June 17, Day 2. Turtlehead.

Monday, June 17. Hikeathon Day 2. I hiked 16.33 mikes along the trails at Turtleback and Turtlehead Preserves, and climbed 3115 ft. 

Dear Trail Friends

I woke early this morning and thought it was just a few minutes before my alarm (set for 3:45am). But as I headed for the car I discovered it was only 3:15am, so I had woken at 2:40am and misread my watch. It didn’t make sense to go back to bed, so I headed for the trail, and started hiking at 3:40am. 

One good thing about my mistake was that I got to see the full moon - first on my drive over and then to my surprise at Turtlehead. (Photo 1)

The other good thing is that much of the Turtleback trail is an old road, much easier to follow in the dark than most of the trails I’ll be walking. 

Turtlehead has a pretty amazing view. On one side I could see the moon preparing to set, on the other the rising sun. (Photo 2). I didn’t feel so bad about misreading my watch when I stood there looking first one way, then the other. 

I was happy to be walking through beauty contemplating summer, but I was also exhausted. I remember that even on the trail (the “real” trail, when I went out for weeks or months at a time backpacking), after months of training (and I admit I did not train for this hikeathon), the second day tended to be really tough, so that I wondered if I could do this after all. Usually the first day was “wow, this isn’t as hard as I expected” and by the third day it was “this is hard but I can do it.” But the second day was “where in the world did I ever get the idea that I could do this?”

But you know, trail friend, there is something sweet, almost delicious, in being totally exhausted. When I sat down for a late lunch at the Ship Peak viewpoint (usually I think of 10:30 am as a very early lunch, but not when I’ve already been hiking for 6 1/2 hours) my body just melted into thatcplace and that moment of being. I just didn’t have the energy to resist the beauty of what was all around me.  I watched flowers and butterflies, gazed at the peaceful view, (photo 3) and enjoyed the total emptiness of mind that is physical exhaustion’s sweetest gift. I also had a phone conversation with my brother Scott about our ongoing concern for our sister Bonnie - and I felt a whole lot more detached and reflective than I usually do talking about our sister’s very difficult life and the challenges we face trying to respond lovingly but maintain self-care as well. It was wonderful to feel held by the beauty, and to feel my love for both Scott and Bonnie supported by the beauty and my empty mind.  Come to think of it, I think the empty mind of physical exhaustion is for me tranquil in the way I imagine that decades of Buddhist practice bring tranquility.  My mind just doesn’t head down the habitual neural pathways of fear and catastrophe. Maybe that’s why I live the trail so much.  It’s a mind altering drug (that teaches me how to love it so much)!

I meditated as I walked today about summer. I realized two of my earliest memories were probably summer memories - sitting on earth in the garden with my mother while she plants seeds and uses seed envelopes as signs, and releasing into the world a monarch butterfly (whom we raised from a caterpillar and who  has just emerged from her chrysalis and crawled onto my finger). My mother was in medical school but she had summmers off to be with her children. 

I also remember spending summers with my mother after the divorce, especially at her house in rural Lakeside with its grove of peach trees, corn field (with cantaloupes growing between the rows of corn), vegetable garden, dog, donkey and horse. I thought of that summer even at the time as a kind of paradise. 

It was fun to think of shuffling my memories like a deck of cards and then sorting them by season. It felt like a different kind of life review from one that focuses on chronology and narrative thread. 

Walking beside the blossoming Ocean Spray, I was struck by how it glowed in the morning light. We had a big Ocean Spray (tree? Shrub?) growing near our garage/guesthouse (which doubled for many years as both my office and our summer home, when we used to move out and rent the “big house” as a vacation home). As I watched the flowers I thought of the association of Aphrodite and sea foam (which Chris says may have been invented by Hesiod and have no basis in earlier myth - but I do picture her arriving on a clam shell as in Boticelli’s painting, and the Oceab Speay blossoms today seemed worthy of ushering in the goddess of love). 

So I seem stuck with this metaphor - yesterday the sea of ferns, today waves and waves of shining Ocean Spray. There does seem to be a deep association for me between the feeling of summer and bodies of water that beckon, as Aphrodite beckons, to pleasure and love. Photos 4, 5 and 6 are trying to capture the morning light on the Ocean Spray, and the sense of waves. 

I’m not sure I have much more to say today. I am still pleasantly exhausted but grateful as always for this opportunity to reflect and share. Thank you for walking with me and I look forward to seeing you on the trail tomorrow. I think we will probably be walking on trails that focus on water tomorrow (lakes, creeks, a glimpse of the sea). 

Until then, I hope you are enjoying this summer day. (Okay - summer doesn’t officially begin until Friday, the last day of my hikeathon. But since I dedicated this hike to summer, I am already feeling summer all around me. Bear with me that it’s not quite literally true. )

June 16, Day 1. Boundaries

Sunday, June 16. Day 1. Boundaries. 

I hiked all the trails closest to the perimeter of Moran Park, with a few small excursions (view point off SE Boundary trail, short trail to Winter Falls Lane, short excursion to Cascade Falls, looping around trails at edge of Cascade Lagoon). 

