Over late autumn and the premature winter I climbed the minor mountains of the North Cascades and traversed the river valleys and benches where they once flowed trying to learn how to see. Gray Jays, cousin of the crows, kept me company while I traversed the fresh snow on Mount Washington. Sooty Grouse kept to the shadowed under story exploding into short flight only to be ushered into the deep silence of late dawn on an icy morning on Dirty Harry's Peak. Deer, rabbit, and bob cat left undeniable if ephemeral traces in the snow up near Thompson Lake. It was there I learned the work of breaking miles of trail in waist deep snow. Pacific Wrens catching the refracting light momentarily before they disappear into the moss and decaying wood off the White Chuck River. If the spring is for luxuriating in the vibrant world of angiosperms this time of year is the time of fungi before the cold takes hold of all things. With no need for pollinators they seem to be everywhere, nowhere, and in all things simultaneously. Attempting to read the geography through deep time and the cycles of living things through the eons reclaims a sense of rapturous wonder and yearning. I catch myself looking out over the slough seeing a heron in prehistoric flight low over the wetland while a bald eagle perches high in a dead snag back lit by fading light and for a moment the traffic and weight of the day is eclipsed. 
I have faded with the light as autumn has turned to winter. The drudgery of 0330, seemingly pointless labor, and hours spent on congested roads have led to sleeplessness and while feeling like Sisyphus I have yet to take Camus' acceptance of absurdity to heart and so the boulder rolls down hill and the sting of it's decent cuts further into the mind until the lacerations become tangible corporal wounds. After all we are such fallible, powerful little gods spinning worlds into existence then consumed by the entropy we set in motion. At which point we take up our mourning lamenting the injustice of the cosmos. We the victims of a capricious and impersonal universe not realizing ourselves as architect.
Today I thought of little else other than wind and rain. The trail a tributary and my eyes warily on the heaving canopy above looking for shelving mushrooms and dead snags. The evidence of winter storms proliferated as I moved up the mountain. Thick seeming impermeable timber snapped off some thirty feet above the soil meeting an end generations in the making; impregnated with rot at the beak of sap suckers. Other trees up ended from the saturated soil root ball intact uprooting others as they descended in an unintentional cavalcade of proximity. If such a procession were to unfold I wonder which would be the final emotion: terror or acceptance. The moans of bending wood and howls of wind through threadbare branches is an overture to impermanence. The trees in a wind storm, while fraught, do offer some measure of protection. Once the ridge was attained and I cleared the end of the maintained trail the full force of the wind was on me doubling me over. That initial feeling of exposure does just that: strips the traveler of certainty exposes the insecurities and inadequacies. Most danger has been exercised from our lives and up there alone we discover our nature beyond the reach of self delusion.
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