smell?” Leaping into the little pool, we raced up the rock steps, which,
in hindsight, was pretty dangerous, but what does youth care? We piled
in under the waterfall, letting the cold cascade refresh our bodies. It was
actually incredibly cold, to the point that we could only bear it when
the clouds let the sun through. But we enjoyed it anyway and I have to
admit, we did smell a little better afterwards.
That night, after we had made camp and replaced our soaked
clothes with dry, wooly layers, we settled for dinner. This was the first
night that we could build a fire, so of course I got started on it. Morgan
handed me a flint and steel and let me do my thing. I have to toot my
own horn a little… I was the fire champion. Within a few minutes I
had a pot of river water boiled atop my glorious (small) fire. Lex’s eyes
suddenly lit up. “Dude! Do me too! Where’d you get that?”
I responded in confusion, “What are you talking about?” I finally
realized that she was talking about the black smears of soot on my face.
I had done it by accident, but apparently it looked like war paint. There
was only one thing to do. I used the cooking pot as a palette for my ashen
paint and decorated each of my companions with savage markings. My
mind drifted back to Into The Wild as my fingers swiped at the soot. I
thought of the end of the book, when Chris, the lone hitchhiker, wrote
that happiness was not real unless it was shared, a feeling he would
not have admitted to earlier in his travels. I thought of the soulful
connections that had grown among my fellow adventurers. I thought
of the warmth in their smiles and the trust in their eyes. That night we
danced and howled at the pitch sky above us using the fire for energy
and the pot for music. Our spirits leapt about until the wee hours of the
night. Nature had acknowledged and received us and we celebrated.
The following morning, we traced the river some ways and
heaved ourselves up and around a few tight switchbacks to the crest of
the ridge near where we had started. Every hundred feet or so we would
get glimpses of the valley through holes in the thick canopy. We could tell
we were getting near the top and the end. At last, we cleared the thicker
forest and found ourselves atop a cliff across the grand valley from Lion’s
Head. We gathered at the edge to survey the long journey’s path.
We were so meager. Standing on that peak, looking out over the
expanse on each side, I realized how trivial we were to that mountain, to
the trees in the valley, to the ceaseless rivers. I was such a small, irrelevant
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