I exit my vehicle and put my boots on the dirt. It is still early in the day, and early in the autumn, so the air is cool, but supportive. You can smell the autumn, and you can see some fallen leaves on the ground, medallions of orange and yellow, but the trees are still mostly full of green, filtering spears of sunlight.
I always take a few moments to consider the trailhead before I begin. The trailhead is one of the most reliable things about this place. It is always here, first of all. But it mostly always looks the same. Of course it changes with the seasons and the elements; it gets muddy in the late summer when the thunderstorms come at night, and it gets hard in the winter and stays hard throughout, and it receives the snow, and it releases it in the spring. These are trivial changes, though. The trailhead bears these stoically. It displays them without changing its character and without concealing its face.
Once you begin, though, the trail quickly becomes less reliable. I have seen most of the variations of the first few hundred yards, and even that much can surprise you. It will be deeply unsettling the second or third time you come when you suspect so immediately that it has changed.
I take a mental note of everything that I recognize. The wildflowers on either side of the trail—purple today. An exposed stone on the east bank of the trail. A large tree with lichen covering its trunk. A fallen log. A large root, exposed by the feet of voyagers, and worn smooth by the tread of their boots. It is good to notice these things. It centers you and sharpens your mind for the voyage.
Beyond a hundred yards or so my experience with the trail already becomes insufficient. Most of the things I see will be familiar, but as you get further out the variations build on each other and it becomes less and less likely that they sum to anything that you can map onto your memory. For instance, as I count my one hundred and seventh step, I see a smooth stone, about five inches in diameter, that I have seen before, but much further out, at the five-thousand three-hundred ninety-ninth step. I look up and I realize that the brush to my right has cleared; there is a small meadow of tall yellow-green grass, grass unburdened by the weight of last night’s shower, grass standing tall, except for a small depression near the trail where a deer or a bear must have lain to rest and then shaken off the moisture of the morning and set out again into the trails.
The pattern of this place is available to the animals. They have no trouble navigating it. They receive it, and know it, without effort; or they create it, they induce it, or perhaps they become it. They are aspects of it, reflections of it. They provide little clues to the structure of it, the un-logic of it, and I have learned to pay close attention to any animal behavior I can observe, even the quiet rustling that the birds do in the brush as you walk by—listen closely to that. I have never seen this meadow before, but the deer already knows it. She welcomes it and the meadow welcomes her, receives her like an old friend.
Before long I come to the first fork. Each voyage typically presents two to three forks. I have found in my experiments that it does not matter which way you go. The trail seems to put you along the path it planned for you either way—it is as if the trail just wants to know which path you would choose, or how you make the decision: do you make it arbitrarily? do you weigh the options carefully?—but it does not change anything.
I respect the wishes of this place. Today the choice is between taking the skinny, ascending path to the left, and the fatter, flatter path to the right. I look down each path as far as I can see. I squint and take a deep breath. I rub my foot into the dirt. I inhale. I take the left path.
The mild incline of the trail continues for several hundred steps. I stop for a drink at a switchback. I am an old man. These voyages are difficult and they demand more time of me than they once did. My water bottle is constructed out of two layers of aluminum, powder-coated dark green on the outside, with a black screw cap. It has a thirty-one ounce capacity. It keeps the water very cold. One of the interesting properties of this place is that my water bottle never seems to empty as long as I am here. Still, I bring purification tablets in my pack just in case, because this place is unpredictable, after all—that is its core trait, its identity.
These are the contents of my pack. My water bottle, thirteen water purification tablets, five granola bars, two bags of beef jerky (one teriyaki, one black pepper), three spare pairs of socks, a spare pair of underwear, a safari hat, a beanie, a lightweight t-shirt, a gaiter, a folding knife, a fixed-blade knife, an emergency blanket, a small tarp, a map of the area (useless, of course, in this place; but it would be helpful if I got lost and wandered out and wound up in an unpredictable location in the periphery), a Glock-19, a compass, a pair of binoculars, waterproof matches, kindling, a pocket sundial (as a backup for my watch which I keep on my wrist and check frequently) a small hatchet, a lightweight foldable shovel, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, a small notebook, a pencil.
I would never dare plan to spend the night in this place but it is best to be prepared.
