MOUNT WHITNEY

The strangest thing about the entire trip is how natural it all seemed. Those mountains are so damn realistic up close.

On Friday night we pulled into a mediocre camp site somewhere in Yosemite -- the camping purists amongst you will no doubt be appalled that I can't even remember which region of the park we stayed in, but you know, one tree-lined creek looks just like the next -- and Bob immediately rigged up a lean-to tarp tent for me. It was very boy scout looking and I planted myself under its protective shelter and tried to inflate my little rented ground pad without bursting into hysterical laughter. Elissa began unpacking the cooking gear, not the least of which was an engraved set of matching Sierra cups (the shallow, stainless steal metal cups with the wire handles that double as bowls) that they'd received as wedding gifts. Upon seeing those I set off to gather firewood.

You will note that we divided into neat and tidy roles. Being the restaurateur that she is the cooking tasks fell to Elissa while the guy tasks -- pitching the tents, trying to explode the gas stove, etc. -- fell to Bob. My role was naturally that of The Child and my tasks were primarily confined to not getting lost in the forest while gathering firewood, refraining from uprooting the tent stakes and keeping my hands and face away from the fire. I excelled at all of the tasks and, as extra credit, killed three mosquitoes without once saying, "eeewwwwwww."

Saturday we arrived at Mt Whitney. Well, first we had to, um, strike the tents, pack up the gear, purchase bandannas ("Excuse me, but do these come in any other colors?"), drive for hours, examine the Eastern Sierra map at *least* four thousand times, and argue about which impossibly far away and pointy peak was *really* Mt. Whitney. When we finally took the turn off from the highway which lead up to and dead-ended (how apropos, no?) at The Mountain, we cranked up the Led Zepplin cd. I tried to be enthusiastic but the most I could manage was, "You have GOT to be kidding me."

It is difficult for this city girl to describe the mountains amongst which Mt. Whitney is the highest by virtue of but a scant few extra feet. They are impossibly tall and impossibly gray and impossibly, well, impossibly fractured. They are like three-dimensional cracked paint. You see them and you can barely think of any word other than escarpment. No wait, you can barely think a single word except Escarpment. Or maybe ESCARPMENT. And the word, naturally, echoes in your head.

Let me try again: These are not the mountains to the North. They are not the fairy tale mountains of Dhoom. No Winter Winds were born here. No dark and stormy nights for this spine o' the world. These are the mysterious southern mountains. The home of the Dwarf King and his caverns of gold and magic. From these crags the White Dragon flies forth to ignite the evil minions of the Dark Lord's troops.

These are the mountains that lightening strikes in portentous moments. They are not the Good Mountains because good and evil are concepts lacking the subtle distinctions which please the gods. These mountains are only a threat to the unworthy. And what they define as worthy is etched in their unreadable faces.

The mountains do not loom over you. They are too tall for that. You are too tiny to care about and they have better things to do than to tower over the likes of humans. But worse, they do not reach for the sky, towards god and heaven and the happy singing angels because they themselves are so powerful and stunning and awesome that they don't have to be in heaven in order to rule over the earth. They are there and that is that and this is the reason that you have to climb them.

While you set up camp you keep looking, not over your shoulder, but straight, neck craning up to wince at the spires which probably occlude the North Star if only you knew where to look for it. And you try not to think about the fact that you are going to be walking along that silhouette's edge tomorrow morning. And you feel kind of woozy and weird and presumptuous for believing that you are even remotely capable of or prepared for or even have the *right* to be undertaking such a task.

So we camped by this little creek with a hundred other campers and it was just too, too cute and groomed and maintained -- a little, rock-lined path reminiscent of Disneyland followed the creek's edge -- and in such total contrast to the mountains in which we nestled that the entire effect was utterly nerve wracking. We lounged around and ate chili and made s'mores and went to bed around 9:30 to the white noise of the rushing water.

6 hours later we awoke. I strapped on my borrowed headlamp, as did the others, and we broke camp in total darkness like so many crazed one-lighted cyclops cyborgs, downing sips of coffee in between remembering to pack sunglasses and trail mix and our ugly, new bandannas. In what was to be the least of the impressive feats of the day, we were on the trail, on the ascent, moving on up, no looking back, headlamps a-blazing, 'hey god, here I come,' by 4:30 in the a.damn.m. No mountain stream was too cold to dampen our spirits. No star brighter than the psychotic fervor in our eyes. No break of dawn over the distant red desert mountains, the soft valley floor, the muted granite walls, was more beautiful than that feeling of sheer possibility and the sharp certainty of an as yet unknown but indisputable, tangible triumph waiting for us, somewhere, up in the peaks.

