by Greg Kincaid
“It’s getting dark. Let’s stop for now.”
As Ted and Angel walked back to the campsite on the narrow path, it was inevitable that they bumped up against each other now and then. It felt good. Ted wondered why the idea of taking a spiritual journey with a beautiful Lakota princess had never occurred to him before. His only regret was that the ghost of Wild Bill Raines wasn’t tagging along behind them in his sky blue ’82 Cadillac.
By the time the moon was high in the night sky, Angel, Ted, No Barks, and Argo were ready for sleep. They were arranged on the floor of Bertha like piano keys. To Angel it didn’t seem particularly odd to have a nonrelative and nonintimate snoring away in close proximity. She’d grown up with neighbors from down the road who crashed on her floor or collapsed on the sofa for some dubious reason (usually not enough money or too much to drink). The last time Ted had had a similar experience was naptime in kindergarten.
Argo, lying next to his wild cousin, gently put his paw on No Barks’s neck. The wolf dog gave a little shudder, sighed, and closed her eyes. When Angel rolled over, her blanket fell off. Her long, strong legs shone in the moonlight. She looked so extraordinarily beautiful that Ted wondered if she was even real. To avoid torturing himself, he rolled over and tried to fall asleep.
Before long his dream returned. The fire was now barely burning beside the same small, clear river. The campsite was empty and the sun was about to rise in the very early morning hours. Angel moved in and out of a stream with two does and a spotted fawn. She was alert and gracefully naked. She cautiously sniffed the air for danger, then carefully picked up her feet like they were delicate hooves. She nudged the fawn toward the bank. Her head tilted and her long, black hair blew sideways. In the distance there was the sound of human voices. Angel led her small herd into the thicket of brush on the other side of the creek, where they disappeared from view.
15
Ted shifted his pack slightly to the left. “Am I forgetting anything?”
Angel gripped and tightened the straps that crossed over Ted’s chest and handed him a walking stick. “You need much less than you think. There is nothing in the pack you couldn’t do without for two days.”
“Water?” Ted asked.
“You’re hiking to a lake. Lots of water in lakes.” Angel checked her watch. It was nine fifteen. She didn’t want Ted to feel rushed to get to the top before dark. “It’s time to go.”
Ted was still no Jeremiah Johnson, mountain man, but his attitude about the hike was improving. While not eager, he was feeling some sense of adventure. He looked down at his dog and commanded, “Let’s go, Argo. Bears and mountain lions have to eat too. Someone has to keep the great circle of life spinning.”
Angel grinned. “Try to relax and have fun. That’s part of the point!”
“Nice knowing you,” Ted called out as he departed the campsite and started toward the trail.
“Back at you!”
The mountaintop looked far away as Ted slowly distanced himself from the safe and secure campsite. He registered at the kiosk and took note of the moderate fire warning posted on the chalkboard—contained campfires were permitted. There were pages of signatures from other hikers who had both checked in to the trail and checked back out several days later. This put slightly more confidence in Ted’s step as he began his ascent.
Within five minutes he had left the little meadow at the bottom of the trail and entered the forest. He promised himself never to complain about riding in Bertha the Bookmobile again. At least Bertha provided a roof over his head. He didn’t see how anyone could possibly make it to the summit, where Lake Stewart was nestled, before sunset. He tried to recall Angel’s advice: “The only way to the top, Ted, is one step at a time. Before you know it, you’ll look back and realize you’re there.”
Like most novice hikers, Ted was anxious, and this caused him to start out too quickly. Besides, he wanted to appear intrepid as he walked away from Angel. At this confident but too-brisk pace, he passed along the first of a seemingly unending series of switchbacks. Before he had gone even a hundred yards, his breathing became surprisingly strained. Taking a break from trying to avoid the many sharp rocks that lined the path, Ted stopped a moment to catch a long, cool, fresh breath of mountain air. It was his first taste of real adventure in many years, and on some level he was proud of himself for taking this step out into the wild.
