of freedom. The wildness that lies dormant in so many of us seems to
awaken to the smell of mid-spring melt and the sounds of spongy marsh
under heels.
The day that ensued after getting back on the trail was like
something out of the Odyssey. About a mile up the trail the sky let loose
and, in its own way, baptized us in Nature’s name. I remember tramping
along watching the little drops of water reach the tip of my rain hood.
I would try to catch them with my sodden boots between hopping
from rock to rock. It must have been a cool day, too, as I can remember
taking a break off the trail at one point and seeing steam rising from our
damp hair. Don’t mistake rain for misery, though. I could not have been
traveling with a more chipper group. We sang classic rock songs and hits
of the 90s whenever we could hear ourselves through the pattering rain.
This group had a great sense of adventure and life. And the scenery!
Every turn was more incredible than the last. We’d be trekking through a
pine forest, the thick, dark green swallowing the hikers ahead of me, and
all of a sudden we’d pop out onto a grassy, rocky hillside where you could
see the trail bobbing over little hills in the distance. The next mile we’d
be on a ridgeline where we could see entire valleys and the rain would
turn to mist and I’d pull down my hood for a moment and just let the
mist form tiny droplets in my eyelashes. By the time we reached our next
camp, we must have looked like sodden vagabonds, the only dryness on
us our packs under their rain-flys.
Once the rain showed mercy, we took the chance to set up
camp near a sizable river. As irony would have it, we all changed into
“swimwear” that we didn’t mind getting wet and set off to find a nearby
“waterslide,” as our guide called it. We were soaked. What was it going to
hurt? Along the way I stopped to look at a large undercut in the far side
of the riverbank when I realized what I was seeing. It was a coal seam. I
had never seen a coal seam unearthed without the help of entire mining
crew. It was undisturbed blackness. I thought of the earth heating and
pressing plant matter for thousands of years to form this black rock and
then thrusting it with immeasurable force to the surface where it would
once again feel the sun. What was it worth to the trees growing around it,
to the bugs in the water, to a coal-fired power plant? It was just a rock on
this vast earth. Nothing more than a rock.
With the waterslide nowhere in sight, we splashed about on the
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