This was not just the golden hour of the morning but the golden hours of the hike. This is the period in which you sip water from your water bottle and relish the smooth purity of the liquid, delighting that nature can make such a life necessity so enjoyable. This is the period in which the fruit you snack on is nothing short of ambrosia. During this time you take the timed photographs in front of gorgeous views, grinning with wide, naive smiles.

Three hours, two meadows, one lake and more breathtaking vistas than I have lifetimes to describe later Elissa and I began to voice our misgivings to each other. Earlier, as I'd been winding my way with Tom through some (pine?) trees spaced so perfectly apart that you knew for sure you were in Plato's Real Forest I had said, "This was a great idea. This hike.... I just want to say that now while I mean it." I meant it then. I still mean it -- in that I still mean to have meant what I did at that moment and so would say so again given that chance but history doesn't really ever repeat itself that neatly and I wonder if I would state that sentiment in those exact terms had I another opportunity to do so but we will never know now, will we?

The misgivings of the hiker once committed to the trail are dull and predictable but we should probably note a few of them for the record: We really have a long way to go, don't we? Do you think it's going to be this rocky/steep/hot the entire way? How much farther to do you imagine until we reach [point X]? I wonder what time it is. Whose idea was this anyway? I can't believe I agree to do this. This is going to suck. What am I doing here?

But those negative thoughts were mostly quashed, of reserve-steeling necessity, during our break at the geographic midpoint, 6 miles up the mountain, at Trail Camp. We ate our sandwiches, filtered some water from a pond of melted snow, all the while admiring the tiny, blurry distant desert mountains upon which the sun had risen and glancing up with renewed awe at the vertical, barren, endless, walls of rock which circled the flat-bottomed valley fissure in which we sat. The 97 switchbacks which would take us from 12,000 feet up to 13,700 in a scant two and a half miles were all but invisible from our vantage point. We could see tiny dots of red and yellow and blue moving oh-so-slowly along the face of the cliffs -- the longer you looked the more inadequate the term "wall" became -- tiny people in brightly colored waterproof, windproof, highly advanced gear, moving back and forth, barely distinguishable, headed along an inconceivable path toward an unfathomable destination.

And, yes, 'unfathomable' is as appropriate a term as any other. A drowning body gasps for air with no less fervor than the lungs of an unseasoned high-mountain hiker. But more to the point, an ascent of that nature is a descent into silent subjective oblivion of self. How far down do you have to go before you can say for certain that there is no bottom?

It took three hours to walk those switchbacks. Three, endless hours of staring at the fist-sized rocks of the trail path upon which one could never step with level surety. Three, endless hours of all-too-frequent, all-too-brief breaks to catch our breath. The oxygen seemed to dwindle as rapidly as our descent slowed in an exponential relationship the meaning of which became cloudier the closer we ourselves came near the clouds. I can honestly say that I do not remember that part of the trip. What was there too remember? Leaning against one pile of rock after the next, on one leg of one switchback or another, staring at some perky little plant with the bluest flowers, clustered into frivolous, perfect spheres. "Oh crazy, inappropriate little flowers: What are you doing up here in this barren wilderness? How do you survive? Why do you persist?" No answer from the flowers. No sound other than frantic lungs, hammering heart. Nothing to wait for. Resume the trek. Crush more stone with the thinly covered flesh of your feet -- any amount of rubber, any thickness of sole is thin, too thin, up there against the growing solidity, increasing mass of rock.

At some point the granite cliffs become just that, just rock. Nothing more, nothing less. The plants, those silly, preposterous blue flowers and their equally incongruous golden cousins, are simply the mountain's way of calling attention to its true nature. The mountain is not about fancy, quartz composites. It is not about geologic time and powerful forces of nature. Not about text book weathering and erosion and plate tectonics. Not about peaks and summits and John Muir and adventure and discovery and the early pioneers and the ecological preservation and the mystery of nature and Genesis I versus Genesis II or Marxist utilitarianism or Nietszche's ~ubermensch~ or Ansel Adams or vision or insight or success or failure or camaraderie -- it is not even 'about,' it is merely rock.

It is so much rock that stating it, having to employ the word "is," the verb to be, having to call up a state of being that might be separate from the actuality of the moment, alluding as I do now to a distinction between myself and the surrounding, is wrong. It is not rock. It is a Wittgensteinian utterance of pain, a grunt which may or may not allude to an inner state which alludes in turn to an outer state which sets up the vicious circle of reality by which we attempt to define ourselves. You, if that was ever meaningful, do not exist on top of the escarpment. You are not, only the mountain is. I can describe the top-most region of Mount Whitney no more accurately than to simply say: Rock.

