We’ve braved the weather at Waterton Lakes for four days; rain pelting gortex as we stir fry dinner on the Coleman stove, tarps snapping and flapping in the never-ending wind. Day five. We wake to a shard of sunlight climbing the side of the tent. Could it be? Will we hike today without toque and mitts?
We set off for the Alderson-Carthew Summit – a 15 km round trip hike from Cameron Lake: a turquoise pool circled by walls of rock. The trail rises slowly through alpine terrain – huckleberries, blueberries and fireweed turn rosy in the sharp air. Stunted spruce and tamarack, wind shaped, create a bent and roughened forest. We begin in partial sun, but a few hundred feet up the trail the clouds lock closed – and a hard driving slurry of sleet/snow begins.
Sigh.
We put our heads down and keep walking. Abruptly, landscape turns stone-scape, alpine meadows replaced with the red shale of a steep rock trail that switchbacks up the mountain to a summit covered in blowing cloud one minute and patches of blue sky the next. Since we now see the top there is no option but to reach it. By now the air is thinner and we breathe harder, our steps more laborious. I stop and look up the last 200 feet to the summit, put my head back down, hoist up my pack and trudge to the top. John has arrived ahead of me (of course) and is already shooting pictures, framing up his shots between banks of low cloud that blow into us and then pass down the other side of the mountain.
We are standing on the spine of a mountain ridge that curves down to a far valley. The ridge passes through two small lakes we see in the distance, then travels into trees. Farther still we see the prairie grass lands, mottled with alternating patches of sun and rain.
Our journeys this summer have been devoid of any real story. The drama and gossip of everyday life has fallen silent – not that either of our personal lives contain much of this, still the inevitable connections of modern-ness mean we know more about the world and its people than we used to, or probably need to. This ridge top is a river of wind, a home for absence, a place linking sound and silence, each promising to not out-do the other. I want to stay a while. Throw away a galaxy of thought, the continual turning of the mind. Feel a space whose existence depends on my not being there. Look closely at the saxifrage clutching rocks and ledges, the tough grass blasted by weather.
This is the world.
And soon, because sound and silence have struck a natural bargain, we must leave. Cold, tired, we slope homeward, silence stepping sideways, the wind naming us inconsequential creatures who do not, cannot belong.
In her poem A Name, Many Names Anne Simpson says…
Later you’ll need a name
that’s door and window, roof
and bed. You’ll need a name to foil
the thief that comes
to live in your heart. But now
you’ll need a name so diaphanous
and small
it takes its shape from air.
Here is the link to John’s photos for the day…http://picasaweb.google.ca/lh/
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