Good Books, Bad Blisters, Dust Jackets Required on the Trail

Crater Lake, Summer 2008

Disbelief!  Wonderment!  Awe!  Disbelief and Wonderment and Awe!  Time and again, the Guidebooks of the Pacific Northwest promise a feeling of disbelief, a sense of wonderment, and a state of awe to be discovered in the geologically tumultuous Cascades. We’re feeling it and sensing it and finding it as we scramble up a gentle rise, meander through a copse of wind-tattered pines, and take a long, lingering look at Crater Lake in south-central Oregon.  

The gem-like object of our Disbelief, Wonderment, and Awe was improbably formed over seven thousand years ago when super-sized volcano Mount Mazama blew its top, collapsed into a caldera, and whimsically filled with rain water and snow melt, so that today the lake appears take-our-breath-away-wipe-a-tear-away-blue, thanks to the relentless passage of time and the routine principles of ultraviolet light absorption.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail

by Cheryl Strayed.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. 315 pages. 
Non Fiction and Biographies 
Cheryl Strayed feels it and senses it finds it, too, the Disbelief and Wonderment and Awe that the guidebooks promise: The jagged circle of the lake spread out beneath me in the most unspeakably pure ultramarine blue I’d ever seen.  It was approximately six miles across, its blue interrupted only by the top of a small volcano, Wizard Island, that rose 700 feet above the water, forming a conical island upon which twisted foxtail pines grew.  There are different ways to travel to this lakeshore.  We are day hikers.  Out, out, out, and back to the lodge in time for hot shower and hot dinner and hot cocoa on the stone patio day hikers.  Cheryl Strayed, burdened with a colossal backpack named Monster and a complex emotional itinerary all her own, is roughing it on a one-thousand-one-hundred mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail—from the Mojave Desert in Southern California all the way to Cascade Locks in Washington State:

She's not whining, but she is wanting: The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.... We follow Cheryl Strayed as she chronicles the loss of her mother, the breakdown of her young marriage, her painful-to-watch descent into drug dabbling and self-destructive behavior, and her inimitable decision to hike her way back to emotional wellness on a long-distance, high-altitude trek through some of the West’s most lovely and challenging scenery.  A motivational tale: moments after her reading is complete, Cellar Door friend FF is inspired to lace up well-fitted boots and walk the wilds of Vermont.  Keep compass and tissues at the ready, break out the 2^nd Skin Blister Pads: Wild is a powerful, poignant memoir, shared with brilliant expression and brutal honesty.  Brutal blisters, too.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. 
Broadway Books, 1998.  276 pages.
Non Fiction and Biographies

Wild reminds us of a read from a few years back, Bill Bryson’s memoir of hiking the Appalachian Trail or—as Cheryl Strayed describes it—the far more popular and developed cousin of the Pacific Crest Trail.  Bryson walks the woods with a childhood buddy: they get lost, get found, survive blizzards and bears and bizarre fellow hikers and blisters, always the blisters.  Logging umpteen miles a day, our intrepid and humorous best-selling author soon reaches the point where aches and blisters were so central a feature of my existence that I ceased to notice them. 

Trouble at the Trailhead

Next stop: Moab, Utah.  As we fiddle with our boots and fidget with very noticeable blisters at the Fisher Towers Trailhead, we take solace in the observation that the Great Story of the West is littered with ill-fitting boots and Festering Feet.  We feel podiatric kinship with Cheryl Strayed and with Pea Eye Parker, cow hand of Lonesome Dove Fame: The sensible thing would be to... think about things that had some bearing on his day’s work, like how to keep his old boot from rubbing a corn on his left big toe.  An army mule had tromped the toe ten years before, and since then it had stuck out slightly in the wrong direction, just enough to make his boot rub a corn.  The only solution was to cut holes in his boot, which worked fine in dry weather but had its disadvantages when it was wet and cold....

Lonesome Dove: A Novel by Larry McMurtry.

Simon & Schuster, 2010 (1985).  858 pages. 

