Holt
Monday, November 21st, 2022: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
It was time for my first hike in three weeks – after the hiatus of visiting family in the flatlands of a Midwestern city. Before that, I’d blissed out on the exposed rock and forever views of my beloved desert, so now that I was back home in southwestern New Mexico, I wasn’t anxious to bury myself in the forests and thickets of our local mountains.
The views being better on the west side, I decided to head over there and choose a trail while driving.
The temperature was in the low 20s and I had to scrape heavy frost off the windows before starting. A low haze hugged the landscape ahead – probably some effect of the cold. At the end of September, I’d discovered that most of the west side trails had been wiped out by flash floods, and the access road to another had been cut off by the same floods. Now, two months later, I hoped that road would’ve been fixed, so I took a chance and detoured about 16 miles up the dirt mesa road – only to find “Road Closed” and “Impassible” signs at the turnoff.
By the time I got back to the highway, the false start had delayed my day’s hike by an hour. Without much hope of success, I decided to do a “reconnaissance” hike on my old favorite trail, which leads up a canyon to a high saddle with views over the wilderness. I assumed the canyon part of the trail had been damaged by the floods, but at least I would find out how bad it was.
Entering the foothills on the highway, I suddenly saw a half dozen geese wheeling low overhead, on their way south. They looked really big – I’m used to seeing them much higher.
Starting the hike on the traverse into the canyon, I scanned the ridge above, on my left, as a possible alternative if I found the canyon too choked with flood debris. I figured I could return up the traverse and bushwhack up the ridge and see how far I got.
Then, on the final approach to the canyon bottom, a big black bird emerged from the bend below me. A friend has often been skeptical of my bird sightings, correcting me when I’ve misidentified eagles, so I’ve become insecure about bird identification, and reluctant to take pictures of what might be some more humdrum species. This bird wasn’t flying like a vulture, and its coloration wasn’t right for a raven, but I was still slow on the draw and failed to get a pic as it gracefully flapped its way past me.
I continued, and three minutes later another one emerged. This time I knew it had to be a golden eagle, and I was a little quicker with the camera. Two eagles! They must be migrating and had temporarily joined up here.
But after another three minutes, yet another eagle. Three! It was like scheduled flights leaving an airport. I was almost at the creek crossing in the canyon bottom when the fourth eagle emerged from the riparian canopy, following the first three. This one passed within 60′ of me, but wasn’t visible long enough for a photo. This was the third time I’d encountered a convocation of migrating eagles – it’d been at least a decade since the last.
And to my surprise, the canyon bottom, and its creek, showed no evidence of flooding. I wouldn’t need a bushwhacking alternative, but after the false start, I didn’t have enough time to go my usual distance on this trail. I would just hike 5 miles up to the viewpoint on the shoulder of the 9,700′ peak, but that was okay – it would be a “soft” resumption of my broken hiking routine.
Unusually, there had been two other vehicles – pickups – parked at the trailhead. And about 3 miles up the trail in the canyon bottom, I spotted a dog ahead, and then its owner appeared – a backpacker, probably in his 40s. We stopped to talk, and unlike many “outsiders” I’ve met on these trails, he seemed glad to meet me and reluctant to continue his descent. As he revealed his familiarity with the area, I assumed he was local.
He’d spent two nights up on the crest trail, but he wasn’t returning happy. He’d only made it as far as I’ve gotten on a day hike, and was surprised to find I’d gone that far, as he complained about the overgrowth and deadfall he had to fight his way through. He said it was just too much work to be worth it. He said the trail was much worse now than 2 years ago, when he’d gone almost twice as far.
We agreed that in the current wildfire regime, most wilderness trails are simply unmaintainable, and he wasn’t adapting well to the new normal. He said the only way to keep trails open now is with mechanized equipment. Local trail crews had applied for a permit to bring chain saws in the wilderness, but they’d been denied, which he seemed to think was a shame.
