The Final Time

 My cousin wrote today of being aware some seventeen years ago, standing in a high place in the High Sierras, that he would be seeing the place, experiencing the place for the last time. Never again would he find himself beneath "the wonders of sky filled days and bottomless starry nights."

There is a certain comfort in this, however sharp the regret--like being at the bedside of a dying loved one, perhaps. There is closure, there are words of farewell. 

I enjoyed no such fond departure, because the last time I stood in my beloved mountains I had no idea it would be the last time. I'm not even sure now what year it was. It was 2006, or perhaps 2007. There seemed at the time no need to mark the date in my personal history. 

I had simply decided to take a day trip with my stepson, because I longed to see the place, as always, and because I thought it would surely be a high point of his own young experience. He had never been in the forest, in the mountains and was certain to be dazzled and amazed.

Except that he wasn't. All the way there, he asked glumly 'How much farther?' He did not like the bumpy dirt road that stretches the last 30 miles, objecting to every jarring dip and rise. He did not like the dust, the wind, the mosquitoes, the long grass of the meadow, the ice cold of the lake.  

It was early in the season and the meadow where I had so often pitched my tent was an inch deep in water, making it necessary to skirt the meadow through the woods, which themselves were pocked with puddles. Eventually though we were able to make it to the lake, though my stepson rode the last half of the journey on my back. 

We got in a swim in the icy lake and then I set about to cook some hotdogs I had brought along for a picnic. I had forgotten however to bring a knife, and so I bought one at a little store in Government Camp. 

Who knew that this knife was going to be so sharp? It was just a cheap little thing, and I needed it only to shave the bark off a couple small branches so that we could spear the hotdogs and roast them over the fire. As I stripped the bark off the first branch, I managed to plunge the knife into the side of my thumb, creating a deep cut that pumped out blood like a faucet. 

I tried to continue with our hotdogs but the ridiculous finger just kept gushing blood. How to stop it? 

Well, what I ended up doing was to take off my underwear, wrap the fabric around my thumb and then stretch the elastic, tightly tying it around my elbow. 

Our trip was done. 

Back in Portland, in the Emergency Room of the hospital I worked at, the examining doctor pronounced my bandage/tourniquet "really neat". Quite an inventive idea. 

And that, for one reason and another and another, turned out to be my last trip to my beloved mountains. I don't even count it now in my mind, in my memory. It was a do-over that will never be done over. Sometimes I imagine somehow going there again, and yet must admit that any circumstance that would find me there is perfectly unimaginable. And so I remember only. I remember the feel of the forest floor on the bottoms of my feet, the smell of the pine and fir trees, the glitter of the water when the sun strikes the ripples, the gentle seam that my fishing line makes as I cast the fly one more time just beyond the ridge where the deeper water begins. My final journey never arrives yet never ends.