Allowing for Uncertainty

  

. 

A wing of the middle section of the Rocky Mountain Range branches south-easterly from below Grand Teton National Park, stretching into flat highlands of southern Wyoming.  I visited its northeast corner at Whiskey Mountain and reported in the last two blog posts of being quite intoxicated with that brew.  But I had not seen the southwest side.   

Every winter these high mountains, mostly above eight thousand feet, are closed by nature, not man, to all but the hardiest.  And every year most of the snow melts.  But I am finding that not until sometime after August first does Springtime in the Rockies end.  

A new day was dawning, here on the southwest side of the Wind River Mountains, new for me in a new place.  Just after dawn I was walking the first mile from the trailhead, when I spot her grazing.  It’s an advantage of hiking alone, quietly—I often see them first.  For her it was the end of night at home.  I stood watching, but soon she raised her head slowly to look around for danger.  Her eyes locked on me.  What can pass between two species, one a native, the other an outsider?  She saw me as danger, and she is right.  The deer was nimble and quick, as she was beautiful, leaping into the green distance of the trees, their thickness and compassion all around her.  I walked on wishing.   

All this is prelude to saying that I am at the main destination for this trip—Pinedale, Wyoming, and yesterday afternoon I returned from a first hike in the southwest side these majestic mountains.  Almost without precedent, I feel free from beating on the confining walls of circumstance, my inability to incorporate loss and move on.  Most of you have fared better.  I don’t think I am old yet or done with growing, but feel forced to accept life’s brevity, forced to move on in a different way.  The restlessness of rooted trees, as Robert Frost moaned, meant they could not feel the thrill of being trees without the cry of roots, or see the golden leaves without the sign of nearby death.  I, on the other side of ground level from Frost, walked free at ten thousand feet yesterday accepting risk.

On the fringes of paradise, summer on earth, I reveled in my being here, who I am, surrounded by unmatched beauty.    

In this new time and place, it seems easy to say to you who can break through the walls of time and place—wilderness awaits.  An indifferent universe, you say, the narrator’s solitude.  But your often strange and unfettered imaginations in poetry and art are not so different.  You unstring the universe and restring it in another way, as if it were a necklace, while I revel in the way it appears, in study that helps me understand it, and still none of us really understand the grass.    

The need of my mind builds as I dine on the Winds, like the need of a mountain to rise from beneath the surface of the earth.    

  

Michael Angerman is making a map of nightly locations, as he has done for many of my trips.  Please see    Michael's Map