10.08.19

   Mein Alltag:

    Six and a half months in Switzerland. Breathtaking alpine reveries. Sunsets arching behind villages in green pastures in hallowed valleys lined with waterfalls, animals, pines, and patches of melting glacial snow. Mornings with bitter instant coffee next to mirror-lake sublimity. Sharing moments with friends and family. Taking kids on their first epic hikes. Slowly warming to the language. Lists checked and unchecked. Things done and left undone. Memories from songs. Dreams on the verge of authentic language every night. Guiding halos. Warnings. Illuminated little footpaths by candle light.
    People tend to ask: "So, what's next?" i.e. surely, I'm scheming something as usual. Either I did the PCT or I lost my mother or I moved to Switzerland. It's very rare that someone gets a glimpse into the context of all three side by side. That's hard enough for me most days. I've hiked around 700 miles in the Alps in the past six months; packing tents and tripods and food over the red and whites in fog, rain, lightening, rock falls, and melting avalanches brimming with mangled trees and silt.
    I've got an immense respect for this range, which claims more lives each year than most ranges in any given decade. Honestly, it's the access and allure. It's the seductive mountain hut culture and guided package tours - all of which amounts to money. People take gondolas straight up into the sky having never set foot on a mountain before and fall thousands of feet on a weekly basis. The Alps themselves are laced with every topographical condition imaginable. Glaciers, seracs, avalanches, flying boulders, and the like and they never stop moving throughout the year. I suppose we tend to forget we are little more than guests in a living cathedral.
    For almost a year after the trail, every former impulse was replaced by an incessant  need to re-commune. I didn't care about the mileage or elevation. It had very little to do with anything rational. It felt more like a raw magnetism to the places I belonged. I can't describe the allure of the mountains in general. I can only empathize when I hear quotes from Fred Becky and Messner and the like; people whose lives are symbiotic with the heights. Is it the climb? The blood thumping through your chest alongside the sound of your lungs in the mid-morning air? The silence in between? The way your mind turns completely off when you've reached a pass only to stare into the endless distance? And this distance...this safe conciliatory distance from an endlessly-maniacal-driven world...it's all whispers up here. The idea of language and craft isn't part of the vernacular. It's communication to be sure, but it forces me to wonder what's really worth communicating at the end of the day...
    We walked and walked this summer. We camped behind barns on private farmland. We drank from streams. We watched the sun go down over endless snow-melt lakes and mended blisters and hunger and made little campfires when we could.
    For me, the ultimate allure of the mountains is in their distinct realm. The higher you go, the more you realize how humans are really designed for waterways and coasts. From these little islands of civilization we regard them resting eternally along the horizons of the earth; sentinels that gather clouds and light up for our pleasure at dusk. However once I walk deep and high; whether the Sierra, Cascades, Rockies, or Alps - I find an ecological precision more in tune with the daily seasonal rites than any reference down below.
    The high mountains are sacred because they're largely inaccessible. They're inaccessible because humans never found them practical places to exist. In climes above 15,000 feet, human existence becomes tedious and, if you go much higher, nearly all forms of biological life cease to get a foothold. The highest established town in the world is La Rinconada in Peru at 16,700 feet and it's more of an old mining settlement. If you climb Wheeler Peak outside Taos at 13,161 feet you'll go well above the tree-line with little more than clumps of grass here and there. A winter summit would be extremely challenging although I'm sure its been done.
    These places are always in flux. Always moving. Always pushing and pulling, falling and rising. Melting and freezing. I've never seen more immediate signs of process than in the high mountains, but the more time I spend in them the more I see that they're intrinsic to all life down below. It's like a great cyclical work of engineering where everything eventually undergoes osmosis and returns. The mountains themselves are often partially comprised of ancient seabed raised thousands of feet into the sky where they mingle with the atmospheric currents and create their own weather patterns. Then, out of the blue these changes in electromagnetic flow and impedance and temperature and ionized vapor et al (and who really knows) charge the atmosphere and nature herself comes crashing in with such fury that that wildfires engulf entire mountainsides. Packed snow breaks loose and comes hurtling down, snapping hearty pines and tossing them aside. Creeks rage at full tilt, flying over cliffs, carrying branches and sediment to the lakes below.
    Back in the relative safety of the civilized world below...very little moves at these rates. We power our movement. We plug in. We set up relay and proxy systems to exist, but we've tamed the general landscape, covering it with cement and asphalt and metal and glass and petro-chemical by-products so we can shoot radiative waves of all sorts to each other. If we can't find suitable bodies of water, we find valleys and siphon the water hundreds of miles in from the snow-melt rivers that gradually warm and lose their tenacity in the languid canals and water systems until they're treated with chemicals and made 'available for public consumption'. What is this for?
    I often wonder if conscious evolution is something within our grasp to appreciate, let alone apprehend. Or do societies simply evolve indefinitely until they reach terminal velocity and push through a gateway to another way of existing? I suppose it depends if you take a linear approach or not. I can't exactly see a model of that future at this point. A future where the genome is hacked and everyone's lives are uploaded to servers and siphoned by algorithms. When I look at so much of the modern world I see little more than replacement-level stage-craft. I see poorly-drawn copies. Maybe Einstein was onto something when he suggested we look deeply into nature if we wish to understand everything better. He also said we still know less than one-thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us, and what has taken its place? Narratives. Endless mad-cap stories about a world that never even existed. In the meantime:
  



    
   
    
     
    
    
    

 
   

    
    
   
    
   
   
   

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