In From the Storm

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

To be awake is to be alive.
Henry David Thoreau

...was talking about how I sometimes feel nostalgic for the most tragic and horrible times in my life....when, for a while, the mind stopped drifting so haphazardly...attention overwhelmed...focused, whether it wanted to be or not, on a gaping and unavoidable pain...every unhappy moment felt so deeply and intensely as to burn with a flame that continues to glow in memory....but this isn’t a story about that...

...went backpacking in the Rockies twenty years or so ago...Indian Peaks Wilderness, near Boulder, with a friend who’d never backpacked before...and probably never did again....we hiked about six miles, mostly up, and were way above treeline when dark storm clouds appeared off above the ridgeline....I thought better get the tent up...which is what we did...this old fashioned pup tent found in my dad’s attic...and managed to clamber in just as the first raindrops started to fall, which seemed to us like perfect timing...though it couldn’t’ve been more than a minute or two before wanton winds coursing across the alpine tundra unearthed flimsy metal tent stakes, bringing thin orange material down on us like a wet cowl....which, as best we could, we held up with arms outstretched like twin Jesuses as the scene through the open flap resembled the Apocalypse as much as anything I’d ever seen...lightning dancing and exploding everywhere, wind raging in countless directions at once, cold rain hammering down....my friend said, at one point, I don’t know if I can deal with this....and I said I don’t think we have much choice...

...not that I wasn’t terrified, too...I was, of course...but also felt a curious exhilaration...crouching in the midst of this all...the insane, spectacular lightning, the wind and rain rampaging at us from all sides...the inescapable knowledge that we could die at any moment, easily...but that, right there, right then, blood was pulsing through us with a ferocity rivaling that of the storm...

...at some point, we decided it'd be a good idea to get away from the useless metal tent poles, and went to crouch by a rock that kinda sorta almost gave us some shelter until the storm passed...which it did, after a while...but by then it was dark, though the moon shone limply through the clouds, and we went back to the tent, found it completely waterlogged, sleeping bags and everything else utterly soaked and cold...and, even if I’d had the backwoods know-how and fortitude to get a fire going, there was no wood up there....then, if I’d had any backwoods know-how at all, we would’ve turned around and run for treeline as soon as we saw those dark clouds....so, with hands numb from the cold, we crammed sleeping bags into backpacks, leaving the tent stuffed between two rocks, where I retrieved it, along with various other items strewn around the area, two days later, and started the long climb down...

...not sure where it came from...except that I shared it with Mittens, our otherwise fearless Welsh Corgi...but I had a phobia about thunderstorms from early on...by my mid-twenties, it was subtle...just a dark cold feeling somewhere inside whenever I heard that ominous rumbling...but very real nonetheless....after that experience in Indian Peaks, though, the fear was gone....my friend Jeff came out to Colorado and we spent much of the rest of that summer backpacking high in the mountains...often setting up camp just below treeline so that, when the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm came, we could go and watch it from close up....and even today, when I get caught on my bike in a storm...which happens at least once a summer, usually somewhere between downtown and home...I try to avoid it, but not always very hard...it can feel like a crisp, unruly baptism...