1.18.2005
I can breathe. Description of the picture above, taken at 3:34pm on January 15th.
We leave the wilderness highway of Bear Valley Trail, gorgeous but covered in such a deep green canopy and occupied by so many dayhikers that one has no sense yet that they are on Holy Ground. You can't connect into the otherworld that is Point Reyes with any other people around.
We turn off of Bear Valley Trail after one and half miles southeast onto Glen Trail. I start the process. I get out my camera and hook it onto my belt next to my dad's old Buck knife so that I can take pictures as I wander in this state between worrying about plane tickets and breathing in the dark green, the expansive sky, the absence of closure. The lack of a ceiling or walls. Room for my soul to spread out. I raggedly inhale a sigh of relief, oxygen fresh off of the trees scraping down the sides of my ribcage and cleaning out my city lungs.
We are on our own for a while, but only 0.6 miles, and we come screeching to a halt as we happen upon this ramshackle group of cacophonous boyscouts. They are all spread out over all three points of the crossroads with Glen Camp Trail, gear on the ground and various maps lying about ignored. We walk past them without stopping so that we can get nice and far ahead of them.
I fall into my typical "someone behind me, must escape the infernal voices" rhythm and start marching, arms straight down, running nearly to put space between me and any other vocal cord or twig-snapping boot on the ground.
And here is where a Wilderness Etiquette Lesson begins. The group is big. The group is slow. The group is extremely loud. There is a spry-stepping pair of people who wants to go in the same direction that The Group is going. The Group, being large and unwieldy with all of the clattering and straps squeaking and twig-snapping clomping boots and screeching, should chill out for a few more minutes, letting the pair get far ahead.
It works. But one of the "leaders" of this group of young male animals is busy teaching the group about being competitive, and he's demonstrating one-upmanship, the DSI (Disease of Social Interactions) that seems to infect every human on the planet in this social relations ice age 2005. Oh yes, this leader watches us pass. He looks down at his large and bellowing group and takes off right after me up the hill. He is breathing down my neck, right behind me, but I will not yield as he is a member of The Group. And to allow him in front of me psychically ensconces me in said Group. I am chugging breath, I am stumbling ungracefully up the hill and away from the Scout Teacher, yet he will not stop his attempt to beat us. This grown man palpably wants it. He wants to beat us.
I finally cannot stand it anymore and tell Mat that I'm bailing off to the side to allow him by. Mat stops, too, and as Scout motors by Mat says,
"Which way are you all going?"
Leader : (impressively demonstrating one-upmanship disease) "mumble, mumble, something unclear, I've been here a million times, mumble mumble, snorfle, chortle, garumph, snort."
As though "I've been here a million times" were an adequate answer to our query, he marches off.
We see him again, taking his shirt off at the intersection with Glen- Spur-North-to-the-Coast and Glen-Spur-to-Glen-Spur-South-to-the-Coast. We go the opposite way from the one that he indicates that The unfortunate Group will take, thus missing out on some coastal scenery, but gaining our space, our silence, OUR woods.
And now I can breathe. Point Reyes works her voluptuous fingers into my spine and loosen the kinks and whispers in my ear that everything's going to be OK. I have passed through the doorway, and I stand fresh in the oxygen-saturated primordial forest.
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