In the roadside town of Independence, which looks like a museum of the previous century, Tashi rouses. “We need more food.” They stop at an all-night place and buy some ramen, cheese, candy. Outside Tash goes to a phone box and closes himself in for a call. It really is like a museum. When he comes out he is nodding thoughtfully, a little smile on his face. “Let’s go.”
They turn west, up a road that heads straight into the mountains. “Here comes the tricky part,” Tash says. “We only have a wilderness permit for one, so we’ll have to take evasive action on the way in.”
“You have to get a permit to go into the mountains?”
“Oh yeah. You can get them at Ticketron.” Tash laughs at Jim’s expression. “It’s not a bad idea, actually. But sometimes it’s not practical.”
So they track up the immense slope of the range’s eastern face, following a crease made over eons by a lively stream. Tashi’s car slows on the steep road. They leave behind the shrubs and flowers of the Owens Valley, track up among pines. Their ears pop. They follow a series of bends in the road, lose sight of the valley below. The air rushing in Tashi’s window gets cooler.
They come to a dirt road that forks down to the stream on their left. Tashi stops, drives the car off the track, hums down the dirt road on battery power. “Fishing spot,” he says. “And still outside the park boundary.”
They put the extra food in the backpacks, put the packs on, and walk up the asphalt road. It’s getting light, the sky is sky blue and soon the sun will rise. The road flattens and Jim sees a parking lot and some buildings, surrounded on three sides by steep mountain slopes. “Where do we go?”
“That’s the ranger station. We’re supposed to check in there, and real soon a couple of rangers will be out on the trails to make sure we have. There’s another one stationed in Kearsarge Pass, which is the main pass here, right up on top.” He points west. “So we’re going north, and we’ll get over the crest of the range on a cross-country pass I know.”
“Okay.” It sounds good to Jim; he doesn’t know what a cross-country pass is.
They hike around the parking lot and into a forest of pines and firs. The ground is layered with fragrant brown needles. The sun is shining on the slopes above them, though they are still in shadow. They reach a fork in the trail and head up a canyon to the north.
They hike beside a stream that chuckles down drop after drop. “L.A.’s water,” Tashi says with a laugh. Scrub jays and finches flit around the junipers and the little scraps of meadow bordering the stream. Each turn of the trail brings a new prospect, a waterfall garden or jagged granite cliff. The sun rises over a shoulder to the east, and the air warms. Despite the rubbing of his boots against his heels, Jim feels a small trickle of calmness begin to pour into him and pool. The cool air is piney, the stream exquisite, the bare rock above grand.
They ascend into a small bowl where the stream becomes a little lake. Jim stands admiring it openmouthed. “It’s beautiful. Are we staying here?”
“It’s seven A.M., Jim!”
“Oh yeah.”
They hike on, up a rocky trail that rises steeply to the east. It’s hard work. Eventually they reach the rock-and-moss shore of another surrealistically perfect pond.
“Golden Trout Lake. Elevation ten thousand eight hundred feet.”
Suddenly Jim understands that they’re at the end of the trail, at the bottom of a bowl that has only one exit, which is the streambed they have just ascended. “So we’re staying here?”
“Nope.” Tash points above, to the west, where the crest of the Sierra Nevada looms over them. “Dragon Pass is up there. We go over that.”
“But where’s the trail?”
“It’s a cross-country pass.”
It all comes clear to Jim. “You mean this so-called pass of yours has no trail over it?”
“Right.”
“Whoah. Oh, man.…”
They put on their packs, begin hiking up the slope. In the morning sun it gets hot. Jim suspects the tweaks from each heel indicate blisters. The straps of his pack cut into his shoulders. He follows Tashi up a twisting trough that Tash explains was once a glacier’s bed. They are in the realm of rock now, rock shattered and shattered again, in places almost to gravel. Occasionally they stop to rest and look around. Back to the east they can see the Owens Valley, and the White Mountains beyond.
Then it’s up again. Jim steps in Tashi’s elongated footprints and avoids sliding back as far as Tash does. He concentrates on the work. How obvious that this endless upward struggle is the perfect analogy for life. Two steps up, one step back. Finding a best path, up through loose broken granite, stained in places by lichen of many colors, light green, yellow, red, black. The goal above seems close but never gets closer. Yes, it is a very pure, very stripped-down model of life—life reduced to stark, expansive significance. Higher and higher. The sky overhead is dark blue, the sun a blinding chip in it.
They keep climbing. The repetition of steps up, each with its small tweak from the heels, reduces Jim’s mind to a little point, receiving only visual input and the kinetics of feeling. His thighs feel like rubber bands. Once it occurs to him that for the last half hour he has thought of nothing at all, except the rock under him. He grins; then he has to concentrate on a slippery section. Sweat gets in his eye. There’s no wind, no sound except their shoes on the rock, their breaths in their throats.
“We’re almost there,” Tashi says. Jim looks up, surprised, and sees they are on the last slope below the ridge, the edge of the range with all its towers extending left to right above them, for as far as they can see. They’re headed for a flat section between towers. “How do you feel?”
“Great,” says Jim.
“Good man. The altitude bothers some people.”
“I love it.”
On they climb. Jim gets summit fever and hurries after Tashi until his breaths rasp in his throat. Tashi must have it too. Then they’re on top of the ridge, on a very rough, broad saddle, made of big shards of pinkish granite. The ridge is a kind of road running north–south, punctuated frequently by big towers, serrated knife-edge sections, spur ridges running down to east, out to west.… To the west it’s mountains for as far as they can see.
“My God,” Jim says.
“Let’s have lunch here.” Tashi drops his pack, pulls off his shirt to dry the sweaty back of it in the sun. There is still no wind, not a cloud in the sky. “Perfect Sierra day.”
They sit and eat. Under them the world turns. Sun warms them like lizards on rock. Jim cuts his thumb trying to slice cheese, and sucks the cut till it stops bleeding.
When they’re done they put on the packs and start down the western side of the ridge. This side is steeper, but Tashi finds a steep chute of broken rock—talus, he teaches Jim to call it—and very slowly they descend, holding on to the rock wall on the side of the chute, stepping on chunks that threaten to slide out from under them. In fact Jim sends one past the disgusted Tashi and sits down hard, bruising his butt. His toes blister in the descent. The chute opens up and the talus fans down a lessened slope to a small glacial pond, entirely rockbound: aquamarine around its perimeter, cobalt in its center.
They drink deeply from this lake when they finally reach it. It’s mid- or late afternoon already. “Next lake down is a beauty,” says Tash. “Bigger than this one, and surrounded by rock walls, except there’s a couple of little lawns tucked right on the water. Great campsite.”
“Good.” Jim’s tired.
The west side of the range has a great magic to it. On the east side they looked down into Owens Valley, and so back to the world Jim knows. Now that link is gone and he’s in a new world, without connection to the one Tashi yanked him from. He can’t characterize this landscape yet, it’s too new, but there’s something in its complexity, the anarchic profusion of forms, that is mesmerizing to watch. Nothing has been planned. Nevertheless it is all very complex. No two things are the same. And yet everything has an intense coherence.