The Pulitzer Project 

We read Lonesome Dove in conjunction with the ongoing Pulitzer Project and encounter: Out-of-Tune Pianos! Card Sharps! Sympathetic Whores! Restless Ex-Whores! Swarming Water Moccasins! Rolling Thunder! Scorching Lightning! Bruising Hail! Stampeding Cattle! A Terrifying Indian Named Blue Duck! Prairie Storms! The Timely Appearance of a Canvas Tent! More Stampeding Cattle! Plagues of Grasshoppers! An Opportunistic Cook! Fried Grasshoppers! Bumbling Sheriffs! Malodorous Buffalo Hunters! Piles of Buffalo Bones! Prairie Funerals! Strong-Willed Ex-Loves! Sod Houses! Centipedes! Hungry Indians! Poison Arrows! Scant Water! Thirsty Cattle! Unlikely Heroes! Gun Outfits! Gruesome Hangings! Unacknowledged Sons! And Retired Texas Rangers!  

Gus McCrae, one of those Retired Texas Rangers, declares, If I'd have wanted civilization I'd have stayed in Tennessee and wrote poetry for a living.  We don’t begin our reading expecting to find civilization or poetry, but at every turn in the trail, we happily encounter good writing, loveliness of land, and lyricism in the people who inhabit a romantic, defiant, authentically American landscape.  Unfortunately, that authentically American landscape features: Lots of Blowing Dust! Gus’s long-ago sweetheart Clara had always hated the sod house—hated the dirt that seeped down on her bedclothes, year after year.  It was dust that caused her firstborn... to cough virtually from his birth until he died a year later... It seemed to her that all her children had been conceived in dust clouds, dust rising from the bedclothes or seeping down from the ceiling. 

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

Houghton Mifflin, 2006.  340 pages.

History and Travel

Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains—a force of their own.  When the dust fell, it penetrated everything: hair, nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom, well... The eeriest thing was the darkness.  People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away.... Moving through well-described darkness and dust, we watch the precipitous rise of people and place in the early years of the twentieth century—rampant, reckless tilling and turning of native grassland by Great Plains nesters, premised upon little more than the quaint notion that rain follows the plow.   

We continue to watch, helpless, as this quaint notion produces a worrisome wheat glut—and an authentically unsustainable American landscape on the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.  In the course of regional environmental catastrophe—and the worldwide economic collapse of the 1930s-- we witness a dust-borne Armageddon through the eyes of six families and their beleaguered communities: a desperate struggle for survival amidst roiling dirt storms, freakish black blizzards, epic crop failure, staggering property destruction, desperate illness, heartbreaking loss of life.  It's a lot to take in.  But ultimately, Egan’s narrative offers a resonant recitation of human resiliency during the Worst Hard Time: quiet seeds of hope and lessons learned, sowed on a windswept historical plain. 

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Penguin, 2002 (1939).  455 pages.

The Pulitzer Project

The dirt crust broke and the dust formed.  Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air.... The dust was long in settling back again.... Timothy Egan’s 2006 National Book Award-winner prompts us to pull John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winner from a high and suitably dusty shelf.  We follow the Joad family on their migration to California during the Great Depression, sifting Steinbeck's fine storytelling dust through our fingers, re-experiencing his formidable language, re-visiting his redolent imagery, and re-considering his powerful portrayal of hardscrabble Okies confronting ravaged Western landscapes during the Worst Hard Time.

Serena: A Novel by Ron Rash.
Ecco, 2008.  371 pages. 
Historical Fiction 
Darkness and Sawdust: You can't see it more than you can see air, but when it's all around you sure enough know it.... Here’s what excellent Cellar Door reader BPB is recommending this early autumn season.  She’s making it easy for us: rounding up multiple library copies, checking them out on her very own card, and distributing them at our last meeting.  She has no plans, of course, to sit and read the book to us, so we must take care of that part ourselves.  We’re looking forward to a moody, atmospheric story of love, betrayal, avarice, passion, and plenty of good old-fashioned timber, set in North Carolina mountain wilderness, circa 1929. 

