Before the Storm

“You should turn around,” the old man said.  “The storm clouds are forming on the mountaintop.”

I remembered the storm from yesterday:  sharp bolts slashed the sky as the thunder exploded.  I was afraid to get out of the car and dash across the parking lot and into the café, where I sipped a hot cider as I watched the rain pelt the ground.  I love watching thunderstorms, but I was uneasy about heading straight toward a dark cloud.

“How much farther ‘til the top?” I asked.

“You’ve got a ways to go,” the old man said.  He wore a navy ball cap and clutched two shiny trekking poles.  “I’ve been hiking from the summit for about an hour and a half, and I’ve been booking it, too.”

I came to Great Basin National Park in Nevada for one reason:  to ascend Wheeler Peak.  Popular images of Nevada revolve around casinos, brothels, and the desert heat of Vegas, but the truth is that the majority of Nevada is full of mountains.  At thirteen thousand feet above sea level, Wheeler Peak is the second tallest in the state.  I had never ascended a mountain this high, and I hated the idea of returning home without reaching the summit. 

I recognized the old man from a cave tour I took the day before, and I caught a snippet of his conversation with the ranger.  He mentioned that he, too, was a park ranger before he retired.  This man, who I assumed to be in his early sixties, was an experienced outdoorsman and seemed to be in good shape for his age.  Despite these signs, I had a habit of telling myself I can make any physical feat come true merely by willpower.  So far, by sheer luck and an ounce of youthful strength this strategy had worked for me, but this recipe didn’t seem sustainable in the long run.

“When is the storm due to start?” I asked, knowing full well this was a stupid question that made me look like an amateur destined for death by lightning strike.  He probably assumed I was just another idiot who had no business being out here.

“You can never tell with storms,” the old man said, “But the clouds have been forming for at least an hour.  I would say you have an hour and a half at most.  You don’t want to be out here when it starts storming.”

I stood there weighing the old man’s words against my own desires.  Truthfully, I was afraid of those dark clouds forming and expanding above my head.  I imagined myself on an exposed ridgeline, practically immersed in the smoky mist of a thunderhead, soaked and shivering, partly due to the cold but mostly due to the unshakeable fear of being struck by the undiscriminating bolts.  At this elevation, luck would be the only determinant between walking out of here unscathed and being zapped like a mosquito imploding against the porch light.

Although my sense of reason pleaded for me to turn around, my legs ached to climb, and my ego was hungry for the opportunity for a brag-worthy experience. 

“You can’t say you didn’t warn me,” I said, “But I want to make a go for it.”

The old man’s face shriveled up in clear disappointment.  Instantly, his concern transformed to apathy.  I knew he meant well, but it is much easier to advise someone to turn around once you have already reached the top.  I left the old man behind and picked up the pace.  I made a promise to myself:  I would try to make it to the top, but the second I heard thunder I would turn around and sprint down this mountain.

* * *

Hi, how are you?

We’re just fine.  And you?

I’m doing well.  What would you like to drink?

I’d like a glass of wine.

(There’s more than one.  You should be more specific.)

On the left are the whites, and on the right are the reds.

I’ll take a zinfandel. 

And have you decided on the menu?

We have a few questions.  Is the trout really local?

(Not if you consider Sysco’s warehouse in Houston to be local.)

Yes.

Is it frozen?

We’re very far from water here in the desert, so, yes, unfortunately, it is.

And the salmon?  Is it farm-raised?

Unfortunately, yes.

I’ll take the short ribs, then.

Okay.  Thank you.  I take the menus and start to walk away.

So do you live around here?

Yes. I live over there.  I point out the window at my dormitory.

How did you end up out here?

I use my usual refrain:  I moved from Pittsburgh to Florida to live with my aunt, rent-free, so I could travel more easily and not be tied down with a lease.  From Florida, I found a job on a cruise ship in Hawaii, where I met a man who told me about park jobs, which led me to Yellowstone.  An ensuing road trip took me through Utah.  I applied online.  They hired me.  Here I am.

