Whipped Cream Topping

Yesterday, after several days of rain, it snowed.  Today, the sun brightened on a new white world.   I parked the jeep at a trailhead and walked into a new creation, where never a human had trod.  I walked for hours and returned to the jeep following the only boot prints—mine.

Snow creatures greeted me along the trail, such as the trail was, with snow-covered bushes along its sides, ready to spray whipped cream down my neck if I touch them.  I’m sure the snow creatures giggled.

Some little creature with bare toes walked here before me, and overhead, skinny trees bow their heads under weight of snow.  I hear one break and wonder who is next—me, or the  little bare-toe creature.

Along the way, somewhere in mid-hike, I passed under a wedding arch, white with symbolic purity, and felt no different.  

Peaks high above, in their wedding dresses, singing angels, with cloud wings, dart in and out from behind trees.

I come to the shore of Stanton Lake in the Great Bear Wilderness and wonder why, in all these hikes, I have seen no bears, neither grizzly nor black bears, where they are reportedly quite populous.  I have not even seen a bear footprint, nor their scratching on trees, nor their droppings.  I often feel oblivious to something unseen around me, and this is only one thing.

.

Lake McDonald

Tomorrow I will talk with Dave, landlord and nice guy, at the Whitefish Motel.  I will give him my departure day and discuss details of my leaving and returning my security deposit.  Negotiation will go as business goes with men—the real and the imaginary, the dollars and the metaphor.   

I come to wilderness like Glacier Park to escape civilization, a revolting frustration, relieved by the aesthetic wonders that trump the minor hardships and risks involved in getting to wild places.  But rain in the last four days has kept me in the lowland.  The peaks are hidden in clouds, and the road through the Park is closed with ice.  

While waiting for aesthetic wonders to become available in the highland, I visit the semi-wilderness of Lake McDonald, an easily accessible place in the Park that I can get to in the rain.  And even here I can view rocks thought to be some two billion years old.   

On the pier at Apgar, I stand where boats crowded in summer, now closed for the winter.  Stark gray sky and water, rain falling, as if loneliness is all that remains.  

Hike along the shore and feel the transition between summer and winter—the clutter of tourists past, the deep snow to come.  Back in my room, I look at the pictures and wonder at how bright they are.  Was I darkened with depression, and only thought the scenes were darker?  Or is my camera more optimistic than I am.  

Imagine a glacier so big that it dug this lake 470 feet deep, then melted and left a pile of debris on which I stand.

A Line in the Rock

Whitefish, Montana

These rainy days in Whitefish, Montana, press hard on me.  They close the mountains in clouds and forebode coming winter that will shut the high country til June.  They lead me into dark queries and puzzles where answers come scarce and faulty.    

Craggy Range Bar and Grill,
Whitefish, Montana

Buffalo Cafe,
Whitefish, Montana

I sit in Craggy Range Bar and Grill on Central Avenue and listen to good-ol’-boys talk about big fish and bucks shot,  And again in the morning at the Buffalo Café, before they go out to cut mountain maple that clutters the grassland.  It takes a good sport of a woman to get on with them.  They like a good sport.

The bar is “L” shaped, and I peruse the men along the other side of the L. 

“Where ya from,” he says.

“Southern California.”

“I’m sorry,” and he’s not joking.

At least they haven’t used that Midwest cliché, “From the land of fruit and nuts,” that I heard so often on a cross-country bike ride.  I confess to being a nut, and try not to show any leaning toward “fruit,” but preconceptions are hard to override with mere trying.

Good-ol’-girls don’t do that.  They take me for a nut, and don’t care.  And the barmaid, cool as Liz; I imagine her behind the bar, good sport, handling the good-ol’-boys.

Song of geology, lyrical in my eyes, strong in my books, vivid in my expectation.  Earth, not the same everywhere, as poems are lyrical, but not the same.      

Here we go again, into the rock.  Sorry, they pull me down.

Reynolds Mountain 9125’
with a dike of intrusive magma,
now hardened into rock,
running up through it.

Magma pressed up beneath the earth’s crust, so hard it cracked the cold, solid limestone.  Can you feel it here, see it in this picture, the past it represents?  (Click on the picture to make it larger.)  And once cracked, the limestone opponent, like a weakened boxer, cowered, then succumbed.  Magma punched into the crack, widened it, and kept moving upward, into the weakened foe.  See it here in the dike running at about twenty degrees upward through the sedimentary establishment.

The revolutionary underground movement broke the conservative level layers above it, pressed harder than they were prepared for. Not satisfied, the intrusive magma pressed outward between the layers, pitting them against each other, revealing weak places between them.    

On the wall of the Craggy Range Bar and Grill, I see a picture of Reynolds Mountain, the same peak I saw in first light, before clouds removed the mountain.  A distinct line struck across its layers.  To you, maybe, it’s just a line in a rock, easily shrouded in clouds.  To me, it’s a force that nags and tears, a movement that disturbs the established order.    

Puzzle in a Rock

Three little lakes in the cirque
below Piegan Pass

Piegan Pass

A knife-sharp crest, the continental divide, cuts Glacier Park down the middle.  It slices snow and rain as they fall, sending some to the Pacific Ocean, the rest to the Gulf of Mexico.  I sat on a low point in the divide, called Piegan Pass.  There I propped myself against an intrusive igneous rock, and looked across a cirque at a vertical wall of uniform flat layers—Precambrian limestone—and wrote notes about the day so far. 

