[at-l] Bear Mountain Tango Part II

[cballs@mindspring.com (Curtis Balls)]

Part II - Bear Mountain Tango

Although I had been up Bear Mt. several times in a car, this was my first
time on foot.  The Trail on the north side of the mountain is paved for the
first quarter mile.  I didn't like the pavement.  I was beginning to wonder
if this went all the way to the top, and beginning to get annoyed at
whomever's idea it was to come out here and put down asphalt in this place
and had started drafting letters to my congresspeople in my head when the
asphalt finally faded away and I was again on tierra firma.  I suppose it
was the remains of some road up to the ski jump that didn't look like it
was operational any longer.  It's August, so it wasn't easy to tell for
sure about the ski jump.

I rummaged around among the fallen limbs until I found a walking stick.  At
the base of Bear Mountain just past the paved section, the forest takes on
a stately, almost manicured magnificence.  The lush foliage is mostly in
the canopy, which gives the woods a kind of cool greenish indirect light.
You can't quite catch the tops of the trees in eyesight they are so
straight up and evenly spaced and uniform in size.  You have to bend your
head completely back to see how far up they go.  The tree trunks, rising
out of the steep mountainside blanketed in dead fallen leaves, look like
enormous dark gray birthday candles stuck in a brown lopsided cake.  The
Trail rolls gently through this portion but only for a few minutes.  The
incline quickly gets steep and rocky and the trees get shorter and the tree
roots start to take over the Trail.  Since it hasn't rained in NY for a
month, it was also dusty.  The huffing and puffing had started and it
wouldn't get any easier until I got to the top, about an hour and a half
later.  The mountain and the forest go through several changes on the way
up.  Well, no, no that's not quite right.  Bear Mountain has been there for
a very, very long time, even before it was called Bear Mountain, even
before there was such a word as "bear," even before there was English and
back even before that.  I experienced the differences in the flora and rock
formations on my way up the mountainside.  It's a different place at the
top than it is at the bottom and different still in the middle.  It isn't
that the mountain hasn't gone though any changes.  It's gone through
plenty.  It's a living thing.  Slowly though, very, very slowly except when
humankind intervenes.  But Bear Mountain didn't go through any changes
while I was there.  I did.  That mountain whipped my behind.  At some point
I was grabbing at the saplings and tree trunks to keep from tumbling
backwards.  All my diligence in cutting off all those labels and throwing
out all that useless packaging and packing only what food I needed didn't
seem to have helped.  The pack still felt like I was carrying bricks.  I
passed some Australians.  The man was carrying a daypack.
"I'll trade 'ya."
"No, yours weighs more," he keenly observed.
"The pack and everything in it, plus $10.  That's my final offer," I
puffed.  He grinned and turned up the trail ahead of me.  At some point the
guy who had been beaten down by the Trail map back at the Inn passed me.
He and his wife were empty-handed.  I consoled myself with thinking, well,
yes, but they're lost; at least I'm not lost.

About half way up I found a large flat-topped rock, all dark on the bottom
with moss and decorated with lichen around the top, an expansive, inviting
place to drop the pack, chug some water and catch my breath.  I took out
the trail mix and nibbled while watching all the day hikers maneuver their
way up, a few feet at a time. Great blinding shafts of light coming into
the forest at this point between the more scattered trees and saplings made
the hikers seem like supplicants, almost beatific, as they stared up the
mountain side to ask, "How much further Lord?  How much further?"  After
about 10 minutes, the Trail map victim and his wife passed me again.  "How
did you get behind me?"  I called out.  "Uhh, we took the wrong trail," he
mumbled.  I had spoken to him about the AT and how it was blazed while we
were back at the Inn.  I told him that it went all the way to the top.  No,
he didn't want that one.  There was another one that he'd been on a few
years before that he thought was better.  I think they were from New
Jersey.  Or maybe it was because he's a man.  Men are never lost.  Even
when they don't know where they are, they're not lost.  Two middle-aged
Jamaican women came down the mountain while I was sitting there, I could
hear their syncopated patter about how beautiful the mountain was while one
told the other one where to step so as not to fall down.  Since I was ready
to go, I strapped on my pack and stepped back on the Trail.  I showed the
Jamaicans how useful the walking stick would be for them while descending
the mountain.  We looked around and finally found a couple good ones.  They
thanked me and off they went, tottering but stable.

I turned to face more up.  The trees were beginning to thin out a little
here and glimpses of the river valley below and the mountains on the other
side of the river were occasionally visible.  Just before coming to the
first level portion since I began at the base, a young man and woman from
Trinidad came up behind me.  They both looked to be around 20 years old.
We greeted each other and began to speak of this mountain and hiking in
Trinidad.  They said they liked hiking and often hiked the mountains at
home, especially since the beach was waiting for them once they came down.
They seemed as fresh and open and gentle as a leeward breeze.  They lived
in the City, students, and this was the first time the young woman had
hiked up Bear Mountain.  We all agreed how lovely it was but she complained
how hard the climb had been up to this point.  He hadn't told her how hard
it would be.  He didn't think it was hard at all.  He'd hiked it about five
times now and thought it was a good workout.  Of course it was easy, he was
with his woman.  Nothing to it.  We walked together until we reached a
plateau with eastern views.  The young Trinidadians went over to check it
out and I continued up the Trail.