It makes me sick even now to think of it. And not for metaphysical reasons. The altitude hit me hard and I was nauseous, delirious, dizzy and incoherent on top of being simply exhausted and incapable of breathing. Our group had broken up in Trail Camp and I had made the ascent so far, setting our steady, plodding so-called "pace" up the switchbacks with Bob and Elissa -- the others having gone before us. Suddenly, as these things are reckoned, with under a mile left to go, with the summit's ranger station in site, I was forced to choose to turn back. Or maybe it wasn't a choice. It's difficult to say. Physically was I capable of going on? Certainly. Given hours more. Given a life or death necessity. Given any less sanity. In any case Bob and Elissa left me huddled against the mountain's crest, half insane and tearful, unable to even look at the unsurpassed view for fear of its nausea inducing vertiginous expanse.

The rest of the adventure is easily described. To return to earlier themes: It really was a long way to go. It really was that rocky/steep/hot the entire way. It really did suck. By this point the consumption of food was done begrudgingly, done to keep the body fueled, and done only by Bob and Elissa as I did not want to risk my stomach's rejection of substance thereby courting serious dehydration. Drinking water was no longer the mystical one-with-nature experience of the early morning but a task mechanically, automatically accomplished -- and usually only at the insistent reminder of others. The vistas were no longer admired as our eyes were pinned to the ground in an attempt to prevent our weakened ankles from twisting on the repetitively, rock-strewn pathway.

The nine mile descent from the top of the switchbacks down again to the cars was a hellacious, dull, agonizing, joyless walk during which you do not actually move forward in space or time but are merely moving toward the absence of discomfort. It concluded without fanfare, without celebration, and with very little comment.

During the last stretches of the hike you experience nothing more than an unawed sense of surprise that you are still moving. It is both surprising that you are moving simply on a physical level -- a surprise that your body is still capable of producing sufficient motion to qualify for moving -- and surprising that you are still moving of necessity -- that you have chosen this particular adventure and are therefore compelled, of your very own accursed free will, to continue moving until the adventure's natural conclusion is reached. It is surprising to discover that Kant might have actually been right about causality.

What is not surprising is to find that the end of the hike is arbitrarily defined. I can say that for myself the end of the hike began at the upper meadow, somewhere around the 15th mile. I think Elissa claimed that for her it began around her the mile. But for those three of our group who did not ascend with us, for Tom and Whitney and Norman, who in a feat of spectacular stupidity, stumbled off the summit in their oxygen deprived, judgment impaired delirium, it is safe to say that the end of their hike did not begin until the 30th mile, or the 13th hour, or, shall we say, it did not begin until far beyond the point where they would have ever thought to be awake or moving or alive.

Thinking that they were heading down the alternate descent route known as the mountaineering trail the three somehow ended up on the west side of the mountain, miraculously surviving an inconceivable slide over a ridiculous ice sheet onto a slope of entirely unstable boulders. In an account which was delivered all but incoherently to me and is therefore entirely unrelatable here I gathered only that they somehow managed to locate a recognizable lake and align themselves with a path which would lead them toward a trail which would eventually take them to their cars which, we can presume, have seen them home. Norman, in a state of true exhaustion opted to head for some tiny tents near the lake, thinking to beg the people for shelter while Tom and Whitney decided to head for the trail. Finally out of the hell of circling a cirque filled only with unstable rock, they now faced a brand new 3,000 plus foot descent up to the top of the mountain escarpment. Again. Six miles or so later they crested the top and found themselves back where they started with sun long set, the stars coming into focus and the very same nine mile descent which I would have previously defined as an extreme misery had their path somewhat redefined that concept for me.

And what of Norman? Did he spend the night with the Tent People? Did we call the Search and Rescue team for him? Again, the story is simultaneously amazing and understandable. As it turns out, after a brief hiatus with the Tent People -- a tale which I have yet to hear first hand -- Norman undertook the exact same route taken hours earlier by Tom and Whitney. He too re-scaled the mountain, took the descent in total darkness. He apparently collapsed in his car at 2:30 a.m., woke up at 8:30, drove to Los Angeles and, in a finale for which they have yet to write the musical score, appeared for the first day of his brand new job only twenty minutes late.

The story becomes increasingly prosaic from here on out and the audience walks out on the mundane ending: Norman is at work, Tom and Whitney attempt to smother the memory of a near death experience through cheeseburger consumption, Bob, Elissa and Heidi float around a hot spring. Everyone lives. The moral lesson is ambiguous. Triumph and failure and purposeful, reasoned action are all left dangling definitionless. We do not pan back on the sun setting over Mt. Whitney. There will be no sequel.