Ted removed his baseball cap and wiped the sweat from his brow, then grabbed one of the two water bottles that were strapped to his belt for easy access. After taking a drink, he poured a small amount into a collapsible water bowl he had brought for Argo. The dog was resting under a pine tree and glanced at the water with total disinterest. “Argo, at this rate we’re going to go through our water much too quickly. We’d better slow down, or maybe just stop here and camp. What do you think? I won’t tell if you won’t!”
Argo sauntered over to Ted and circled him a few times, sniffing at the ground. Like a lone drop of rain mysteriously falling from a nearly cloudless sky, another thought plopped into Ted’s mind: gratitude. He was a little chagrined that his grandfather had had to practically boot him out of Crossing Trails and that it had taken a Lakota spiritual consultant to nudge him up this trail. He wondered where that resistance came from. Was he too conservative? Frightened? He wasn’t sure, but now that he was here, he was overcome with gratitude to his grandfather and Angel for the push. Without the least effort, the forest had managed to captivate Ted with her beauty.
Returning to the trail, Ted chugged along for another half hour at a more moderate pace. When he came to a sign that signaled his entry into the Santa Fe National Forest, he stopped again and checked the notes that he had put on his smartphone earlier that morning. Sure enough, his entry into the forest was at the one-mile mark of his trek. He checked his watch—it was eleven o’clock. It had taken about forty-five minutes to complete the first mile. He was tired but able to continue.
It was less than six miles total to the top. If they continued at this pace, and if he didn’t collapse from exhaustion, Ted calculated that they would make it to Stewart Lake by 4:00 p.m. But why be in a big hurry to put even more distance between himself and civilization? “Argo, good news. We’re going too fast. Even if we slow down a bit, we’ll make it to the top long before sunset.”
Ted looked down at the portion of the trail he had just hiked and was surprised by the amount of elevation he had gained in the last forty-five minutes. Angel, No Barks, Bertha, and the campsite had all disappeared from view. Something else occurred to him. He and Argo had walked for nearly an hour and not seen one other human being. Nor had he heard a car, a plane, a cell phone, or any other hint of human existence. It was surprisingly quiet—certainly not the forest scene from a movie, with brooks babbling in the background. The mountain felt like a void paradoxically full of presence.
Walking farther up the mountain trail in this silence, Ted began to feel naked, but not in an embarrassed or even a vulnerable way. It was more a sense of being uncluttered, floating free and unencumbered by his accustomed sense of identity. His reliable and fundamental Tedness had dissipated like the early-morning fog. Whoever this man was, walking up the mountain in the intermittent sunlight, didn’t seem like Ted Day—educated male lawyer, thirty-year-old, dog owner, Crossing Trails resident, white man, son of a doctor, Republican, or anything else that might have previously defined him. He was just here, at this spot on the path, and moving ahead. Uncluttered. That bare nakedness did not diminish him. In fact, unencumbered by all the costumes and adornments that defined his life, Ted was alive and untethered.
With each step something different was arising. He was more aware of what was around him. By slowing his pace, inhaling deeply, and taking more brief rest stops on fallen logs and conveniently strewn boulders—by not pushing himself to the point where his breathing was strained—Ted was able to divert some of his energy to the simple task of paying attention to his forest surroundings, and the hike was becoming fully enjoya
ble.
A little before noon, Ted realized that he was hungry. He shed his pack and dived into the first meal that Angel had packed for them. Peanut butter and jelly had never tasted so good. Argo sniffed his dog chow but was uninterested. When the sandwich was gone, Ted reclined, rested his head on his backpack, and glanced up at the peaks on the horizon, enjoying the panorama. Interacting with the mountains, with a foot on the path, was a different experience. Angel was right about that.
Feeling drowsy, Ted knew he’d better get back to hiking or he’d be sleeping. On his feet and with his straps adjusted, he checked his notes; he was anxious to see what was around the next bend. They should be approaching an enormous hillside grove of aspen that spread over an entire mile of mountainside. It was at approximately the two-mile mark. “Let’s go, Argo. I think something interesting is up ahead.” They trekked onward and upward for another fifteen minutes until the terrain shifted its appearance, the pines giving way to aspen. Angel hadn’t mentioned that between the trees were densely packed ferns and bushes with small red berries that Ted could not identify. In this silent and verdant forest, with a certain amount of reverence, he felt as if he had stumbled into the crucible of life herself.
