Diary - Mile 788.
Forests and mountains - I’m at home.
It’s only been 6 days in the Sierra, but I’m in love. Finally, there’s shade from the trees. Everywhere. And water! You don’t have to carry 4 liters anymore. No need for excruciatingly long siestas. And the mountains…I love trees for their life, movement, rustling of the leaves. I love mountains for precisely the opposite - stillness. They are the closest thing to eternity that I’ve ever seen. I like to revisit that “eternity” from time to time to remind me that I’m not. To look at it, to walk it, touch it briefly. One day I will be gone and the mountains will remain, standing there, in silent adhitthana, humming softly when the wind passes through their creases. And thousands of other people will walk the same paths. By then, the wind will have long erased my footsteps as if I have never even been there. And that’s fine. Maybe by then I will have turned into a tree. And years later, I’ll rot and turn into a handful of dirt. Who knows, maybe footsteps of many hikers will trample me into a path on the ridge of a mountain. And someone like me will pass by, thinking I’ve been there for an eternity. But I haven’t. This is what I like about life. It passes. It doesn’t really die, it recycles in time, changes form and lives on.
So there I was, walking alone, around ice-blue lakes, thinking about life when I reached a river and decided to have lunch. Cooked some pasta, ate, filtered some water. Many hikers have passed by in that time. Eventually I packed and decided to reply to a message on a garmin. Now, replying to a message on a garmin mini is worse than doing that on an old Nokia 3310. It takes ages. So I sit there, crouching near my pack, pressing rubber buttons when I notice something moving out of the corner of my eye. “It’s another hiker” I think, and lift my eyes to say hi. And no, it’s not a hiker. It’s a waist-high, fat, brown bear, standing two meters from me, looking at me. I jump up with words “wow wow wow, bear” and start waving my arms in the air. To my surprise, the bear startles, walks a couple of steps further and turns around, as if reconsidering his decision. I politely and loudly ask him to go away, and clap (cause if you get eaten by a bear, you want to leave life clapping, like a great event it was). The bear, very reluctantly, walks away to the river. I want to take a video, but he keeps looking back so I decide not to be a stupid tourist, haul my bag pack on, and get out of there before he changes his mind, laughing to myself at this “what did just happen”. I wanted to see a bear, but at a distance. Not a freaking front seat at a petting zoo. I’m impressed though at my indifference to a potentially badly ending situation…not even a scream. Cold.
This eventful day has concluded my first week in the Sierra - was running out of food, because I was never good at calculation, so went 21 miles in a day over two 3K meter passes, met a bear, and hitched to Bishop town, where I bought myself a gin tonic and a cucumber.
Cheers.