"How to be alone"

"I was walking far from home...I saw lovers in a window whisper 'want me like time', 'want me like time'."

I am in the awe inspiring metropolis of Missoula, Montana.  It at least feels that way compared to the igneous despair of Idaho (more on that).  Everything is beautiful, still, though some places are starting to look very similar to others and I have to keep reminding myself that this snow-capped mountain range is actually not the same as the one in Utah or wherever.  It is more a metaphor for my life than I would have expected: everything is new.  Stop being bored.  But it's easy to let it happen anyway, especially if I haven't slept well or had to drive farther than I expected in a day.  So, Missoula is the current.  I spent a couple days in Bend with Dani before I set out on my own.  Couch surfed with some cool guys and tried to take it easy after the stress of Washington.  Since then it's been going pretty steady.  I crossed all the way to east Idaho and then north into Montana.  I will camp out somewhere tonight and then make Glacier tomorrow where I hope to spend two nights and get some killer hiking in.  Idaho, it turns out, is 1/3 lava flow...so Craters of the Moon is a volcanic site that shares the same lava flows as Yellowstone.  It's very cool, the same kind of desolation that is outside Bend but you get to really explore here - most of the park is designated wilderness so it's kind of "go for a walk, take water; don't die".  It is a spectacle but not exactly what I would call beautiful.  As an aside, I have yet to encounter a potato.  My second night I camped in a national forest site, a Friday (usually impossible to find camping), and I was utterly alone.  It was me an squirrels for an entire night and most of a day.  It was the first night I ever really spent without another soul I think.  I mean, there was always somebody in the apartment below or one of the roommates had a party; maybe I went camping but the next site was occupied.  The experience gave a new perspective to the idea of "the void stared back".  My nerves took some time to settle but then it was rather enjoyable.  Then at Craters - and here I say thank God for how completely void of life Idaho really is - the stars were so dense you could see the milky way cloud.  And not the little whispers of a fog that I might have seen before.  There was no doubt of what I was looking at.  I went totally crazy and had AN ENTIRE BEER BY MYSELF and watched for some shooting stars.  I did make a wish.  I am not telling.  I would prefer to have some profound sentiment to share, I get bored of these rundowns.  I will say I am learning.  My brain processes a ton and it's more to do with not feeling like I can say it all than that nothing is happening.  My mind wanders and it's fast and my fingers and my pens haven't always kept up.  Right now, home feels very far away.  And I think about coming back and not at all in a bad way.  Still more to see though.  It certainly wasn't going to be Boise - I have no idea what happened there but I expected a pretty big college town with something urban to do.  No jokes, I blinked and I missed it.  Signs said next town: Boise and then I was passed it and...maybe that's not bad haha.

Here's some stuff to look at, don't blink.

Went on a hike through a lava tube with Dani.  Basically it's a cave but formed by lava cooling on the surface and then the liquid draining out underneath it leaving a hollow tube. Oregon and Idaho have many of these but this one is quite large and easily navigable.  

This is with my headlamp off, just the flash.  I'm standing about 2 feet from the wall, to give you an idea for how dark.

This is the end of the walkable trail.  Again, that's with the flash on and the wall is right behind it.

Very cold.  It was about 90 on the surface but our breath made fog and my beard got soaking wet from the condensation

Just inside looking out.

Eastern Oregon.  John Day Fossil preserve.  Lots of interesting geology.

Idaho!  Strangely at both state signs there wasn't anybody else stopping, so nobody to help take a picture.  Oh well, least I have been there!

This is...where is this?  Hell's or Devil's Canyon?  Hell.  Hell's Canyon, I double checked.  It's a river and a lake.  It's just like Grandbury, really...

More interesting formations.

This is the entrance to an ice cave.  Water seeps into a lava tube and the air flow is cold enough that it freezes.   In some places the frozen water is as much as 30 feet deep, and it is solid from top to bottom.  It wasn't as glorious as the one in Austria, but not bad for a stateside wonder.  The city there (Shoshone) claims to have been the first to make ice cold beer with the ice they chipped out from inside.

