Bergen: In defense of mountains – Sarasota Herald

No, it’s the feeling that’s familiar. The dull ache in my feet. The adrenaline, from dread, and a little bit of excitement. The way the land starts to fool me, makes me swear the half-mile we just covered was three. And those temporary moments where — if I do it just right — my mind resists the constant urge to think and I am free in the present, feet hitting hard dirt the only thing grounding me to Earth.

I had tried to opt out of this trail off Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park. But after spending the week north in Yellowstone, taking in spewing geysers, tranquil lakes and flowing waterfalls with my sister, Emily, she had pointed to a blue blob on the map. The blob was Lake Solitude, and to reach it, we’d have to hike around Jenny Lake, through Cascade Canyon, then uphill.

19 miles round-trip.

Dad had told her about this lake. He’d hiked to it with Mom years ago, on their honeymoon. Or was it their cross-country bike trip? Emily couldn’t remember.

I’m surprised at how angry her suggestion makes me. My feet are blistered from a week of walking. We had made a plan together — to try to see as much of the parks as possible, at the expense of exploring the backcountry. And — had she forgotten? — our family has dragged us on enough unnecessarily long hikes to last a lifetime, thank you.

“I want to go there.” Emily says sullenly, and she gives me a look that says, “You are a wimp. And I will be in a bad mood unless we do this.”

And so I agree. And I tell myself that it can just be like all the ones before. That no matter how miserable it gets, if I keep putting one foot in front of other, then eventually it will come to an end.

Family pastime

Mountains became my family’s permanent pastime when I was nine, my brother, Jack, seven, Emily just five. My parents drove us through winding roads in the Great Smoky Mountains until we piled out of the car in a parking lot, and walked the half-mile paved road to Clingmans Dome, the highest point in Tennessee. Shortly after, Dad informed us that this would become a tradition — climbing mountains — and we would keep hiking high points as a family.

This was a source of great dismay for me. I wanted to go to Italy for spring break, like my friend, Lea. Or take a family trip to Aruba, swim in oceans and drink pina coladas. Or partake in what I saw as the ultimate family vacation, a cruise.

“Dad, can’t we go on a REAL vacation?” I’d whine.

“You can see other countries when you’ve seen your own,” he’d say. He kept track of our mountain trips on a big map he hung in the computer room. I became convinced that my family hiked because we could not afford to travel overseas, that the outdoors was serving as some kind of poor man’s vacation. I’d realize later that these family hikes were truly characteristic of my parents, who seem to come to life when they were in the Great Outdoors, who rode their bikes across the country in the 1980s, who honeymooned in Grand Teton National Park, who wanted us to understand that big adventures could be found in this vast country of ours. Mom liked to regale us with the story of the bear that stole a bag of bread off her picnic table. Dad tirelessly reminded us that he didn’t develop a taste for coffee until his bike trip.

There was no use resisting. My parents were a united front, a force that said, “There will be hiking.”

I whined for most of our high-point trips, on the rainy 15-mile hike for New York’s Mount Marcy, the bug-infested walk to Georgia’s Brasstown Bald summit, the 3 a.m. wake-up call for Maine’s Mount Katahdin and the snow-slicked path of New Mexico’s Wheeler Peak. But they kept coming, and eventually I grew begrudgingly accustomed to our forced family passion. One peak turned into 37, until the trips stopped.

A bear and her cubs

We run into the Mama Bear and her cubs a mile or so into Cascade Canyon. We’d set out in good moods around 7 a.m., as the sun rose over Jenny Lake. I had thought we were alone on the trail, a concept both exhilarating and terrifying. But as we round a corner, I see a woman with a brown Park Service shirt frozen in the middle of the trail. She looks at us and cocks her head to the left. Across a creek, a mother black bear and her two cubs graze. They occasionally glance over at us, but seem undisturbed.

I look at my sister behind me and smile. We had quietly hoped to see bears, and had sought out higher elevation earlier in the week hoping to find them feasting before the hibernation season to no success.

