Recently, I went alone up the Caps Ridge Trail on Mount Jefferson. It’s a bargain hike—minimal mileage for maximum view. One mile and you pop up out of the woods and into a rocky, blocky scramble, and another mile and a half brings you through the boulders and scree to the summit, and the Ridge.
The weather was perfect—cool and crisp and clear with the air starting to have an autumnal pop. I took water, work gloves, a peanut butter sandwich, a bag of potato chips, Sour Patch Kids, my warmest puffy, and a freshly painted set of fingernails (deep orange sparkle) and set off.
For all the time I spend alone, I don’t often hike alone. Not because I think it is inherently dangerous, but because I have spent such glorious hours hiking with people I love that it feels like I am forgetting something more vital than water if I go alone. But, that Sunday, I wanted to go up to the Prezzie Ridge more than I wanted to be around my people, so off I toodled.
That trail is the closest I can imagine to the terrain where Hannah died. It is rocky and scrambly, but nowhere steep enough that it would be considered a rock climb, rather than a rocky trail. At one point after I came out of the woods and on to the rocks proper, I came up a rock and steadied myself on the bigger boulder making a wall to my left and slightly overhead. I got to the top of the scramble and turned around. I had a rock wall to my right, a rocky-slab-trail slanting away below me, and a slight drop off to my left, with a bigger drop into the Jefferson Brook Ravine just beyond the boulders on the left.
I can see the physics of how a place like that was the last place Hannah saw, where she last was. To stand there, to look up to the right and understand that her dying was as explicable and random as if something had come loose there, knocked me down and dead on these rocks, on this mountain, on this ridge which is as familiar to me as the mountains of Colorado were to Hannah, was grounding.
It is no more fair, it is no comfort, to see these things so close to home, close to the mountains I know and love, the trails I take off for on a whim and a need to be in the hills and sunlight, but it was a deepening experience. And then, if I imagined that I was Hannah, and that standing there at the base of the scramble was a smiling friend, someone I know and love and trust, someone who understands what is bold and sacred and joyfully beautiful about being out and alive in these places, to have a friend like that, a place like this be the last thing my sister saw and knew…it is not enough, it will never be enough, her life will always have been too short, her end too terribly violent where she was soft and kind, her absence too unshakeable, but it was also a something to have such a crystal clear moment of pure joy be rather ordinary in her life.
That kaleidoscope of excellence in the moment just before the end was not random in Hannah’s life, it was routine. She died, and those words will never sit easy with me, but how she lived !
I hiked up and onward and began to come across the crowds who had hit the trail before 11 a.m. Some years ago, I finally started to get over myself as a hiker. When I worked in the huts, I was often a jerk to other people on the trail. Even when I was being sugary-High Mountain Hospitality-nice, I made sure that the other person in the conversation knew that I knew more than they did. I was trying to get into the good graces of the mountains, I think. I wanted to be Theirs. Which, spiritually, is a fine pursuit, but probably being arrogant to other people who are just up in the hills for something like the same reason I go there is not the way to the mountains’ hearts.
I don’t do that anymore. Lately, I try to come across as merely cheerful, and not maniacally glad, to be sharing the space with other hikers. I assume the mountains work on others’ hearts the same as they do mine, and that seems like a much more a solid start for authentic greetings and smiles. It is a great day to be out. The weather is absolutely ideal! Thanks for the tip, I’ll be prepared for it to be a little chillier on top! You have a good hike too! Yep, any day up here counts as a good day! Would you like me to take a picture of you, rather than you taking a selfie? I have hiked this trail before—it’s such a fun one! No siree, we sure aren’t going to get many more days like this!
None of this was false or glib. It costs nothing to share the mountains pleasantly. And not to cut too close to the obvious of why I am writing this and why you are reading this, but none of us may get many more days in beautiful places, doing something we love with people who also enjoy walking steeply uphill on uneven terrain carrying basic supplies on their backs, for fun.
In the Zen Oxherding pictures, after the boy has found the ox, tamed it, and is sitting quietly with the end of his quest, there is one picture that shows nothing, and then the next picture is a riot of life. As I learned the series, the trick is not to balance the void with the fullness, but to be able to see and hold both truths at the same moment, like adjusting the lenses of a telescope.
Hiking Caps Ridge, and particularly taking a quick loop along Gulfside Trail, while smiling uncontrollably and unconsciously about being up there on such a day and wrestling with the realities of Hannah’s actual moment of death in similar terrain, and all the rippling repercussions of her loss to her life and my loss of her, everyone’s loss of her...this was the emptiness and the fullness crashing together. I don't know if the fullness is my heart of love and pain and the emptiness the serenity of the ridge, or if the fullness are the unfolding mountains and the emptiness the unfathomable void of life without my big sister. As I texted Emily that night “I just hiked past rocks that look like the last place my Burda saw, and I still love this ridge like a crazy person.”
Crazy person or no, that hike was the best I’ve felt since Hannah died. I didn’t feel better, exactly. It wasn’t cathartic or healing or a step towards closure or learning a lesson from her death or life in anyway. I don’t want to heal or be closed up or be able to find an “at least…” or some sort of koan hidden in all of this. That I can be as happy as I was up there while still being as utterly broken is either insanity or brilliant or both. Having my own mountain joy was like the sun coming out after a long storm, even though the shadows are darker in contrast to the light.
I hiked down and paused again at the spot that looks to me as much like what Olof described as I can stomach yet. I didn’t feel particularly sad standing there. My right eyelid didn’t twitch the way it’s started to do just before I burst into tears. My chest didn’t tighten or hurt the way it does when I wake up from having Hannah make an appearance in my dreams. Standing on the rocks, holding my elbows tight to keep from touching the rocks and to hold my heart in, everything just made a terrible sort of sense. It won’t bring Hannah back to live in fear of or without the mountains or the emotions they hold.
So down I went, being frantically chipper to everyone I met on the trail, because I want everyone to have nothing but perfect days in the mountains from now on.
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