All the moss-covered rocks looked like the cover of a Led Zeppelin album as I clambered out of the river and onto the shore. Another cold plunge in the mountain water by our camp, this time before dawn with the sky still dark. Without my glasses it all looked fuzzy and dreamlike. And there was a weird danger to it, too. The river went over a cliff down a waterfall and if you swam too close to the edge you could get pulled off the side and die. I pinned myself against a boulder so that didn’t happen and laughed at my luck: this strange crab of a man, naked and fleshy, defying death. It made me feel so alive, I wanted to hold on to that feeling forever.

Brad and I hiked the last 50 miles on the Oregon PCT northbound, from Timberline Lodge at Mt. Hood to a small border town where they filmed a scene from the movie Wild and people still lined up at the ice cream shop featured in the film. The PCT was closed in sections due to wildfire, most notably through northern California, forcing north-bounders who’d started in April to take alternate routes or save sections for a future date. With new fires in Oregon and Washington hikers devised elaborate workarounds, taking trains or hitching rides to alternate trails to finish the hike to Canada.

On our first night camping, near the flanks of Mt. Hood, Brad and I watched one of those fires burning in the distance. It died down as the sun set but flared up again in the morning, the same direction we were headed. And it gave a feeling of unease with the constant campfire smell and strange tinge to the light.

Because of the rerouting we ended our section on a trail through a scenic canyon called Eagle Creek, the site of another historic wildfire started by a 15-year-old boy in 2017. It was there we met a 75-year-old Japanese through-hiker named Snake Bite, who’d been bitten in the calf by a rattlesnake at the start of his journey in April, near Mexico. It had been a dry bite (no poison) but they still charged him $1,500 USD for the visit.

We stopped below a footbridge to soak our feet in the river and eat, and Snake Bite asked if he could join us. Brad told him we’d met while working at Starbucks many years ago, and Snake Bite pulled out a packet of Starbucks instant coffee and proudly displayed it. He carried a small American flag pinned to his pack and had the calves of a young man: had just retired from a long career in customer service, looked about 60.

Snake Bite’s English wasn’t great but he made a point of telling us that most of the young people he passed on the trail weren’t interested in talking or connecting, they were all in a rush. He said he planned to keep hiking as long as he could, because life is short and you don’t want to die in a hospital. Kiss your wife goodbye and die in two days, he said.

We didn’t have cell service on the trail but got news about the wild fires near trail heads where there was access to parking lots and day hikers passing through. In this way we really had to rely on other people for information, and I was surprised by how deep the connections felt with those we met.

On the last day I had my most memorable encounter with a solo through-hiker, a 62-year-old man from Alabama. We were just a few miles from the Washington border, the “Bridge of the Gods,” and he was carrying a bag of trash he’d collected not far back. He’d taken a picture of the note he wrote to the people who’d left the trash, handed it to me on his phone and asked what I thought of the note. Being so close to civilization you’d think that people would be more civilized I said, and he smiled. There was something odd about him and the fact he wore long layers, gloves, and a hat — though it was mid morning and getting hot.

Yet in the last few miles we had the deepest talk, so much so he nearly brought me to tears. He asked me to share one insight from our hike that week and I talked about my hope for humanity, that despite all the divisiveness in our country I wanted to believe that deep down inside, people know better: they default to kindness. I wanted to believe that, but had to qualify my optimism. It’s easy to love the people who love you back, he said. The hard part is loving those who don’t.

When we came to the end it felt like it had all gone by too fast and I wanted to keep going. There was something sad about being back in civilization with all the cars and people but I quickly got over that at the prospect of grilled fish, and handcrafted coffee.

My new friend from Alabama got tangled up in a debate with a local about COVID vaccines but it was a friendly disagreement and the local agreed to a selfie. Then he told us the story of that 2017 canyon wildfire, how it was so strong it created mini tornadoes, how the large basalt headwalls were so hot they glowed like campfire coals for days. As we parted ways he said don’t buy fish from those people selling it under the bridge, they say it’s fresh but it’s not. You can tell by the eyes.

We had come through that burned-out canyon in the morning but the aftermath of the fire filled me with hope. Here despite the dead were purple fireweed whorls blooming and a green underbrush offsetting the bone-colored white of the dead trees and brown scarred rocks. Life had a way of coming back it seemed. The way nature rebounded from a fire made me think people could too. Nature knew no sentiment: it just kept going.

I’d spent the summer making new memories and trying to revive favorites from my past. Like the microcassette recordings I made of my first summit attempt on Mt. Rainier; on those tapes were scenes from times we’d spent in the south of France and Morocco, when my stepdad John was still alive. Peepholes into the past, the museum of my life.

Why did I insist on saving things like that? It evoked such vivid sorrow. When I reminisced through memoir it felt both freeing and emptying, it hollowed me out. All I had loved and grown attached to would one day end, though on the surface you could be fooled into thinking it would last forever. That was the real lesson of life: to love it and let it go.

Wading in the mountain river in the early morning I’d felt the same, wanting so badly to hold on to the present. I’d trained all summer for it and now it was almost done. I used to write and record things as a way to preserve the moment but life’s not meant to be held, it’s just meant to live.

Snake Bite said these berries are the same as the ones he knew from Japan, though he did not know the name for them in English.

I gorged myself on those berries until it stained my hands and thought I will remember this, I will write it down.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, pacific northwest