Midlife Crisis

A midlife crisis usually comes with a V-8 engine or too much makeup and a short skirt. Mine, if indeed this is midlife, and if indeed that constitutes a crisis of some magnitude, is topped with snow and requires sleeping in tents at high elevations.

 The volcanic peaks of Mts. Kilimanjaro and Whitney have too many domestic chores on their respective geological plates to venture forth and visit each other’s magnificent landscapes.  Children of the same Mother, their values were shaped with the same sense of responsibility to nurture the juvenile ecosystems that depend on them. Whitney has spent millennia cultivating a handsome granite profile to attract mature winter storms to nourish the giant sequoia forests below.  Kilimanjaro holds glaciers gently under the folds of her volcanic skirts so they won’t  melt too quickly under a punishing sun.

To hike both mountains within five months was not a crisis averted, but a feast of gifts bestowed by friends who knew having a sarcastic, energetic, vegetarian photographer along would provide a necessary comic relief.

For a native Californian, Whitney is a rite of passage. Yet I am slow in following so many predictable paths. And therefore the super highway of hikers flowing like ants hauling a spilled load of cracker jacks up and down the tallest mountain in the U.S. smothered any sense of solitude. No matter. The perfect remedy came in following behind a group of three hikers just leaving the portal. Older than myself (imagine!), I overheard one cheerfully proclaim, “I don’t need to go where no man has gone before, just where I have never gone before.” Smile.

Water from the previous week’s flash floods and thunderstorms left uprooted pines scattered across the landscape at lower elevations. Lone Pine Lake was an angry, murky child refusing to mirror the marvelous granite arms reaching into her ponds. Pines twisted and exposed, their bark torn away by forgotten fires, glowed gold and amber against the otherwise green landscape. Open meadows with nothing taller than the stalks of Indian Paintbrush wildflowers rimmed streams born from under shelves of snow and ice.

Hikers whispered as we passed, “she has an ice axe,” and I smiled to myself, letting them believe I knew the first thing about ice climbing. I had read enough to attempt to self-arrest if there was a sheet of ice along the ridge, but that’s it.

We tucked ourselves behind rock ledges against the wind at Trail Camp, Crystal and I read the ingredients of our freeze dried meals. Mine had twice the calories, but I was loathe to leave any uneaten because there was so little room in our bear canister.  We counted the minutes after sunset, forcing ourselves to stay up till at least 8:30 before retiring to our tents.

Awake at 1:30 a.m. I crawled out of my warm bag to stare at the Milky Way spread like magic dust across the sky just above the jagged peaks leading to Whitney. Against a blackened wall of rock, the tiny dots of headlamps bobbed back and forth on the switchbacks, striding for the summit before dawn. I fell back asleep watching for a promised meteor shower, waking just as a red glow seeped over the eastern horizon.

Frank the jackrabbit led the way over patches of ice on the rocky trail, daring me to count the switchbacks. We passed weary hikers on their descent, and at the ridge that divides the Sierras, Trail Crest, hikers from all directions paused in reverence.

The jigsaw stack of rocks piled precariously before us separating Sequoia to the west from the Whitney Zone on the east defied the strong winds leaping out of the cold western shadows forcing us to reach for windbreakers and gloves. This trail was over 100 years old, yet still just wide enough for one person before dropping into a catastrophe. How was this possible: to be walking this amazing razorback ridge with these views? How was it possible I’d never been here before? Did everyone see it the same way? Even these tourists with no day pack or sweater?

It wasn’t until after the last sheet of snow, halfway up the final switchbacks that I felt the dizzying effects of altitude. Too close to the top to stop, I willed away the creeping headache and buzzing in my ears and we signed our names to the register beside the stone hut. I signed for my brother who was here 30 years ago. Girls weren’t invited on such trips back then. They certainly didn’t carry ice axes.

If Frank is a jackrabbit, I am a certified mountain goat. Back at Trail Camp, packing our gear for the trek down to Outpost Camp, the ridges above now looked surreal. I would like to have stayed longer. Maybe I will be back.

  The perfume of pine gave way to incense cedar as Mirror Lake came into view. Strange birds like round pheasants crawled through the thorn bushes at Outpost Camp and a ghost woman paced back and forth through camp until dark when two hikers returned to the tent she circled most often. A fury of water rushed down the hillside at the edge of camp, carrying our dreams down river with the last light of day.

Pancakes the size of wagon wheels waited for us at the Portal Café. But we sensibly feasted on buttery hash browns, toast; a normal breakfast, before heading back to Lone Pine where people are either about to climb, have just come down from Whitney, or came just to stare. Everyone has a story about that majestic granite profile, holding steady through eons of harsh snows, blistering sun and in between. This was mine. No crisis, just another wonderful journey with friends.

The History Lesson

The mailboxes were right here. And this hill was steeper. A suspension bridge spanned this creek until a winter storm tossed a stately sycamore tree into mid-span, sending both tree and bridge down river to the lagoon that swallows Volkswagons. I swear the beetles are stacked three high under the sands in the beach lagoon; and there was the refrigerator floating by from upstream that I swam out to ride in. A few bookcases, at least a dozen bicycles. When the rains ceased, people would gather around the rim to watch appliances disappear.

The Statue of Liberty in the Planet of the Apes.

How do you explain childhood? Or describe life in an open meadow where the only remaining evidence of homo sapien domesticity is a random staircase to nowhere concealed by bamboo, or a rogue grapefruit tree patrolled by a granddaddy rattlesnake?

You smile and laugh and step over the snake. You remember where the full moon rose in winter, the hillside you climbed to escape homework, whose yard had the best loquat trees. And you re-live it all in the telling: a conspiratorial half smile revealing your personal conspiracy with history. And you harvest the grapefruits.

I watched my cousin go through the same process a day later in a clandestine ravine behind the hillside house that began life as our grandparents’ home. The homestead was handed down to her father, who took up caring for their fruit trees, a career in medicine that mimicked theirs, his own three children and eventually a new wife and her two kids. Last year everything but three oaks were reduced to ash by a careless migrant flipping tortillas over open flames in the canyon below.

But here we were wandering up a stream in Rattlesnake Canyon, dragging the next generation over boulders, across fallen logs, dodging poison oak and parachute-shaped spider webs collecting dew from the dense ground fog, listening to Moira tell her kids about the times when the world stood still, right here.

In the morning, viewing the coast through the window of a southbound train is like seeing through a Holga camera: every scene a murky, hand-tinted postcard from 1959. On the back would be a brief attempt to record the smell of salty ocean air, the ecstasy of ripe strawberries, standing below a two-story tall plaster Santa Claus with your grandmother.

At a consignment shop somewhere in Omaha, Nebraska, someone is lifting the lid on a wooden cigar box full of 50-year-old hand-tinted postcards from Santa Barbara.