I didn’t think it was appropriate to touch on the issue with a frustrated stranger, but afterward I revisited the question of whether human access to wilderness is good or bad. It sits within the larger problem of wilderness itself – an artifical Western concept that denies the cultural nature of pre-conquest habitats. We only preserve wilderness areas because our unsustainable society has degraded or destroyed all other habitats.
What does this mean for trails? Pundits and policymakers claim that access to natural areas encourages people to care about them, and this is lost when trails are abandoned. But the effort and cost of maintaining trails in this new regime are more than we’re willing to invest.
Talking to the backpacker slowed me even more, so I embraced this as a more leisurely hike than usual. The low haze was starting to clear as I reached the crest, but it was still chilly up there, with patches of snow in shady spots. Knowing this trail well, I continued past the crest for another half mile so I could log more mileage and elevation while still ending the hike at a reasonable time.
Unfortunately, on the downhill stretch beyond the saddle, my right knee started hurting, and I remembered the same thing had happened on my last local hike, a month ago in late October. Strangely, I’d had no trouble in the 30 miles of hikes I’d done in our rugged desert mountains. Why did my knee hurt in New Mexico and not in California?
Maybe it was the cold – it is colder here this time of year. But the more I pondered, I thought it might also be the activity itself. Here, I hike on trails that are mostly hard-packed, where I end up pounding my way downhill, which creates repetitive impact on the knees. While in the desert, with no trail, I tend to pick my way cautiously downhill, in random directions dictated by obstacles, and the ground is often loose, absorbing impact.
In any event, I’m going to be even more frustrated now since I’ll need to rest that knee for weeks!
In the meantime, even with knee brace and a pain pill, it was a really painful return to the vehicle.
At least the pain pill put me in a good mood while driving home. And as dusk turned to night, I saw a bright falling star leaving a long trail, directly ahead over the highway.
Monday, April 3rd, 2023: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico.
I was tired of driving to Arizona for lower-elevation hikes, and was hoping that the recent warm weather had melted most of the snow on our mountains below 9,000 feet. But I knew that my favorite high-elevation trails would still be blocked.
Reviewing the topo map one more time, I saw a trail up on the west side of the wilderness that I’d never noticed before. Starting at only 5,100 feet, it climbed to over 9,000 feet, eventually joining one of the crest trails, but it took it a while to get there, so even if I ended up blocked by knee-deep snow, I’d still get some decent mileage and elevation. I had no idea what the condition would be, but I found a note online saying part of it had been worked on last year, so I was optimistic.
Weather was forecast to be clear and warm, but we’d been in our windy season for the past month, and today there was a “red flag” fire weather warning as well as a dangerous wind alert.
The map showed this unfamiliar trail beginning along a road drawn with the same heavy black line as the paved road it branched off from – a road I’d driven many times. But that first road is narrow and twisty, and I missed the turnoff, coming to the stream crossing on the main road, which I’d completely forgotten about.
This is the big perennial creek on the west side of the range, draining a fifty-square-mile watershed ringed with peaks over 10,000 feet tall. The road crossing is simply a shallow concrete dip in the road, where the creek normally spreads to no more than an inch deep. But after our heavy snows and warming weather, today it was a raging flood. And because it flowed to my right, I knew the access road for my trail would also cross it.
I turned around and found my access road a quarter of a mile back. Despite having the same line on the map, it turned out to be a little-used gravel road. And the creek crossing looked bad.
Because I’ve never had a serious high-clearance vehicle, I’ve never gotten really comfortable with stream crossings. This one had a submerged berm of rocks on the downstream side, but the water was too cloudy to tell how deep the crossing would be. I’ve crossed creeks up to about 8 inches deep, but I was afraid this might be a foot or more. If I got submerged above my door sills, the flood might exert enough force to wash me downstream into deeper water.
As usual, I decided to try it anyway, switching into 4wd low range and rolling slowly down the bank into the flood.
All that water raging around the vehicle sounded and felt scary, but I successfully rocked and rolled across and climbed the opposite bank, where I stopped to get out and see how high the water had reached.
