Chapter 4
I slept like a baby....in a shaky womb! I woke up here then there then here then there every five to six minutes it seemed. I kept feeling cold drops on my tent encompassed face, splashing me in my absurd position. It wasn’t raining nor snowing but the little snow capped branches on the tree above kept dropping little pieces of snow, probably due to the breeze pushing the little white flakes off their foundations.
If I wasn’t tired, frustrated, and a little insane I might have recognized those little snow drops as snowy Buddha’s affecting my senses to remind me that they hadn’t existed prior to my feeling them - a demonstration pure and true of no-thingness. I only saw them as a nuisance and further proof that I was stupid to be out here alone.
Finally my long awaited sun rose and I was quick to throw my tent blanket off me and head back home.
I first grabbed the “Power Bar” I’d saved for breakfast - frozen solid. “Well, at least one thing went right,” I said to the trees. “My sleeping bag works. It does, in fact, keep you warm in freezing temperatures.”
I would have ran down that white mountain if all the snow from the day before hadn’t turned into hard stone ice. The trail turned from gentle marshmallow puffs to speed demon bobsled race courses. The mountain lion tracks were crystalized and to the side of them were my hefty boot prints, frozen together as two wildly different Bikkhus walking the same path - one at this point lacking in faith, the other making his home among the ageless conifers and the dreamy snow scene. One panicked and tired, the other serene. One fighting his surroundings, the other, one and the same. The mountain lion was my teacher but I lacked the eyes to see. And I made my way carefully down this treacherous icy slope cursing and muttering.
Halfway down I stopped by a tree, hungry to eat my frozen “Power Bar”. I took it out of my pocket and between the body heat and the pocket friction it was good to go. Sitting by that tree, putting something in my stomach, I started to look around and appreciate my surroundings. I was in a fresh snow garden like some mystical fantasy guy. Everything was soft and clean. The only boot prints around were mine. This place, in this exact moment, only existed for me, through my senses. And nobody else could even conceive of it - especially at home in their warm comfort.
“You got to get out in this world,” I said with hope that the sound waves would be carried off into some lonely soul, encouraging them to get up and move. I looked up and saw clear skies and I felt blessed that my jacket was so warm.
“Things aren’t so bad. At least I’m not talking to myself anymore.”
“That’s right,” I replied. I was starting to feel real glad that I came up here and slept in an unerected tent and one day would by able to laugh at my utter sense of discouragement and loss of faith from the troubled night before.
“Today I’m in Heaven and it’s a snowy glade like Santa and his crazy wife.”
I looked over to the side and saw a pile of little black poles - the very poles that would have made my last evening comfortable. It was all coming together - full circle.
What I didn’t notice was that I wasn’t two feet from an incredible patch of pure stony frozen over ice. I stepped onto it with no reservation, no caution whatsoever, and it grabbed my foot and yanked it clean out from under me, swinging me like a pendulum till I landed, once again proving Newton’s physics, hard on my fragile side.
At first I simply laid there, backpack attached, feet straight out, right arm free, left arm crushed, head softly leaning. “Am I paralyzed?” I thought - feeling nothing both in the senses and in the mind. I laid there examining this crazy scene sideways. “No, I can move.” And then I screamed.
All the anger, the frustration, the pain, the sorrow, the wrath was unleashed in this scream and I can only imagine brother mountain lion hung his head. I staggered up to a standing position, bruised all up the side. I carefully made my way across the ice, snatched up the cursed poles and limped away down the icy trail. All my thoughts of Heaven and Santa Claus were lost to the rage, my limp serving as a physical reminder of the disastrous nature of this trip.
I gathered all my energy and started on the trail with full intention to finish this horrible hike as quickly as possible, drive home and sink into a warm porcelain bathtub. I was limping like a regular cripple.
As I was making my way down I kept looking over my shoulder to tremendous drop-off falls and then I’d look at my feet standing on slick ice exactly like the kind I slipped on earlier. I’d think, “I better not slip here or I’ll be at the bottom of a fatal fall.” And I actually felt glad for my recent tumble because it kept me careful on these dangerous switchbacks. And I had to go slow because my leg at this point was one big throbbing bruise. I only had one leg at this point - one leg and a long black and blue stick - my burden - my cross.
After entirely too long a time, I made it to the bottom of San Jacinto and said a short prayer thanking everything for keeping me alive and relatively safe (relative to the fact that in the end I survived - I don’t by any means think I was actually safe).