Two hundred yards into the aspen grove, a sudden crash broke the peace of the forest, catching Ted completely off guard. Something very large was moving very quickly not far from where he stood. He flinched reflexively and jumped off the path, diving for cover. When he regained his composure, Ted looked toward the noise. It was just a flash of buckskin, really, but still he could make it out: thirty or forty yards below, a large elk was moving away from him. Argo looked at the beast, unsure whether to give chase or turn tail and run. The dog looked to Ted for guidance. Ted grabbed Argo’s collar to hold him back. “He’s a little big for us. Let’s let this one go!”
There was something rather exhilarating about sharing the outdoors with a thousand-pound elk. Ted took a few quick breaths and let it really sink in that they were participating in such a wild space. He laughed and realized, with a significant sense of relief, that he had not been hurt. Having survived his first trekking calamity, Ted figured he had been initiated into the wilderness, and his confidence grew. Somehow the elk sighting had been a gift from the forest. He stood up, brushed off his shorts, and turned to Argo. “Come on, Argo, up we go. It’s just an elk. We’re already halfway up the path now.”
At the top of the aspen grove the trail started to flatten and turn west, and it was easy going for the next few hundred yards. Still, Ted kept his pace slow and deliberate. Coming around a bend, he stopped and took another long drink from his first water bottle. After he had emptied it, he started on the second. He poured a little into Argo’s bowl, and this time the dog lapped it up appreciatively. When Argo lifted his head, half the water in the bowl seemed to be dripping off the thick fur around his chin. “Argo,” Ted said, “you’re a sloppy drinker.”
Ted’s heart rate was almost normal when he heard another crash. This time it was much closer—not more than fifteen feet away—and above him rather than below. Worse yet, whatever the source of the noise, it was moving directly toward him.
Argo’s reaction was much faster than Ted’s. The dog panicked and bolted back down the trail with his tail between his legs. Ted simply froze. Instinctively, his hands went up in front of his chest to fend off any attack. From behind the trees a small—about 250-pound—black bear scooted out of the berry bushes and ran across the trail directly in front of him. The bear seemed as panicked as Argo and fled down the hillside, making a reckless descent as if fleeing for its life. It moved with such speed that it quickly disappeared into the underbrush below. It seemed, in the flash he saw of it, to have shades of gray or white above its left shoulder. Dazed, Ted could hardly piece together what had happened. He concluded that the bear had been resting beside the trail, perhaps even sleeping, when he and Argo had stumbled across it. They’d scared the hell out of the poor creature.
Ted could not help laughing for pure joy. He had confronted a bear, and it appeared that he had survived to tell about it. He called out to Argo to rejoin him. When the dog returned, he remained agitated, uncertain whether the danger had passed. Argo kept weaving back and forth through Ted’s legs, trying to find a safe and comfortable bear-free haven. Ted knelt down and tried to calm his traumatized dog. He held Argo tightly. “Don’t worry, Argo. He won’t hurt you. He’s gone now.”
Ted stood, took in a few deep breaths, and then let them back out again. He couldn’t help smiling. The forest was quiet once again. He was in the middle of the Pecos Wilderness. There were bears, there were elk, he was hiking, and all the things he allowed himself to be anxious about in life—from unfiled legal briefs to house repairs—seemed insignificant. Almost laughable.
As Ted scanned the hillside for movement, it occurred to him that lots of hikers must meet bears on the trail and have similar, entirely safe encounters. How many of Ted’s other fears were unfounded? How many bears and other dark creatures were merely frauds of his consciousness? After thinking more about it, he realized that the bear was a lesson on reactivity. His reaction—his worrying and anxiety over the bear—was causing him far more discomfort, unease, and problems than the bear itself. The whole lesson seemed vaguely familiar. It seemed to be yet another demonstration, like the meditation exercise the previous evening, that his mind was not always his best friend. In some ways, he was not his mind but something beyond it or behind it. Angel seemed to think that an insight into the essential nature of the self might just lie in this forest.