Sometimes the Trail markings turn out to be a riddle.  The Trail here
turned up a steep incline and then entered a cleared area with an old paved
road, which didn't look like it was being used any longer.  The Trail made
a 90-degree right turn up to a paved traffic circle and then a 90-degree
left turn and ran along a paved road.  I began looking for the white blazes
everywhere.  That's the fun part, trying to find what clever places the
trail maintainers have found to put the white blazes.  They might be on the
pavement, outcroppings of the rock face, tree saplings, boulders placed
alongside the road to serve as a guard rail, man-made posts - anywhere.
Except maybe the tree leaves.  I don't know.  I wasn't looking for them
there.  I walked along the road for about a quarter mile and then the Trail
goes up the mountainside again over a sparsely treed area that was
overgrown with mountain laurel.  The vegetation was colored a paler green
than down below.  It looked faded.  Everything was short up here.  Just as
I entered the Trail off the side of the road, they caught my eye.  Two doe
and two fawns were grazing above my head about 150 feet away.  They seemed
tame and paid no attention to me at all.  I've always known deer to bolt
from you and leap off in that amazingly graceful flight that leaves you
holding your breath for a few seconds and makes your heart skip around.  I
walked back a few steps to the roadside and waved the Trinidadians on who
were just below me still on the road.  I signaled for them to be quiet.
The young man came, the woman stayed on the road.  He and I stood there for
awhile, silently together, admiring the deer.  A white family with two
young children came down the Trail from above us and watched for a second
or two and then the father began fiddling with his complicated camera
equipment, looking at the deer through the lens, trying to frame them just
right.  The mother had already pulled out an instamatic and snapped a few,
looking at the deer through the lens.  The children just looked.  And
fidgeted some and looked some more.  The little girl wanted the camera so
she could look at the deer through the lens.  The family looked very neatly
dressed in expensively tailored, color-coordinated outdoor catalog
clothing.  Pressed and clean and healthy.  The father wanted to get a
picture of the children with the deer in the background.  He took some more
pictures, looking at the scene through the camera lens in the way
everything else in the world gets looked at these days, including his
children.  They seemed a perfectly happy family.

I moved on when the deer did.  The young man turned and went back to the
road to his girlfriend, who apparently had decided that walking up the
paved road was easier than climbing the Trail.  Things got a little steep
again and the trees all but disappeared.  There were lots of white people
up this far.  Man-woman couples.  All of them day hikers.  No one spoke.
Some of them didn't speak even after I'd said hello.  The trees began to
look like bonsai.  Squatty and stubby, short limbs, thick trunks.  The
Trail leveled off as I came closer to the top of the mountain.  Weaving my
way through several huge, flat-topped rock formations that looked left over
from "Lost In Space" episodes, I found a picnic table on a broad flat rock
that stuck up out of the ground about twelve inches.  At the moment the
place was deserted.  Finally, a place to sit down, unharness the pack and
enjoy the views.  I hung out here for awhile and ate my apple.  I walked
around on top of the rocks that were so expansive and level that they made
you want to dance on them.  I was feeling a little triumphant about having
made it up the mountain and a whole lot relieved that the
hardest part was over that as soon as I got my wind and had some water I
felt like dancing.  Maybe a little Zen Tango.  Psychologically, the tango
is a dangerous dance.  It marks out the promise and passion, the excitement
and the pain of loving and living with its constant, abrupt, switchback
movements; it's quick reversals.  It's beautiful.  You go with the flow and
you have to keep up.  Your dance partner is not so much a partner as a
challenge, the dance a gauntlet.  You can get hurt.  There are no
guarantees.  I thought about the Trail, its beauty and peace; how rolling
along you take what the Trail offers, without planning for anything
specific to happen or knowing what might happen.  It's best to remain
limber and open and accepting.  Best not to fight it.  It makes you feel
creative, alive, and centered.  I thought about how much work my climb up
had been, about how tired and winded I got from time to time and how hot.
I began to have doubts about a thru-hike next year.  I'd only been out for
an afternoon.  I had been sweating all the way up the mountain but I hadn't
begun to smell yet.  What, I wondered, would I feel like once I'd been
rained on for several days and was muddy and dirty and had laid in a tent
or shelter, cold and stinking and then hot and sweaty, muscles and bones
aching and feet all blistered.  Lonely.  Hungry.  How long could I endure
that?  I'd grown up on a farm and I'd certainly been most of those things
for a day or two, but never for long stretches of time.  And now I've lived
in the city for 16 years and have become accustomed to certain comforts and
convienencies.  Would being trail hardened make the critical difference?
How long would it be before I became trail hardened?  What did I really
want to do a thru-hike for anyway?  A bridge to a new life?  For the
adventure?  To escape?  Was it okay to want to escape?  What would I be
escaping into?  What if I just couldn't stand it after a week or a month?
What if I couldn't make it out of Georgia?  Would I feel like a failure
after telling all these people what my plans were?  I was having a field
day with myself up there on the top of Bear Mountain, all alone.  The
Harpies were after me.  This little Bear Mountain Tango was nothing like
the enormity of the challenge of walking 2,160 miles over the full stretch
of the Eastern Mountains.  The more I contemplated the whole thing, the
more doubtful and afraid I became.  With every step I take on this Trail,
my respect and admiration increases for those who can rightfully call
themselves "Thru-hiker."  I strapped on my backpack and took off walking.
I'll just walk, I thought.  I'll walk until there's an answer or until it
doesn't matter anymore.

-------------------

End Part II