The Mountain Was Always There

Every mother of young children, even the most competent, needs a break from them now and then. When our kids were very young, I was a scrapbooker. On an occasional regular but not rigidly scheduled Friday night I would drive to Linda’s on Prior Lake and she and I and Tammy and Michelle and sometimes Ann would cut out little pictures of our kids and paste them into fancy and expensive books which became works of art. We used to joke that in the event of a fire, we would risk it all to save the scrapbooks. It is not lost on me that the two hour escape from family life was spent documenting family life. Now the books are in a cabinet on the staircase. I don’t think about fires very much anymore. At least not house fires.

At the beginning of July, Bill and I went to Aspen for three days to visit Calvin, who was there at the Aspen Music Festival studying with Anton Nel. Dr. Nel was and is faculty at UT Austin among other things, and though I was only a student and our paths never crossed we had lots of people and places in common, like the Eastside Cafe, and it was delightful to visit with him. We also added a reprise hike to Maroon Bells, and on to Crater Lake. Bill and I had been there before when Calvin was a toddler, when I was doing teacher training with Doris at Snowmass. Little Calvin chanted “the bear went over the mountain” over and over from his vantage point on Bill’s back.

This visit, we also added to “the list” an impromptu trek up the Continental Divide and the coup de grace, a hike to Cathedral Lake. At Cathedral Lake I got my highest altitude badge. I confess that we scrambled up a loose rock boulder field to hit that 12,000 feet mark but that still counts. I’m doing better than I used to with high altitude. That makes me happy.

The altitude can be dizzying, but so was July in general. I came home from Aspen to go to Duluth. I taught at the Young Artists Piano Camp, Paul Wirth’s brain child. Calvin attended this camp years ago. Andrew Staupe is the artistic director. I loved doing something new to me. There was a faculty recital. The five of us on faculty each gave a lecture on Mozart. Mine was using Doris’s tools for interpretation. Power points take time to create, and I will give that talk again for our SPTG group in January. I taught seven kids. The music was amazing the whole week. My Ella and Tyler participated in the concerto competition! I was very proud of them. The food in the dorms was surprisingly really good. I met some great new teacher friends. The weather. . . not so good. It was the peak of the northern Minnesota wildfires and our air quality index hit 1129, which is twice what the weather app on my phone will register. The temperature averaged 95 degrees. The University of Minnesota Duluth is built for cold, not heat, and most of the studios and dorms have no air conditioning. Normally that would be no big deal. . . but between the smoke and the unseasonal temperature it was a thing. A couple nights we drove down to Lake Superior and soaked our feet in the ice cold all season water. I hope they ask me back to teach again.

A day to do laundry and air the smoke out of my music scores and on to Washington State with Mary. Our family has a thing to do “epic trips” one on one. Once, I took Calvin to Acadia and points east just the two of us. Now, Mary and Mama got to go. The timing was perfect. Two years out from her leg surgery. We geared up and went for it. Over the five days we logged forty miles on foot. Pain free. Dr. Novachek should be proud of his work. We hit Seattle and North Cascades, Mt. Rainier, and Olympic national parks, I loved every minute of it. Two people traveling are nimble. Communication is easy. There’s time and energy for everyone to get what they want and need. Mary has always loved the water. And she loves what’s next to the water. The round pebble on the shore of the mountain lake. The tiny water creatures in a puddle on the vast beach of the endless ocean. Little heart shaped rocks she gives to my mother. This is nothing new. Make sure no one is living in that shell before you save it.

We hiked to four mountain lakes (Blue Lake, Bench Lake, Snow Lake, and Devil’s Punch Bowl on Crescent Lake) and got to plunge in three of them. It’s our new thing. It’s very refreshing and gives one a feeling of bravery and accomplishment. Side note, the water in Lake Superior was actually colder. Minnesota has its glory too. Our last morning we spent meandering the tide pools of the Olympic Peninsula. Her whole world in an oceanic puddle.