Ted was trying to allow this realization to fully sink in when, fifty yards ahead and lumbering right toward him, came a second black bear. To a seasoned hiker it was entirely predictable, but to Ted seeing a second bear seemed as implausible as lightning striking the same place twice. This one was larger, around 350 pounds, and wore a red tracking collar around its neck. The bear paused for a second, rose onto its hind legs, and sniffed the air. Its dark brown eyes locked onto Ted, each creature sizing up the other. Ted simply stood still and looked back at the bear. He felt no fear on his own part, nor aggression on the bear’s. What he felt was more matter-of-fact. The bear was in the woods. Ted was in the woods. That was it.
Letting another hearty belly laugh rise, Ted felt a profound masculinity. It wasn’t a violent or primal masculinity; he had not shot and killed the bear. This different kind of strength came from knowing that he could coexist with a bear and the bear could coexist with him. They both belonged on the earth and could respect each other’s right to be on the trail without wanting to destroy each other. The bear went downhill, and Ted and Argo kept trudging uphill, putting one foot in front of the other.
Ted spent the next few hours slowly gaining elevation. Just before five o’clock he reached an intersection and turned onto a second trail that went back to the west. According to Angel’s directions, he was almost there. Ted turned left and crossed a wooden bridge by a small tarn, or pond, at the edge of an enormous meadow full of elk tracks. He was only about a quarter of a mile from the lake. There was a sign prohibiting camping near the lake, so Ted decided to pitch his tent near the tarn. His pack dropped to the ground and he walked along the edge of the water.
Fallen cedars and pines had stained the water iodine red and tall lemon-colored grasses grew around the edge. Ted noticed an area beneath the canopy of the trees where stones had been collected and used to form a fire ring. He made a note of it and continued up the trail.
Fifteen minutes later Ted reached Stewart Lake. Though ten times larger than the tarn, with less than a mile of shoreline it was not a large lake, roughly triangular and with clear, unstained water. It deserved to be photographed and put on the cover of a hiking guide, he thought. It beckoned you to find it.
Ted sat on a rock, amazed to see small fish flirting with deeper waters. He realized that he had not seen anyone on the trail the entire day. He set his backpack on the ground and tried to sift through an unusual swi
rl of thoughts. On the surface was a dull exhaustion—it had been a long and difficult hike—but after he peeled away the fatigue, there was more. At first he thought it was loneliness, but with Argo nearby, he realized he could be just as lonely sitting by himself in the living room of his small house in Crossing Trails. Somehow this was different.
Walking away from a barrage of societal conveniences that surround us—everything from credit cards, appliances, and utilities to fast food, hospitals, and dry cleaners—had left him bare and unprotected. All of these conveniences, and hundreds more just like them, were the twigs that formed society’s protective nest. What he felt was not loneliness but isolation: he’d managed to leave the nest. As Ted pondered the seemingly endless list of things he had left behind at the base of the trail, he realized that however intimidating, it was also liberating to be on the other side of the wall that society weaves for our protection.
This isolation made him alert, observant, and independent. As he tried to make sense of it all, he got even closer to the heart of it. What he was experiencing was not simply an emotional response; it was a subtraction from his identity or sense of self. Ted realized that all the fibers of the societal nest also define us—as much as or more than we define ourselves. Outside the bounds of the social contract, he had lost the mostly useless labels and measuring sticks he used to define himself. Ted thought back to Angel at the campsite and realized he was experiencing nothing less than her second realization. We are not what we think we are. Who are we when all the labels are peeled away and we stand naked, stripped of our identity, in the forest?
Just as Ted had begun to come to grips with his isolation, he was startled by the sight of a lone fly fisherman on the other side of the lake, casting slowly and deliberately. Unsure of the proper etiquette for greeting the only other human in the middle of the wilderness, Ted just waved, and the tall man gave a friendly wave back.