By Paul Willis

Paul WillisThere is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up.  —René Daumal, Mount Analogue

 

Sitting here, high on the shoulder of a peak in the Ansel Adams Wilderness, I am looking down at a grassy swale where I startled a herd of eleven mule deer. From this height they are now too small to be seen, but they kept their ground as I detoured around them on scree and talus, not wanting to disturb their pasture. And looking down in the other direction, a blood-red canyon drops away to the round expanse of an alkali lake, from this vantage point its two or three islands an obvious continuation of a series of craters to the south. And, looking up, the summit of the mountain I'm on rises gently, inviting me to visit before thunderheads build and explode, just as they did yesterday on my way down another summit. Such a relief to be lost in sky, no other purpose beyond placing the next boot, the next hoof.     

 

There are bighorn sheep up here as well, though I've yet to see one in the Sierra. Almost fifty years ago, my brother brought a pair of ram's horns back from a ledge just north of here. (Then, conscience-stricken, he returned them.) A few years later he came home from a cold mountain in Alaska without his fingers or his feet. He was supposed to come on this hike with me—he on horseback, I on foot—but what is left of one of his feet is sore and infected, and so he had to take a pass. Exactly fifty years ago we climbed our first peak together, in the Cascades of Oregon, and I climb this mountain thinking of him. A neighboring summit, according to the guidebook, was first ascended on horseback in 1864, and certainly my brother could have ridden up the shallow slopes that I climb now. 

 

As I pause again beneath the crest, seven dished-out resting places appear at my feet. For deer, by the look of the scat, though what if these are bowers for bighorns? I'd rest here too—am resting here—as I think about the last few steps to the summit, that place where earth becomes the air and there are no more steps to take. And then, having lunched and lingered on the top, traversing from one peak to the next for a better view, I see a flash of white rumps, curved horns, as six or eight bighorn sheep clatter over the edge of the slope. A miracle of wish and witness, there and gone. But one has seen, says René Daumal. And as I descend, I carry with me the stutter of hooves into the stubborn cliffs below.

Bighorn sheep by Steve Yeager


Paul Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.  He has published six collections of poetry, the most recent of which are Deer at Twilight: Poems from the North Cascades (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018) and Little Rhymes for Lowly Plants (White Violet Press, 2019). He is also the author of an eco-fantasy novel, The Alpine Tales (WordFarm, 2010), and of the essay collections Bright Shoots of Everlastingness (WordFarm, 2005) and To Build a Trail (WordFarm, 2018). Years ago, he played a small part in gaining protection for the Salmo-Priest Wilderness in the northeast corner of Washington state. www.pauljwillis.com 

 

Photo: Bighorn sheep by Steve Yeager

 

 

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