Everything fell apart, we grumped and fussed, and we all laughed anyway. Laughed some more, too! Ahhh, what a strange misadventure into the beauty and awe of Mt. Rainier National Park, September 2005
*This is a work in progress with more pictures to be recovered from the wake of The Fire. Enjoy anyway! More awaits.*
“Hello, I see you!” Talia, my stepdaughter I’ve raised since birth as my 3rd & youngest daughter. Her cold weather clothes got left behind at home sho she had on my 1986 wool shirt and Gwen’s old anorak from the Appalachian Trail. Life is funny. Life is messy. Yes, it’s cold outside, colder than it’s supposed to be for summertime, and, hey, we’re having fun anyway!
Sometimes everything goes wrong. Nothing is as expected. Certain private fantasies and anticipations get pushed aside. Expectations turn upside down like toddlers flipping bowls of wet, mushy food. Whatcha gonna do, huh? Call Ghostbusters? From many miles deep in a national park? Where there aren’t any payphones to “quarter out” from nor cell towers for cellphones to connect thru? Well, you share everything you have, take a deep breath, grin, giggle, and chuckle at the gauntlet of predicaments until hysterics take over, and laugh. Laugh at the silliness of the living as we live ones sort out our messes from being too busy living without paying attention to…well, as most parents may understand, parenting children in the midst of everything else provides those perfect storms where focus scatters when priorities themselves become distractions. How in the world does that happen? No matter. Gotta go potty. Real bad, too! Figure it out on the way there and all around trying to get back from lost, not-lost. As we did back in the Summer of 2005.
This was the second time to Mowich Lake for me and my oldest daughter, Morgan (now known by Dylan since 2018). Once Gwen, Morgan’s mother and my wife at the time, spent a few days there. The three of us were there during the 3-day Labor Day weekend of September 1998. Morgan/Dylan was four years old that summer. Kathryn, or Kate, her cousin we adopted as her sister, was born until later in the depth of autumn the same year. Morgan, however, was a tough little hiker. She hiked with us Gwen and I all the way up to Knapsack Pass, a rough, rocky, eroded trail sneaking thru the forests behind the rundown little Mowich Lake Ranger Cabin to shoot straight up a wide ravine thru a wild mix of alpine meadows and boulders and scree to dead-end at the pass. It was a beautiful hike, and the views from Knapsack Pass were spectacular. This trip, eleven years later, was to be a different journey into deep relationship altogether.
This was Kate’s first time to Mowich Lake, a modestly large gem of a lake in the northwestern corner of Mt. Rainier National Park. This trip was also the first time to Mowich Lake for Kristina, my then-life partner and fiancé, and her daughter Talia, younger than Kate, whom I raised as my own. Gwen and I only had one child between the two of us in 1998 while Kristina and I were busy blending together two more in a mixed family of five. Gwen and I had a certain hiking and camping groove from thruhiking the Appalachian Trail together in 1991 along with other backpacking and even mountaineering excursions. Kristina was a seasoned world traveler and hardy adventurer in her own right, but we hadn’t done much together quite like this yet. We learned from this goofy ass trip, however, and went on to deepen our own backcountry groove. Each new relationship is different, and even older relationships change. Life is messy. Life is an adventure. And being in relationship with others becomes a spiritual practice. If you let it become so, of course.
Kristina and I took our blended family of five up to Whidbey Island about a week and a half before our Mowich Lake dramawama. Whidbey, in the fulcrum of the Salish Sea, is the 40th largest island in the USA and the 4th largest in the Lower 48. We went there via car and ferry to hike trails along the tops of spectacular bluffs and down across amazing beaches of Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve/Park. Talia was in and out of the child carrier pack we had back then, and she was obsessed with buckling herself into it and lugging it out of parking lots and down the trails. Many kids engage in similar seriousness, but Talia was particularly determined. She kept scuffle-draggle-doodling down at Ebey’s Landing in August 2005 and less then two weeks later up at Mt. Rainier.
“As big as a backpack!” Talia at Ebey’s Landing heading for the trails. August 2005.
A very serious and most determined child … is also a girl on the go!
“Lookit! Check out the bugs!” Talia forgets all about lugging that pack as she squats down in inquiry. Wait! Is that black sternum strap across her throat?
“Sooo strong!” Talia lugs a tote bucket full of yummy food from the minivan to our Mowich Lake campsite. September 2005.
“Hello!” says Talia as she stays warm in everybody else’s clothes. Well, lugging heavy buckets makes ya kinda warm, too.
Kate & Talia at Mowich Lake.
All “Tongue & Cheek!”
William Dudley Bass
Thursday 11 July 2019
Seattle, Washington
Cascadia
Copyright © 2019 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth. Thank you.