I love lakes too. But I really love mountains, and specifically the last nine years, being on top of the mountain or at least as high up as possible. Washington state had it all. We had never been to Mt. Rainier National Park and I didn’t know that Mt. Rainier is actually a specific mountain and the focal point of the whole park. Driving the two lane mountain switchbacks and passes, (we logged over 900 miles) we joked that that big white mountain was following us. On our Wednesday hikes it was everywhere. Around every bend, a far off mammoth bossy rock. It was the back drop to every scenic pull off. Arrogant and photogenic. Justifiably conceited. Amazingly beautiful. Far away and out of reach. We admired it from a distance.

I was lucky enough to score a reservation at Paradise Inn, one of the old school national park lodges. We arrived at dusk almost out of gas. There are no gas stations in national parks, something I really should have remembered. Usually Bill is in charge of this. The mama bear in me was counting the miles the rental car was telling me were left (75 but I don’t think it knew we were on mountain roads because the number was going down way too fast for comfort) and how many miles to get out of the park and to a gas station (25 but again, 25 really crazy miles). I missed the turn to the parking lot of the lodge and we ended up on a one-way loop. My heart sank. Five miles to get back. I didn’t have five miles to spare. Not too much to do about that tonight. When we got back to the lodge (on the loop we did see a beautiful mother deer and two fawns for our trouble) we were both slap happy from a long day of driving and hiking and we ate dinner, packed our packs for the next day and went to bed. We woke up to dense fog. Really dense fog. We ate breakfast and looked at the gift shop and killed some time to see if it would clear. Our plan was to hike the famous Skyline Loop, the must do hike in the park. Serendipitously, the trail head was at the lodge, I didn’t have to waste precious gas driving anymore. At 9:00 we decided to go for it fog or no fog. There is an eerie haunting quality to the pines in fog and we soaked that it on our ascent. Two hours up and we were still in the fog and came across some over domesticated but adorable marmots. A mama and baby. We saw a lot of mamas and babies all week, jellyfish, goats, deer and marmots to be exact, one set everyday, celebrating our mother and daughter trip. Back to the marmots, we stayed there a bit and ate some gummy bears enjoying the creatures.

We blew a kiss to the marmots and hiked on into the fog. Literally 45 seconds up the trail, the wind shifted, the sun came out, and right there, smack dab in front of front of us was the rock himself, Lord Rainier. Close enough to touch. Accessible. The clouds parted. It was a spiritual thing. I cannot do it justice.

We had no idea we were hiking up THE mountain himself. I hadn’t read the fine print I guess. And there it was. It was always there. I thought about the Mary Stevenson poem from 1939 about her dream that she was walking with God on the beach and there were two sets of footprints, her’s and God’s. Then there was only one and she thought God had abandoned her and the poem goes on to explain that God was always there, during the roughest times, that’s when he was carrying her. It’s kinda dramatic for every day use, but Mt. Rainer being right there behind the fog reminded me of that poem. The notion of God always being there. Most of the time we admire His beauty from a distance, but sometimes we are climbing uphill for a long, long time and can’t see Him anywhere in the fog. Then the God moment happens and we realize He was always there.

My hiking mentor, Catherine, taught me that you can almost always go higher than planned, especially if you have a map. At the top of the Skyline Loop, I saw the little side trail going up the mountain. My trusty All Trails map called it Pebble Creek Trail. There were some guys going up there with axes and ropes. I asked Mary for 20 minutes. Just 20 minutes higher. She agreed, because there was a creek involved. Twenty minutes got us across Pebble Creek, and as high as we could go without climbing gear. I was satisfied with that. We found the perfect rock for our picnic lunch. Right there next to God.

It was another God moment rolling into the skanky probable cause gas station and filling up the tank Friday morning.

Coming down from the mountains is never easy, but I went right into the MacPhail institute on Monday. Teaching an institute from home is also never easy, because you have the teaching part, which you want to give your all to, but you still have the home part, which will die without food and water. A weekend at the cabin with Susan and Sam bookended July and crept into August.

I’m writing this on Saturday morning. The first hours I have been alone in my home in a very long time. I need solitude to center myself. To have my own thoughts. To drink coffee with a candle and watch the cats lounge in a sunbeam. To secure my own oxygen mask.

What did I do with my morning? I wrote about my family’s summer. More documentation. I cut little digital pictures and pasted them into a word document called a blog in the internet cloud where no fire can reach it, attempting to write something beautiful. I might be hopeless. This is not lost on me.