A New Eye for Detail

When my folks retired and moved off the farm to town five years ago, I acquired all of the color photographic slides my mom had taken since 1950. The intent was for me to scan them into a digital format and share them with the rest of the family. When we were young, once a year we would set up the old metallic-smelling projector and screen in the living room and have a family slide show - lots of family stories were locked into my memory at those times. Some time well before the move, my mom organized all of the slides that had been held in orange-colored Kodak slide boxes - twenty to a box - into carousel holders - an intermediate antiquated technology before digital. Just before Christmas, I sampled a half dozen or so slides from each of the 15 carousel trays to scan and load into a digital frame we were giving my folks as their gift - a 60 year swath of family memories. As I did so, I was struck by how much horses and the Sierra Nevada mountains were a part of my family - trips to places like Horse Coral, Funston Meadows, Roaring River, Painters Camp, Garfield Grove, Big Wet Meadow... Later, there were trips of my own - backpacking with a map in my pack to places like Mineral King, Hamilton Lake, Eagle Lake, Valhalla, Big Arroyo Canyon, Kaweah Gap, Sawtooth Pass, Kings Canyon... My dad could never figure out why I would walk rather than ride a horse - "at least take a mule with you to carry your pack." (1)
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My Dad loves horses and the mountains. I am sure he farmed because it was more profitable, but deep down, he was always a cowboy and a mountain man. In Smith of Wooton Major, a young boy, not-so-much-by-luck, ingests a silver star baked in the Great Cake of the Feast of Good Children. As a result, the star becomes a part of his forehead and later allows him safe passage through the Land of Faery as a man, until his time had passed and so another may follow. And so it was for my dad - like Starbrow - when in his 70's he lost his star on a pack trip to the high country. He had a serious reaction to the elevation, and so like Smith from Wooten Major, he knew that was his last journey and that he wouldn't return - it broke his heart to sell his mules and all of his pack gear - there was no going back again. (2)

For me, there was much less drama when my time had passed, or just slipped away. I haven't done any serious backpacking into Faery country for more than 30 years, and it is unlikely I will ever try to again for a combination of reasons over time - too many kids with too my sports events to go to, too out of shape, a bad back, too little time on my hands... As we prepared to move east three-and-a-half years ago, I found that after years of neglect my Jansport Trail Wedge tent's rain fly had disintegrated, as had the padding around the rim of my Kastinger hiking boots, and my walking stick - the one Colin Fletcher insisted one must have for trekking - all into the dumpster. On one of the many trips to the Goodwill Store while still cleaning out the garage and basement, I donated my Mountain Master backpack - a huge external frame contraption by today's standards that from behind looked like a semi-truck going down the trail. It was funny how the college'ish aged fellow who sorted our stuff took note of the pack - he remarked, "it's a classic"... I said, "I know." (3)
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At last he found a road through the Outer Mountains, and he went on till he came to the Inner Mountains, and there were high and sheer and daunting. Yet in the end he found a pass that he could scale, and upon a day of days greatly daring he came through a narrow cleft and looked down, though he did not know it, into the Vale of Evermorn where the green surpasses the green of the meads of Outer Faery as they surpass ours in springtime. There the air is so lucid that eyes can see the red tongues of birds as they sing on the trees upon the far side of the valley, though that is very wide and the birds are no greater than wrens.

Roaring River

On the inner side of the mountains went down in long slopes filled with the sound of bubbling waterfalls, and in great delight he hastened on. As he set food upon the grass of the Vale he heard elven voices singing, and on a lawn beside a river bright with lilies he came upon many maidens dancing. The speed and the grace and the ever changing modes of the movements enchanted him, and he stepped forward towards their ring. Then suddenly they stood still, and a young maiden with flowing hair and kilted skirt came out to meet him.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Smith of Wooten Major, 1967
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A year ago this past February, my wife and I flew to Missouri for the retirement party of a close friend. Paul and I go back to undergraduate and graduate schools days together - Fresno State, Oregon State. We also did collaborative research together for decades. We flew into St. Louis and then drove to Columbia for the party - only Charlotte, Paul's wife, knew we were coming. Thus starts the next phase of generational experiences....retirements in my age cohort.

Recent photo by my friend Paul

We spent the night after the party at their home, had a leisurely morning together, toured their Boone County property - the farm, and then rushed back to the airport after lunch for our return trip east. With soon-to-have-plenty-of-time, Paul was planning a High Sierra adventure for this past summer and invited me to join him - of course, not having found the silver retirement star in my cake and not-soon-to-have-plenty-of-time on my brow, I had to pass on the offer. Months later I got an email from Paul, and attached was a photograph of what I missed. When I opened the image, I was struck by the diversity of plants in the scene - years ago I would have never noticed.

A first notice of trees

Immediately I was taken back to August 1969 when I had my first trip up in the Sierra with my dad and brothers - on horses with pack mules, not backpacking - and how I was not all that enthralled with spending hours, bored, sitting on a horse getting-to-where-we-were-going and knowing how long it would take. It was somewhere along one of the worn trails in the Kern River Basin when all of a sudden I realized there were more kinds of plants out there than green - trees, grass, and ferns. That was a pivotal moment for me, the starting point that would eventually take me on my own treks to Faery - setting me off in directions through places that led me to the classes I later took in college with their own strange languages that can describe another faery: Botany, Plant Physiology and Biochemistry, Systems Ecology, Autecology, Plant Geography, Rangeland Ecology, Seed Technology - and dialects used where I work today: Sustainability, Organic Agriculture, Food Systems and Rural Development, Renewable Energy and Biofuels, Systems Architecture. Strange words to others' ears, but ones that are a part of the star on my forehead that let me pass into foreign lands.
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(1) I don't know whose blog link this is, but the places in their photographs are the same places I have been, just a lot of years earlier - everything looks the same, but I wouldn't want to drink the water right out of the streams any more, as we did then from a tin cup hooked on our packs.

(2) All of the mules went to a pack station near Kings Canyon National Park - my dad's hobby had been breeding the palomino-colored mule string he took to the mountains each year. Back down in the Valley, he would occasionally ride a mule when checking the cattle out on the remnant prairie pasture our family had leased from another family for 80 years. The story goes that once when out looking over the cows and their new calves, his mount wyley took a sudden side-step that left Dad with hang-time in mid-air momentarily, before crashing to the ground - like in a Roadrunner cartoon. After gathering himself up - broken ribs and his pride - he deftly picked up a stick, thrashed the mule in between the ears to show who was still boss, and then remounted for the ride back to corral without further incident.

(3) When I bought the Mountain Master pack, it was the top rated backpack in Backpacker magazine. I remember it was manufactured in Fresno by Denali. A quick check on the Web showed that packs (modern ones) are still manufactured under the Denali brand, but I could not find the place where manufactured - probably Thailand.