June 20. Day 5. Water.

Thursday, June 20, Day 5. Water. I hiked 18.26 miles and climbed 1632 ft. 

Dear Trail Friends, 

Starting in the predawn dark, as I have every day of this hikeathon, is a joy for me. I was especially aware of it Thursday, of watching the world slowly change from a black and grey world to one with hints of light, and gradually color. Photo 1 is a collage to illustrate the magic of walking through this change. 

And of course the magic of the changing light of dawn is magnified by the reflection in water. 

Last year on this hike I took a trail from Twin Lakes that I hoped would lead down to the north shore. It never did. It made a very long hike and the trail, which I was so thrilled to discover last year, does not seem to be being maintained (unlike the short trail behind the Richardson Waterfowl Preserve in Deer Harbor, I have no fantasies whatsoever that I would be capable of maintaining this much more demanding trail). So... back to the drawing board. I was surprised to discover on my Gaia app (Gaia is the hiking gps app I use to record my tracks) a small trail leading from the Cascade Lake lagoon to Rosario Resort. Why not take that newly discovered (at least for me) hike down, and explore the grounds of the resort, right there on the shore of Cascade Bay? After all, it was once the lovingly built mansion of Robert Moran, the man who gifted Moran State Park to Washington state. It totally makes sense to include it. 

I totally loved walking around the Rosario Resort grounds, including the beach and the dock. (And like most of these walks I had them all to myself in the early morning). But what moved me the most were two things, installed over a century ago, that clearly expressed Robert Moran’s passions for shipbuilding, for beauty, and for Orcas Island. 

One was a masthead that made me think of the Greek warrior goddess Athena. (Photo 2). I also offer you photo 3, poor quality though it may be, because it gives you a sense of Robert Moran (who had been a poor boy who arrived in Seattle with nothing in his pocket and ended up making a fortune building ships) and what it meant to him. 

I was impressed by the landscaping all over the grounds but I don’t know how much of that retains any of Moran’s style. But when I saw the fountain and “canal” with arched bridge (dated 1915) - evocative for me both of Venice and of Monet - I was moved by the legacy this man left and the passion it expresses. Photo 4 shows the fountain and bridge. 

I was struck, just as I was last year in the hikeathon, how this particular hike traces the flow of water down the mountain - from Twin Lakes down a creek to Mountain Lake and from there down a creek through a succession of waterfalls eventually to Cascade Lake. I was struck on the hike to Rosario that  there was a gully where a stream might once have been, but it was dry. I wondered if I would find water there in a rainy season? Or had the dam (which, if I recall correctly, helped to create Cascade Lake as a manmade Lake) ended that flow? I like the way this hike makes me curious about island history. I’d like to know more about Robert 

Moran. I’d like to know about the gold mine and the putative medicine wheels. I’d like to know about water cycles on the island, and human interventions, when the dams at Mountain Lake and Cascade were built and for what purpose and with what consequences. 

My spurious (well, inappropriate) romantic fantasy interest, Rolf (the man who rebuilt the stone tower on Mount Constitution and with whom I was having such an enchanting conversation that I missed the shuttle from Seatac airport to the Anacortes ferry landing) is utterly passionate about water. He is in the business of recycling waste water from toilets and wants to teach people not to discard toxic pollutants, especially trace metals present in things like medicines and cleaning supplies (I think), in hopes of making that water fully reusable (on Orcas, and as a model for the larger world). 

So is my curiousity about water mere barely disguised sexual desire posing as lust for ideas? Or is it, as our dear professor Freud would surely reassure me, mature adult sublimation?

Which reminds me of a poem I once wrote, and a drawing my sister Judy made for a card (photo 5), on the back of which card she added a quote from one of my poems (photo 6). 

I kept thinking of that poem and the drawing while I hiked beside water. I thought of water as something I was immersed in - like forest bathing - bathing in the presence of the water, the sounds and movements and reflections - without literally getting wet. And also I thought about water as metaphor, my name River, the idea that my name was a kind of medicine, meant to help me identify with the changes not the constancy (like the cartoon I always imagined of a river trying to cling to its banks). 

