the salmon, the thunder, or the coyote. These spirits watch over the bodies of the visible world. In the tradition of the Nisqually and the Yakama, who live on the plains east of the mountain, when a young man came of age he was sent alone into the wilderness on a quest to discover his tahmahnawis, the spirit power that would guide and protect him throughout his life.
Spirits inhabited all aspects of the Nisqually world. Doquebulth was the spirit of good forces, Seatco the spirit of darkness and evil. Most spirits were a little bit Doquebulth, a little bit Seatco. Wha-quoddie, the storm spirit, blew ferocious weather in from the coast, but also brought the rain that nourished the camas fields and fed the salmonfilled rivers. At the center of it all was Sagale Tyee, the great creator, the closest Nisqually equivalent to Yahweh, God, or Allah. If there was a point at which Sagale Tyee rested on the earth, the Nisqually believed the summit of Mount Rainier was the most likely spot.
Powerful forces—storm, wind, volcano—ruled the world of permanent snow and stood guard over the sacred summit. In 1870, when two white men asked a Nisqually named Sluiskin to guide them to the top of Mount Rainier, he considered the idea absurd, but agreed to take them partway up. They made it as far as the snowline, where Sluiskin halted and refused to lead them any farther toward destruction. If avalanches, rockfalls, or high mountain tempests didn’t kill them, the summit spirits surely would. “Finding that his words did not produce the desired effect,” wrote Hazard Stevens, who made the first recorded ascent with partner Philemon Beecher Van Trump, “he assured us that, if we persisted in attempting the ascent, he would wait three days for our return, and would then proceed to Olympia and inform our friends of our death; and he begged us to give him a paper (a written note) to take to them, so that they might believe his story.” Stevens and Van Trump continued to the summit and returned to tell the tale. To this day many Nisqually refuse to cross the snowline that separates the sacred from the profane.
It seems unlikely that no Indian had reached the top prior to the white men’s ascent; Sluiskin’s warnings to Stevens and Van Trump about the rockfalls, bitter cold, and winds strong enough to “sweep you off into space like a withered leaf” bear the accuracy of experience, not imagination. His own grandfather had climbed close to the summit once and barely escaped with his life; Sluiskin couldn’t have been eager to risk his own for the sake of two climbing-mad Bostons (as white Americans were called by local Indians).
Nisqually and Yakama myths often begin with the phrase “Back when mountains were people . . . ” Back when mountains were people they quarreled like wet hens. The Cascade volcanoes were often jealous wives, stealing each other’s goats and berries and boxing like leviathans. Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens threw fire at each other across the Columbia River. In the stories, Mount Rainier often assumed the role of a fat angry wife. Duwamish myth depicts her as a huge woman who lived in the Olympic Mountains and squabbled incessantly with her husband’s other wives. One day her husband could take no more. He picked her up and set her across Puget Sound, where there was room for her ample flanks and peace from her bickering tongue.
The Lummi, who live near the Canadian border, cast Rainier as the jealous wife of Mount Baker. Rainier was the favorite of Baker’s two wives, but she had an awful temper. After a while the younger wife, Mount Shuksan, with her kind disposition, became the shine of Baker’s eye. Furious, Rainier threatened to leave unless Baker showed her more attention. When Baker ignored her, she made good her threat and traveled south, alone and slow. After a distance she looked back, expecting Baker to call her home. He did not. A little farther, she looked again. Still nothing. With a heavy heart she continued on and camped for the night on the highest hill in the land. She stretched and stretched to see Baker and her children, until she stood higher than all the mountains around. But still Baker did not call her home. “Often on a clear day or a clear night,” says the narrator, “the mountain dresses in sparkling white and looks with longing at Baker and the mountain children near him.”
COMPANY
The rain, the rain, the rain. If it didn’t strike directly, it found me in more insidious ways. In the high meadows of Indian Henry’s Hunting Ground, ankle-deep lupine washed my feet. The green leather of der Wanderschuhe soaked up water with such enthusiasm that the boots earned themselves a new name: “der Waterschuhe.” Two days into my trek, the sweet mountain of my affection was turning nasty and cold.
Indian Henry’s was named for a Klickitat Indian who settled on a farm near Eatonville in the 1880s and guided some of the first climbers through his hunting ground for two dollars a day. A prosperous farmer with three wives, Henry was known for his well-developed sense of property rights. Philemon Van Trump once saw a sign on Henry’s barn door that read: “Notice: Any one entering here is liable to instant death, as I have set spring guns inside. To all whom it may concern. Indian Henry.”
“It probably was only a bluff,” wrote historian Aubrey Haines, “for he was really a kind man.”
Descending in the early afternoon from Indian Henry’s, I found myself shuffling through a car wash of leaves. Wet hands of fireweed, paintbrush, and devil’s club slapped me as I passed. The icy splash soaked my arms and chest and gave absolute fits to The Renegade. I was as sorely wet as I have been in my life.