I set out again and here is one of my markers. A cairn built from five flat grey stones. I began to leave markers like this occasionally because I wanted to determine if there was any capacity for permanence in this place. I would leave them in places that I had seen before (and so expected to eventually see again) or places that seemed to have some import. A broken stick, a notch in a tree, a stack of rocks. The markers are not perfectly reliable. I have come across places that I remembered and that I was sure I had left a marker at, but the marker was gone. I have left at least a couple dozen markers but I only come across one or two each voyage. Maybe the animals investigate them and carry them off, or this place removes them, or maybe my memory is simply confused. Because actually I have noticed that whenever I do come across a marker I can not remember why I decided to leave a marker in that specific location. When I come across a marker the location seems entirely new and unimportant. This cairn, for instance. Where am I? One-thousand and forty-nine steps in. A skinny part of the trail after the first fork. Headed east. I look out both sides of the trail, turning my head to the north and then the south. The forest continues out both ways infinitely; as if the trees were not but a hall of mirrors, echoing darkly. I cannot remember or fathom why I would have left a marker here. I take a mental note of the location so that if I come across this marker again I will remember that I could not remember why there was a marker here.
As I proceed I begin to hear the babbling of the creek. It is the sweetest sound. It rises and falls as you navigate the trail, hinting that the creek might greet you.
I almost always come across the creek. There are possible variations that go alongside the creek for hundreds of yards. There are other variations in which the creek runs right over the trail, and you must tiptoe over the smooth rocks lest your socks get wet. Certainly the elements have something to do with the pattern of these variations. There is also at least one bridge in this place. In one voyage I crossed a bridge twice but I cannot be sure if it was the same bridge both times. On the second time I counted the planks, wishing I had counted the planks the first time. It had twenty-nine planks. On other voyages I have counted thirteen planks and fifty-three planks in the bridge.
The trail takes a right turn, and here it is. I call it the Silver River, because I do not think it has a name. It is sort of an ironic name, because it could really only be called a creek, and that is being generous. It is the clearest water in the world. It is glass at some parts, a mirror in others, cold air in others still. I was warned not to drink from it, but I am tempted by it every time. So far I have succeeded in resisting but I am not certain that someday I won’t dip my hands into the liquid and let it run into my mouth, my throat, my belly; and that I won’t disappear into the creek bed, and become a sound, the sound of the wind moving through the leaves in this place, the sound of the little birds moving in the brush, the sound of a deer laying in the grass, the sound of an eagle screaming, the sound of a gunshot ringing against the slopes, the sound of the sun in the sky, the sound of a leaf falling, the sound of the snow touching the ground, the sound of a flower blooming, the sound of a blade of grass gathering dew, the sound of the night taking over, the sound of the creek, hinting its greeting.
Somehow the creek becomes or comes from the falls. I have found the falls on eleven of my voyages. I have always thought of the falls as the end of the trail but over time I have started to question that circumstance. The falls may be simply the place where I turned around on my first voyage. They pour themselves from a height of about five feet into a small, shallow bowl carved out of brown-grey stone, and then flow out back away from the trail. The trail can come at the falls from any direction. It is an amazing place. It feels untouched by sunlight, but it is so green. Flowers grow very well in the overgrowth surrounding the pool and they attract butterflies. The rocks all over are covered in moss. The trees shout their green at you, or in the autumn they whisper their colors down into the pool, and then they are carried by the creek, away and away forever. The falls make less noise than you think they should.
You lose your sense of time at the falls. You feel dead and immortal. I always stop for a snack if I reach them.
I am ascending. The trees will give way to the first overlook soon. The first overlook always comes, but it is impossible to say when it will come or how far you must walk. I count the three-thousand four-hundred sixty-ninth step as my eyes gain the view out. The view at the first overlook is not particularly impressive unless there is a mist covering the valley, but I have stopped taking voyages in such conditions out of fear, since the forty-third voyage in the thick fog two winters ago. There is, however, information to be gleaned about the pattern of this place from the view here. For instance, today the sun is blanketing the valley. The trees are harsh and blurred and whitish-greenish-grey; they take on and reflect the color of their trunks and the dirt below them. This has something to do with the light that touches the ground at the trailhead, but I am not sure what the connection is exactly. You can also see from here that the slopes are shallow today. It can be assumed that the turns of the trail in this place interact with the broader shifting of the patterns in the geography. It can be helpful to stop at the first overlook to gather your thoughts about the pattern and get the proper sense of scale and emptiness.
I am about to continue when I see a hawk come into the sky from the northern slope. She is small and nearly black but for her beak, of which I can just barely see the yellow, or I impose yellow upon it from my imagination. Her feathers are dark brown flecked with white, coated in air. The hawk circles once and then moves southward, the same direction the trail is leading me.
I am far enough in now that any prediction of what is ahead, even around this bend, would be a mere guess.
There is a lake in this place. I have only seen it once, on the thirty-first voyage. It is a small lake. I found a big rock to sit on and I ate my snack and watched the lake for an hour. I saw twenty-three trout sip bugs off the surface. As I sat I wished I had a notebook to record the details of the voyage which led me there. Not because it would have guaranteed my ability to get back to the lake—this place is unpredictable—but because it was beautiful, and certainly a powerful anchor of the pattern, and it would have been interesting to see how it connected to other details. I started carrying a notebook after that voyage, and I occasionally write things down that are particularly interesting or surprising, but I never read the notes.
