suggesting dust-brushes, not trees;
some finding strength in union, forming little stunted grooves
their flattened mats of branches shrunk in trying to escape”
from the hard mountain “planned by ice and polished by the wind”
“Cushion krummholz” is the official name for these trees stunted by the altitude, a term that is uncharacteristic of Moore not to have used. The natural history contained in the poem is actually a little crackpot, since Moore had also visited Banff on her trips west and conflates these two locations.
The filmmakers also wanted footage to suit the poem’s close, where Moore’s version of nature gets wilder and more fearsome, finally resulting in an avalanche going off “with a sound like the crack of a rifle, / in a curtain of powdered snow launched like a waterfall.” So I took them to a place where we looked down on the Nisqually glacier, the same glacier whose snout we crossed on the road. (I think Moore might have climbed down to it — there is a picture of her standing on the edge of a dirty crevasse.) One of the sound technicians threw a rock while the other held up the microphone. And the result was strange karma — way across the valley, as if in response, a small avalanche tumbled down.
Moore spent the night at the Paradise Inn, which is where we go to take the chill from Angus’s bones when we finally arrive at the top of the road. Built in 1917 in typical Park Service style, out of the kind of logs that epitomize Park Service structures, logs that look as if they would make a good throne for an ogre, the inn is a place where I rarely set foot back when I was a ranger, meeting its comforts with my disdain, intended as they were for tourists, a word I always uttered — like the other rangers — with derision. Becky and Angus buy chili at the snack bar, but I stick to the cheese I’ve brought and a mealy apple from my own tree. I can at least be a climber in this regard — eating bad, cold food.
From here, Moore hiked with her brother to the mountain’s famous ice caves under the Paradise glacier, formed by the river that runs underneath. I do not know if Moore toured the caves as I did, entering the darkness with my headlamp where the river flows beneath the glacier, following the river until it exits at the wide mouth of the cave. Her poem is full of colors that seem accurate enough: emerald and turquoise and manganese-blue. They would have been lit by daylight through the dense quartz layer of the ice, which gives the colors a muted neon glow.
But the Paradise glacier is just about gone now, its lower reaches reverted to firn, the intermediate state between ice and snow. It is sad to fathom how the fundamental thing — a glacier — on which Moore built her poem could have disappeared, for the poem is nothing if not a statement about the endurance of the unfathomable complexities of nature in the face of the human desire to get them figured out. The fact that the glacier has melted away delivers a blow to the gut of the poem. It may have been complex, but it did not endure.
A few relatively flat meadows exist in Paradise — hence its popularity with nineteenth-century campers. From here a series of hillocks stair-step up — to a large snowfield that ends in Camp Muir, at 10,000 feet, where a climber has to rope up to begin glacier travel. On this day I can’t see the mountain’s top, and the high clouds shrink the distances. The Tatoosh Range is visible to the south — black crags down which I glissaded every summer, an unmarked route that dropped back to Longmire.
Today we set off to wherever the dinky concrete trail leads. You can tell that the ground is not used to being exposed, as it is on this dry year with scant snow cover — the soil is brown and dusty between the various clumps of alpine leafage. Angus keeps forgetting that it’s against the rules to wander off the trail — whenever we see a flower his impulse is to march straight for it. I would prefer that no one talk, a remnant from those days when I traveled alone, but how do you say to your friends, Please do not speak? It is rarely possible nowadays for me to replicate the experience of traveling alone. Sometimes Jim and I can manage it, but I am tired of requiring a husband.
People coming down the trail nod to encourage me a little more enthusiastically than seems natural, but I will not let this piss me off today. The ones who keep to themselves are those who have come down from the mountain’s upper reaches. When I worked here I climbed to the top each year, just to prove that I could, and so I know them not just by their plastic climbing boots but also from their leathered skin that tells me they have spent time above the clouds. You climb at night, when there is less danger that ice will melt and crevasses pop open, and you try to time it so that you get to the summit not long after the break of day. That first light is an oozy purple with the clouds below, when you gradually step out of their last stratum. That light is what people climb for, I think. Everything else is dark or heat or cold or exhaustion, but the early light is heaven.
Now there is one young woman walking down alone with ski poles in her hands to break the impact on her knees. Her hair has been pinned up carelessly, and her gaiters and clothes are ragged. I want to stop her and suck her blood: I was you, make me you again. I should know better — if she really is me, then she would probably resent the intrusion on her privacy.
Since I can’t march, my plan is to be content with identifying the plants, even though it seems unnatural to wrench knowledge from the field guides without balancing that knowledge with some gained by experience. So I tell myself: Okay, have an experience. Two ravens swing on branches overhead along with the other birds made bold by years of snack food. This is my experience: to hear the ravens croak. To hear the slow, sporadic way they say the word grok. (This, the book says, is how you tell them from crows.)
It turns out that we are indeed late for the peak blooming weeks, which come right after snowmelt. And it is my habit to sulk when I feel that my perfect experience has been foiled by my disease — if I were healthy, I would have come here alone and sooner. But Becky points out that there are still plenty of ragged stragglers, like the blue cascade asters everywhere. And purple gentian, the last bloomers, just coming up, their flowerheads like little boxing gloves punching upward from the ground.
Dirty white mops, which are the seed heads of spent anemone flowers, stake the hillside. And the tall dry stalks of hellebore, a plant distinguished by its pleated leaf. Becky and I stop often to consult the field guides and play our knowledge game. Angus is fidgety and wanders ahead until he realizes he’s lost his $500 Harley-Davidson sunglasses and heads back down in a tizzy to see if he’s left them on the bike. We wait for him at a dip with a trickle of snowmelt where neon-pink monkeyflowers still bloom.
Even before he returns over the rise, we can hear him coming back up: now he’s wearing the sunglasses and talking on his cell phone. When he gets off the line, I grouch at him for trammeling on my nature experience with his technology and loud blabbering.
“But I wanted to call my brother George! I wanted to tell him about all this!” His excitement shows in his voice’s high pitch, as if we have taken him to the moon. He tried to come here once with his wife, he says, but heights scared her and they turned back.
And now my friends force me to turn back because the asphalt is getting rugged and ripped. I have no choice but to let them have their way since they are the ones who’ve been pushing me free when my wheels spin, though not to end somewhere spectacular seems anticlimactic, and I feel my expectations plummeting again, which forces me to find an Indian paintbrush flower still in bloom so I can write this down in my book of gratitudes.
The scooter skids down the pavement — the paths have been steeper than I realized. Angus and Becky walk in front of me and promise they’re willing to throw themselves in my path if I lose control. I’ve given up on having a meditative experience, though there are not many people out on this gray day. Still, when we come to a marmot near the trailside, I tell my friends to shut up for a while.