Trail Markers Maureen Bard Introduction to Creative Nonfiction October 11, 2010 Some people are born athletes. Others, like me, know the feeling of exclusion from the athletic club. As a child, I fell into the category of last chosen for dodge-ball teams, a sort of runt of the litter on my parochial school playground. This lack of physical prowess helps explain why it took me until my late thirties to get over my feelings of athletic inadequacy and attempt in a roundabout way a variety of outdoor activities most other adults seemed to have mastered long before. I learned soccer by coaching my five-year-old son's team. I tackled alpine skiing with my ten-year-old daughter. I hiked my first mountain with a poetry class. The course's subject, the nature poet Gary Snyder, practiced the Buddhist mountain-walking meditative methods of a Japanese Zen sect, the Yamabushi. For the class's grand finale, Snyder himself had agreed to lead us on a ritualistic circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin, California. The course description cautioned: "Participants must be in good physical condition." As a hiking novice, whose maximum physical exertion consisted of walking uphill once a week, I dreaded the culmination. A six hour walk of 14 miles with a climb of over 2500 feet sounded more exhausting than meditative. On a sunny April morning, we gathered in a parking lot near Muir Woods at the base of Mt. Tam. Waiting for the group to assemble, I wandered around aimlessly on the heels of my squeaky new boots, trying to stretch them. I barely noticed when Snyder, a slight, unassuming bearded man of about 70, accompanied by a small entourage, joined our class of about 20. Our numbers grew as the moments passed, the walk being a regular solstice activity for a devoted group. I noticed someone in monk's robes and another person in bare feet ready to begin the trek. The soft morning murmurs of the crowd drew quiet as we heard the chant of the first station, "OM RAKSHA RAKSHA HUM HUM HUM PHAT SVAHA." Once we had begun our slog up the steep beginning of the trail, a snake of 60 people or more, heavy breathing predominated. I dropped back to the rear of the crowd as Snyder led us up the mountain, stopping at pre-ordained scenic stations he, Allan Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen had mapped out in 1965, chanting different mantras at each spot. Someone rang a small bell at each of these places. Incense was lit, bringing back the Catholic funeral masses of my youth. Sometimes at these meditative rests the setting enthralled me—a live oak tree growing out of rock, a high mountain redwood grove. More frequently I found myself shuffling my feet, catching my breath, gazing out over expansive views of the Pacific, the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, and wondering when we would stop for lunch. I felt somewhat disengaged from the spiritual side of the endeavor, my Midwestern roots viewing the whole thing as dangerously close to whacko California New Age spiritualism. As the hike progressed, however, the group developed a sense of unity of purpose and familiarity despite our varied backgrounds, and the chatter increased as the day wore on. One chronicler of the event said that the group was so large and noisy that Snyder even slipped away on his own for a bit to try to find silence (Davis, 16). I struck up a conversation with a wine maker who reminded me of Clark Gable, fresh looking even late in the day dressed in pressed white linen shirt, a red bandanna ascot, and a straw fedora. His tales of youthful adventures in Central and South America distracted me from the arduous climb. After hours of sweaty exertion, sustained by lemon drops shared by a classmate, scrambling nearly on all fours through the final ascent of red-barked manzanita scrub, I joined my group near the sparse, stony summit, at a station referred to as Serpentine Cairn. "SALAM ALEY KOM ALEY KOM SALAM." On the trail side, marking our achievement, lay a three-foot conical pile of small gray stones, looking like a heap dumped in a driveway ready to be spread by a gardener as mulch. Several fellow hikers each found a small stone to deposit in solemn silence on the pile, as if making an offering to a sacrificial pyre of some mountain god. In a hushed voice I questioned someone what it meant. She shrugged in reply, "It's just something I do. You can add a stone too, though some people say you should carry it up from the bottom." Uncertain whether this was part of the Zen ritual or endemic to mountain trekking, but nevertheless in the spirit of unity wanting to make my mark as well, I scanned the ground for a rock, picked up the nearest, and tossed it on the pile. I had signed the guest register of the mountain, not considering it to be of any consequence to the mountain itself. As I've had the opportunity to explore a few more peaks, I've come upon more and more cairns, each one celebrating the hiker's sense of accomplishment and allowing him or her to leave a natural mark proclaiming, "I was here too!" A few years after my Mt. Tam hike, I found myself 4,000 feet higher, in the Austrian Alps. We departed from a lake the color of a Coke bottle filled with milk, trekking 