To Conundrum in Late November

 

I do not feel alone and abandoned even though I find myself in the desolate valley, high on a ridge above the roaring creek, trying to make my way across a snow-filled crevasse before dark; even though the sun has already slipped behind the mountain peak, outlining it in a nimbus of glory. Even though I punch through the ice at every step and sink up to my hips and have to use all three remaining limbs to pull out my leg while staring and yearning towards the rocky promontory that offers its sheltering trees and rocks where I might rest out of the whistling menacing wind for a few hours until dawn or I am about to freeze to death, whichever comes first. Even though I slip down a foot or two or ten each time I take a step going across the snow-filled crevasse while imagining being on a tightrope across the Twin Towers, trying to stay on the "high road" to save precious energy by not going down just to go up again. Even though I at last arrive at the rocky promontory that will be my evening's resting place, though I find that the trees are too bedraggled to shelter me and the rocks are too craggy and pointed. Even though I find myself a good 10 feet below the most promising looking rock that has a triangular overhang. Even though it takes 10 minutes of effort in the fading light to climb up closer to the sheltering rock only to find that there is no place to perch underneath it. Even though I slide even lower on the promontory so that I'm hanging by my fingernails from a sheer face. Even though I use my trekking pole to punch an ice igloo in the sheer face only to have the bottom drop out just as I step in. Even though I abandon the promontory and slide/ski on the soles of my boots down the mountain several hundred feet in just a few minutes, losing, with a happy yell, all the altitude I had been carefully preserving for the past two hours. Even though I slid and scanned the landscape just below me, my mind racing to search out a passage through the brambles, tangles, thickets, and woods, till I came to rest sideways and with one leg bent under me, and two pant legs full of snow. Even though I struggle through the woods going back and forth, getting all turned around, while the twilight deepens, and I stumble out into a clearing, following the tracks of who knows what animal (see right) but at least it doesn't look like it has claws. Even though the clearing, which I had so hoped would be easy going, turns out to be yet another boulder field where my leg sinks in at every step and I must work a jigsaw puzzle to get it out again. Even though the light is seriously disappearing by the time I reach the creek and I cross halfway on a fallen trunk and halfway on an ice bridge, and still I can't find the trail and wander around in circles until in the last light of alpenglow I see the trail, I will feel no despair, only hope, and wonder, and excitement about what will happen next and will I be man enough to face it and know that, yes I will. Because finding the trail is one thing but there's also 8 miles of trail to navigate in the pitch black night with the crescent moon sulking and not climbing in the sky, since it saw my departure on this trail more than 12 hours ago. 

It is all wonderful and exciting and even more so because I am alone and yet my friends are with me the whole time, the two brave horses, the wild ponies, one on either side of me in the faint daylight and in the strong moonlight.