Do you like it out here?

I love it.  There’s so much to see on the weekends, and the weather is nice.  It’s hot during the day, but it gets cold at night.  There are times I want a more glorified job, but it serves its purpose.

 

You should travel while you’re young. I wish I did that.

If you want to witness the homogeneity of the human race, you should wait tables.  You get the same questions all the time:  Where are you from?  What brought you here?  Where’s the bathroom? Everyone flies to Vegas to see the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Bryce.  It’s amazing that in such a large country with millions of people they all come up with the same itinerary.  Even I did the same thing:  driving from Vegas to the South Rim to Zion and onto Bryce. 

But to them I am a curiosity, an anomaly, the one who swims against the current.  They are envious of me, but I feel sorry for them.  From what I understand, this is how they think life should go:

You get an education, a job that turns into a career, a girlfriend who becomes a wife.  You buy a house, have a baby, then another.  You raise the kids, change their diapers, help them with their homework, ship them off to college.  Thirty years after you bought it, the house is empty, except for you and your partner, but now you’re scarred by the war you barely emerged from:  screaming babies, sleepless nights, endless headaches, sexual frustration, sagging skin, graying hairs, and the bosses you curse under your breath but never out loud because of the mortgage you must pay.  

You count down the years until you can retire.  Then one day, you punch out for the last time.  Your coworkers send you off with a cake and balloons.  You’ve been dreaming about this day for decades. 

You’ve got money saved up, so you buy an RV with a corny name like RoadRunner or Voyager.  Now you do all the things you’ve been putting off while you were busy with spreadsheets, 401Ks, and sitting in rush-hour traffic during the daily pilgrimage to and from the office.  Now you leave the suburbs behind and you hit the road and simultaneously clog it up with your house on wheels, stuffed to the brim with all the things you deem necessary for comfortable living.  You don’t care about the line of cars honking their horns behind you because you’re leaving all your stressful memories behind, and you’re living for you now. 

As the drivers behind you risk their lives to pass you against oncoming traffic, you soak up the sights.  This is your country, and now you’re going to see as much of it as you can.  You hop from one national park to the next, and you park at the viewpoint, climb down from the cabin, and gaze down upon some alien landscape colored orange, purple, and white.  Your hands are on your hips, your head shaking in amazement.  You lean toward your significant other and mutter something generic like:  Isn’t this something else?

Now it’s time to gather proof you will later show your neighbors during your Tuesday night bowling league which is outside the gated community where you winter in Florida.  You get out your camera and ask the nearest stranger if he would mind taking your picture.  You put your arm around your wife and smile.  You are happy because time belongs to you now, and you’re with your partner on a beautiful planet that stands in the background.  You thank the stranger because now you’ll be able to save this onto your computer and show your grandchildren what they have to look forward to after sixty years of cramming knowledge into their craniums and toiling away until their spines ache.

You owe it to yourself to get out there, but there is only one problem with this method:  now you are too old to walk, to run, to climb, to scramble, to swim, to shimmy, to carry a heavy load on your back, to withstand the extreme heat and cold, to sleep on the desert floor.  You can only look down upon the land from the safety of this parking lot.  You will not dirty your clothes, jump over snakes, squeeze through narrow slot canyons, fall out of trees, plunge into crystal blue pools, or run from the lightning.  You won't embrace solitude, for you will not escape the overcrowding presence of your fellow man and woman.  You have brought the comforts of home with you, and possibly there's a kitchen with a sink in your vehicle, so you cannot understand the thirst of a parched tongue or the hunger of a body stretched to its limits.  In this manner, you will not know the land you claim to be yours.

* * *

I could see the top from where I stood.  I had been pushing myself, yet the summit seemed to get no closer.  Behind me, the sky was clear blue, but a blanket of dark gray loomed before me.  The peak looked like the backbone of a giant whale, a white stripe coursing down its body.  Even in July, piles of snow had yet to melt.  I was well above the timberline and now hopped from one boulder to another.  To my right I could see green circles on the land between mountain ranges.  I assumed these to be manicured fields watered by machines.  Forests, on the other hand, looked like messy patches of green hair.  Below me, a raven took flight.

