I love mornings on the trail. As hackneyed as it sounds, the world seems fresh in the morning. You're more likely to see a bear, or a big deer, in the early morning. The light is still a little amber, the air still cool.
Until some dude runs you off the trail.
Yeah, it happened again. Some guy roughly pushed past me without so much as saying hello. Again, I got all pissed off. I say hello to everyone I can on trail; I may only see them once, but I want to acknowledge their basic humanity. This dude was hiking like he was the human incarnation of an Audi driver (they themselves being lizards, obvi). He clearly assumed he was faster than me, so would never see me again. But he was wrong. It's the kind of crap that just ruins your day. Again, I determined I would catch up to him, pass him, show him he had a better.
But unlike Mr. Earbuds, this guy was wicked fast. We both passed the other hikers trying for an early morning passage over Mather Pass. At one point, he veered off the trail onto a shorter but steeper cross-country route. I stayed on the trail. We both reached the final switchbacks at about the same time, but the kid just had more wind than me, and he got there first. I scrabbled up right after, panting, sweating, irate.
He was seated in a niche in the rock of the pass, smug.
"That wasn't so bad," he drawled.
"Pro tip," I huffed, "when you pass people, say hello. You never know when you'll see them again."
His eyes narrowed. He knew I was telling him off, although not necessarily why. In his defense, I had just raced him up a mountain to needle him about his manners; it's not like we really had a blood feud.
Until then, that is. His expression got quite dark. I hiked past him and on. Because screw him and his lack of manners, his sprint to the top, his smugness. Victory goes to not the fast, but to those with stamina. Endurance. Or me, anyway, which was the important thing.
I flew down the pass, executing two glissades. (That's fancy mountaineering French for sliding down snow on your tuchus.) (Tuchus is Yiddish for butt.) At any rate: Not wanting to cede my clear (moral) victory, I raced down below snow line, only to find:
I had lost my rod and reel on one of the glissades (tuchus-slides).
Well, I thought, I totally had that coming. I was all filled with zealous victory, which is usually exactly when I overstep. What exactly had I achieved today? I had been angered, and in response had pissed someone else off and then lost my prized fishing rig. I do not really believe in karma per se; I think the law of averages tends to even stuff out, but not really that divine retribution will cost you a pole.
A couple other hikers, a man and a woman, come down and passed me while I was having this remorse orgy. Had they seen or picked up a pole? They had not.
"I'm carrying some flies, but no pole," the man said.
"Really," I replied, "because I happen to have found a fly rod two days ago and haven't been able to find the owner." True story: I had found an ultralightweight Tenkara rod and had been searching for its owner for days.
I gave him the rod, he was delighted, and I felt much better about my whole day. The Mather Pass Kid and his hiking partner showed up, and when they (quite archly) told me that they had seen my gear but not picked it up, I figured that was okay. Just fishing gear, anyway.
Well, fishing gear and a glove. That glove worried me more, because my hands got pretty cold when I was in the snow. Nothing to do about it now, I thought.
Or rather, there was one more thing to do: Apologize to the Kid. I had come off as a grade A asshole, I knew. And we probably would be seeing some of each other, as we seemed to share a pace.
I made my mea culpa when I saw him next. He accepted my apology, and we shook on it (hikers shake by touching their closed fists these days because our hands are so gross). And in doing so, I reached a sort of grace for a moment. One that acknowledges the inevitablity of some stress in my life, some rude boys, some young men faster than me. There was a hint of taoism in this relaization; that I had been fighting the universe and should just have accepted it as it was. My reaction was far worse than the original offense.
I even saw this extend a bit towards my immense sphere of grief over Jennifer's death; I was realizing that her death was tragic but something to accept, to let it come and go as it would, make a ruin of my day when it did, because fighting that grief it only made it worse.
I promise that I won't make this blog about overcoming grief. That book, quite famously, has already been written. But you'll have to bear with me once in a while.
The trail cruised down one creek, then back up the Middle Fork Kings River. As evening fell, I was passed by two guys with tiny packs. Having been in the game for a bit, I recognized them as some true hiking badasses. You can just kind of tell.
"You going up over the pass?" I asked.
"Yes," said the taller one, his wild hair flopping in the breeze, "AND YOU SHOULD CONE WITH US!"
"I dunno," I replied, "pretty late in the day for an attempt at Muir Pass." Muir is the snowiest of the passes by an order of magnitude, and the later in the day it gets, the softer and less easy the snow gets. Until dark, of course, but then you are night ice hiking.
Night ice hiking, it turned out, was exactly their plan. I loved them for it. I loved them for inviting me along. That's how you will know the true elite in this sport, I thought. They're so badass that they are nice. They seemed like Hawkeye and Honeycut from MASH. I learned later that the tall one was John Z, a total badass famous for his CDT video, and his buddy was I think Andrew Bentz, current holder of the fastest known time for hiking the John Muir Trail.
I hiked until I found a, perhaps the last, shelf of flat unsnowy earth on the ascent. I shared my camp with three gregarious hikers: Fat Kathy, B Squared, and Golden Boy. They made me laugh. Fat Kathy was, sadly, not named after the comic strip. At dark, a troop of ten loud,young hikers came into camp, thought about staying, and then bellowed their way further down the trail.
All in all a good day.
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