August 12, 2024
Greetings from the purpose,
As I write this, coffee close to my right hand, I can still feel the mild ache in my legs, a physical echo from Oregon. Borne of reaching and pushing up switchbacks and over rocks, stepping onto roots and levering over deadfalls. Miles of hiking along single tracks carved into the woods, pressing these muscles to carry me to new places.
I am still fresh from travel, still feeling as if I am in many places at once. Among the many gifts I unpacked when I came back is the realization that I always want to feel this way.
Every adventure has its own origin and a unique vibration that remains long after its completion. Plans and anticipation and expectations are a fundamental part of the adventure, but it’s best not to become too attached to them. As Steinbeck said, “We do not take a trip, it takes us.”
I traveled west with my friend Tom, an Olympic Gold Medal-caliber travel companion, whose life passport is permanently stamped with patience and curiosity. We explored Oregon in a blend of purpose and deliberate spontaneity. We laughed a lot, got lost, nearly ran out of gas, forded washed out roads, drank good coffee, cold beer, and made friends everywhere we went. And every night we fell into our beds, we said “Man, did all of that happen today?”
The images of the adventure that stayed with me, I realized this morning, were nested at two ends of a spectrum, small and colossal, but delight threaded through both, connected both.
At the coast, tiny shells clinging to rocks, starfish lingering at boulder bus-stops waiting for the next tide. Scrollwork in hardpacked sand, the tattoo from some wandering thing, marking a floral trail as it made its way to another place.
And enormous haystack monoliths in the ocean’s edge, prehistoric, silent witness to eternal waves. In the last light of the day, they seemed like living things coming ashore. In the bright of morning they were colorful sentinels, lined with thousands of birds, resting, romancing, bristling with life.
There were the small, smooth stones at the bottom of a creek, the water as clear as liquid glass, rushing between the banks on its way to becoming something else. The simple paths, gnarled roots, carpet of pine needles, scraps of trees littered on either side. Tiny yellow flowers tucked in green growing impossibly in the middle of a river. Moss hanging from branches like sable stoles. Birds hopping between branches. Diamond glimpses of sun between towering pines.
The rivers became waterfalls, some roping over the rocks in narrow sluices, others fanning out like bridal trains, cascading and rolling in long undulating foam. Some roared, others whispered, searching and tumbling and becoming distracted as creeks, then coming back to join rivers and flowing on to wherever all waterfalls go.
Small discs of water rested in the cups of hollowed rock, reflecting trees and sky. Strands of sunlight piercing the green canopy, spotlights on enormous drooping leaves springing up from the base of oak and cedar trees. Giant aching pines, bark blackened by wildfire, somehow made harder and stronger by what sought to destroy it.
Quiet moments between the trees, when the only sound was the wind in the high places. Then the sigh of a far away waterfall, and then the symphony of sounds of a river playing between the banks, teasing the boulders, lilting and cymbaling, whirling the air in between to make a laughing noise.
Only the sound of our soft footfalls on earth, following a path up a steep carved into the mountainside, then balancing on the ridge, sun dappling the forest floor, glimpses of the lake far below us. And then, almost suddenly, in a space between the pines, there was framed Mt. Hood. Regal and imposing, demanding place in the horizon. Tom and I both had the same response we’d felt hours before when we first saw the peak: astonishment. Later that day we said to a native “There should be signs on the road warning you: ‘Amazing Thing Ahead’”
The days will want to fade these memories, time will want to sand off the feelings, and life will want to push them aside for other new things, some of which won’t be welcome. My purpose, starting with writing this out today, is to keep the experience fresh and to inspire the desire to find more adventure like it. I want to feel as if I am in many places at once, as if they are always in me, even as I am right here in this place.
Hope this finds you exploring,
David
Copyright © 2024 David Smith
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