A Yellow Roman Candle

October 13, 2014

The terrain

              The roads are winding and winding and I’m sure that they will never end, and the changing red, orange, and brown leaves, still drenched with summer’s green, blur into a 1960’s burgundy tie-dye outside my window, and I want to close my eyes and sleep but our destination could be right around the next corner, so instead I settle into a conscious daze, rattled to alertness only by the chasmic potholes that shake the car like landmines. We don’t know where we are or where we’re going, but we’ve driven for miles along this mountain path, the sounds of gravel crunching under the tires our steady lullaby, and it’s four hours until the sun sets and we have an eight mile hike up to a 3,300 foot elevation ahead of us, and we need to hurry up and find the trail head or else we’ll be hiking most of it in the dark, because there’s no way we’re going to turn around. Erica will get us a map, says a jovial fellow beckoning to his female passenger and her stack of laminated maps. He’s driving his big white creeper van down the mountain, the first sign of humanity we’ve seen in over an hour, and we flag him down like desperate survivors. Nope, the map says we need to turn around, but we’ll get there.

The first view of
a snow-capped mountain

              And then the gravel road opens up to a parking lot and we begin our trek to a lake at the top of the mountain. It must be something of a magical lake to be up so high and sought by so many. I like to believe it is, but then I forget about all that because it. Is. So. Steep. Jordan the Energizer Bunny marches ahead, leaving Megan and me panting and weak-kneed to continue the journey alone. As we walk up the mountain, everyone is walking down it, most of them minding his or her own business, until we begin to get desperate and ask every single hiker how much further up the mountain is the lake. We’re nursing beer hangovers and have about half a water bottle each, and about two miles up we realize that’s a really stupid amount of water to bring. Hours pass and we sip the water like it’s expensive wine, and the air gets thinner so our breathing gets heavier, and there are less and less people, and damn it’s getting cold. The foliage is thinning, which is really a beautiful thing because we can look out beyond the tree line to the gigantic valleys and snow-capped mountains in the distance, but it's freezing and we can smell ice in the air, and our water bottles our empty and it's starting to rain. So this is how we go, then. The last moments of our life on a mountaintop dying of hangovers and dehydration. I see Megan holding moss over her mouth and I think we have hit the point of delirium you see in movies. She saw it on a nature show, she said, where you squeeze the moss and water runs out of it.

Where we stopped for the water

              And then we hear the trickling of water, and there’s a small hill of rocks with water running between them, like a little mountain spring. “It’s our youth spring!” Megan shouts with childlike elation. “Or what do you call them? Fountains of youth!” The taste of that ice cold water is life-giving. Oh man it tastes so good. We try not to think about the potential Ebola or some exotic disease like it that we could be contracting as we guzzle abundantly, and instead I notice the silence, and I wish I could bottle up the silence and take it with me to the city. The clouds are sneezing on us, and it’s getting dark, so we keep moving, walking through mountain meadows and past small bogs, our horizon painted by the snow-capped Cascades. After seeing no human being for a considerable time, Jordan takes the momentous opportunity to jump out from behind a tree where he had been waiting for us, and I do believe our screams are probably still echoing through the mountain canyons and valleys. We finally reach the lake, and we’re there just long enough to take a few pictures and eat a peanut butter sandwich, and then we hit the trail again, with four miles of straight downhill and long hours of silence and darkness ahead.

The lake... worth it.

              We make it about a mile before needing to break out the flashlights. In the darkness, time fades to nothingness and it strikes me that I’ve read about that happening in books, where an hour could be twenty minutes or twenty minutes could be an hour, but I never really experienced it until this moment, where the three of us form a line down the mountain and say nothing, alone to our own thoughts, focusing only on the roots and rocks at our feet, the only interruption the occasional slip down the muddy slope or a stumble on the spidery roots emerging from the wet soil.  Our minds drift with the rhythm of our marching to places only we alone can conceive of. And then we stop. Jordan’s in the lead, and we hear him emit a hushed, reserved whisper, “What the hell?” and we look to where

The candle

he is looking, and we see a single, solitary tea candle sitting in the center of the path, its flame flickering in the light breeze, casting a circular glow onto our hiking boots and creating eerie shadows on the trees around us. And then the air gets a little colder and I clutch my walking stick a little tighter to me, and murmur that we should watch our backs, because candles don’t light themselves.

              We finish the hike and our legs feel like they will break in half if we walk any further, or lock up and paralyze if we take any breaks. And right now I could talk about the cheesy life lessons I drew up in my mind on the walk back, about how life is like a night hike and all you can see is the step in front of you without knowing the challenges that will come or how much longer the trek will be, but that would be terrifically boring of me.


Other pics:

Jordan and me

Megan and me