The water of the lake is very wet, dark gray. A stream flows out of it at the east side (or at least it was the east side when I saw it), and I imagine this stream contributes to the Silver River somewhere. The lake sits on an open overlook; you can see up the slopes past the tree line, and depending on the time of year there is likely to be large masses of snow wedged in the clefts of the peaks. You can see how the snowmelt is channeled down the slopes in veins. It has occurred to me that the lake may be ephemeral, only existing in the summer and maybe only when the conditions are right; you need the right shape in the geography, a large bowl, and then an early spell of thunderstorms to create an initial repository of water, and then plenty of snowmelt to keep it alive.
I look up and there is a shifting dark hulk ahead, just off the trail. Nineteen yards or so. It’s a small black bear. I purse my lips, shake my head slightly, and blow air through my nose. I should not have been looking at my feet. That is a rookie mistake. That is exactly when this place will throw something unexpected at you. I have never seen a bear before. I have always known that there are bears here but I have not had any sense of their number. I stand as still as possible and watch him.
The bear has not seen me. He is pawing at a fallen log just off the trail. There must be something smelly underneath it. He sticks his nose under the log and then raises his head and paws at the log again. He does this multiple times. I just watch him. I count breaths. His fur is amazingly coarse, if you touch it expecting something like a dog you will be quite unsettled indeed; his breath is hot and loud, it fills my ear and pushes everything else out, and I automatically synchronize my breaths to his.
One hundred and one breaths go by.
He finally manages to get the log to move. He puts his nose under the log quickly and then pulls his head out before the log settles again. I wonder if he succeeded. He looks towards me as if he knew what I was thinking—there is something in his mouth. He begins sauntering towards me. He will be looking for a place to eat whatever he has found. I begin to raise my arms so that I will appear larger, but he jumps, almost like a human would, startled, and takes off into the trees to the right. He must have thought I was a tree until I moved.
I check my watch. Before long it will be time to turn around. Often, the trail forms a loop and it is not necessary to turn around; you simply end up where you started, at the trailhead, automatically. But this circumstance cannot be relied upon—the trail is unpredictable, this is its core attribute—and so you must keep careful track of time so that you can know when to turn around in order to make it back to the trailhead before it gets dark.
I learned this lesson early on. In one of my first voyages into this place, I wore my watch like I always do, but I did not bother to check it frequently. I assumed that I would make it to the falls in a similar amount of time to the previous voyages, at which point I would have a snack and make my way back to the trailhead with plenty of daylight left. This is hubris. This is not respecting this place. I never reached the falls; I sat to take a drink and I looked up past the treetops and I realized the sun had moved halfway down the western side of the sky. I was perplexed. I took out my compass because I thought my sense of direction must have been failing me, but no, indeed, the sun was approaching the horizon, sunset was only a few hours away. It was later in the year so the day was shorter, and it is possible that I set out later in the morning than the previous voyages, but the point is that I was not paying attention, and that was my mistake. I did some rapid, intuitive calculations and figured that if I hurried, with some luck I would be lucky to make it back to the trailhead before dark. As if this place recognized that I gained respect for it, the way back was shorter and I made it to the trailhead just as sunset was beginning.
I waited weeks before I attempted another voyage, but when I did, I set out early and checked my watch frequently. That was when the trail formed a loop for the first time.
It is time to turn around. The feeling hits you in the gut and you get this mix of relief and regret, of satisfaction and disappointment. Most of all, though, the curiosity fills you up all over again. The voyage replays itself in you and you catalog all of the salient details, and you plug it all in to your map of this place. I call it a map but that is not really what I mean. I mean my sense of this place. I do the voyage again, its mirror image. Or something close to the mirror image. It is not exact: no fork is presented, the bear does not appear, the stream runs over the trail instead of coming up next to it, the cairn has seven stones instead of five, and the meadow where the deer lay has vanished.
It is ending. I can tell because I am starting to see a mirror of one of the familiar variations of the first hundred or so yards. There is a sharp incline close to the trailhead in one of the variations and I am turning a corner now and then I will begin to descend it. Fifty-three steps later I will be at the trailhead, a subtle variation of the one I set into.
The dirt is drier, firmer, now, later in the day. It was a short voyage. The sun is still high in the sky, just west of straight above. I wonder why this place only kept me for such a short time today. I almost think of turning around and doing another—it is possible there could be enough time—but I think better of it.
Here is the trailhead. It is one of the most reliable things about this place; its beginning and its end.