Today I saw a picture from the Mount Washington Observatory that brought some things from my past back to me in a startlingly vivid manner.
Rime ice and snow thickly coated the tower at the top of the mountain. It was about this time last year I began my first stint as a Back Country Caretaker in the Pemigewasset Wilderness, on the side of Mount Garfield...4000 feet above the sea.
I went to my room, reached to the top of my closet, into a bag I have full of random writings. In it, I keep my handwritten journal from my summer in the mountains. I thumbed through it.
I wrote everyday up there. Once in the morning, and often in the afternoon. It still smells like the woods.
To be a Caretaker in the back country is a practice in learning where the grass is really green. To walk in the woods, knowing you won't look at a computer screen, hear a car go by, eat a pizza, or shower for the next ten days is an exciting experience, until the 6th day, when all you want is a pizza, shower, and to check your email. You work when you want, but more importantly, you hike.
You hike every trail near your site, which you are responsible for, for an entire summer and part of fall.
Once you've hiked every trail, you try to do it faster.
Once you're bored with that, you start trying to find new shit that perhaps no one has seen before by braving the krummholz and bushwhacking to areas that others don't dare to go.
What I knew about this while I was doing it, was that all of this adventuring was ridiculously fun. I found cliffs, waterfalls, a dead moose at 3800 feet, and more unknown vistas than any trail-walker could ever think about looking from. I knew the wilderness in that area just as well as the animals that dwelled there, because I DID dwell there, loathing extended rainy periods and seemingly coming alive in the sunny days that followed. After each 10 day stint, I walked out of the woods, pondering whether I WAS one of those critters.
What I know about this now, is that to know an area of rugged wilderness that intimately is a life-changing experience.
Knowing every rock in the trail. After a night of wild winds, to be able to notice which branches broke from any given tree in any given spot around the site. To see the incredible impact that foot traffic has on a mountain over the course of just one season.
I have not lived indoors during the summer in 3 years. It blows my mind to think of where I was at in my life during that season 3 years ago. I owned a Land Rover. I had a dog. I had a fiance. I lived next to a drug dealer who beat his pregnant 17 year old girlfriend.
The things that happen to us are surely on purpose and part of a plan we can never understand- this I have learned. Now, I sometimes look at the transients around town and sympathize with their plight, but wish that just for a moment, I could be living their renegade life... going wherever the weather takes them. Everyday a different and new adventure.
Thanks for reading,
krp