My vehicle’s minimum mechanical ground clearance is 8.5 inches, and the door sills are 16 inches off the ground. The water level at the front had barely reached the bodywork, but the wake had pushed about ten inches higher toward the back. I wasn’t shaking in terror, but I wasn’t looking forward to doing it again.
The road on the opposite side continuously deteriorated as it climbed along the foothills, eventually reaching a washout with ruts requiring all my ground clearance, followed by a stretch where a side creek flowed down the road surface, two or three inches deep. I got out and walked up it a ways in my waterproof boots. It would be driveable, but I was still worrying about the previous crossing. I’d always heard and assumed that snowmelt streams flow light in the morning and heavy late in the day. I was frankly afraid the crossing I’d survived would be impassable when I returned from my hike, and I hadn’t brought camping gear. So I turned around and carefully recrossed the flood.
At this point, my only option was the final remaining west side trail with access to the crest. This is my old favorite, and since last November, I’d been anxiously waiting for the snow to melt enough to make it accessible. Now, the snow would likely still be knee-deep on the crest, but at least I could do the climb, for up to 9 miles and over 3,000 feet of elevation gain.
On the drive up the dirt road to the trailhead, I passed a late-model minivan with Texas plates and a fancy roof box, parked in a clump of junipers. Then at the trailhead log, I was surprised to find a whole page of visits recorded since November, with most in the past month. They were from all over – New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Alabama – not just the western states. In the past, this trail has remained a well-kept local secret, going up to two weeks without a recorded visit, especially in the winter and summer. But after my initial surprise, I realized that it’s the last remaining entry point to the west side of the wilderness – all the others were washed out last year by catastrophic monsoon floods.
And unlike me, virtually every other hiker is either casual – only venturing a mile or two into the canyon – or if more ambitious, they’re taking the branch trail to the old prospector’s cabin in the next canyon over. In the general public, more people are drawn to historic man-made structures than to true wilderness.
One log entry, a couple weeks earlier, mentioned “trees on trail”, but I ignored that. There’d always been a few fallen logs on this trail.
I’d had food poisoning two days ago and was only gradually recovering. I found myself fatigued and short of breath, nearly as bad as after my hospitalization last spring. A short way up the trail to the wilderness boundary, panting heavily, I saw a trail runner approaching – a slender guy in his late 20s, the minivan driver. The trail was narrow and the slope was steep, but with difficulty I used the edges of my boots to sidestep up enough to give him space. I smiled and called good morning, but with barely a glance and no change of expression, he brushed past me silently. Locals would return your greeting and thank you for yielding right-of-way.
The way into the canyon is through a stark burn scar from the 2012 wildfire. The creek in the bottom was flowing about as expected – this is one of the smaller watersheds on the west side. A few hundred yards up the canyon bottom, you leave the burn scar and enter the only-patchily-burned canopy, and it gets pretty – mature ponderosa and Doug fir, maple and Gambel oak, and lichen-encrusted boulders, with the creek flowing briskly and noisily over rocks in its bed.
Spring flowers were spreading and checkerspot butterflies were out in force. But before I reached the branch trail there was an ominous sign – a mature ponderosa snapped off on the opposite bank, its yellow heartwood a chaos of splinters.
I reached a creek crossing dammed and flooded by a perpendicular log which had clearly been there for a while. It made the crossing much more difficult, and it was an easily removed small-diameter log, but none of the other hikers had thought to remove it. Weird. I pulled it out of the way, the flood quickly subsided, and I crossed easily.
Two miles in, past the branch trail, I met the blowdown. And it just got worse, and worse, the farther I went. Living pines and firs, at least half of them between two and three feet in diameter, had either been uprooted or snapped off like twigs, and much of the ground was blanketed with foliage that had been blown off crowns of surviving trees.
The damage was selective – most of the canopy survived. But the wind event had opened the forest enough that I could now see the rock towers that line the slopes just above the canyon bottom.