I crawled in my car, ready to get home and have the greatest bath of my entire life.
My stick shift car was like a steady irritation to the bruise stick extending from my battered waste. Every time I had to shift gears I grimaced in pain and pushed down on that pedal with my dead meat leg. Catching onto that freeway to take me home was a relief and at this point I was counting minutes to climb into that bathtub. With Gordon Lightfoot blasting from my speakers I called out, “One hundred forty-eight minutes!” - a long trip home for this lonely pilgrim but I was starting to appreciate the fact that I had this crazy adventure and the shadows on the side of the road were starting to look like trees again - something you don’t recognize when your mind is troubled.
About an hour from home I drove into Julian, a nice quiet remote woodsy Heaven, and I saw the ever tempting and angelic Dudley’s Bakery - home of the best bread in America (the best bread in the world being, of course, German). I parked on the side thinking it would be nice to bring home a couple loaves for the folks, being that they begged me not to go on this trip and they were right. I stumbled out of the car and made my way in.
As I was waiting in line I started to have an acute awareness of what, exactly, I looked like. I think this awareness came from the general look of shock in the eyes of the good old Julian folk that I limped by.
I looked down at my pants. They had a couple rips in them I had not noticed and they were dirty as can be, muddy at the bottom from the interplay between the snow and the dirt.
I looked at my hands. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed the blood all over them from before. By now it was dried and hard, like clay on the hands. I’d actually scratched up my left hand pretty good from the fall.
I glanced in the window to see my reflection. My hair was standing up every which way and it was good and oily. I also had a little blood around my lip. I was an absolute mess! As beat as they come and twice as scraggly.
The line diminished and it was my turn to order. I hobbled up to the counter, looking in dire need of a crutch or maybe an ambulance.
In my head I called out in a burly mountain-man voice, “I’ll have one loaf of potato bread and one sourdough.” But I’d just spent a car ride in silence, basking in Gordon Lightfoot, letting my tired throat slowly dry out because my water was gone. What I said in actuality to the lady behind the counter was, “Can...have one...ota (cough, hack) potato loa and....(hmmm, hmmm) one sour... sourdough....(hmmm, hmmm) please?”
The nice lady looked at me in genuine concern for a moment, putting together raspy voice with hobbly injured walk with bloody hand with torn up and dirty pants with sweaty wild hair and thinking, “madman, homeless bum, alcoholic, car-crash victim, plane wreck wanderer, or bigfoot?” And she shrugged and bagged me my bread. I hobbled out of Dudley’s Bakery like a pirate on a stick leg, an outcast to society, totally beat, but laughing on the inside, totally satisfied and crazy. Incidentally Julian did report a bigfoot sighting a week later that made national news (my sister in Alabama told us a bigfoot sighting was reported in Julian, California!). I chuckled inside and thought, “I wonder if he visited Dudley’s Bakery?”
When I got home my folks were happy to know I was alive and they sat around wide and nodding as I told them about the disastrous trip. They assumed I’d learned my lesson not to go camping alone - particularly in the dead winter - but by this time I was happy with the trip and the things I’d learned. For one thing, I learned that Buddhism is hard work and there’s a reason there’s so much focus on discipline as wise old enlightened monks whap their humble students on the backs with canes. Buddhism is not simply about going into the woods and finding Nirvana under a rock. I mean, yes, that’s part of it, but it takes time and it takes right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right means of livelihood, right endeavor, right mindfulness, and right contemplation. I broke like a twig when I found myself in brutal cold with a lame tent, obviously showing that these attributes were not deeply held within me. I think I went to San Jacinto in hopes of finding these things, forgetting in every way that they are not external and I should have spent some time contemplating the whiteness of the snow.
The other lesson I learned is that the wilderness is very good about intensifying experience. It’s so easy to get lost in your thoughts hiking and the leaves seem to whisper sweetness in your ear and you experience good long breaths of Samati. The joy in your heart is energized by the very trail you stand on. On the other hand, in an intense and morbidly bad situation such as I found myself, these leaves will haunt you and tell you you’re gonna die. And the moon will just stare at you like it’s plotting and any feelings of fear or sadness you have stirring within you will multiply exponentially till you go practically insane, as exemplified by my troubled experience.
As I lay down in the warmest, wettest, most calm and serene bath of my life I thought, “There are deep mystical forces around San Jacinto. I need to return some time with a beginner’s mind in calm contemplation and repose. The Buddha lives there, as he lives everywhere, in everything.”
No comments:
Post a Comment