Day 21: Mile 253.1 - 266.1

Rooster once said that, as far as he could tell, when they routed the PCT they just let a crazed donkey run around the hills then declared: yep, that's the trail! Well for today and yesterday, the trail design certainly *felt* that way.

After the big climb into the San Bernardino Mountains, the PCT starts its way north, to Highway 18, where it will make the Big Left Turn, effectively turning around the northeast corner of Big Bear Lake, and head west across the mountains towards LA. In this section I got the impression that it wants to stay in the "wilderness", but there's one major pass going north to Big Bear and inevitably the trail takes it, overlooking the highway as it does so (indeed I could hear the cars from tent last night). But it has a deep aversion to that civilized route, and tries it's best to veer away or at least hide it behind a ridge or bend or woods or something, anything! And that's the way it's been the past two days: overall we're going roughly north then west, but at any one moment we're going [roll dice here].

For me, though, the striking bit today came after the pass, when the trail left the woods and entered into more of a high desert landscape. There are different types of empty, but this is my kind of empty: open but varied and rolling, shrubbed and strange-rocked, as a hollow wind hollers into the unyielding stillness. That kind of emptiness where the woods are always over there, over that bluff, and here only their scattered siblings wander, as the sun casts down, tinting every green and brown and even red with the sheen of that yellow near-white that simply means "heat".

I took lunch sitting on an uprooted stump under the shade of a wind-leaned tree, stout and strong, not 10 steps from a PCT trail marker. Behind, the dessicated evidence of horse and that empty landscape. Ahead, a little town in the valley below, the only house I could see--a little building on the edge of the property on the edge of town--replete with metal siding roofs and blue tarps. And at my feet, the trail: to the left coming over that dry hillock, to the right going round that pile of boulders, a smooth dusted track, filled with footprints. It was a good lunch, some tortillas, some tuna in a bag, and just a wide world, ticking to its own inexorable mechanisms.

Some time later, the trail came to a local peak which looked out north, over the desert below. And standing there, the uplifting wind from the desert below cooling my face, the sun above warming my back, I realized yet another corollary to Leslie's Principle (with all apologies to the Major):

    "For the World is vast and limitless."

How can you see that and *not* want to cross it? (Of course I'll be singing a very different tune when it's 95+ degrees and the sheer bright of the sand is blinding me!) Because crossing it is the way to *know* it, to discover one small bit of that vastness, drink one small drop from that deepening well. And how wide is that vastness, how deep is that well? How much *is* there to *know*? I remember visiting a bookstore in Taiwan, the stacks full of books, the aisles full of people in that way that only east Asian metropolises can crowd, and thinking: here is all this that I *don't* know, and that I *can't* know (a consequence of being illiterate), and for a moment being overwhelmed with the sheer amount of knowledge that implied. Forget the infinitude of all that I *can* know--already overwhelming--here's pages upon pages that I *can't*. That desert view gave me that same feeling, of a vast open space, probably ultimately unknowable. But still you gotta walk it: how could you *not*?

And the day ultimately became quite meditative. There was something resonant in the empty hills, something stirring in the vast desert, but I couldn't tell you what. All I know is that standing there, gazing out over that landscape, I didn't feel small, I didn't feel insignificant, but it felt huge and vast and limitless. A whole world, complete and real and which I've as-yet ignored (but of which I'm nonetheless a part, whether I like it or not), and one which I might in my even-so hubris, hope to discover and understand in some small part. Hmm, there is the germ of an idea here, there is something here that means, or can mean, something--and something very real--but while I can sense it, I can't yet touch it, I can't yet hold it in my mind, and I definitely can't yet express it.

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Some notes:

-- Campsite > Arrastre Trail Camp > Hwy 18 > Big Bear Lake

-- A thought about thoughts: one of the things I like about "Electro-shock Blues" by the Eels, and about "Thoughts in Solitude" by Merton, are that these are works by thoughtful folks who are *trying*, honestly *trying*, to sort something out that they can feel and see and almost touch but can't express. They don't claim to have it figured out, but they're trying the best they can, as honest as they can, and that will have to be good enough because--at the end of the day--it's all they can do. Now I don't claim to be anywhere near those folks in terms of insight or skill, but that searching probing poking, throwing words at the wall to see what sticks, well, I like to think that's why this entry is so disjointed! 

-- Just for those like me who like to keep track of such things:

Leslie's Principle = Life is awesome.

First Corollary = The World is beautiful.

Second Corollary = The World is vast and limitless.