“Do you know where the mountain is?”
I was standing at the signpost that read Pacific Crest Trail with my map spread out before me, a pack carrying all my essentials for the next two days on my back (although I had forgotten water), and generally wondering if I had gone the way that for weeks I had planned.
As readers know by now who have joined me on this journey of logging 100 backpacking miles this summer in memory of my wife of 50 years married lost recently to cancer, I am notorious in these wilderness wanderings for going left when my plan clearly had been to go right.
However, once again, had I gone the way my careful calculations dictated, I would have missed what – so incredible to me – was to happen.
“No, I don’t know where the mountain is,” I replied. “I haven’t seen it either.”
But because now we were both wondering where the mountain was and I, after all, had a map, we found where we were on the map and where the mountain was supposed to be.
According to the map, the mountain was right behind us. Huge in fact. Filled the whole map. Every glacier named. Every main route to the top drawn. Every trail for miles and miles with dotted zigzagging lines going here and there.
We both turned from where we stood and looked in the best-guess direction of where the map located the mountain. But it wasn’t there. Well, the mountain was there, but apparently clouds, minding their own business, with places of their own to go, run into the mountain given the mountain is so high and all of a sudden, just like that, there is this huge traffic jam of clouds.
No more mountain.
Disappointed, because I had been watching the updated seven-day weather forecast, around which I had planned this twelve miler into Anderson Lake (Anderson being my last name), I folded up my map, wished the stranger well, and I followed the ranger’s directions (left, instead of right) and headed on up the trail.
It was a fortuitous decision, another decision that did not go according to plan.
Not my plan anyway.
Hour after hour I hiked down one steep ridge and up another and then down again.
Finally, seeing some hikers heading the way I had just come, I asked “Do you know where Anderson Lake is?” They answered, “You’re standing next to it.”
Tiny, indistinct, you’d miss it if you’re not paying attention especially if it is encased in the misty, fog-enshrouded covering like it now was, just the very tops of trees poking through eerily like helmets on sentinels further adding to the mystery, Anderson Lake was indeed right there.
It was cold that night.
But the next morning dawned bright and clear, with the sunlight filtering through the trees on the forest trail. It was going to be a beautiful day.
I am instinctively drawn to photograph on the trail anything that occurs in pairs. Two beautiful alpine meadow blossoms that stand apart from all the others for example. I know I do this because my wife and I for a half-century were a pair, close, and in love.
I would read to her as the end came. She loved that. They were her favorite love stories. She’d heard them before. They were the very same stories I had read to her shortly after we were married. The setting was the mountains. Now that she’s gone, I think that’s why I go to the mountains. Sometimes, in reading to her, I would go off script and wax eloquent about what I envisioned how the flowery meadows should be described.
But as soon as I mentioned anything about butterflies, flitting here and there, flower to flower, my wife would open her eyes and say “David. Butterflies are not in there. Read what’s in the book.”
The butterflies may not have been in the book, but they were in my trail. At my feet. Not one, but two. A pair. Waiting to have their picture taken and then they were off.
After a long, long, slow step after slow step, climb back up the way I’d come down the day before, I turned a corner around a rock outcropping.
I found the mountain.
On the end of a log I sat, wearily shed my pack, removed my boots from my aching feet, and just stared.
I don’t know how long I was there. I do know this. Had I gone according to my plan, I would have missed what now could not be missed.
The mountain, in all its majesty, dominated the entire skyline. Other hikers would come, one even taking her place down the log aways. No one said anything. Just stared.
I reached for the cloth that hangs on the outside of my pack, not to wipe away sweat, but to brush away tears.
For there, standing tall, and close together, were two trees, before the mountain.
A pair.
And it was like, ‘the pair of blossoms, David? The pair of butterflies? The pair of trees before the mountain? This most beautiful of all days? The route you took?
‘This – all of this David – was for you.’