Grand Ambition: A Novel by Lisa Michaels.

W.W. Norton, 2001.  274 pages.

Historical Fiction

Grand Canyon National Park. We pick our way down, down, down four-and-a-half-miles of fabled Bright Angel Trail before passing through lovely Indian Garden and toggling northeast along the Tonto Trail.  Our path ends at Plateau Point, three thousand daunting feet below South Rim Village and one-thousand-three-hundred dizzying feet above the Granite Gorge of the Colorado River.  Basking on that sun-drenched overlook, munching apples, sipping precious water, taking in blue sky, multi-hued rock, and green river far, far, far below, we remember the story of Glen and Bessie Hyde, idealistic young newlyweds who set out to run the rapids of the Grand Canyon on a hand-crafted boat in November 1928... They were in Middle Granite Gorge, the canyon narrow and dark.  The boat drifted at the bottom like a match in a gutter... At times, they heard the roar of a rapid in the distance and knew they would have to run it blind.... 

Lost on the Landscape, Plateau Point

If Glen and Bessie successfully navigate the rapids, they will win the attention and adulation of an adventure-enthused nation at the close of a derring-do decade, and Bessie will become the first woman to traverse a particularly treacherous stretch of Colorado River.  One month into their ambitious journey, however, they vanish without a trace: their story, their dreams, their lives lost in the timeless tumbles and turns of the grandest and most inscrutable of canyons. 

Sir Isaac Newton and 1960s jazz-rock band Blood Sweat and Tears remind us: what goes up, must come down.  In the case of Grand Canyon hiking, of course, those who go down, must come up.  Maybe we should have contracted a mule.  As we pick our way up, up, up four-and-a-half miles of fabled Bright Angel Trail, fighting gravity and cursing our blistered feet, we praise this fictionalized account of Glen and Bessie’s ill-fated canyon passage, one that mingles sparse historical fact with poignant emotional deduction and imaginative adventure writing.  We’ll happily share our well-worn copy—and a generous slathering of 2nd Skin--when we reach the comfort of our lodge room on the canyon rim.  

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey.

Simon & Schuster, 1998 (1968).  269 pages.

Nonfiction and Biographies

Everything is lovely and wild, with a virginal sweetness... Here all is exposed and naked, dominated by the monolithic formations of sandstone which stand above the surface of the ground and extend for miles, sometimes level, sometimes tilted or warped by pressures from below, carved by erosion and weathering into an intricate maze of glens, grottoes, fissures, passageways, and deep narrow canyons.  At first look it all seems like a geologic chaos, but there is method at work here.... 

Delicate Arch, August 2012

Early evening in late August, Arches National Park.  We are making a twilight pilgrimage to Delicate Arch, following a dim meandering path leading upward for a mile and a half into a queer region of knobs, domes, turrets and coves, all sculpted from a single solid mass of rock.... We’ve traveled this trail before: once, in the chill of an April morning, and once again on a warm July afternoon.  This time, in August, the late-in-the-day air might be cooling, but the rocks around us holds heat-- a clear, deep, passionate heat, heat made manifest when the sandstone begins to burn with heartbreaking sunset intensity, red and pink and orange and gold, a flaming kaleidoscope for the mind’s eye.  

We think of Edward Abbey: essayist, environmentalist, quintessential American contrarian—and of his classic account of three seasons spent as a park ranger in Arches National Park.  Abbey ruminates about many important things in Desert Solitaire, including the ephemeral nature of nature, the notion that, in good time, all is reduced... to dust, a burden on the wind.  We like the sound and feel of his words, the sound and feel of dust beneath our feet, the sound and feel of hot desert wind in this unlikely and magnificent place.  We pause halfway up the sandstone slope: a swig of water, a swipe of the brow, a survey of the fantastical terrain that encircles us.  We turn, turn, turn, and continue the climb, a burden on the wind.