Craters of the Moon.  Entry desolation.  The flows cover 735,000 acres so literally it's as far as you can see sometimes.

A couple different kinds of flow.  The top is a word that I can't say because it is Hawaiian but this is how most of it looks there.  The second (with the loops) is called A'a (which is also Hawaiian but it's only two letters so I got it!).  The top cools and then each layer builds up like a damn behind it.

Cool twisty tree thingy.

These are massive boulders from the crater itself, not lava.  Imagine the lava flow that could move these a half mile from where they started.

Inferno Butte.  It's relatively new and still covered in Igneous instead of trees or any other plant life.  They let you hike the top (super cool).

From the top of the butte.  The dark line on the left is where the lava flow stopped, so everything going right all the way back is still lava.

It's a crater.  I honestly didn't read this plaque...

This one is cool cause you could look down into it.  See next picture.

This was the only flower like this one I found and I hiked about 6 miles here.  Though some of that was caves, to be fair.

The Indian legend about the site is that a snake lived on the mountain, and one night got so frustrated by lightning that it squeezed the mountain until fire came out.  But the snake was caught in the magma and lives there until this day.

I thought this was pretty.  This was the path to the caves.

Pretty silvery looking stuff.

This is with headlamp and flash, visibility is still only about 30 feet.

Formations and colors.  All weird.

More silvery stuff.

Collapsed lava tube.  I still hiked it...it went about 800 feet through so it was still fun.  People followed me the whole way like I knew what I was doing haha.

Onto the next one.  I gotta go find a camp...

"Sons are like birds flying always over the mountains."

Good old Iron and Wine.  They've been the primary listening for this week so it's all over my brain.  He paints such a picture with his words.

It has been kind of a difficult week, to be honest.  After leaving Astoria instead of heading straight off to Mt. Saint Helens I took to the Olymipic National Park.  There is a very important note about Olympic that the National Forest Service and every map I could find completely fails to mention: there is no connecting road through the park.  So if you're trying to reach a particular campground, which I was, and you come in the wrong side, which I did, then you have to circumnavigate the entire national park to get to the right place.  There is a second note: there are then only 3 paths you can take to get from there to the Northern Cascades: a) Canada [does not work with an expired passport] b) a ferry that costs a good chunk of change and can take up to an hour and half assuming you show up on time and don't even have a wait or c) drive from the top of Washington all the way back down to Tacoma then north and east, effectively forcing a 3 hour detour - the same amount of time as the ferry without the cost.  Once you are in the Cascades Park - which is absolutely stunning, mind you, and under normal circumstances completely worth the trek - there is only one highway that goes all the way through, and none that go directly south.  So if your goal is to cross into northern Idaho like mine then it is a perfect plan.  Except that there is a wild fire at the only junction that goes east, forcing you back yet again the way you came.  This is how you drive almost 2,000 miles in a week within one state LOL!  To be fair, the wildfire was extraordinary, and I showed up only a few minutes after they began to evacuate that area.  Also to be fair, these were stage 2 evacuations, meaning the wire was within half an hour of the town and they were preparing for stage 3, indicating that most of the people I passed were leaving their houses and livestock.  This made the whole journey much more profound than frustrating.  I stayed for some time at the junction (the last gas station there) and helped a local lady organize traffic around the two pumps to make sure nobody cut and ran.  She was a brave lady, had just picked her daughter up from the elementary school but couldn't do nothing.  It all went more smoothly from there.  Once you knock down all the walls then the journey is always easy.  I stopped off again in Seattle and saw an old coffee shop friend that I used to work with.  He is taking names at Amazon now.  Mount Rainier is a spectacle - go, go, go!  There have been few opportunities to just sit in wonder and examine a place of majesty, but here I even took the time to set up a hammock and wrote a couple chapters for the book.  My campsite was the junction of several trails including the Wonderland and PCT, so of course the surroundings would be stunning.  I did get to do a couple of short hikes but the actual mountain is glacier so special gear and permits are required to summit.  Not to mention it is a 14'er and I'm not sure I'm fit enough to give that shot right now.  I had planned a longer hike this morning but last night brought rain and major fog, which lasted all the way past Mt. Saint Helens.

