Into the Wild Scotchmans
Sandy Compton
The River Journal
July 13, 2005
Imagine you're a movie camera, focused on the
broken edge of a sunlit surface of reddish-gray stone embossed with
ripples of a 750-million-year-old sea bed. In your field of view, a
sun-browned hand appears, getting purchase on the rock. A boot appears
on the rock. The hand flattens and muscles flex as it pushes off, and
the other boot lands beside the first. You, the camera, move away from
the rock and the owner of the boots is revealed; first her, and then
three other humans with packs traversing wrinkled stone. They are not
wearing day-packs, but packs made for days of hiking.
You continue to pull away to a view of the
hikers trudging up a steep, narrow ridge. The
perspective grows and grows until the four
are bits of color moving on a huge bulk falling
to both sides in leaps and bounds and arching
runs of glaciated sedimentary stone.
That movie has been running in my mind today,
but now, the dryer's buzzing, and, I have to
leave the theater. I fold a newly-washed cappeline
shirt. It no longer smells of wood smoke and
sweat from countless thigh-burning steps up
one and down rock-strewn, bear grass-laden,
goat-trodden ridges. Most of the stains came
out of my hiking tee-shirt. My Carhart shorts
no longer have a patina of Phil's killer camping
spaghetti sauce, charcoal and dirt from Elk
Ladder ridge. My boots are nearly dry - nearly.
We got plenty wet, we who just returned from
a trek through Scotchman Peaks wilderness:
Deb, Phil, Jonathan and I.
The Scotchman Peaks haven't been declared wilderness
by an act of Congress yet, but I defy anyone
to find a better descriptive noun by which
to name this faulted, glaciated, jumbled, contorted,
inaccessible, steep-ass, dangerous and completely,
extraordinarily, awesomely beautiful chunk
of planet.
Three otherwise intelligent folk followed me
into that wilderness near the Montana/Idaho
border last Wednesday. The wilderness, after
trying mightily to eat us, spit us out at Spar
Lake on Saturday afternoon. We aren't bright
enough to avoid being swallowed up, but we're
too tough to chew, and that country chewed
on us a great deal. Besides trying to drown
us on a couple of occasions, it provided us
with some dandy guerrilla hiking.
"Trails?" we said. "We don't
need no stinking trails."
The hike leader fell from grace daily, but
there was no mutiny because the wilderness
came through with spectacular rewards for the
travails we suffered. After an hour beating
through soaking wet tag alder and devil's club,
for example, we walked out into a semi-vertical
garden lush with purple penstemon, bear grass,
arnica, bone white flax, Indian paintbrush
and yellow wild columbine growing out of rock
that seeps water fresh and cold as space itself.
The wilderness also provided good camps, the
best in a soft, grassy alpine meadow at the
top of a ramp of pinkish rock that still shows
scratches left by glaciers 12,000 years ago,
with a trickling stream of snowmelt, ensconced
by cliffs rising 700 feet. In return, the group
did not stone me for leading them for ten and
a half hours (just five and a half miles) along
straight-up-or-straight-down ridges; cliff-dodging,
boulder-climbing, back-tracking and bush-whacking
all the way.
There was also the small matter of walking
back up 500 vertical feet to get to that camp.
I am grateful for forgiveness, and that the
wilderness gave us a lowering sun, great slabs
of raw rock with all those same flowers growing
in their cracks and a rambunctious stream beside
us to escort us up the hill.
As we lowered our packs into the grass of that
little meadow under the cliffs of a mountain
we had stood at the top of hours before, I
felt another Presence with us.
Wilderness is Creation exposed; God's work
unfinished, magic, magnificent and unaltered
by our species. In the heart of wilderness,
the pulse of the universe becomes audible,
palpable, complete, ponderous and vital. In
wilderness is a great hope for our species,
for it may be a place that we can go and reconnect
with this orb that has spawned us through the
miracle of evolution.
It is an old rule of navigation that if you
want to know where you are going, it is good
to know where you began, and we began in wilderness;
a place where we might believe that we are
not so safe as we are in our automobiles and
living rooms; a place where the earth will
eat us, given the chance.
But in a world without wilderness, we will
become more disconnected from the planet than
we are already. With no connection to the planet,
it may be impossible to find connection with
our neighbors. With no pastures to lie down
in together, we are likely condemned to fight
about where to put the fences.
There are no fences in wilderness. There are,
however, awe and peace and a chance to remember
where we came from and perhaps get a better
bearing on where we might go from here.
As for personal navigation, I will roll that
movie again as I need to. It will sustain me
until the next time I give the wilderness a
chance to eat me. I will go willingly, for
to be digested is to be softened, made more
pliable, less rigid; and thereby less fragile
and less easily broken.
Sandy Compton's new book, Archer MacClehan
and The Hungry Now is set in wilderness and
is available online at www.sandpointonline.com/generalstore
or your favorite bookstore. For more information
on the proposed Scotchman Peaks Wilderness,
visit www.scotchmanpeaks.org.
This Scenic Route column originally appeared
in the July 13th edition of The River Journal.
It is reprinted here by permission of the author,
Sandy Compton who holds all Copyrights.