Anna and I went out into the mountains on Sunday, the first weekend in May as a big thaw transpires. Last month was dry and warm, and even though there’s still plenty of snow yet to melt up high, there was possibility that we could find walkable terrain. I packed snowshoes in the back of the car, plan B.
One feature created by this pandemic is the need to find solid footing juxtaposed with the marshy bog of uncertainty. It made sense to find ourselves this weekend wanting a break, her from college studies that had been redistributed to an upstairs corner in our home, me from tangles lurking in my head that seem to be fertilized by my continual flipping through news articles and analyses and wondering why I can’t manage a coherent paragraph of writing, nevermind any sustained narrative.
So an excursion seemed in order. Even if it couldn’t possibly reset our psyches completely, it would be a break. And in the process I could learn where snow and mud saturated the terrain, what the spring thaw looked like, if roads were passable or even advisable. In retrospect, I don’t think I’ve ever tried a trek into such high terrain so early in the spring season. That’s what made the excursion that much better. I’d never really experienced this place in this way before.
Our path ahead wasn’t any more certain than our day-to-day lifestyle in pandemia. Here’s the punchline, the moral, the lesson: That’s exactly why it was such a good trip. If we’d known exactly what our destination could be or had a goal for any particular route or sighting, we never would have discovered the golden eagles that took flight right in front of us on the approaching drive. I wouldn’t have found new geological features that were laid down by an ancient riverbed overlaying the newer floodplain. We wouldn’t have stumbled across a vocal, flappy sage grouse, or soaked our boots in the thick sandy mud and slurry of old snow drifts.
There were new discoveries, besides the route and the old road that was impassible to all but our solitary footprints. An old beaver pond with the last traces of ice along the edges, snow surrounding it and echoing the silver of the aspen before they would leaf out. Swollen swales with meandering, slow-moving streams and bright red skinned stalks of shrubs filled with birds before greenery had thought to fill in. There were deer prints, moose prints, and other paws of wanderers who had come by before us and surely could have spied us from afar but stayed clear. It hailed on us for a while, and cold breezes picked up; but in between these fits there were breaks and a glow that felt nearer from the perspective of 9000 feet elevation, .
But most especially there was that episode, on the return hike, after our lunch on the log by the pond, after the trek back through mud slurry and snow slush and rivulets of runoff, where we sidetracked to a knob that overlooked the valley we’d navigated in the car with the “wrong” turn that got us to this great vantage point. And on that miniature peak we found a survey marker, and then some surprising flowers stretching out in celebration of spring and no more burden of ice. And then there was a lake down below, one we’d missed seeing when we first hiked on the other side of this perch. And then there were the frogs calling out, and while we knew it was to one another it felt just as much that they were talking to us, some ancient song being chanted in this cathedral. And that was the moment when two sandhill cranes launched their flight from the far side of the lake, calling out in their distinctive, urgent trumpeting way across the wide valley and into the horizon below. The frogs went mute, and I could imagine them crouched low, their own wide eyes looking up into the sky to marvel, just as we did.
It’s cliché, if not simple bullshit, but I’ll take it: We discovered and experienced all this within the uncertainty — because of the uncertainty and the lack of a solidified plan. We found new routes because we didn’t know where we were going. We harvested this precious moment out of the soil that held no promise whatsoever, just a collection of seeds we didn’t know were there.
And then we hiked back to the car.
