The Undetained – 2
Where was I? Oh yes, I was mentioning how last year in June I had come up against the lack of a word for the quality of resilience that does not abate during the destabilization process. It was like something out of a catechism, a Westminster Confession for the 21st century. What is that which outlives mortal strife? It is unde-______. I felt strongly that an English word existed, but I could not put my finger on it. I searched the dictionary for a few days, fervently. My effort for the word exhibited the word itself. Then, all of a sudden, an image, almost clear as day—definitely clear as moonlight—came to mind. It was an image of the high Sierra, with a lake in the foreground, a pointed peak in the background, rolling glacial terrain all around. Islands in the lake, dotted round with pine trees. I drew what it looked like and showed my friend who knew the Sierra decently well from growing up in the Boy Scouts and backpacking with his dad. Immediately, he said, “That’s Thousand Island Lake.” The resemblance was striking. The moon was in the distance, it was a gibbous moon. My search for a word for a concept had become a search for a place.
My affection for the Sierras began in the summer between the fourth and fifth grade, when my papa took us to Yosemite. We stayed in Oakhurst, and purchased a giant sub sandwich from Vons for lunch. As most family vacations go, it took us until past noon to get into Yosemite, the Mariposa sequoia grove. I remember being in awe of seeing a deer amble casually past the row of cars, and how casually my dad commented that they are used to people. The giant trees really caught my imagination, and I later wrote a little piece about them for fifth grade, in which I used the word gargantuan for the first time and perhaps the most fittingly in my life, and drew a picture that got an award with the library of some kind. I remember feeling the effects of altitude at 7000 ft, of marvelling at the water bottle becoming tense with the relative air pressure difference inside and outside. I remember the shorts and shirt I was wearing that day at Glacier point, and how much I wanted to run around the rocks and see all the vistas, but time was ebbing. The winding forest road, the tunnel view, the valley meadows, looking down on the clear and broad Merced river—I had never seen a real river before. I begged to drive up the Tioga Road, and we went as far as overlooking the Tenaya Canyon. The slanting, glinting light, the amber glow on almost purple granitic gray, the clear wind, the sparsity of trees up there. I remember my papa frantically trying to use an old camp stove to make a pot of soup to satiate my mother and me. But the high country had sunk its lovely venom into me. Yosemite transported me. I begged to go back for a few years.
Fast forwarding, I had visited the Sierras a few more times through middle/high school, Yosemite once again with my parents and family dog, the east Sierra twice with my aunt and uncle, but it had not yet become an independent love. Neither was hiking. I would go on long rambling walks once I became a Christian. Once I walked nine miles from my house to the summit of a local mountain (Stanley Peak) barefoot and without water, only donning my flip flops to get across broken glass. I would meander the hills of San Luis Obispo like a 19th century romantic poet of the Lake Country, melancholically searching for the dreamy ideal. People portrayed me as a mountain man, a hobbit. Perhaps the sheer whimsy for the hillsides and woods made me out to be a John Muir category. It was an aesthetic pursuit, one brimming with glory in the beginning and then rotting with disappointment and disillusionment in the pursuit for the lost Edenic aesthetic purity, the fresh eyes of the heart. I am still searching for those fresh eyes, yet I keep approaching. The fog is thin, I can see the coastline rocks and shrubs and trees from this vast ocean of longing.
One of my biggest regrets is not taking up backpacking in college. I was consumed with inward matters of faith. I had all this time and all this opportunity to meet people, and it didn’t even cross my mind. All I could do was envy the Front Porch church/coffee house community and their annual trips to Limekiln—which is now essentially my backyard. My love of nature was existentialized, internalized, scholastified. The touch of nature, the immanence of the body was something marketed to me in books about spirituality and phenomenology. Being outside was not a lifestyle. Hiking as a hobby was thrust upon me as a label. I never thought of myself as a hiker. I was simply going for long walks in the countryside, searching for self, for pleasure, for divinity, for truth. Albeit, nature existed for me almost as a representational tool, a symbolic medium.
Again, off to work I must go.
July 21, 2023
Gorda