Nonconformity above the lake
in the right of this picture

Close-up of the nonconformity

I noticed a gap in the sedimentary layers, a nonconformity in the regular buildup of limestone; it appears to be filled with something else.  A light-colored layer angles up and through a dark layer of limestone.  Though solid and stationary today, something seems to have pressed in from the left, punched through the dark layer above it, and then proceeded onward to the right.  But is that what really happened?    

Standing on the light-colored layer

Close-up of the light-colored layer

Come, you geology buffs; I know you’re out there.  A prize of inestimable worth goes to anyone who can explain the nonconformity.  

Close-up showing crystalline structure
in the light-colored layer

Mount Siyeh, 10,014 feet,
looking down on us,
judging our answers

Come theologians, spiritualists, poets, and artists; speak where geologists equivocate and where broad-sweeping theories sometimes teeter on details that don’t fit.  Nature has thrust on us a puzzle in a rock wall.  I’d like your reactions to the evidence set before us.  I think I hear a giggle coming from the wall, a sound awaiting an answer.  

“An artist is an instrument of unknown energy.” - Susan Dobay, from her new book.

Trees on High

The inspiration trees give can give serves as sacred text—not metaphor, but real connection.  Worthy souls, if trees have souls, can stand the test of living tall and straight while others dwell in lowland comfort.

Spruce

sturdy trees

they may not seem

with pointed tops

and stubby limbs

up here where

snow falls deep

and wind hits hard

lowland trees

would topple

but spruce know how to live 

crooked little spruce
of youthful twenty years
you’ve felt the wind
the pain of snow
and buried deep in winter
you heard the creak
of slipping drifts
pressing on your back
you bear the scars and bends
of dark depression
and wear the white and green
of bright summer
as gray was always lurking

these adults

throughout their youth

stood strong and straight

easy for them then

without enough to bear

to make them strong

fallen now without the test

that you survived in youth

this one also made it nicely

through an easy youth

beat the ones like you

with crooked tops

in every game and test

almost risen above the snow

on her way she said

reaching up to lofty tops

of those who stand above her

but then times changed

and snow got deeper

her top was like a child

built upon an easy youth

now bending under load

my friend, I think you’ll make it

your youth is looking good

don’t listen when they scoff

thanks for caring, little one

I’ve enjoyed our time

together on the trail     

Slow as a Glacier

On the shore of McDonald Lake, a lodge has stood since 1895.  When the area became a national park in 1910, the lodge kept right on operating, and has ever since.  It closes for the season on the first of October, turning away plenty of people who love this time of year.  But profits are lower, so why bother.  Let them come in the summer when demand doubles the price.  Of course, pressure on the environment is greater then, but taxes pay for that. 

Here by the quiet lake, it’s hard to imagine a glacier two thousand feet thick, melting ten thousand years ago, and leaving moraines that dammed McDonald Creek, making a lake 470 feet deep.

From here, I headed into the woods, and though the forest is dense, occasionally I could look down on McDonald Lake.  From where I took these pictures, we are still below the top of that great Pleistocene  glacier.

Now we are far above the lake.  Ttrees are thinning and becoming smaller, but the yellow aspens of fall don’t seem to get elevation sickness.

Moss hangs from the trees like it does in Georgia, but it’s a different kind of moss.  Interesting that the idea of moss survives in such diverse places, like laws of nature do.

Turning ahead now and looking up canyon, away from McDonald Lake, the climb steepens, and walls press in on both sides, and still the aspens carry on.

Nothing disturbs the silence here when wind is calm and the birds are relaxing, except perhaps Kathaabela flying to Chicago.  There’s a poem in that rumble overhead, I sense it. 

The conifers are lean and strong up here; they know how to live where snow comes deep and wind strong.

Another glacier-formed lake, much higher than McDonald Lake and formed by a smaller glacier, which might have been a branch of the same glacier, back when ice covered most of these mountains.  Snyder Lake lies today in still air, cloistered in a cirque against a high ridge.

                                                                       My Enabler

                                                                             (haibun by Sharon Hawley)

I remember the survivor’s expression on your face.  Gallon canteen strapped over your shoulder, as you followed me up the trail. You had brought a wild girl into the world, and you would raise her.  This, your way of training, socializing without punishment.

You were hurt by those times I went alone into the mountains without telling anyone, even stayed overnight.  I worried you and probably caused your early heart attack. 

Your determined jaw as you trudged up the trail.  I think how it must have been during the Depression on the American River.  You left home and panned gold, sent enough money back to save your family.  Now your determination is saving me so I can hike again.

I was hiking alone in bear country again today, obsessed with seeing as much of Glacier Park as I can before winter.  You gave me the means to enjoy the therapy and authority of hiking alone where instructions say never hike alone.  You see, Daddy, nobody really recovers from anything; we learn to live with it.  You were my enabler. 

Memories condense like sedimentary layers in my brain.  Having you along now is as much a part of the journey as the shuffle of my boots along the trail and the hard blue sky when the sun comes out.

                                                                            when passion goes awry

                                                                            sometimes

                                                                            one understands