In my weakened state, as I climbed over and through obstacle after obstacle, the only thing that kept me going was the belief that conditions might change at the switchbacks, a mile and a half beyond the branch trail.
Conditions did change, but there was one final giant down across the trail right at the base of the switchbacks, like a grand finale – a ponderosa 30 inches in diameter. And after climbing over and past it and starting up the loose dirt of the upper trail, I began to discern the tracks of the only other hikers who had gotten this far in the past months – a medium-sized man and woman.
There was blowdown on the switchbacks, but only the smaller-diameter trees that can mature on these steep upper slopes, and less of them, indicating lower wind speed. I kept encountering branches and small trees blocking the trail that could easily be moved, but the couple before me hadn’t moved them, despite the fact they’d had to repeatedly step around, going up and coming back down. I moved all these out of the way myself and wondered, not for the first time, at the cluelessness of people venturing into nature these days. I’m sure many if not most are urban novices whose only preparation is the GPS on their smart phones, and who, like that trail runner, are trained to ignore strangers.
My stomach was still recovering, so I was not only weak and out of breath, I was actually feeling sick. But with well more than half my time gone, I reached the rock formation with a southwest view where I’d stopped on my first attempt at this trail, 4-1/2 years ago.
My left knee began hurting on the descent, which was otherwise much easier on the rest of me – even climbing over all that blowdown in the canyon bottom. But the day had been just as discouraging as so many hikes in the past year. The equestrian trail crew the Forest Service has authorized to do trail work is not equipped to cut these big-diameter trees, and it may take USFS years to get funding for their own effort. And if there was a blowdown here, there were likely blowdowns elsewhere. Three of the five other wilderness trails on the west side were already blocked by flood damage – now there’s only one left, and it doesn’t access the crest. So the crest is now only accessible to a very tiny minority who are even more hardcore than me, willing to accept an experience which is more obstacle course than trail.
Monday, August 21st, 2023: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
My twice-weekly hiking routine had been disrupted since April, and the Southwest heat wave had mostly prevented me from hiking for a month and a half – the last serious hike was during a brief cool-off a month ago.
An old friend had taken her life last week, and no hike was going to overcome the melancholy, but the forecast showed the heat wave fading during the next couple of weeks. I re-checked the online trip reports for my old favorite crest hike on the west side, that had been blocked by a massive blowdown in March, and found one from a lady who’d hiked through there at the end of May, mentioning only a few trees down. So with no expectations, I decided to give it a try. It’s a challenging hike and I knew I’d lost a lot of conditioning, and depending on the weather, solar heating might be intense on the exposed crest. But the day was forecast to be windy – that might help.
As I approached the trailhead, I was glad to see a cloud bank over the mountains – wondering how long it would last?
Unsurprisingly, there were few entries in the trailhead log during the past two hot months, and the farthest anyone had gone was the spring at 4-1/2 miles. But one hiker thanked the Forest Service for trail work, which was encouraging.
And a few yards up the trail there was a new wooden sign, to replace the metal “Warning: Trail Not Maintained” sign that’s been there since the 2012 wildfire. This permanent-looking sign announced the trail is unmaintained past Camp Creek Saddle. That suggested two possibilities: first, that the eight miles to the saddle might actually be cleared now, and second, that the remaining twelve miles to the crest trail have been permanently abandoned.
I was excited about the first possibility. Despite being in poor shape, if the trail was clear I was determined to make it to the saddle, a 16-mile round trip with over 5,000′ of elevation gain. I would do it if even if it meant coming back in the dark.
The second possibility was depressing, since this is the last potentially maintainable link in the vast network that used to enable backpackers to traverse the crest of the range.
Unsurprisingly, again, the creek was dry when I reached the canyon bottom, but vegetation was lush in the old burn scar due to our wet winter. And even without running water, I encountered a painted redstart as soon as I left the burn scar and entered the riparian canopy.
Then, two miles into the hike where the blowdown had started, I found that the dozens of big logs across the trail had indeed been cut, probably in May after I called the ranger station to report it.
