A Rucksack Rumination
An essay by Jeff Darren Muse
One of the generalities most often noted about Americans is that we are a restless, a dissatisfied, a searching people. We bridle and buck under failure, and we go mad with dissatisfaction in the face of success. We spend our time searching for security, and hate it when we get it.
—John Steinbeck, Paradox and Dream
The spray paint surprised me. Neon orange. Unnatural. The slashes crisscrossed beneath my boots, contrasting with the emerging greenery crowding both sides of the trail. Chilled, I rezipped my collar. Scraps of clouds ascended the mountainside.
The paint marked the end for a fifty-four-year-old woman shot dead in that very spot the previous August. I’d forgotten about the incident, my mind on footfall in loose gravel, a much-needed break from the journey I’d been making from rural Rockport, through Seattle, to the tidal coves of Olympia on the southern tip of Puget Sound. And back up I-5 at week’s end. I was seven months into a new job, a renegotiated marriage, a renegotiated identity unwedded to a dank river valley deep in the North Cascades. I had the same share of the mortgage, but also rent. I had a 320-mile round-trip commute and a futon in some lady’s outbuilding, a studio her ex-husband, a psychologist, had used for appointments. It figures I would end up there. I remember the towering Douglas firs that swayed above the studio’s roof, how windblown cones would plunk the metal as I lay awake, exhausted. I remember weeknight after weeknight, alone.
I’d been hired by The Evergreen State College to help Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, a world-renowned forest ecologist, launch the Sustainability in Prisons Project. Gathering dozens of collaborators, we took science and nature into the state’s correctional system: green-collar job training, inmate-led research projects, and initiatives to save tax dollars as well as natural resources, from composting and recycling, to gardening and beekeeping, to refurbishing old bicycles and rehabilitating troubled dogs. Nalini wore mismatched socks—different colors and patterns—and on the morning I worked up the courage to ask why, when we were preparing to present to a state legislative committee, she replied with her typical zest. “Chaos theory, Jeff! Who knows what might happen next?”
Next. I was worn out by next. But there I was, back in Rockport, hiking up a subalpine meadow I could see from my half-a-house, my thighs starting to burn and my shoulders at last loosening from highway-weary weekdays that were anything but sustainable. My wife, Paula, was working that day at the Park Service visitor center, striving for a promotion as the district interpreter, a better-paid GS-11 position she was trying to land after serving a decade as a GS-9 ranger. My plan was to venture up 5,500-foot Sauk Mountain, where a fire lookout had once sat. The Beat poet Philip Whalen stood watch on Sauk in 1953, the same season his friend from Reed College, Gary Snyder, had been posted on Sourdough, thirty miles up the Skagit River. Fifty-six summers later, I was the one who was beat, from commuting, from renegotiating, and far from the beatitude Jack Kerouac had longed for in On the Road. But I hoped to spend a few hours with the poets and writers who had lured me to the mountains in the first place, at least my notion of them, as if wandering was simply something I could lay down in my journal, something I could look back on to appraise my life, to measure it. I could turn the chaos into story, a book perhaps, and maybe it would all be worth it—the stress, the journey, the countless decisions that seemed so random at the time but actually were leading somewhere, wherever I needed to go. Such as Sauk Mountain, a few days before my fortieth birthday.
But in that moment, I was lost. I’d wandered all that way, half a lifetime, thousands of miles from one job to the next, one bed to another, yet felt no closer to figuring out who I was or what I wanted, what I needed to feel contented. And committed—a committed husband. Or rather, settled, unplagued by indecision and the desire to renegotiate the terms of where Paula and I would live, and what we were living for. Instead, I felt imprisoned. Imprisoned by my own tendency to flee.
