After I climb the ladder and root through the albums, I find the one, carry it to the table, dust it off, pull out the creased Topo Quads, cut a piece of string and set it down in scallops and waves, in occasional straight shots through valleys, in switchback zigzags, and follow once more now across four maps, the route we took through the Beartooths.
The rules of teaching in Pennsylvania decree that we must take graduate classes. I had spent my first summer in the UK. I had credits to rack up. Montana State University offered a two month course, Wilderness and American Literature, room and board provided in the fee. Pay your money and come west.
In the professor’s acceptance letter he promised that we would learn the rudiments of technical climbing, that we would spend weeks of our time walking in wilderness, that we would climb high peaks, read wonderful books and write about those books and our time in-country.
The course work began weeks before leaving. For the first time I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Big Sky, Desert Solitaire, Gary Snyder, Theodore Roethke, John Muir, Dee Brown, John Wesley Powell. I had never read anything in a concentrated fashion that had been organized around the theme of wilderness and the west. I had never traveled past Pittsburgh. I had no sensual feel for the place beyond movies and Ansel Adams photos.
I rode the train for 3 days from Harrisburg to Montana and saw the landscape unfold in a kind of slow motion — the back ends of cities, the center lines of small towns, across the Ohio and north, the land flattening, losing trees, opening up, into Chicago for a transfer, out into farm and prairie, crossing rivers, the land emptying out, telephone wires leaping with my eye, long moments without anything except this sky unlike anything I had ever seen, then climbing into foothills, then the Rockies as if giants had quarried and splintered rock and set them up in stacks and jumbles, raw and sharp with the signs of fracture. When I finally left the train in Bozeman, I was in a kind of daze.
Twenty five of us made up the class. At 24 I was one of the younger teachers. What I remember from our classroom time and trail time was the brilliance of some, the sturdy resilience of others, the out of place futility of only a few. I was the equivalent of a 1 year old border collie, enthusiastic, possessor of endless energy, sometimes senseless, eager to learn, one who occasionally yapped too much.
I took to climbing as if it had been an endeavor I had learned in an alpine life previous to this one. My height gave me an advantage in making moves on the rock over a larger area. I was not very flexible but somewhere had acquired strong fingers and hands. I had no fear of heights and the first time we rappelled was happy to flip myself upside down and fold my arms as if ready for a nap. I liked the balletic feel of it, the flow of moving among holds and tiny ledges. Most of all, I loved its demand that all of one’s body and all of one’s concentration be kept on the rock. The world fell away. Anxieties vanished. Nothing else existed except the rope, the rock, the sun, the shift, a move, the motion.
When we entered the back country with heavy packs and began our move from parking lots into deep wilderness, I always volunteered to sweep, to be the last in line. I knew, selfishly, that I wanted the solitude of that position. I wanted to walk out of sight of everyone else. I wanted the silence. I wanted immersion. Sometimes it felt as if I was melting into a bundling of seeing and listening and walking, a kind of animal fusion that left my mind adrift, my imagination extending itself, my senses sharpened.
Out of the two months, we spent at least one full month (more I think) in deep country. The 25 had been broken into cooking groups of 5 each. We had responsibilities to each other as a whole, but especially to those with whom we ate. We watched our friends for signs of sore feet and blisters, for dehydration, fatigue, injury. We took on extra weight if someone faltered, found walking staffs for those who struggled with balance, gave encouragement to the gassed out on difficult ascents. I loved the interdependence, the reliance we forged with others, the stories at the fire, breakfasts, shared chores, the saunas and roll in snow events, the laughter together that came at no person’s expense.
I took every measure of delight from the high country. Maybe there’s a church of ‘Space and Light’, a doctrine of “Endlessness’. If so, Montana was my christening into the faith. I returned home changed in subtle and more forthright ways.
I ‘saw’ differently, as in the basic perceptions of my ‘seeing’ had shifted. I don’t know how else to say this. The readings we had done, especially Pilgrim, and the days and nights in areas so wide and clear, in a medley of light I had never seen in the humid east, broke me open or introduced me to the utterly fresh or bestowed a gift upon me of vision. I do not mean to sound mystical or pompous or pseudo-oracular or pseudo anything. I came home enraptured by the natural world, by birds and the big predators especially. I came home helplessly drawn to enormous skies, to long horizons, to light falling down across a vastness of treeless places — the plains, the geography above timberline, the sea. For the last 43 years I have lived in the forested east, and my intuitive home has been in the emptiness of the west or at the edge of a wild shoreline on the Atlantic.
For another wilderness course in Colorado two years later, I had a professor/writer who said to us that in the dreary, gray and wet confines of winter, the mountains would be with us. He was right. In spite of my own frequent dullness of temperament and my tendencies toward distraction, that landscape and animals and solitude have rescued me from purposelessness as much as my love of teaching and kids and community. Through no wisdom on my part, through blind chance, I blundered into this balance that was to be my salvation.
Face coated in zinc oxide, somewhere high in the Beartooths. Summer, 1977.