The work had been done by the equestrians, and I was grateful, but it still bothered me that they were using this to promote their own agenda, going so far as to brand one of the cut logs with their acronym.
Normally, at this time of year, there would be thunderstorms with rain and hail and lots of wildflowers and fungi. In this drought I found only a few flowers and no fresh fungi. Buy the wildlife seemed to be thriving – in rapid succession I came upon an Arizona/Sonoran Mountain Kingsnake, a whitetail deer buck, a Downy Woodpecker, and a rattlesnake.
Panting with effort as the grade got steeper, I made it to the bottom of the switchbacks and found that the big tree across the trail there had indeed been cut. But that’s where the equestrians’ trail maintenance had ended.
Quite a bit of new blowdown slowed me down on the switchbacks, and the wind increased as I trudged upward, exceeding 40 mph in more exposed sites. But clouds still drifted across the sun, and both the wind and the shade really helped. I even felt a chill when under a particularly dark cloud, but as soon as the sun returned it felt like the mid-80s again. The spring at 9,100 feet was still flowing, and I wondered if I would run out of water trying to reach the distant saddle. Nice to know fresh water was available here.
Finally I rounded the corner of the last long switchback and the crest was in sight. I hadn’t seen human tracks anywhere on this trail, and I figured I might be the only person to make it up here since last fall.
I crossed the 9,500′ saddle on the shoulder of the peak and headed down the trail on the back side, through the burn scar dense with regrowth of aspen and locust. The wind was coming from the south, and when I reached the first small stand of intact forest a big limb snapped off and fell a couple yards to my right. I stopped, then figured I’d be safer in the midst of the forest, so I kept going. But then another limb snapped off and fell a few yards to my left. I was pretty sure the wind here was exceeding 50 mph, so I was paying a lot of attention to the canopy.
As usual, the trail down the back side, leading to a long ridge and eventually Camp Creek Saddle, was an obstacle course of thorny locust and blowdown. Virtually no trail work has been done here for at least five years. The burn was patchy, and small stands of alpine mixed-conifer forest alternate with jungles of regrowth. I’d fought my way to the distant saddle almost exactly two years ago, but I knew I wasn’t up for that today. I was just trying to make it to a tiny saddle, the first low point in the ridge, where there was a stand of forest on the south side where I could stop and rest.
But about halfway down I came upon a pile of really fresh bear scat, and started making a lot more noise. Then I saw the first hawk, circling around the little peak above my destination saddle, and heard it screech. Soon it was joined by another, and they poised together in the face of the wind and were joined by a third. The wind was fierce but they kept trying to hold a formation together, right over my head. They stuck around for ten or fifteen minutes before drifting away together.
I had a nice rest in the shade of the forest, while staying vigilant on the wind in the canopy. I was deep enough I felt somewhat protected. I also noticed a pine that wasn’t ponderosa – you have to be really focused to tell the difference, and it’s common to just assume the only conifers in this habitat are ponderosa and doug fir.
Finally I made my back up through the jungle, to the shoulder of the high peak where I climbed to the little rocky overlook. I knew the wind would be at its worst here, but I always love the view, over the heart of the range on the east and the open country to the west.
When I finally reached the long switchbacks down from the crest and got some relief from the wind, I was lucky to encounter a solitary swallowtail butterfly. And I stopped to examine a small pine that had blown down across the trail recently enough that some needles were green. I figured it was the same species as the trees I’d seen on the crest – probably a Southwestern White Pine, which must be fairly common here if you know to look for them.
Steller’s jays had been harrassing me all day, but partway down the trail in the canyon bottom I sensed something rising in the corner of my eye, and noticed a shadowy form settling on a low branch, only 30-40 feet away. It was an owl! A small one, only about 12-14 inches head to tail, but when I got home and looked it up, I found it was almost certainly a rare Mexican Spotted Owl, probably a young one. It just sat there and watched me, obviously curious, until I finally had to go.
