Chrisonomicon

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

We hiked Mount Elbert on Sunday?"we" being Will and I, along with his friend, Mike?and I'm still nursing the blisters and sore muscles from the climb that turned out to be much more difficult than I was expecting. It's been a little over a year since I hiked Mount Harvard. It only seemed natural that my boots would have been well worn in by now, but my feet have softened and my legs have been lacking any recent, decent, endurance exercise.

You can't get the sort of escapism in a day-trip that comes from spending extended periods in the wilderness, the kind of release from life that drops you closer to the earth. What I'd like to discover is some simplified way of returning to that root self where all you need is food, water, and air. The irony is that the simpler you try to make things the more complex they become.

In an attempt at simplicity?no, in an attempt to save face?I've considered cutting myself loose from the sinking triad that has formed between Steve and Mike and I. It's turned into a chess game that I want nothing more than to be free of; free of the heat generated from this stressing friction between them in battle over checkmating me and free of the constant strategizing. At some point in high school, I had learned this lesson and it seems fate is bringing me up to speed with a little refresher course.

It came to me in a moment of clarity in traffic. You know, one of those moments that seems to slow for an instant, the colors intensified around you, and the world reveals itself in all its complexity through something as simple as a cloud or a stop light or a hand gesture, and the only way to describe the feeling that floods your body is "understanding." It was an understanding that everything would be okay, that survival isn't contingent upon this decision, and that all I really need is food, water and air.

Although complexity often arises from an attempt to simplify things, the opposite is true as well: simplicity often finds you in the midst of weaving tapestries in your head, regardless of whether you're in the concrete jungle or the jungles of South America. The escapism that comes with the wilderness is just a perk.