In wetter years, I used to kayak on this lake. The trip that gnaws most on my memory is one on which I took one of the summer volunteers with me. Paul had been born with cerebral palsy; he staffed the Visitor Center desk and had a signature joke for the tourists — that he was built like a buffalo: big head and shoulders, tiny legs. He walked with forearm crutches, dragging his legs along scruff scruff scruff. I will tell the truth and admit I had a speck of resentment for his presence: his weakness was bound to tax the rest of us, someone had to put his shoes and socks on in the morning and take them off again at night. When a male ranger was assigned this task, I was relieved. The intimacy of holding someone’s foot in my hands terrified me and made me think of the apostles and Jesus, how all that footwashing created a sexual quantum field when I read about it on Wednesday afternoons at the Catholic school.
On our trip, Paul paddled strongly and we laughed. But when we returned to the boat ramp, I could not lift him out of the kayak to stand with his crutches. So I dumped him out, and that worked well enough because he could use the water to buoy himself up, though afterward I insisted on going to the grocery store, since the lake was halfway there, and I made Paul wait in his wet clothes while I went shopping, despite his shy complaints. My impatience mortifies me when I think back, now that I’m the one who’s always slow.
Sorry. . sorry. . this is a song the Subaru’s tires sing.
As we rise to the lake, Becky tells me about the time she herself climbed Mount Rainier, when she was a student of Willi Unsoeld’s at the state college in our town that was founded in the 1970s as an “alternative” institution. Unsoeld is a legend there, a philosophy professor and a mountain climber. Becky says that she climbed as one of the students tied to Unsoeld’s rope when he led a mob of them to the top in 1972. This is a poignant story because Unsoeld died a few years later while leading a student group down from the summit in a storm. One student died also, and Becky was asked by Unsoeld’s widow to call the girl’s mother. We speculate that she made this odd and too-intimate request to prove he was not a reckless man when it came to shepherding young people through the wilderness.
I’ll say it again: many of us can be made bold by grief.
But grief can only transform the actual body so far, and our widower turns out to be trembling and pale-cheeked when we pull off just past the lake. We stop at a garden of creatures made from scrap metal, sculptures whose style resembles that of the driftwood fish and horse erected on the dry bed of the lake. Angus did not attach the windshield to his motorcycle, nor did he wear his leather jacket. When we ask why not, he gets a hangdog look.
“I wanted to look studly,” he says, sucking in his belly. The thought had not occurred to me, that he’d seek romance on this trip. The day does not seem conducive to romance — the cloud ceiling high but solid.
The place called Paradise where the asphalt trails do their zigzagging lies at an elevation of 5,000 feet. His teeth are chattering but Angus assures us: “Don’t worry, I will make it up to Paradise.”
It is difficult for me to believe that almost twenty years have passed since I worked at the mountain. As soon as we go through the entry gate, I am ransacked by my old ghosts. We’re in old-growth forest now, in the deep shade where the tree trunks glow reddish, almost purple, thickly grooved in patterns according to their species. We go by the limbless snags that are the remnants of a mudflow on Kautz Creek and by the trailhead of the secret trail I remember leading to two humongous Douglas firs. When we come to Longmire, the little enclave where I once lived, I am glad the place is more developed, bustling with people and tour buses. This little bit of ruin makes the sight of it easier to bear.
After Longmire, the angle of the road increases as the trees begin to shrink. We pass the trailhead to Comet Falls, which is the trail I took to my old workstation. I tell Becky about the man who tried to walk across the top of the falls in golf cleats, and about how his girlfriend ran all the way down to Longmire, out of her mind with the sight of his body dropping inside the water column. Marianne Moore wrote a famous poem about Mount Rainier, in which a mountain goat’s eye is fixed on a waterfall “which never seems to fall / an endless skein swayed by the wind, / immune to the force of gravity. . ”
But of course the man was not immune.
The alpine meadow above Comet Falls is where I worked one summer, changing the signs (this is harder than it sounds, as they were planted in concrete) and repairing the trails. I tell Becky how Jim, back in the early days of our romance, came to visit me here in the rain. He’d hiked with two friends who looked hypothermic, so I made soup on my camp stove and saved the day — that’s the kind of girl I imagine I was, the spunky saver of the day. We all weave our private myths.
Becky tells me that I’m still an Amazon, but I suspect she is just trying to make me feel good, seeing as she has a habit of overestimating human nature. These days I am a Roman, right there with Ovid when he says: Call no man happy until he is dead and buried.
Yet the challenge remains that there is still this day, which has erected itself before us like one of those signs planted in concrete. And I probably will live through it, a day when my friends and I are going to travel a mountain path, and we probably will see a bird or two and a flower or two, and those things should be goddamn good enough for me to record on my list of gratitudes.
Soon the Nisqually glacier appears before us, its snout like a strip mine, a pile of dusty slag filling the wide canyon where the glacier drips to form a river that is always being born. A wide steel bridge spans this place, a bridge that looks like it was built for the sole purpose of being ridden over on a new Harley-Davidson Dynaglide. I bet Angus is terrified.
In Marianne Moore’s poem, this mountain is an octopus of ice, seen at first from the two-dimensional view of the map, the mountain outlined by the twenty-eight glaciers that sprawl down its sides. She wrote the poem after coming here on one trip from New York to visit her brother who was stationed at the shipyard in Bremerton. Her approach took a primitive version of this same road, as she too headed for Paradise.
The poem renders the mountain from varying perspectives — we see the rocks close up and from afar, we see both the map and the living mass. Moore quotes from a dozen sources, from spiritual treatises to tourist brochures, and we’re referred to Henry James and Greek antiquity by way of explanation. She means to make us dizzy, as the colors of the lichen-covered rocks are dizzying: “the cavalcade of calico competing / with the original American menagerie of styles.” The poem emulates in form the myriad stuff it is describing.
Filmmakers came to the mountain when I worked here to shoot some footage to accompany Moore’s poem for a PBS series. As the resident ranger-poet, I lobbied heartily to escort them around the park. They too were from New York, and I remember their brand-new pack boots and enormous cache of M&Ms, as if they were prepared to bivouac for days. Their gear was hardly broken in, I noted smugly, before marching them straight uphill.
They needed footage to accompany two passages in particular, and my heart went haywire when they left the locations up to me. They wanted to illustrate the penultimate stanza of the poem, where Moore describes the trees she must have seen on her hike to the ice caves that once lay under the Paradise glacier:
Is “tree” the word for these things
“flat on the ground like vines”?
some “bent in a half circle with branches on one side