Shining Rock

C-double-you and I took a hike along the Art Loeb trail into the Shining rock wilderness. This trail runs across an entire spine of a mountain ridge, which is not unlike many ridges in the area, but for one thing, most of it burned 50 years ago and the re-growth in the area is not nearly as thick as all the surrounding hills so you have spectacular views; that and its really high up.


We hiked in Sunday afternoon as most folks were leaving. He and I talked and talked about outdoorsness. He is from the perspective that can be summarized by Ray Jardine's The Ray Way, which is a method of making and packing gear that is all about multi-use and efficiency so you can get to the middle of nowhere. I on the other hand, have subscribed to the idea that REI is
a store of the gods and have been happy to pay for their expertise so I can get to more important things like accounting. Anyhow we picked a great place to camp in a grove of hemlocks on the Southeast side of the hills to avoid prevailing winds; it was also only a hundred feet from a spring where we filled our water bottles. He pitched his tarp, and I my tent, and then we went back up to the ridgetop to cook dinner under the sunset.


The night was spent around the fire with us sharing stories of everything, as campfires in the middle of nowhere have a way to draw out the depths. I told the story of how I had proposed to my ex-wife before even holding her hand; and he spoke of things that are held in secrecy under the Code of the Campfire.
He taught me to tie a couple of knots and I have found that once I have the motions down, its easier to do without looking and to not bother my mind with seeing, but to trust my fingers. The training is paying off. After sipping the fine fine aged scotch C-double-you brought along (even his liquor bottle is wrapped with duct tape, so he doesn't have to carry a whole roll of the stuff) we put the fire out and were both relieved to find that neither of us stood by the tradition of peeing a fire out because, well, it stinks, but more importantly, isn't how you show respect to something that can disintegrate you down to molars.
I sleep fitfully because my sleepmat, the inflatable kind, has blown a seam and doesn't inflate. This has not bothered me for months as i've slept on hardwood floors on it from Florida to NYC, but when the ground underneath you is, literally, frozen, that missing layer of insulation is found to be crucial. But its hard to complain about the ice on the bottom of your tent when you wake into the sun rising off the eastern ridge.

We decided to shoot for Shining Rock, a HUGE quartz deposit a few mountaintops from where we slept. In the spirit of our adventure we decided to forgo the trail and bushwhack our way through the network of blueberry bushes. After half an hour of this we found a bunch of bushes the birds had not picked clean, which revived us to continue off in the wrong direction. This took us into the most magnificent hemlock clearing I have ever crawled through briars into. It was clearing like this after clearing like this interspersed with rhododendron thickets. We were amazed by the space so much that we were devising a way to mark off boundaries for a paintball or capture the flag game on the mountain top. But then we realized we were off track and doubled back by walking through thousands of blueberry bushes to camp and took the trail.
There C-double-you split off from me to climb the quartz boulders up to the Shining Rock. Even though these boulders that started off the size of me and grew to the size of cars and beyond up the hill were strewn about with time's degradation of the rock, I had enough bushwhacking so I took the trail all the way up. It was immense and amazing and it filled my soul with the magnificence of this evolving creation of a world. Here's a photo from the top of Shining Rock

As we packed up camp and moved towards a different spot for the second night we noticed it had not gotten any warmer even with the sun overhead, big clouds were rolling in, and the water in our water bottles was freezing, all this plus the wind was so hard it moved me around on the top of the ridges (even with my heavy backpack on) led us to decide that it would be better to just make a fire and hang out until we felt like driving home. This proved to be a wise decision as it started snowing by the time we got to the car. So we put on another layer and started gathering firewood before it got completely dark. Around this fire we shared the majority of our foodstuffs remaining, made hot cocoa -put cinnamon cereal in it because things you would not normally eat at home can taste amazing in the woods, and talked more about the intricacies of fire-shaping. Then it got really cold. So we jumped in the car and I stuck on Tom Wait's Heart of Saturday Night, which fused the mood into the night as we wound around the Blue Ridge parkway for what might be the last time of the season as icicles were already formed on the rock outcroppings which, C-double-you explained, would continue growing until they reached the ground then they would cross the road, forcing the authorities in charge of such things to swing the gate closed on this road for the season. But, he continued, rock climbing clubs, would hike the miles in with all their gear and climb the ice for the two or three weeks it was frozen enough. And people look at me like I'm crazy.
When Wait's crooning ended I offered C-double-you to pick from my collection and without my prompting he picked the best album ever, Ambient.