Then I stepped on that spray paint, the remnants of a forensic analysis. Four switchbacks up the trail, I encountered a second set of neon orange lines and an arrow pointing downhill, indicating where the shooter had stood to fire his gun. It all came rushing back: “the accident.” Everybody called it that, though it led to a conviction of second-degree manslaughter. A fourteen-year-old hunter had pulled his trigger when he thought he saw a black bear rustling in the vegetation below, the wind-whipped fog obscuring his view. But it had only been a hiker leaning over her pack, perhaps stowing her jacket or grabbing a field guide to study a few plants. The woman was a longtime nature lover from the next valley over, the Stillaguamish. The boy was a Skagit kid, hunting legally on a Forest Service trail signed for “extra heavy” use. His grandfather had dropped him off with his older brother, another teenager, thinking that the morning’s clouds would keep hikers away.
“Both families lost a life that day,” I recall a neighbor saying, someone who’d lived in Rockport for decades and knew the boy’s parents through the school system. I nodded in agreement, not wanting to offend with an opinion about guns—guns in the hands of teenagers.
At the time of the killing, early August 2008, bear season underway, Sauk’s meadows would’ve radiated with wildflowers: lavender lupine, flame-red columbine, valerian, bright white, shoulder high, drunk on sunshine and snowmelt. But on this hike—June 20, 2009, according to my journal—only ground-hugging glacier lilies were blossoming, their petals creamy yellow, a shade that looks exactly like they taste, like sweet corn. I wrote that I put one in my mouth and thought about the black bears, how they rise from lowlands come summer to feast on blooms and bulbs and berries. I thought about the dead woman and the friend who’d been hiking with her, how she lay terrified, fearing another shot.
I suppose I felt fear too. Fear of how Sauk Mountain was no longer what it once was, at least for me. The wildflowers had become blood, the trees ghosts, the hike itself switchbacking to a loneliness I couldn’t bear to imagine.
The thing is, more than a decade later, I still can’t make sense of that time. My mind races with memories: an ironing board I bent violently during an argument in our second bedroom; thousands of haloing headlights, smeared through my windshield; men in red “DOC” shirts raising endangered Oregon spotted frogs; a female inmate, incarcerated for life, calmly taking notes like a scientist; and Nalini’s laughter, her muscular arms, her tree-climbing equipment in my office in an Evergreen biology lab. In the years that followed, long after I worked for Nalini, whom National Geographic once called “Queen of the Forest Canopy,” she nearly died from a fifty-foot freefall while conducting treetop research. Four surgeries later, after a coma, after weeks of hospital care and months and months of physical therapy, she continues to teach about her personal experience through lectures and papers on “disturbance, recovery, and resilience,” much in the way ecosystems regenerate after a traumatic event.
Next. The science of next.
It would have been helpful to realize that at the time. It would be helpful to fully grasp it now, to embody it. But I’m not as durable as Nalini, nor as strong as that hiker’s friend, who survived the hunting accident by lying in the wildflowers, their kaleidoscope of blooms providing unexpected camouflage. I imagine her rising to her feet, shell-shocked.
But I do recall sitting on Sauk’s summit, taking in its 360-degree view for what would be my last time. The Skagit River swept back and forth in a widening valley, heading soundward, as I would the next evening. I dug into my rucksack to pull out my journal and then a small book, Philip Whalen’s The Diamond Noodle, which I hadn’t read since my own job upriver, in North Cascades National Park. And for some reason—a decision that continues to elude me—I wrote down its first line: “The sun itself hadn’t come up yet, but its light boiled up above the mountains.”
I remember that light, that light before everything changes, the possibilities beyond daybreak, the promise. I remember hiking down, my boots gnawing through the gravel. Yellow glacier lilies. Orange spray paint. Scraps of clouds.
From crawdad creeks, to national parks, to former slave plantations, Jeff Darren Muse has worked as an environmental educator and historical interpreter throughout the United States. Today he and his wife live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His new book, Dear Park Ranger, interrogates his lifelong restlessness—that of a fatherless, childless tree hugger, a Generation X midwesterner who wouldn’t and couldn’t stay put. This essay is drawn from that collection, forthcoming from Wayfarer Books (May 2023).