MAKING PLANS FOR GETTING HIGH AGAIN

I will be going to Zion National Park in a couple of weeks for a hike to Angels Landing. The last time I visited Angels Landing was October 1974, two months before my 30th birthday. This time I will be two months shy of my 70th birthday. It's been 40 years. I never intended to wait this long to go back.

I first arrived at Zion this way:

After spending the first 29 years of my life as an often unhappy (and occasionally unhinged) southerner, I decided to go somewhere else. Somewhere west. So I took a leisurely 16,000-mile drive to places I had never been. It was a trip without a plan or a timetable to wherever the next place was on the map. Or maybe somewhere else. That's the kind of trip it was.

Zion was supposed to be a stopover on the way back to Santa Fe to close the western loop of the trip. One night, then hit the road. But it became much more than a stopover. I fell in love with the place. I ended up spending a week there on the trails - short ones, long ones, easy ones, not so easy ones, flat ones along the valley floor, wet ones up the Virgin River and steep ones up the sides of the canyon. The last hike I took was to Angels Landing.

But before that there was a treacherous long-closed trail to the top of Lady Mountain. An old guy from Arkansas who had visited the park years before told me about it and told me where he thought it was. Park rangers said the trail had been closed for years because it was so dangerous. That was all the encouragement I needed. I searched out the unmarked trail. I started up. It was more than a hike. A couple of ladders and a chain cable to hang onto while scaling the cliff were part of it, but I made it, stayed long enough to view the 360-degree view (the only one in the park), peel and eat one last orange and head down in the late afternoon.

The ladders and the chain cable are gone now due to what the Park Service describes as "deaths and bothersome rescues" on Lady Mountain. Both ladders and 2,000 feet of hand chain cable were removed in 1978. Obviously bad things happened up there in those four years after I made it to the top. But not to me.

I was invincible.

I was not quite 30 and already had a long trail of wreckage (what I would later learn to tidy up and call "experience"), human and otherwise, behind me in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I had a very good job (with a future). I come from a long line of dedicated employees. My father thought quitting a perfectly good job in Atlanta and going for a drive with no plan for the future was too dumb a thing for a grown man to do. But I was not a very mature 29-year-old and I certainly was not a dedicated employee.

Besides, I was in great shape after traveling, hiking and sleeping in a small green tent for months on end. My hair was long, my eyes were blue, I had a great tan, I had a cowboy hat and expensive Italian hiking boots, I had walked on glaciers, been to the top of Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming (John Denver was there the day before), driven over Beartooth Pass in Montana in a late July snowstorm, been swimming in the cold Pacific Ocean, drunk beer and mai-tais with the crew of a salmon boat at the the Sea Hag bar in Ilwaco, WA (while one of their crewmates, an Apache guy named Ernie who was going home because his grandmother was dying, played drunken boogie-woogie piano until his midnight bus to the Arizona desert arrived), been to San Francisco, Big Sur, Disneyland, sailed the Santa Ana Wind from San Diego to Mexico and back on a teak-decked sloop, saw whales and a nuclear submarine, driven the Mojave Desert at night, been inside Hoover Dam. I had been to Mexico and Canada. I had been places and done things.

And just the day before I had been to the top of Lady Mountain.

I was so ready for Angels Landing that I never gave the hike a second thought. Up I went. Invincibility on the move. A long way up, through 21 switchbacks called Walter's Wiggles and out along the narrow rocky spine to the end. After Lady Mountain it was a bit anticlimactic. But standing there nearly 1,500 feet above the valley floor with sheer drops all around seemed like the place I belonged.

Now it simply seems like the appropriate place for a man in his 70th year to go. Again.

My wife loves the beautiful cliffs and canyons in southern Utah, but she does not like hiking to high, narrow places. There are other Zion trails for the two of us and we will hike them before and after Angels Landing. I had hoped to make the hike with my sons Eric and Nick, but Nick can't make the trip. Eric will be hiking with me. He agreed to go months ago. He called the other night and asked me if I knew people have died hiking to Angels Landing. It's true. The Park Service says five people have fallen to their deaths over the past several decades. I told him we will be careful, we will consider the wind and the weather, we will turn around if we need to. He knows and I know we have been dangerous situations before and come home safely. Angels Landing will be a test in more ways than one. But we will not hike it like we are invincible.

I have nothing to prove by doing this, but the one thing I know is that I will be hiking up the trail to a place I have been before, but not back in time. Nostalgia is a crippling disease. I have no desire to relive those old days because a lot of them were bad old days and there were more bad days to come after I hiked down from Angels Landing in 1974. My good old days started years after I last climbed the trail and they have gone on being good days for more than 26 years now. At the age of nearly 70 I finally have acquired some good old days and they keep accumulating. I like that.

I don't feel as invincible as I did 40 years ago, but I feel pretty good. So I am getting ready. Getting in shape. Making plans. Booking rooms. Counting days.

By the time I came down from my sneaky trip up Lady Mountain and returned to camp back in 1974 it was dark and the old guy from Arkansas was nervously apologizing to the rangers for telling me about the hidden trail and asking them to organize a search party. When I walked in the rangers were angry, the old guy was relieved, I was smiling. I suppose I could have died up there that day, but what kind of life would it be without a hidden trail to a high, narrow place and a search party in it from time to time?