I abandoned my backpack on a hilltop and now moved freely, crawling up the rocks and trekking through piles of slippery snow.  The air was frigid and extremely thin.  My heart was pounding from the exertion and the fear of the storm’s inevitability.  I scared myself into believing I heard thunder now that I was close enough to practically inhale the clouds.  But I had ventured too far to turn around now.  Five more minutes, and I would accomplish my goal.

I was exhausted and thirsty.  Against my better judgment, I left my water bottle behind with my pack because I thought it would attract lightning like Benjamin Franklin’s key, so I scooped up handfuls of snow and swallowed them.  With each step forward, I asked myself what was so important about climbing this mountain.  I knew that I was partly being melodramatic.  I was not climbing an erupting volcano, but this storm could turn ugly.  Was summiting this peak worth putting myself in danger?  I knew it was not, but the only thing that kept me going was my blind optimism.  It won’t rain until I get off the mountain, I told myself, knowing there was not an ounce of truth to this prediction.

I felt this heat in my chest that occurs when my body sounds the alarm.  This has happened before when I thought I was going to be fired from my job, when a bison threatened to charge me, and a when I was running home at night when a man emerged from the bushes and chased me down the street.  Hairy situations that are avoidable by staying at home and being a good boy.  Cortisol coursed through my adrenal glands.  My ears pricked up to detect a rumbling in the atmosphere.  My tired legs found a new energy.  This is the essence of fear.  Part of you shuts down while the rest of you is jolted awake.  You are perceptive to the world and all its threats, and you are ready, if necessary, to bolt. 

     

While in descent a man passed me.  I asked him how much farther to the summit.

“On the map, it’s about a pinky’s length away,” he said.

It seemed like I was climbing up the down-escalator, but his description put my remaining voyage into a digestible perspective and I pushed through the last leg of the climb.  I reached the top, wrote my name in the ledger that was housed in a mailbox, and stared at the expansiveness surrounding me:  chocolate shark-fins speckled with ghost-like shapes clinging to the dirt and, above, a dense layer of thunderheads crackling with electricity. In celebration, I pumped my fist in the air to an invisible audience and quickly resigned to get the hell out of there.

I hopped down the boulders again, sloshed through the snow, and once my feet hit solid ground I took off running.  I retrieved my pack and headed toward the forest.  With each step I took, I knew my probability for survival was increasing dramatically.  I was dropping from threat level red to orange to yellow. 

Eventually, I passed a couple who was picnicking on a large stone.  They asked me about the storm clouds, and I revealed my fear that the storm could start any minute.

“I don’t want to be the one to tell you to turn around,” I said, “Because it’s easier to say that once you’ve already been to the top.”

I mentioned the old man, and they, too, received a similar warning from him.  The fact he showed up in two stories lent him a mythic persona as though he were a portentous wizard who can see the future, albeit not very accurately.   

“He said it would take us four hours to get where we are now, but it only took us one,” the guy said.

The guy said he had climbed this peak before when the weather looked even worse.  His nonchalant attitude was blindly reassuring.  It’s a lot easier to hide your fear when you’re with somebody.  Even I was comforted by the couple’s presence.  At the least, you can revel in the thought you aren’t the only stupid person on the mountain when the weatherman calls for a storm.

I wished them luck and surged onward until I reached the trees.  The clouds looked less ominous as the sky receded.  I startled a family of deer and chased them through the brush. 

After this brief interlude, I proceeded another mile down the trail until I reached a glacial lake where I lay down on the rocky beach.  Just as I hoped, I had made it down the mountain, unscathed, with enough time to spare before the storm.  Using my backpack as my pillow, I closed my eyes for a short nap.  My body sapped of its sugar, I slept soundly until the raindrops splashed against my cheeks and woke me up.