By Olivia Dugenet
Cover photo courtesy of Olivia Dugenet
I was backpacking alone because I had desperately needed a break from my everyday life. I was in the Lewis range of the Montana Rockies, in summer, and I had been rationing a low water supply for a couple of miles. There were no streams at that elevation. Just ragged stone against plump white clouds that stampeded east, shapeshifting as they ran. My thirst compounded with every step. Close to finishing a long climb, I walked in long, fast strides up and over the ridgetop where the wind hit me suddenly with invisible force.
I stumbled all over the place, shuffling my feet and flailing my arms to maintain balance, but the heavy backpack threw off my center of gravity. I landed hard on my hands and knees and caught my sunglasses with one hand just as the wind ripped them off my face. I shoved them in through the collar of my shirt and speed-crawled to the leeward side of an enormous stone cairn. I sat down, wiggled out of my backpack, and leaned into the stone.
Some part of me had hoped that immersion in wild nature would produce answers about how to escape the difficulties that had recently plagued me. For example, several days earlier I had accidentally chopped the tip of my thumb off with a kitchen knife. That’s the sort of mishap that makes me want to throw chairs through windows. There were other things: divorce, financial losses, isolation, a child’s health crisis, a car crash, job change, emergency vet, etc. I had handled all that, but I drew the line at a thumb stump, which was now throbbing and wrapped in bloody, dirt-crusted bandages at 7,600 feet.
I squinted up at the surrounding stone and sky and wondered if I could distill wisdom that amounted to anything more than confirmation bias. I was looking for potent insight grounded in raw physical reality. Sitting there in the dirt, though, all I got was thirstier and farther behind schedule. I recklessly drank my last four ounces of water and stepped back into the barreling wind.
The trail snaked for miles along a narrow spine, skirting oblivion. Eventually it rose steeply to a lookout platform situated in the middle of nowhere with shock-and-awe views of the surrounding landscape—a massive assembly of towering peaks and arétes, sharp as blades. I scrambled up, uttering expletives to keep my spirit light while gusts hurled me toward the cliff edge.
An agitated young man stood on the ridge fidgeting and watching me climb. Enormously tall with a wild expression and broad build, he charged toward me. “We’re lost!” he shouted over the wind and waved a GPS device as proof. He blurted out a story about how he’d gotten disoriented and stumbled mistakenly into this unknowable and sinister region. As I was the only other person he’d seen, he was convinced I had also lost my way.
I don’t know why I believed him. Instantly I felt my heart drop, and dug my phone out of my pack to have a look at my own GPS app. “Where are you heading?” he said. I told him the name of the lake and he shouted in triumph. “I knew it! You are so lost. You’re going the wrong direction. These are the wrong mountains.”
He held his digital device up so I could see. I leaned in close and studied the one-dimensional black outlines of various peaks that appeared on his screen. Then I looked up and around at the mountains themselves, silent snow-spotted giants. How were the mountains wrong? This guy wasn’t making sense. “Hold on,” I said. “Where are you going?” Watching the worry on his face, I wondered which was more dangerous: getting physically lost in the wild, or mentally lost in a maze of disappointment and despair.
He told me his destination and I laughed out loud. “You’re not lost,” I said. “I passed that lake earlier today. There is one trail between here and there, and you are on it.”
“How can that be?” He held up his GPS again.
“Don’t overthink it,” I said. “I promise you’re on the right track. Just keep going.”
“But this wind—it isn’t safe. This can’t be right.” he said.
“That’s true. It isn’t safe,” I said. “This isn’t normal wind. It’s a storm. Be careful out there.”
I wished him luck and moved on, glad to distance myself from his gloom, but also grateful for the encounter. I thought of Alfred Korzybski, the philosopher and engineer who had offered the simple yet profound observation that “the map is not the territory.” When we find ourselves resisting the challenging terrain of true experience, it’s a clue that we’ve strayed into abstraction. Coming into the trip, I had been sure my difficulties were “the wrong mountains.”
My mouth imploded with thirst. A few more miles of dry, wind-scattered scree later, my backpack and I were jogging down wildflower hillsides toward the blue lake. I filtered cold, fresh water and marveled at its sweetness, its revitalizing power, its weird, shape-changing properties and the alien feel of it on my lips. The way I was experiencing water felt like . . . potent insight grounded in raw physical reality.
I walked my whole sweaty, aching body in for a swim. I treaded water with my injured hand suspended above the surface, the aching digit inside its soggy gauze encasement forced into a persistent and involuntary thumbs up.
Olivia Dugenet is a Spokane writer and frequent backcountry traveler whose left thumb is just a tiny bit shorter than her right.
