At the start of July, a particularly sporty friend–the kind who believes a vacay-day is squandered if it doesn’t include at least two athletic “adventures”–asked innocently what my goals were for my time here in the Tetons.
“Goals? Are you kidding? I come up here to get away from goals!”
Guilt–mine–set in before I’d put the exclamation point at the end of the sentence. Maybe she was right. Maybe I should have some things to shoot for, beyond my usual summer indulgences of reading books, doing some writing, hiking and horseback riding now and again, staring at the mountains, refilling the well after a busy school year.
“OK. Table Mountain. I want to get to the top of Table Mountain.”
By the time Ascent Day dawned a month later, I’d at least been out on the dirt roads and trails around our cabin pretty much daily, putting in five or six miles, aiming to snag one of Derf’s 300-miles t-shirts and to hear my name announced at Assembly in September. But that was Nordic walking, not hiking, and certainly very little uphill challenge. I was secretly pretty skeptical about the task ahead–getting to the top (elevation gain: 4151 feet, from a start at around 6500) without busting a lung or dragging a mile behind the others. My hiking compadres were 1) younger by a decade or several (neighbor Suzanne, Robert Welch ’16), 2) nimbler (my mountain-goat husband, Michael), 3) practiced in the art (Tom, Linda), or 4) all/most of the above.
The first hour was a long, steep slog. I pulled out Chuck Warren’s sherpa step, learned (sort of) when I first arrived at Thacher in 1978 and practiced (a little) in the High Sierra environs of Golden Trout. I repeated my favorite mantra for times like these–Eleanor Roosevelt’s Do the thing you think you cannot do. I may have huffed, and I may have puffed, but I did it sotto voce, trying to keep the others in the group from knowing how the altitude gain was seriously taxing my internal organs. Linda–athletic, irrepressibly optimistic–cheerled me that first leg of the journey I now couldn’t believe I’d actually proposed. “Don’t think about the others. We’ll go at our own pace. It’s ok. You can do this!”
H is for Humility. F, for friendship.
The trail leveled out, then turned vertical again for another quarter mile. But along the way, cow parsley and Indian Paintbrush to behold, aspen leaves like green coins backlit in the morning sun, peeks to expansive views north and south, striated headwalls and broad commas of snow against green alpine meadows. Another less vertiginous stretch, and then, the straight-up of the final push to the top. Ahead, Michael stepped off the trail, waiting patiently for me to reach him, then reminding me: “One foot in front of the other, Fluff. You can do it.”
“Re- [sucked-in breath] -ally?” “Yes. I know you can.” Now, the trail really was quite nearly a right angle. But the only way out was through, the only way up was up, so onward.
In the final yards, my hiking poles were useless: I was grabbing boulders and moving up by inches. “Hope you’re spotting me, Michael.” “Of course I am.”
T, Trust.
Then, suddenly, like coming out of a three-sided chimney, I was at the top of the Table. Grand Teton, right there, touchable. Hurricane Pass, Cascade Canyon, a perfectly round emerald lake, rock, sky, sun. Blastingly beautiful, knock-your-Smartwool-socks off stunning. We high-fived, these friends and I, took all variety of pictures, tore off chunks of Balance Bars with our teeth, gulped water.
On the downhill, I was a speed-demon. Much of the way, Robert and I talked about the Thacher year just past–the lessons it had held for him and for me, the laughs we had separately or together in English class, the camaraderie of intentional community. What we most relished for formal dinner or breakfast, our thoughts about the school year ahead, both immediate (preseason football for him, professional development in project-based learning for me) and the longer view.
K is for kinship.
There’s something more in my Table Mountain trek, though, and it’s this: I will use every step I took here to help me be a better leader there–that is, on the Sierra sojourn that the new 9th graders take, ready or not, less than 48 hours after they and their families drive through the Thacher gates on Opening Day. Out of my own uphill challenges, I will, I hope, be more empathetic, more patient. My encouragement of the 14-year-old girl who’s never shouldered a backpack, much less hiked at 10,000 feet with veritable strangers, will come from the recent memory of laboring lungs and burning thigh muscles. And when we finally rest, when we sleep under pines and stars, I will assure those unnecessarily nervous about the wildness of the wildlife (our bear canisters, set far away from our sleeping bags, will likely go untouched in the night) to open themselves to the beauty above and all around that is available to us only if we take the trail.