Arriving home we unpacked the car and let the cat in. Then I made a foot bath in lieu of a shower, because the hiking boots I bought in Colorado are still not broken in enough. I set it up in the kitchen next to the stove so I could reach the beer in the fridge as well as the kettle boiling water. I proceeded to put on the ipod and sit in that chair for over an hour munching Kettle Chips and reading about Hermes Trismegistus.
(PS I don't know how to keep the pics from loading HUGE when you click on them, if anyone does, please let me know)

Prana

There's something about waking up drunk at 11am, feeling a bout of panic and to alleviate it scribbling out a rent check and mailing it to a town two states away.  I am going to go do a headstand to Moby's 'Ambient.'

So that headstand turned into an hour and a half of yoga.  Had to switch from Moby to Art of Noise (Moments in Love is a secret place that only few know about).  The yoga was a payoff for all the years i've been working with my body to keep it bodying...it was the single greatest session of yoga i've ever done.  My psoas muscles released opening my hips and relaxing my pelvis.  I can't put into words how this makes me feel, its like receiving a new body, the sensation of the inner pelvis stretched apart what might not even be measurable in milllimeters and the consequences of my legs turning inwarder is so strengthening/releiving/releasing/refreshing that I walked around the house like David Bowie for half an hour rolling my femur balls in the hip sockets and feeling my pelvis work in symmetrical halves instead of as a fixed unit.  The sensation of my frontal groin bone being moveable is both eerie, for its sudden differentness, and like coming home.  

I laid in corpse pose for ten minutes, listening to Moments in Love again, breathing into my now-opener skeleton and the muscles all twisted around it.  Having received a most spectacular massage two days ago all my muslces were primed for this session of stretching.  The connection made obvious between the deepness into the core of my body and the awesome massage (i'll gladly recommend her if you ask me) has me pining for regular yoga instructed practice and more massages!  Also I can't help but notice this occurred on a day after a night of a good deal of alcohol, lets be honest, and how it acted like a dye put in the body sending toxic flashes where it was most concentrated, in those deep tight recesses, and that instigated me to want to move my consciousness deeper and deeper into my sensation, like scratching an itch.  

Having come out on the other side i'm in a post-elation downer, but am gonna keep moving towards the Stereolaboratory being constructed in the Variety Playhouse tonight.  This could make it into the Book of the Greatest of Days.

Manta in the Morning

[Insert gratuitous awesome photo of self El Capitan took in Quito at the International Phenomenon called Shooters.]

El Capitan and I are on the bus to Bahia waiting for it to leave the gate. We've been here for 1/2 hour between buses and i'm strung out from riding the sharkbus all night without even knowing we had gotten on it.

It all started at the Quito station when I was concerned my big bag would not make it into the luggage storage so I kept pestering the employees for to stow my luggage. It was finally time and as retribution for me being a worried gringo making their midnight shift that much more buggy, they had me carry my own bag from where they had set it down earlier and stow it myself. Fine, so long as it is on the same bus as I am.

We all clamored on the bus and organized into assigned seats. El Capitan is saying "this is the nicest bus i've been on in Ecuador, i feel funny," as he is maneuvering his carry-on bag so the juice in one mesh pocket and the vodka in the other side's mesh pocket won't slide out over the 9 hour ride. I got the window this time, and since we are driving all night, its not for the scenery, but to lean up against while sleeping; we try the seats reclining and they lie almost completely flat, so sleeping appears it will be much easier to achieve than i had first feared.
[I am in a place called the Surf Shack, where i can get both coffee & whiskey and internet along with breakfast. There are a couple townies working the place, cooking my sausage and eggs, and smoking and singing with the Beatles; one gringo just walked in with a waterproof ipod and grabbed his surf board that was sitting against the wall behind me. Almost unplugged my laptop with one of the fins. He turned to apologize and saw my face below the bandanna and realized that I was pretty easygoing. His smile turned to a laugh as he saw the half-finished whiskey shot yet to be poured into the coffee. Pretty neat town. Let's get back on the bus...]

