Well, my plan was to sleep in tomorrow because it's supposed to be rainy, chilly and miserable out. I worked so hard today on Winds of Change galley proofs and organizing poetry submissions, that I thought I'd just rest on Sunday. But part of me was feeling guilty about not exercising enough this week, which of course I must do for my health--more so than other people. However, I wasn't initiating anything. So when my girlfriend called from DIA, all full of energy and ready to hike, what could I say? I told her the weather situation, slightly hoping it would dampen (no pun intended) her enthusiasm for climbing up to Frozen Lake. Not more than five minutes after I spoke with her, another friend called, my constant hiking companion, Mary Jean, and urged me to dress like it is winter again and that we ARE going to hike in the rain. Thank goodness I invested in a rainproof Novara jacket from REI the other day and a nice wick shirt.
We're kind of militaristic about our hikes in the summer because we usually start off slow and build up to one or two peaks above 13,000. This year, our goal is one of the Arapahoes which I've done, albeit when I was 20-something. I figure if I did Mt Lady Washington and survived those boulder fields, I can do either S. or N. Arapahoe. Last weekend, we did Half Mountain which also had the inevitable boulder field, and my legs were wobbly, but I survived. It's funny because I start every hike whining, "I can't do this, I can't do this..." My companions ignore me! Then somehow, my meds, my endorphins, my energy kick in all together and I can usually slam up to the summit. This hike up to Frozen Lake is 12.1 miles roundtrip. So we are in it for the long haul. To avoid the thunderheads, hail and rain that we encountered last week while on the summit of Half Mountain, we're leaving at 5:00 a.m.
But what does this have to do with poetry, writing, illness—all the things that are tagged onto my blog description? Nothing, I suppose, except that every glacier tarn I've ever climbed up to makes me feel well and whole and happy. And I always find something to meditate on as I wind up and up and up. Above tree line I am something else. I feel my human-ness slipping from me. I feel like some lost spirit that is light and made of nothing but air. The silence is so haunting and then I want to run away from it because it reminds me of death. The eternal question keeps skipping around my head like a scratched CD: will death be this lonely? And lovely at the same time? Or am I like Sisyphus engaging in meaningless? Am I just fooling myself into thinking there is something up near the immensity of sky that has something to teach me? What if the thing I am learning is just absurdity? What if there is no depth? I know I have a weight of sorrow, but this haunting silence, somehow, inexplicably, keeps me sane. It's absurd what I've been given. Life is so absurd. And it's absurd because there is so much beauty at the same time. I just remain stunned each day and any time I enter into a death-like space that has no sound but endless, repetitious wind. Reminds me of an old Grateful Dead song: "Out on the mountain, it'll drive you insane, listening to the winds howl." And that's from Unbroken Chain. Of course, Lesh warbles about "window pane," too, in the same song. Any acid-droppers out there any more? I thought not.
The pics I uploaded are from a few years back when we did this same hike. You have to pass Mills Lake, Jewell, then Black Lake, then you have to search around for cairns to find Frozen Lake. It's all a big adventure. And a bitch of an adventure too. Look through your window pane.
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