Notes On Distance Continued

Bridging the gap between endeavor and meaning.

Thanks for your patience. I hope the second part of this piece finds you all well. I do ask that if you enjoy the piece or found it at all useful you’ll consider sharing it. I’ll try to be more regular from here on out and hopefully we can improve our dialogue. I think my generation struggles with a lack of meaningful experiences in this era of incessant scrolling. We’ve had no real crisis, no collective hardship to sink our teeth into so we’ve had to look elsewhere for meaning. I think I have gained some real insight into this matter and I’m eager to share the conclusion of ‘On Distance’ where we close the circle. I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays so far. See you soon.

~FA

At camp it was early evening and we had an hour and a half or so before sundown.  Ours was the last campsite of the campground only adding insult to injury as we staggered in somewhere during our sixteenth mile - only about four more than we had anticipated.  I had tweaked my ankle early on that morning since in all the excitement I had neglected to stretch it out, and I was favoring my right leg a little more than the other. Because of this my knee was starting to stiffen up.  I was glad to rid myself of my boots and take a load off once we gathered firewood and set up our tents.  

We ate like we earned it that night, as the sun started to set we were really digging in.  First, we cooked up hot dogs, a prerequisite any time Coon and I go camping together.  He had even brought buns and packs of mustard and relish.  Afterwards, I had my fill of instant mashed potatoes and my nuts and dried fruit for desert.  Coon and Brah had giant bags of pad thai that were made for camping, and Brah took all night eating his.  We had built a roaring fire we were all happy laying around.  Night fell and Bryan retired early to his tent, and J.R. fell silent in his sleeping bag a little ways away from the blue smoke of the fire, he was sleeping out under the stars that night.  It was dark now and the remaining four of us were talking quietly staring contentedly in the fire.  I was thinking about turning in myself when Shay who had been fiddling with something for a while in the shadows to my right turned to me and said, “Charcuterie?”  

We’d been mindlessly chatting away and all the while he’d been plating up a meat and cheese board!  Yes, our packs had been heavy, Shay’s especially, but we were reaping the rewards of his sacrifice now.  We all snacked on that for a little while, and afterwards he gave us all Oreos from a plastic bag.  We had our own little dinner party with Shay as our host that night.  We thanked him for his hospitality and I crawled into my sleeping bag inside my tent for the rest of the night.  I could hear the three of them talking back and forth for a while before I dozed off.  At some point they all got up and when they came back I could hear them talking excitedly about little dancing lights off in the dark of the woods.  They didn’t really talk about it much the next day and I was too sleepy to remember to ask about it.  

The next morning I rolled out of my tent and the sun was just peaking through the trunks of the trees.  Bryan was already up stretching his legs grinning to himself in the fresh air, and J.R. was stoking the fire.  He’d been up since first light.  I wiped the sleep from my eyes and put some water on to boil.  I made tea and heated up my overnight oats my wife had packed for me.  I was planning on eating them cold but as there was a little chill in the air I got the bright idea to put them in my cooking pot over the flame.  Well, I burnt the bottom of those oats real good, but I ate them anyways.  I didn’t say anything because it was only slightly embarrassing, and I didn’t want to be a downer so early in the morning.  Worringly, my knee was hurting pretty good by now and was stiffer than I hoped it would be after a night’s rest, I was hoping today’s eight miles would actually be the eight miles we had planned.  But, there was no option other than rolling up my bag and tent and walking out of the woods.  I like the straightforwardness of the wilderness.  You can hem and haw all you want but it doesn’t change the reality of the situation.  We left after Shay, who had gotten up last, ate his breakfast of eggs that’d he carried all the from his own chickens, and a side of bacon and waited a little longer for him to brew his coffee.  He’d promised he’d outdo us all and make us jealous of his food stores that weekend.  I’m not too proud to admit he was right.  

