Goats As Visitants

While the smoke from the fires rendering land inert and infertile had cleared away from the river valleys and the peaks of the North Cascades a deep fog clung tightly as one does to a love that seems just this side of attainable. As I climbed I had hoped that it would lift but it only swirled deeper, colder ascending felt like a fall into troubled waters. The trees edging the north fork of the Cascade River shared an aged grandeur: large leaf maples starting to turn draped in moss shrouded in fog spark a pagan reverence I cannot account for. But we leave these behind and climb to the land of goats and scree. Nearly running up the never ending switchbacks with what felt like bailing wire binding my heart for the forest is a place of truth and we never truly enter a place pure or in solitude; we bring our demons and our dreams alike to muddy the experience or perhaps to be cleansed of both but nevertheless even when there are only a set of boot prints we bring multitudes with us into these places. The binding of the heart did release reaching the flat place where the saddle between two mountains came into view and three Oreotyx pictus (mountain quail) scurried out on the trail causing me to stop with them. Unlike the Ruffed Grouse with it's flair for the dramatic with false charges and feigning injuries these quail seemed to rely on the empathy or apathy of their antagonist for their safe passage. After a bit of mutual staring I started once more down the path and they scurried in front until one by one they veered off leaving me to the pick up my pace before cresting the ridge to see what would have been a view that would have split my consciousness into two but being shrouded left me longing for the dress to fall away. Buckner, Storm King, Goode, El Dorado Peak, and Dorado Needle all should have been visible but nothing beyond the ever changing unpredictable fog would be seen. Bears appeared as apparitions, goats the visitants not to be seen only felt conspired with the mountains to leave only longing in the soul. I did reach the glacier but it and the sky were of the same hue. Standing on the edge of everything, taken in by the clouds somehow the longing itself was all that was necessary.