[This article first appeared in The Vernal Express in 2009.]
By Gary Lee Parker
Sports Editor
Note: This is taken from a series of first-person articles by Gary Lee Parker who writes about the outdoors and the America's rich history.
The silent
forest was magic. Light dappling through the top branches of a thick stand of
pine; shooting stars hanging sprightly in purple and golden splendor; the
sights and sounds of the trail captured my young mind and held it transfixed.
I was eight
years old, and my legs pumped rapidly to keep up with my longer limbed, and
more experienced, chaperon. Two of my steps for one of his.
Across my
back stretched a small pinstriped baby blue and white hand-made day-pack with a
change of clothing and a child's toothbrush slapdashedly stuffed inside. I wore
only jeans and sneakers, and an old striped tee shirt.
It was
early in the summer of 1979. I'd been badgering my dad for several years in a
seemingly hopeless attempt to stow-away on one of his annual backpacking trips
into the central Idaho wilderness. Sometime about age five he'd consented to
allow me access once I turned eight. I've never looked forward to a birthday so
much before or since.
Now the day
had arrived, and I moved along the trail, swish, swish, swish, feeling the
firmness of the earth beneath my feet and the reveling in the movement and rhythm
of it all.
Our
destination was Hell Roaring Lake, a dazzling high mountain lake on the eastern
edge of Idaho's famed Sawtooth Wilderness Area. Heaven, and the sun's rays
through the trees were a revelation.
My young
mind raced, along with its body, filled with adventure and a mad desire to
drink in the whole of the moment, each moment, making each step a material part
of my very being.
Squirrels
and chipmunks industriously secreting stores of pine nuts away against the
colder days ahead; the sing-song hymnal of the streams gurgling their way
toward the distant ocean; course granite tombstones grinding their determined
way above the hard-packed dirt, busting past a lake of umber needles at such a
cosmic pace that multi-colored lichen cover their faces like spattered paint.
Each image
hits the back of my eyes upside down, though I don't know it yet. Each sound
vibrates the thin tympanic membranes at the far end of my ear canal, where my
brain translates the motion into what we call noise. Each scent touches the
olfactory sensory neurons in my nose and is then converted into electrical
pulses that tell the computer in my skull what molecules are adrift in my
local.
None of the
how seems to matter though, as I stumble along in the footsteps of my father
who takes care to walk slowly and mind my every step. No, I can think of
nothing but the wonder of the world around me, the splendor of mountains,
trees, water, wind, and life.
When we
reach the lake late in the afternoon my dad sets about getting the tent in
place and rolling out sleeping bags, then begins preparations for our evening
meal. The sun hangs low in the sky, kissing the jagged peaks that frame the
western horizon. Long streamers of snow hang in the shadows of the towering
ridges and reflect tenuously in the sleepy waters of the lake.
I wander to
the lake-shore and poke at its surface with a thin stick, sending tiny ripples
out toward the deep center. And in that moment, that is precisely what it
becomes: The deep center of my life; the reset switch I can turn to when life
becomes irredeemably bent.
It was a
moment only, but one that wrought a profound change in my young mind, in my
young world-view, a change that is with me even now, swirling ethereally behind
every thought and every action, guiding me inward toward the quiet peace that I
seek.
I ate the
fried luncheon meat and beans that my dad cooked on the fire, then played in
the forest as the sun shrunk below the mountain rim. Then I crawled into the
bowels of my sleeping bag, a bag my dad had so graciously carried on his own
back so that I might have this experience, and listened to him tell a fantastic
bedtime tale singing me off to a deep slumber where I dreamed of all things
good.
The next
morning I wandered and pestered and found and climbed and jumped and waded and
explored and cajoled and generally acted like a young child while my dad
attempted vainly to catch breakfast from the icy mountain waters. Then we
loaded up our meager gear and turned our backs on the mountains and walked
somberly into what is now my history.
Now, it's
been many years, decades even, since I first walked behind the swinging shanks
of my loving father along that mountain trail. But I remember it as though it
were this morning. The smells and sounds, the grandeur and the simplicity, the
freedom and independence: each of these breaths on my mind like a small token
of truth.
But more
than all this, I remember peace. And when I walk off the map and into the
unknown, the unknowable, it is this that I seek above all else. Peace.And I never
fail to find it.
This is why
I hike.
