Category: Poets

The Winds of Autumn

The first big fall storm swept through our area today, canceling our usual Monday hike, and probably putting on hold any hikes for the rest of the week.

Perhaps if we hadn’t had such a long, beautiful hiking season we would have risked it today, but we would have been drenched.

Deprived of an actual hike in the mountains, I did the next best thing and read Burton Watson’s translation of Saigyo, Poems of a Mountain Home.

How similar all human emotions must be when an 11th Century Japanese poet can so perfectly state my feelings at this particular moment in time.

Even in a person

most times indifferent

to things around him

they waken feelings

the first winds of autumn

No need to state the feelings, to do so would be redundant.

Saigyo even seems to understand why I have been hiking with a particular passion the last three weeks.

Not stopping to mark the trail,

let me push even deeper

into the mountain!

Perhaps there’s a place

where bad news can never reach me!

Lookout

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
…
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

Gary Snyder from No Nature

Although Bill and I couldn’t avoid talking about the state of the nation on our long drive to our hike, we slowly put our priorities back in order as we spent the day hiking Lookout Mountain, an old fire lookout just east of Mt. Hood. Like most of our late-season hikes, it is virtually straight up and ten to eleven miles long.

The 30 to 40 degree temperature at the beginning of the hike made the sharp uphill easier than usual, but it was still a long climb up, particularly since we haven’t hiked in over a week. Luckily this left little room for talk, and I was able to sink into that kind of meditative rhythm that makes hiking so special to me. For a time, at least, I was able to simply be, without any thought for the day or for the future.

The views of Mt Rainer, Mt Adams, Mt Jefferson, and The Three Sisters from the top were breathtaking, more than justifying the peak’s name. A simple meal of an organic orange and a handful of granola mix somehow seemed appropriate in this zen-like setting.

Too soon, though, we were back on our way down to the flatlands and our daily concerns.