Well, the end of the story is
that we left the cascade with two hours of light left, and I soon slipped into
the “are we there yet” mode, which meant that the trip was pretty much over for
me. My head tells me to slow down and enjoy the journey, but my heart sometimes
gets impatient. That’s especially true when the sun is getting low in the sky. I
like to hike in the dark, but I’m not particularly fond of hiking off-trail in the dark because it bears
an uncanny resemblance to being lost.
We finally stepped out onto Forge
Creek Road eleven and a half hours after we had started our hike. The sun was
low in the sky, behind trees and ridges. We hitched a ride with a family who
were driving around the cove in their pickup truck, looking for deer and bears.
One of the women riding in the back of the truck asked us what we had been
doing. (From the looks and smell of us, we could have said “wrestling wild
boar,” and she probably would have believed us; although, we weren’t bloody
enough to be truly convincing.) We said we had been hiking in the backcountry
all day. We could tell from her blank expression that she had no idea what that
meant. She just smiled and nodded, and so did we, being too tired to start an
explanation from scratch.
Why don’t more people explore?
Why don’t we search out secret places? It’s not that most people can’t get into the wilderness; it’s that
the thought never even crosses their minds, even to the point of not even
knowing what “the wilderness” is. I’d like to blame it on our soft, modern,
consumeristic, materialistic culture, but I’m not sure it’s to blame. After
all, Thoreau wondered the same things almost 200 years ago – “quiet desperation”
and all that. Whatever the causes, in the end, it’s not that most of us can’t get into the wilderness; it’s that
most of us don’t realize that there is another reality out there – like a
parallel universe or a secret society. Alice had her Wonderland. Neo had the
Matrix. Americans have National Parks.
I think on my next bushwhacking
trip, I’ll go to no place in particular. I’ll just walk out into the woods with
a map and compass, but no agenda, no trail, no destination. That would
certainly relieve the challenge of schedules, routes, and running out of
daylight. Who knows, maybe I’ll discover some out of the way, secret spot – a
grove of trees, a rocky outcrop – that would be worth keeping to myself. The
only thing better than being the keeper of an old secret would be discovering a
new secret and passing it on to a select few. Or, better yet, taking the secret
with you to your deathbed. What a great picture: the old hiker calling his
apprentice to his bedside and whispering in his ear, “North 35 degrees, 33
minutes….” A fit ending to a life spent wandering in the woods.
The thing that made this Molly
Creek trip special is, I suppose, that we had figured something out. We had
discovered a secret – inside information that only a few people have – and we
had investigated it to see if it was true. No one held our hands. No one helped
us except the mapmakers in 1931 (and the ranger who had told us about the map).
The fact that the cascade had actually been removed
from later maps made the trip even better. Some mapmaker had consciously made
the decision to take the symbol off their edition of the map. Was it a
conscious effort to keep people away, to protect the secret? Likewise, the NPS
no longer maintained a trail to Molly Creek Cascade. Was this purely a
financial decision, or were they saving a piece of wilderness from human
impact? Either way, it not only felt like we had been someplace special, but
that we had done it in spite of the efforts of others to keep us away. We were
now “keepers of the secret” – part of a brotherhood so secret that we don’t
even know who the other members are. We need a secret handshake to identify
each other.
And by the way… Molly Creek
No comments:
Post a Comment