Shortly after that, I heard a screech overhead, and the hawks returned, swooping low through the canopy this time. I’ve seen young migrating eagles behaving like this, traveling in flocks and showing off their acrobatic skills. What a day for wildlife! I began to wonder if the heat wave and corresponding absence of humans has allowed wildlife to flourish more in these habitats. Despite the displacement of indigenous peoples, wilderness designation is valuable if only to keep us civilized people under control – we just can’t be trusted not to destroy nature.
An East German in the Wilderness
Monday, April 8th, 2024: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
I woke on Sunday not knowing where I would go for today’s hike. I was tired of driving, but snow and runoff were still a problem in the mountains near home. I literally didn’t have any appealing choices, so I started to drive southwest toward Arizona, halfheartedly intending to try another bushwhack in cattle country.
I only made it about twenty miles, then turned back in dismay. I would just bite the bullet and do a less desirable hike nearer home, and since at this point I was getting a late start, it would be shorter than usual.
After a stop at home to review my options on the map, I set out on the highway north, toward the western crest of our high mountains. There I would find a series of options, and since driving helps me think, I would pick one enroute.
I arrived at the trailhead almost two hours later than usual, but with daylight savings time that still left me up to seven hours for hiking. I’d picked the old favorite trail that had first introduced me to our local wilderness. It involves a lot of elevation gain, but I expected deep snow at the top that would make me turn back early without getting much mileage. So be it – at this point I just needed a damn hike.
The sky was clear all around, the air was chilly, but the high was forecast to reach 60 at the mid-elevations.
You’ll notice I didn’t take many photos this time. One reason is that I know this trail so well I could almost hike it blindfolded. The other reason will become evident.
The trail starts at 6,400 feet, climbs over a ridge at 6,800 feet, then traverses down to the canyon bottom, dropping back to 6,400 feet. Then it follows the canyon upstream for a couple of miles, to the base of switchbacks which take another mile to reach the crest at 9,500 feet. The hike I’d done last Sunday, in a storm, had involved worse trail conditions and more mileage and elevation gain, but for some reason this hike felt much harder, especially the steady climb up the canyon bottom. Shortly before I reached the base of the switchbacks, I stopped to dig a lunchtime snack out of my pack, and saw a guy coming up the trail behind me.
I run into other hikers on maybe one out of every five hikes in this region, which is fine with me. One of the great advantages of this region is the high ratio of mountains to people. We simply have a lot more wilderness than we have people who use it, and that enables solitude for those of us who treasure it, and a sense that we’re discovering wild habitat for ourselves.
Sometimes the hikers I meet are even more intent on solitude, and ignore me or toss off a gruff greeting as they pass. Other times they’re friendly and stop for a brief exchange of small talk.
But as soon as this hiker stopped, I could tell he welcomed my company – for whatever reason. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties and spoke with a soft German accent. I asked him how long he’d been in the area, and he said only a couple of days – he was on his way west to Arizona. He immediately announced he was vegan, and complained about the cafe in the town at the base of the mountains, where the smell of frying bacon had nauseated him as soon as he opened the door. He said he was on a goodbye tour of the U.S., returning to Germany after living here for twelve years – most recently on a horse farm in Connecticut. Then he said, “You must know about the BLM and horses?” I nodded yes, and he went on a long lament about his concern for animal welfare and the treatment of wild horses in this country.
He just kept talking, and he seemed like a really nice guy, but I wanted to finish my hike in the time I had left, and said so. I was obviously moving more slowly so he set off ahead of me.
Much later, I reached the patch of deep snow below the crest, and strapped on my gaiters. It was at least 18 inches deep, but fortunately the melting sequence had packed it hard enough that I could mostly walk across the surface. The German’s tracks had veered off-trail at some point so I figured he was bushwhacking to the peak. I avoid the peak because it’s forested and has no view – the trail takes me to a rocky outcrop with a glorious view of all the high peaks of the range.
On the way down, I had just crossed the snowy patch and unstrapped my gaiters when I noticed the German a hundred yards ahead, dropping down through the forest from the peak. I yelled at him and he came up the trail to meet me.
