storyfires

Hiking in the high Uintas this July:  Mountain lakes. Backpacking in a downpour. Watching the sparks fly up in ribbons from a massive fire built on rock. Not sleeping the first night because there might be bears. And the ground is just so hard. Falling asleep the second night the instant we hit the therma-rests because we are just so tired. Freeze-dried food Zero time wasted on face and hair. A mountain silence bigger than space. A million flowers. A billion mosquitoes. Lying on our backs on a rock slab watching layers of cloud barely overhead. Sunset silhouettes. Life stripped down to the simple. We have our peace to carry back home. Time to get back to work.

Continuing the wilderness theme of a couple posts back, here's a quote by Wallace Stegner: "We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope." --from The Wilderness Letter And a couple more by Stegner on fiction: "In Fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth." "How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled? You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens...Sure it's autobiography. Sure it's fiction. Either way if you have done it right, it's true."

With the possible destruction of my favorite canyon looming, I'm feeling a little too much, with Gerard Manley Hopkins, that the world "wears man's smudge, and shares man's smell." Which puts me in the mood for more Hopkins. Here's his "Inversnaid," a poem with great sounds, that captures my feeling perfectly, though it's about a loch, not a mountain. Read it aloud for full effect: This darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home. A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, ...