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)

Living Routines

So for over 7 months I have been on the road now. In that time I have spent a great deal of time in a variety of living situations and been immersed in others lives for days or weeks, sharing space, weaving around others routines, being as unobtrusive as I can into others hospitality, etc.

For the last three or four months no one has been closer to my humanness than Sleg. A major reason that such a relationship has worked is because our routines and lifestyles are so very well matched that we are close to ideal partners in, well, whatever we partner up for, living included. In fact we knew this early on when we were the first duo in history to run for, and lose, Co-Class President of the senior class of our high school. Its not just anyone you can live in an abandoned truck stop with.


On that note, El Capitan and I had a heart-to-heart in the Magic Bean, a Western culture catered-to-steraunt, about our living styles, communication processes and the foundational assumptions that shape our understandings of what the other says or does (anything from body language to full-blown activities that confuse the tenuous grasp on reality either of us has at any given moment), methods of encountering a variety of sticky situations


Variety of sticky situations:
Traffic
Avoiding accostment in the street
Purchase of items not sold in stores

Another element of this mix is that he has spent most of the last few years living alone, while I was married then Slegged. One element of this is that sometimes El Capitan talks to himself and I assume he is speaking to me – eaves-dropping is applied retroactively once he verifies he was talking to himself.

The altitude has not affected me with nausea and headaches but it has dried out my sinuses which was good when I first arrived with a clog in that area, but now my nasal system is very dry and a touch raw. I am drinking a minimum of 64 ounces of water, often fortified with fizzy vitamins, per day but still feel dried out.

The sun is as bright here as on ski slopes or in the desert. When it comes out you squint or shade your eyes. I am listening to a couple of podcasts on learning Spanish, each are 10 or 15 minute blocks and are a good way to shake the dust off my unused decade old study of the language. I am guessing we will stay here a few more days at least while I get comfortable with the speed of life, conversation and driving before venturing off the beaten path. I am already looking forward to trying to find some whitewater rafting. I am also wondering why I didn’t bring my hiking boots. I was trying to pack light, but that might have been going too far.

I am traveling with an REI bag set. And let me take a minute to tell great story about REI and why you too should shop there. I shopped for two hours trying out every bag in the size range I was looking for, for my car-living days. Bought one. Enjoyed it thoroughly but it revealed itself as too small. Took it back after 6 months of use, and believe you me it wasn’t in resalable condition, sans receipt or even my membership card and got a complete refund which I put towards this bag [link, nope i looked forever for this link and its not around]. I am curious to see if it is too large for taking with me everywhere or whether I will leave it here at the Harley Hostel with Pablo who is an adopted father of El Capitan, or whether I will take it on our travels around the rest of Ecuador (and wish I hadn’t).