8/12

Boy what a day, I say in a voice ten years older than my own. Washington had given me nothing riveting over which to push my pen, only ghastly grey days and secret patches of snow, until today. In one day I passed between dimensions. The morning found me on the slopes of Mount Adams, by a lava bedded spring, and the ensuing fifteen miles were no more than a race through damp green woodland against hungry mosquitoes. Cheese sticks and dark chocolate were the proud sponsors of today's race. Breaking above the pine trees and into the legendary Goat Rocks Wilderness opened an entirely new perspective, standing in the jewel on the Yakima Valley's crown.

I chatted with curious people hiking for a day or weekend, answering the questiosn about equipment I can almost write a memo to address. Yes my pack is small- nine pounds. I walk thirty-five miles a day, and excuse me so that I can race ahead, after I eat this dark chocolate.

By seven in the evening I reached the lower slopes of Old Snowy, a mountain unsurprisingly covered in snow. By the way, it is mid-august. The fog descended on me but I plunged ahead, and over the ridge, fighting through a wall of white, kicking stpes into a floor, in a dense white room of the matrix. At 7100 feet altituted I suddenly received the radio signals coming from Portland, telescoped directly to my Alpine retreat. Little did the cosmopolitans in bars and clubs and homes with windows know I was privvy to their party. But I stole the dance when Katy Perry's song "California Girls" was played, and I stepped up the snow listening to the sound of gin and juice beneath the palm trees.

On top of the ridge was like walking the tip of a knife suspended from heaven. A three foot wide tightrop of rock held me in the sky. I was racing, racing fast, and though some say it is more rewarding to smell the flowers, I was thrilled to run down the side of that snowy mountain, down through the fog and past the last rays of light, to a lake where I crashed by someone else's fire. The fatigue of these adventures is creeping on me, but they can't kick me out of my own home.