Which associates to a song I loved in my early lesbian days by Chris Williamson called Waterfall: 

Sometimes it takes a rainy day
Just to let you know
Everything's gonna be - all right
All right

I've been dreaming in the sun
Won't you wake me up someone
I need a little peace of mind

Wake me from this dream
That I have dreamed so many times
I need a little peace of mind
Oh, I need a little peace of mind

When you open up your life to the living
All things come spilling in on you
And you're flowing like a river
The Changer and the Changed
You've got to spill some over
Spill some over
Spill some over
Over all

Filling up and spilling over
It's an endless waterfall
Filling up and spilling over
Over all

Filling up and spilling over
It's an endless waterfall
Filling up and spilling over
Over all

Like the rain, falling on the ground
Like the rain, falling all around

Sometimes it takes a rainy day
Just to let you know
Everything's gonna be - All right
I know, I know, I know all right

Filling up and spilling over
An endless waterfall
Filling up and spilling over
Over all

Filling up and spilling over
It's an endless waterfall
Filling up and spilling over
Over all

I sure wish waterfalls were easier to photograph. I loved visiting the whole series of falls - Cascade Falls, Cavern Falls, Rustic Falls, Hidden Falls - and taking the time to walk as close to them as I could. I would like to share the sound and the rush of water with you, the excitement and the motion. So here is Cascade Falls (Photo 7) and Cavern Falls (Photo 8). 

But of course I also love the less dramatic flow of the Cascade Creek in the quiet places (photo 9) and the even gentler ripples on Mountain Lake (Photo 10) 

When I got to Twin Lakes I was running out of iPhone battery. I really didn’t want to lose my track recording. But it turned out that I brought the wrong cord (the micro usb for recharging the charger instead of the lightning connector for charging the iPhone). So along come to men, first hikers I’ve met all morning. I use the CS Lewis approach (from Surprised by Joy: You wouldn’t want to spend Christmas with me, would you?) “You wouldn’t happen to have an iPhone charging cord with you, would you?” Lo and behold, they did! So Carl and Steve (Photo 11) stood around while I charged my phone and we talked about my life and theirs (artists from LA, Carl a registrar at a film school, Steve a middle school teacher) and about Orcas’s first gay pride event (which did not interest them at all - they came to Orcas to be alone in the woods not to seek out a crowd. They could find that pretty easily in LA.)

I also met David on the trail, one of the current stewards of our Out on Orcas group. I helped Kathy Wehle to found Out on Orcas (in 1998 I think, the year after my mother died, when Kathy and Theresa took me under their wing in my grief and aloneness). Chris was teaching a lot at Pacifica and I was feeling lost and alone. David spoke of the excitement of meeting the young people who are organizing the Pride event, how they didn’t know about us (the Out on Orcas Group), how much fun it was to sit in a circle and go around and have each person say what pronouns he/she/they preferred. “The future is in good hands,” David said. He said he thought the pride event would be great and said there would be a booth for Out on Orcas (our social group - mostly old folks) and for his farm Orcas Song. “Queer farming,” he called it. “Oh, I said, we don’t recruit them, we grow them.” 

But I was struck later as I walked how even though these young people knew nothing about us, the fund that Kathy also started (that helped fund among many other innovative projects in theater and film with gay themes on Orcas) and all her hard work had planted seeds for the acceptance and safety that these young people now experience. It made me happy to think her quiet hard work and all of our contributions helped to open minds and perhaps even to soften hearts once filled with hatred.  And I think I will close with a couple of nursing logs - well, a nursing log and a nursing stump. I love the new young trees growing out of The new growing out of the “legacy” of the old dead trees. 

What does all that have to do with water? It’s all about flow, isn’t it? (Which reminds me of my tattoo: “Home is where the heart is open to the flow of life.”) 

See you on the trail tomorrow (which is actually today and actually over, but we don’t care about technicalities, do we?)

Thank you for walking with me.