I asked why he was returning to Germany after so long in the U.S., and he struggled to answer. He said he was uncomfortable with the way things are going here, but admitted that politics are bad everywhere. When he’d left Germany there hadn’t even been a Neo-Nazi party, but now they represent twenty percent of the government.
He complained about how bad racism is in the U.S.. He’s been working as a carpenter, and white people in the building trades blame Mexicans for taking their jobs. He also complained about their sexism and antagonism toward sustainable construction. That led to a complaint about materials that are non-recyclable or even toxic, from which he launched on a long, excited discourse about a landfill in Brooklyn that began as a dump for fat rendered from horses before the advent of cars, and is now a park, where relics from past generations keep eroding onto the surface. The German’s complaint there was the “Do Not Remove” signs all over the park – apparently he felt these artifacts should be free for everyone.
He’d been walking ahead of me, which made it harder for me to understand his accent, and he kept wanting to stop and just talk, so finally I passed him and took the lead. I was beginning to resent the nonstop conversation, which completely prevented me from enjoying the wilderness and views around me, and disrupted my usual rhythm of stopping for pictures, snacks, and hydration. Instead, I began hiking faster than usual and made much fewer stops.
Back on the subject of the U.S. vs. Germany, he said he’d grown up in East Germany, where his family had been oppressed by both the Nazis and the Russians, so he sympathizes with Native Americans. But he complained about how rude they’ve been on the few instances he’s met them. That’s when I told him about my place in the desert and my Native friend, and the German said he really envied my experience. He wondered if maybe he was making the wrong decision, and should stay in the U.S., moving to the West where people might be more open-minded.
I mentioned I’d done carpentry myself since childhood, even working on construction projects here and there as an adult. That’s when the German stopped complaining and really lit up. He said his passion is for wood-framed construction, and began an endlessly detailed description of the little houses he built for the goats on the farm in Connecticut. One he built in the shape of a wooden ship, with a surrounding deck, a sleeping loft inside, and a wooden anchor on the front door. He told me about something he’d built out of cherry and walnut – maybe some kind of cabinet – with wooden hinges and a wooden lock. This is when I began to visualize the classic old German craftsman out of Grimm’s fairy tales, deep in the Black Forest, carving gingerbread decorations in the lintels of doors and windows.
More random stories of living on a kibbutz in Israel, persecution by hard core Zionists, wanting to have kids but accepting it wasn’t likely to happen. He enjoys being the “bad uncle” to his sisters’ kids but rejects the loss of freedom that comes with raising a family. He didn’t completely monopolize the conversation – I regularly interrupted with questions and comments, and he did ask me a few questions about my life – but by the time we reached our vehicles I was more than ready for a break.
His vegan and animal welfare complaints had put me off at first, since they often reflect an ignorance of ecology and a bias toward domesticated animals at the expense of wildlife. In general, he’d spent a lot of time sharing simplistic complaints on complex subjects. Then he’d proudly mentioned a photo someone had shared of him taking a dump off the side of a sailboat, and said since he’d left the farm he’d launched a project of him pissing at various scenic spots around the U.S., which he was sharing with friends. I said I expected his friends’ kids would love that, and I finally realized that even in his 30s, the German was a kid at heart – that characterized everything he’d said. And in some way, that made him lonely, and anxious to connect on this wilderness hike.
I’d been able to share my experience of moving west to escape the European worldview that dominates the old colonies of the eastern U.S. I’d described how I’d pursued, met and befriended Native Americans, and how they’re struggling to survive our “progress”. I’d described how I’d moved to southwest New Mexico hoping to grow my own food, stayed on a commune and almost tried to join it. The German and I parted as friends, and we both seemed elated by the experience. He seemed impressed by what little I’d managed to share about my accomplishments and experiences. I can only wonder how he’ll continue to ponder all the topics we discussed, and whether he’ll really return across the ocean to stay – because it sounded to me like he might be better off here.
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