Power-breathing my way up the slope. Windless. Soundless. A dry season.
Only the sound of breathing. A puff of rock-dust at each step. 10 steps,
stop to breathe. Below, a sodden meadow, the stream two feet wide, inches
deep, a peat trench through the greenery, and two small fish flee my
shadow, arrow-fast domnstream. Here scant cover, stunted red cedar and
white-bark pine, clusters of trunks rising from the one root-system, tufts
of needles like pompoms at the end of rubbery branches, flexible, to
withstand the weight of snow. Not much soil here. Not much air. Two high
lakes now that were invisible before. At the edge of tree-line. The slope
suddenly level, and turning the corner of a ridge I'd thought would take my
last reserve I'm on the pass itself--Vogelsang, tho no bird sings here.
Perhaps 200 feet, a shallow pond between two promontories, the granite
almost white--glaring against the path's brown muck, the near peaks chipped
into odd, hieratic shapes. Ceremonial flints, I think. Facing north now,
below me a wilderness of rock and boreal scrub, the world as it must have
looked when the glacier faded--poised boulders dropped wherever,
steep-sided lakes at the foot of scarred monoliths, white, and where
mineral-rich water has evaporated stained black. A mile ahead and 500 feet
below, camp a scattering of tents beside a stream and a mound of rocky
field on the edge of still another lake, bare to the sky, horizontal in an
otherwise vertical place. What luck, lungs raw, every bone and muscle
aching, what luck to be here, the scent of woodfire from a distant blaze,
the sky blue, brittle and cloudless. What luck to be here at this age in
this time in the midst of this island of wilderness.
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