SUNSET OUTSIDE ZION PARK, OCT. 2013

 

THE FATUOUS PHONY WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE

My wife and I went hiking on Labor Day. She wanted to show me a new trail not far from our house. We had to cut through the woods and do some arroyo clambering before we reached the road to the top of the mountain. She'd only been there once before and somehow we ended up behind a neighbor's house on the wrong side of the fence. There was a wire gate and as we were going through it our neighbor approached – skinny, white, pale (why do people who fear the sun live in the southwest?), bony shouldered in a tank top, shorts and running shoes with a large, smooth, gray rock in one hand and a smile of recognition on her face. The gate was at the back of her property and my wife explained that we had inadvertently ended up on her side of the fence. She is our neighbor. We’ve had dinner together at Harry’s Roadhouse (she invited us). She chatters like a magpie with a sort of Tennessee-ish southern accent and we had a friendly chit-chat about tomatoes, kidney stones, the trail we were about to hike, old dogs, the bear that ate its way through the neighborhood a few nights ago, a possible dinner together in a couple of weeks before they head back east. Neighbors talking. Pleasant (despite the fact that she clung to that rock the whole time like she might need to bash a bear or something). Then we went on our way up the mountain and she went back to her house. On the way down we stayed off her property because that is the neighborly thing to do and found a different route home. A very good day. A wonderful day in the neighborhood as Mr. Rogers used to say.

The next day an email arrived from the neighbor:

Hi again.  I hope this message is not received as "unfriendly" - it is not our intent!

We am (sic) requesting that you not hike across our property or open the gate at the rear of our property to gain access to our private driveway when you are hiking in the areas around our property. The honest truth is that we just don't want our property - or our driveway - to become part of anyone's hiking trail again.  It has taken us the better part of 2 decades to stop the many people who used to routinely hike through our property [along with their horses, loose dogs, friends, family, house guests, etc.] as well as up and down our private driveway at all hours of the day and evening. 

Unfortunately, we have learned from experience that when one person begins trespassing, then more and more neighbors and hikers [many of whom are not neighbors] think they can do the same thing and the trespassing problems begin all over again for us. Once people start trespassing, they end up hiking all through our property and it becomes simply too invasive of our privacy, and creates security issues - which become truly troublesome for us as part time residents.

We can show you another access point ....

We understand the tensions these issues can provoke among neighbors - so, please feel free to call me or email me if you want to discuss this further.

Thanks for your understanding about our request.

OK - on to something more fun. I will send the pictures ... of the bear shortly.

And, let me know if you do want some of the bounty from our tomato crop when it comes in!

Thanks!

I love the way she chattily chirped “Hi again” then put quotation marks around the word “unfriendly” to show us she didn’t mean it that way. But she did mean it that way. She is unfriendly, un-neighborly, unwilling to simply ask us politely to find a different way to the start of the trail. But she was perfectly willing to make excuses (“The honest truth is...”) and feel compelled to give us the history of their decades long fight for privacy (the honest truth is I don’t give a shit about that and why didn’t they just build a fence after the first decade or so) and have the audacity to imply that if she let us get away with it even one time, there is no telling what sort of riff-raff might follow on our trail (we are her un-riff-raffy neighbors for fuck’s sake).

First there is the offer, "We can show you another access point ...." Then there is the use of "tensions," "issues," "provoke" and "neighbors" along with the invitation to "please feel free to call me or email me" to talk about it. Oh, please. We don't need for you to show us anything and there will be no further discussion. This is it.

And finally the cheery, fatuous fakery of the “on to something more fun” part? She can keep the picture of the bear (she's scarier than the bear anyway) and stuff her tomato bounty with whatever or wherever.

My wife (always more kind and courteous than I am, but someone who likes honest talk rather than weaselly passive-aggressive emails) wrote back to say: Thanks for letting us know.... You should have said something yesterday. We will find another route to hike because being a good neighbor is important. To which our un-neighborly neighbor responded thanking us for understanding because she really feels we might become friends.

Friends? We won’t become friends because what we understand is that she is the sort of person we don’t want to know, the sort who gives Santa Fe a bad name and who cannot understand the pompous arrogance of sending an offensive message like this via email and not expecting it to be seen as unfriendly and tension-making. She is the sort of obliviously silly and condescending person we would never befriend.

Despite its long history as a place where cultures collide, Santa Fe attracts all sorts of people who never quite fit in someplace else. In fact, it is a place where those people can get together, tolerate each other’s quibbles and quirks and call it home. Always has been. People give each other lots of leeway here to dress, eat, sleep, pray, philosophize, fleece, fake and marry however they please, as long as they respect other people’s ability to do the same.

It's not always easy because some are more tolerable than others, but there is one particular type that is intolerable.

It is the person from somewhere else – Maryland, Virginia, perhaps, somewhere just outside D.C., a place like that – skinny, white, in this case female (but not always), lives around here part time, does a little volunteer work somewhere safe for people like her and believes that entitles her to be a local, lives in a nice little place surrounded by trees up a dirt road off Old Santa Fe Trail, is afraid of things that go bump in the night (or day), fearful of strangers to the point of paranoia, yappy as a Pomeranian, untrustworthy as a pit bull and as self-righteously selfish as Ayn Rand.

What a disappointment to discover that one of those people is my "neighbor." But she is. The good thing is she will be leaving soon for the tidy confines of wherever she confines herself back east when she is not here. Maybe she won’t come back. She's clearly not from around here.

p.s. Being unfriendly is my intent.