Wild

When The Ten Thousand Things had turned to ash, I pulled out the other book in my ziplock bag. It was The Dream of a Common Language. I’d carried it all this way, though I hadn’t opened it since that first night on the trail. I hadn’t needed to. I knew what it said. Its lines had run all summer through the mix-tape radio station in my head, fragments from various poems or sometimes the title of the book itself, which was also a line from a poem: the dream of a common language. I opened the book and paged through it, leaning forward so I could see the words by the firelight. I read a line or two from a dozen or so of the poems, each of them so familiar they gave me a strange sort of comfort. I’d chanted those lines silently through the days while I hiked. Often, I didn’t know exactly what they meant, yet there was another way in which I knew their meaning entirely, as if it were all before me and yet out of my grasp, their meaning like a fish just beneath the surface of the water that I tried to catch with my bare hands—so close and present and belonging to me—until I reached for it and it flashed away.

I closed the book and looked at its beige cover. There was no reason not to burn this book too.

Instead, I only hugged it to my chest.

We reached Timberline Lodge a couple of days later. By then it wasn’t just Doug and me. Tom had caught up to us, and we’d also been joined by two women—a twenty-something ex-couple who were hiking Oregon and a small section of Washington. The five of us hiked together in duos and trios of various formations, or sometimes all of us in a row, making a leisurely party of it, the vibe festive because of our numbers and the cool sunny days. On our long breaks we played hacky sack and skinny-dipped in an icy-cold lake, incited the wrath of a handful of hornets and then ran from them while we laughed and screamed. By the time we reached Timberline Lodge 6,000 feet up on the south flank of Mount Hood, we were like a tribe, bonded in that way I imagined kids felt when they spent a week together at summer camp.

It was midafternoon when we arrived. In the lounge the five of us took over a pair of couches that faced each other across a low wooden table and ordered terribly expensive sandwiches, then afterwards sipped coffees spiked with Baileys while we played poker and rummy five hundred with a deck of cards we borrowed from the bartender. The slope of Mount Hood rose above us just outside the lodge’s windows. At 11,240 feet, it’s Oregon’s highest mountain—a volcano like all the others I’d passed since I entered the Cascade Range south of Lassen Peak way back in July—but this, the last of the major mountains I’d traverse on my hike, felt like the most important, and not only because I was sitting on its very haunches. The sight of it had become familiar to me, its imposing grandeur visible from Portland on clear days. Once I reached Mount Hood I realized I felt ever so slightly like I was home. Portland—where I’d never technically lived, in spite of all that had happened in the eight or nine months I’d spent there over the past two years—was only sixty miles away.

From afar, the sight of Mount Hood had never failed to take my breath away, but up close it was different, the way everything is. It was less coolly majestic, at once more ordinary and more immeasurable in its gritty authority. The landscape outside the north windows of the lodge was not the glistening white peak one sees from miles away, but a grayish and slightly barren slope dotted with a few scraggly stands of pines and a smattering of lupine and asters that grew among the rocks. The natural landscape was punctuated by a ski lift that led to the crusty swath of snow farther up. I was happy to be protected from the mountain for a time, ensconced inside the glorious lodge, a wonderland in the rough. It’s a grand stone-and-wood structure that was hand-hewn by Works Progress Administration workers in the mid-1930s. Everything about the place has a story. The art on the walls, the architecture of the building, the handwoven fabrics that cover the furniture—each piece carefully crafted to reflect the history, culture, and natural resources of the Pacific Northwest.

I excused myself from the others and walked slowly through the lodge, then stepped out onto a wide south-facing patio. It was a clear, sunny day and I could see for more than a hundred miles. The view included so many of the mountains I’d hiked past—two of the Three Sisters and Mount Jefferson and Broken Finger.

Hop, skip, spin, done, I thought. I was here. I was almost there. But I wasn’t done. I still had fifty miles to walk before I reached the Bridge of the Gods.