The whole process made me think a lot about goals, and changes, and happiness in the face of those changes.  I had to keep telling myself: this is what I wanted and just because it doesn't look as convenient as I hoped or seem as easy, this predicament is only going to make the finale sweeter.  So I'll be honest with you.  I haven't been the happiest self the last few years.  I have found plenty to be unhappy about, often when there was nothing.  But I had to aim.  Even if things are going wrong, if you have a course and it is feasible to reach, then you HAVE to keep going.  You will not be satisfied unless you reach the end, unless there are wildfires or the road simply dies where you thought it would keep going.  I'm not sure what I'm getting at.  Maybe this: there is no going back.  I'm finally seeing that forward motion is the only motion, even if it looks like it's taking you back the way you came.  Time's arrow is our own arrow and we suffer it until time stops.  This is not the tragedy - though at times it is the agony.  It took 4 years for the Sisteen Chapel to be painted.  And it wasn't even a work of LOVE!  He was politically manipulated into the task; not that that is part of my point.

I'm stumbling around blindly now, hopefully I made some sense in there somewhere.  Unlike the blind, though, here are some pictures that YOU can look at.


This Astoria.  There's not a lot there but it's a pretty town, for sure.

This is the bridge between Oregon and Washington.  As you can see it's very long and I found it rather impressive.

Astoria's monument to the phallus.  Every small town with no international business needs one.  You can climb up to the top, pretty good views really.

I have yet to get a picture with the "entering Washington" sign so I took the opportunity to at least get the bridge.  Don't worry, it was bumper to bumper and I wasn't actually driving.

A boggy marshy thingy in Washington.  They don't name these things, too many.

So the whole Olympic debacle meant I had to sleep in my car outside the national park at about 3am.  I woke up at about 6am to these guys.  Close enough?  Don't worry, I stayed in the car.

This part of Olympic is the only rain forest in the mainland US.  It is, oddly, coniferous but you can tell by the moss drapes that they get plenty of water.

This is glacier runoff from the mountain itself.  Notice the two spots in the middle of the river?  Those are elk.  I got to watch elk ford the river.

This is just an example, but at 9 in the morning, even with the flash, this is how dark it is under the canopy.

Weird alien egg.  Or mushroom/fungus/Disney Horror Device.

Notice anything cool about these 6 trees?

They are all connected at the base by their roots.

So the water in most of these places is miraculous.

Here are the northern cascades.  The weird blue/grey/green color of the water isn't fake.  That's actually how it looks.

Tons of these waterfalls all along the road, unfortunately this was the only one I felt safe stepping out of the car at.

Super green hillsides, take away the trees and it gets me all amped up again for Iceland.

There were a few of this guy's poems placed here and there around the view points.  It spoke to me at least.

This is smoke from the fires.  The road at the base of those hills is the one that cuts east back toward Idaho.  Obviously too close for comfort.

Welcome to Mt. Rainier.

The mountain itself.  Each side has its own glacier system.

Hard to see but there is a river at the bottom of this box canyon, it's about 150ft down.

Here is my spot.  I sat off and on for about 2 hours here.  The sun was in the wrong spot but you should still get the idea.

Back to my spot.

These bridges are part of the Wonderland trail.  They don't look like much but when you are crossing over white water rapids it's a little disorienting.  Glad for handrails.

This guy had the same idea.  He sat in lotus position reading for at least an hour.  I'm pretty sure he lived on the trail...he was pretty dirty.

The visibility at Helens was obviously poor most of the way.  This is at the main viewpoint...

Sometimes you could catch a gem though.

Please note that the "muddy" area in the middle of this lake, where it looks like there is an isthmus of land connecting both sides, this is actually the forest.  That is all timber from the explosion in 1980.  It isn't supposed to be there.