Hiked 17.5 miles, Climbed 3329 ft. 

SO MANY SUMMERS

Dear Trail Friends,

This is my second Orcas Island Hikeathon/Pilgrimage. As in my hikeathon in late August 2018, I hope to walk 100 miles in 6 days and in so doing immerse myself in the beautiful and mysterious order of this world we have been born into - the order I mean of the universe before (and perhaps after) our human attempts to organize the world to satisfy our needs and desires. Though our modern “wilderness” areas are not really wild - they are carefully managed and maintained - they still give me a profound experience of the nonhuman beauty and order. For which I am deeply grateful. 

My late August hike last year turned out to be a lot about autumn. As I walked I became aware that autumn had begun to arrive in the natural world around me. This made me think of the attention to seasons in Japanese haiku (the same culture that gives us the idea of “forest bathing”) and inspired me to dream of doing a series of hikeathon/pilgrimages during the different seasons of the year. Thus, the current summer hikeathon was conceived. 

I suspect my blogs will be short and possibly infrequent for this summer hikeathon. Part of me questions how much new there can be to share either in photos or thoughts and feelings as I hike the same trails that I hiked last year. But I remind myself that was a different season and I was in a very different place in my life. 

I started today’s hike this morning at 4:15, hoping to catch the birds beginning to sing and the dawn, which I did, but with very little sense of wonder. It was mostly grumpy thoughts: the pack is heavy, my back hurts, I can’t believe this trail is this steep. I am sitting at my first rest stop and have just gotten up from my inverted pose (lying on my back, resting legs against a tree, with feet high) and just had the “Here I am” feeling that I so love on the trail. 

So I decided to snap a photo (photo 1) and invite you to come rest with me here, beside Twin Lake (we’re at the larger of the two twins). 

It may be the same trail as last time, but isn’t it lovely?  

Now it is after 3pm and I am home. The first thing that struck me on this hike was that I had a concept of summer, and I was hiking along looking for photographs to illustrate my idea of summer (such as flowers in photo 2 and 3). 

I like it better when the trail surprises me and I get that “wow” feeling - so this is what summer is - instead of trying to fit the unknown into my nice neat little conceptual boxes. And I noticed today that the more tired I became the more open I was to new experience. Maybe I just didn’t have the energy to force it into my categories. I think that being physically tired does create an altered state of consciousness for me that is more receptive and I think that is part of the magic that makes me love the trail so much. 

So I was walking along and suddenly I was gazing over a “sea” of ferns. (Photos 4 and 5) 

They were taller than me and reminded me that we had a similar gathering of deciduous ferns on our regular daily walk around Cascade Lake for many years - and then something in the ecosystem changed and they stopped appearing. It had been magical for me - the way they went away in winter and then came back in summer, so thick and so high. We used to call them the “fern forest.”  Photo 6 shows where the fern forest used to be - a few scattered ferns a foot or so high but nothing like the forest/sea dense with tall ferns that used to be there. 

I was also struck by a similar “sea” of horsetail ferns that seemed characteristic of summer. (Photo 8). 

But it was late in the hike, when I was walking along the south perimeter of the park and treating myself to loops around the lagoon, that I really had a sense that summer began to “call” me. I noticed that I felt a physical pull toward the water. It was like sexual desire - physical longing to be in that water. The soft warm air, the gently rippling water, the sunlight, seeing a swimmer in the lagoon and imagining my own former self swimming there as I walked, seeing young women paddling a two-person kayak and imaging myself paddling. The desire was so compelling and so sweet that I feel certain I will be swimming in the lagoon again soon, however briefly, no matter what the outcome of my physical therapy and whether or not my shoulder can learn to swim free-style again (as I hope.) Photos 9, 10, 11 and 12 are meant to help you imagine how it felt to sense the water calling to me, and to be filled with sweet desire. 

As I walked around the lagoon I met a woman with a dog and walking stick (which she carried but did not use). She accosted me with “you are actually using your sticks!” And we had a brief conversation. She mentioned that she loved to go to the dog park and sit with  other old women. She was working on a haiku, she said: “Old women on a bench/ Sharing stories.” After we parted I found myself intrigued with her haiku and wanting to make it my own. So here, with credit to Diana, is my version:

So many summers:

Old women on a bench

Sharing stories. 

I just keep picturing the old women sitting on the bench in summer, remembering so many other summers, bringing them to life with their stories. 

That seems to express perfectly for me what the summer hikeathon is at this moment. So many summers being evoked as I walk through this beautiful world. Mine and yours. And I feel so grateful to be - as I walk and as I blog - in the midst of so many beautiful summers. 

They don’t take away the horror and suffering in the world, not for a moment. But they exist in spite of it, and I am very grateful. 

Thank you for sitting on the bench with me sharing trails (I meant to say stories, but I kind of like the slip). And as always, you know how much I love to hear from you about what memories and stories stir in you in response. 

See you tomorrow on the trail (walking together through so many summers).