We were a little quieter on the way out after we settled into our descent back into the valley.  It seemed to me everyone was painfully aware that each step we took down the mountain was another one we’d be taking back up at the end of the day.  No one voiced that concern - no one had to - and it was nice not to have to acknowledge that fact out loud as a group.  My leg felt like it belonged to the tin man before his oiling; I could barely bend it for the first hour swinging it out to the side every time I had to step down.  But as the trail wore on it became less and less of an issue only nagging when I’d get in a hurry every so often.  We passed by the little waterfalls and the stagecoach road and had much more appreciation for it this time.  

It’s hard to imagine the group of people who thought to embark on that endeavor out in this challenging country not to mention the poor souls, all of them slaves, who had to build it.  It’s meaningful somehow to try and tie time together like that; try to imagine the people who travelled the road and their reasons for doing so and the horses clopping and wooden wheels rolling on all this rock.  It’s a humbling exercise to be sure, and when your mind starts going that way you just start daisy-chaining those thoughts together.  The six of us just tumbling down the side of the mountain, our footsteps occupying the place only for a moment of all the people and deer and rabbits and crickets and elk and bears and rattlesnakes and ants and elk and bobcats and raccoons and opossums and cougars and beetles that have been here before and will be here again; the rocks and trees and earth knowingly, patiently, enduring us all.  It elicits the type of somber satisfaction that thinking about too much might just bring you to tears.

In the valley we came up on an idyllic stream.  It ran through the forest floor, broke into little falls over moss covered boulders and before it could run over the trail it took a sharp turn into a cave under the mountain.  All things hushed by the reassuring sound of the water rushing through the valley and the sacred abundance of life it conveyed.  Almost immediately by silent agreement our packs were off and our heads were in the stream.  Coon was the first in, I’ve never known him to be shy about getting in water.  We lingered there for a while grateful for the gift of the rushing water and the dimpled sunlight before we started our final climb.  

Brah and Coon had recently completed this challenge where you run four miles every four hours for forty-eight hours.  I asked Brah how it had gone, and he spoke positively about it.  “It was an exercise in saying ‘yes’ “, he said.  I didn’t know if that was his phrase or not but it had struck me just the same; made me think of that Yoko Ono piece with the word ‘yes’ and the ladder and magnifying glass.  I had been thinking about why it is that we engage in these types of pursuits, these arbitrary lengths of time and distance, and his answer seemed to take me full circle.  If it were simply about spending the night in the woods what would be the need of twenty-odd miles of walking?  It must be that the distance is integral to the endeavor as it is through distance that an inexorable truth of existence is revealed.  That in this life nothing can be wished away and it might be sinful to try.  When we are involved in these efforts we are necessarily practicing for the other parts of our lives, the parts where the distance, the amount of effort and time required for meaningfulness and purpose, isn’t so literal.  Answering ‘yes’ when the opportunity arises that allows us to close some ground, make improvements, to bridge the gap between ourselves and God and truth and beauty and the like.

Activities like these serve as worthy reminders that this ineffable span of space and time exists in all elements of our being.  By enduring and challenging the distance set before us the layers of propositional reality are peeled back to let us touch the fundamental nature of our reality, and for that fleeting holy moment we are enveloped with fascination and enthusiasm for what is realer than real.

It seems to me that a great tragedy of life is our solitude from one another, the time spent in the wildernesses of our own consciousness; that I will be of inadequate service in love and understanding to my mate and children and family and friends due to the inherent isolation undergirding our conscious minds.  But suppose this distance is no different at all from the one that’s under my feet. Then it, too, can be reconciled just the same?  Praying this to be true, I’ve resolved to dedicate all the moments I’ve been given or will have been given to chipping away that distance until something is Nothing and two become one.

The sound of wispy Suter Falls was just around the bend and we knew we had just about had the weekend licked.  The end was too close now for one more trip to the water so we viewed it from a distance as we crossed one more swinging bridge in the mist and walked underneath a massive outcropping of rock headed away from the falls.  We pushed on through the last steep bits of the trail to top out on the ridge once more congratulating each other on a job well done.  Tired and sore from the last day and a half we loaded up the truck and headed back home.  The miles of trail and footsteps now tucked away quickly becoming as abstract as they were only two days before, I sat in the passenger seat bobbing along in the warm afternoon sun grateful for our happy sad triumphant rambling little prayer in the woods.