I am elated, high on life.

Yes. Yes. Yes, I want to scream to the mountains. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

A bird skids across the water, making a loud sound. In a second, Mama Bear is on her hind legs, perusing for danger while her cubs run in the opposite direction to a tree.

When she’s satisfied, Mama Bear retrieves her kids from the tree, and the little family lumbers on its way.

Lucky?

The divorce blind-sided the family. I was 23, working in Florida. The siblings were home from college for summer vacation. It happened quickly, a whirlwind of revelations and a mountain of hurt. After the separation, my mother, a social worker, kept asking me to talk about “everything.” I resisted the question.

But the awful, guilty truth that kept me company at night was that, for the most part, I felt a peculiar sense of gratitude. I had weathered the journey from childhood to self-sufficiency with a family intact. If I tried hard enough, I could imagine my parents like a movie that fades to black long before an unfortunate plot twist.

Maybe I was lucky — to have left my family before it left me.

And so I was fine … Except.

Except I couldn’t shake this recurring sense of mourning for the memories, good and bad, that will never replicate themselves: a Thanksgiving dinner with everyone around the table, a trip packed in the minivan or a miserably long hike with my family.

And there was also this: What if reality wasn’t as as I remembered it — my happy hiking family, and me?

A stupid idea

Bear euphoria wears off after six more miles. My legs hurt and my body slows as we start uphill. Rocks have sunk into my lungs. I’m convinced I’m taking three breaths for every breath my sister takes. I’ve hiked enough to know that we’re not even that high.

“The lake should be around the corner,” I say to my sister as we pause on a rock pile. She looks at me, amused.

“We have at least 45 minutes uphill left,” she says and turns.

We had bonded on this sisters trip, told each other things we had never told each other. But the mountain breaks my mood, and I find myself dwelling in a familiar place of annoyance.

“This was a stupid idea,” I snap at my sister. Emily looks back at me patiently as I wheeze up the trail in her dust. And I’m grateful that she doesn’t take the bait, and knows enough to let my anger dissipate on the trail.

A love/hate relationship

I didn’t really hate it, did I? There was a part of me that enjoyed the novelty of our family hobby. It was a go-to icebreaker, something I used to impress teachers, boys, new friends. My parents’ stories, however repetitive, could seem hopelessly romantic. My siblings and I took advantage of our experiences for our college essays. (And so admissions officer, I tell you standing there in the freezing rain on the trail of Mount Marcy, I realized we would never finish the hike without determination and hard work…)

And somehow, for some reason, I can’t keep mountains out of my life. I spent spring break vacations camping with my friends. I take pleasure in planning trips with hotels and clean sheets and taxi cabs, but have cooled toward the idea of a cruise. And I had brought myself here, hadn’t I? Here to West Wyoming, where last week in Yellowstone I met a man who had visited Old Faithful 40 years ago and returned this year with his wife to find that it operated just the same.

Maybe, I’m not sad. Maybe I just had to come here to see something unmoving and regal and ageless. Something I can’t lose.

The end

Lake Solitude is almost anticlimactic. We sit by the water and eat beef jerky in silence until there is nothing left to do but move on.

The last mile back is the hardest, and Emily and I both yearn to be done. My sister is ahead of me by several hundred yards, and I watch her pause below me and then break into a hobbling sprint. I’m too tired to run after her, but I too speed up, eager to leave the mountain.

I can’t help but smile as I see the boat docks, where we can cheat ourselves of three miles by hopping on the Jenny Lake ferry. And I realize something — maybe I’ll never be able to articulate the ingrained loathing, undeniable respect and fleeting attraction I have for mountains. Maybe I’ll never understand what happened to the people I love who love mountains.

But I know this, I may be uncertain if I enjoyed this experience, but I am grateful for it. As the boat pulls away, I lift my head to watch those looming gray rock faces move farther away from us. I take it all in, just in case I never return. Then, because it is over, a part of me longs to do it all over again.