I get to situating ipod, in the left pocket, thread the phones under the warming shirt and up to the ear holes, bandanna off-gulp-because the knot presses into the back of my head so i can't lay back, Mindfold onto the forehead, 2.5mg of Melatonin sublingual under the tongue and curl up El Capitan's sweater into a tube to be my neck pillow so the head doesn't roll with every bump and turn, I slip my earplugs into my right pocket, next to the change purse, for ease of access if the ipod doesn't work its minimagic.

Selecting the pre-made Chill playlist of Eno's smoothest, The Habibiyya, Moby's Ambient and the like, I find that the most relaxing of these sounds have no way to drown out the roar of the bus engine which, even though these windows don't open, roars and rumbles into my ears past the phones and garbling the fragile ambient musics of my favorites. So I crank up the volume, which is a paradox to the floaty sounds drifting among my ears.

This is working for the first short while until we pass the city toll booth and exit Quito, where the television comes on and without lifting my fold I determine it is some sort of Knight Riderish action flick that contains untold thrilling car chase scenes judging by the routine tire squeals and minimal dialogue I can't make out, or truly, don't want to pay any attention to; focusing the slivers of my mind that are still awake towards the magic album "If Man but Knew" which I have moved onto infinite looping. The mideastern acoustic has enough waves of sound to pierce thru the surrounding rumbles enough to make it followable thru the night's churning sonic juttings from the beast's engine, brakes and televised inanity. I settle into the slow groove they are digging out of the communal psyche's malleable thoughtstuff; I let my eyes weigh heavier and heavier.

But the action flick is stunning me at intermittent blasts and I am forced to turn the tunes up again. El Capitan is back from trying to take the empty pair of seats behind us when we stop outside of town for the last batch of riders. So we're back to bumping elbows and knees. I can tell we leave the paved road when the bus - heavier than my last mental image of God - is hopping along the riveted road as if we were on the moguled slopes of the Andes, not the muddy roads. Its all downhill from Quito's 9500' to the port city. The momentum behind us makes the curves around the mountain sides full with gravitation. With the switchbacks hidden from us riders by the driver's cabwall, the movements occur as sudden jerks and we are all swaying in our varieties of sleep. I am teetering with a feather's smoothness on the edge of dreamdom so i don't want to tense to fight the convoluted spirals we take around these mountainsides. I suggest to the mind awake that we are on a roller coaster and letting my body go limp around the center of my being is the interest gathered from all the Chi work i've invested into me.

The melatonin is kicking in and my brain thinks my brain is telling my brain its time for my brain's thoughtwaves to settle into sleep sinking synchronization into the spaces of time being taken to arrive each swerve of the bus at its condition of physicality, the feelings become less and thicker, slower. Adjusting the ipod brought a second trickle of sense into curve with the bus' swervature helping to line mind with the body's predicament.

Walking the line between waking and sleep for 7 clock hours means i have been absorbing the Habibiyya's one album something like ten times through. A fleeting connection between this notion and the time mother walked in on her teenage son lying asleepish on his bedroom floor with White Rabbit on repeat, and her illustrating confusion at my preferences and my confusion from being roused by the outside world from my inner respite merged into that oddness where one can't follow another into Life -- swings the line i'm walking like a tightrope into awareness. Sensations come rushing in to fill the higher crest of brainwareness amplitude with swimming, swaying sensations, but overall the total darkness held deeper sway. Changing from The Habibiyya to Songs of Green Pheasant (as introduced to me by the Illuminated Mar-Mar), though it lasted only a single listen through after the sweet sublimation of drone of the lasting night that Man almost Knew settled the curves into the brain's creases. I needed an album that was entrancing enough to drift sleep along this rocky road but sharp enough to cut through the myriad of busship noises as we rolled thru the moon's night. The answer came from the Deep Forest. First of the glorious albums of my musical youth. My original Morpheus.

Awakening in a foreign town after an entire night of off-road bussing up and down the Andes just short of the ocean was one of the least noticeable most extreme experiences i've had.