2500 feet upward through verdant meadows of technicolor green, accessorized with decorator-blue gentian flowers reflecting the color of the mid-July sky. Cow bells clanked and goat bells tinkled in a ludicrously Hollywood symphonic score to the scene. I wanted to belt out, "The hills are alive with the sound of music." After a few hours of this pastoral bliss, and with seemingly much less effort than my Mt. Tam climb, we reached the alpenhutte. The building rose up out of the setting, constructed of hewn mountain stone, lined with fragrant pine panelling, windows curtained and beds duveted in blue check gingham. We had a weissbier on the patio, watched the wind blow the beer's foam cockeyed, then hiked up a bit further, exhilarated by the bounty of our setting. A few hundred feet past the dirty melting summer snow, all signs of meadow gone but a few hardy pink moss campion flowers clinging to the rock, we arrived at a small plateau, Peterskopfl. On the plateau marched an eerie army of narrow cairns: stack after stack of whitish mountain stone. Hundreds of them, most about two feet high, crowded on an outcropping of about 1000 square feet. The sheer numbers, size, positioning, and uniformity brought to mind a military cemetery with its white cross grave markers. Clearly others too had felt energized by this scene, had wanted to commemorate their presence at this spot, and had taken the time to add to the collection. I added a small stone cap to one of the stacks. My companion told me that the Germans call this type of cairn "steinmann" or stone man, because of its human resemblance. We who had wandered there had in effect left an effigy of ourselves. In fact, cairns can be found all over the world, from the US to Scotland to Africa. They serve as grave markers, navigational aids, and summit indicators. Some ancient grave cairns dating from as early as the Bronze Age are believed to have served to deter grave robbers or possibly even to keep the spirit of the dead from escaping. When cairns are used for navigation, especially in alpine and other barren landscapes, travelers sometimes add to them as they pass by in order to maintain them in the face of nature's powers. Their form may be a simple but precarious vertical stack, a conical pile of pebbles, or an elaborate piece of engineering and balance. Appearing in the midst of uninhabited landscape as they so often do, cairns sometimes merely represent one of many manifestations of humankind playing with the offerings of nature. The appeal of adding to an existing cairn or constructing a new one in a group allows the contributors to feel as though they are a part of something larger, that they belong to a group of other wayfarers who have touched upon this same path. As Snyder, writes in the poem "Endless Streams and Mountains": Walking on walking, under foot earth turns Streams and mountains never stay the same. For Snyder, all trails represent people walking where others have walked (walking on walking), while all around us, nature continues in its own process. Mountains formed by earthquakes and glaciers are ever eroded by wind and stream. People trace one another's footsteps. Cairns, looked at symbolically, represent a human interaction with the ever-changing geology of earth and with the rest of the human race. Once I started to pay attention, cairns cropped up in all types of places. On a Sonoma beach, I came upon a narrow cairn tucked in a corner of bluff. That cairn stood as a lone dark totem of slippery black serpentine, an igneous rock squeezed from the earth like a watermelon seed. The serpentine had formed from flowing magma released upward when two of earth's plates rubbed against one another, California's geological process made manifest. A feet of engineering, precariously but ingeniously balanced of several vertical stones, the small cairn defied the threat of wind and waves. Both the artist and the earth interacted in this cairn, and it offered me the pleasure, as art sometimes does, of deeper connection to the world and what humans can make of it. On the same beach, in a crook of a bluff, I also discovered a pile of golden sandstone shards surrendered by the eroding cliff. A foot high wall in a basket weave of stones rose out of the rubble. It reached around the cliff, embracing and protecting it. The wall's stonemason clearly had an expertise beyond the average layman. The sculptor Andy Goldsworthy has erected a similar one in front of Stanford University's art museum, salvaging building sandstone knocked loose by an earthquake a decade earlier to make a snakelike wall entrenched in yet rising out of the dusty dirt. Like the cairn's builder, the beach stonemason had taken the geological castings of the earth and made something of beauty. I might have gone on happily admiring the work of other more artistic people and adding to summit cairns or other rock art were it not for a visit to Acadia National Park on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. Although not of extreme elevation, the "peaks" of Acadia are barren gray rocks, making trails difficult to distinguish. Here the park service constructs a specific navigational form of cairn, called the Bates cairn, after its inventor, an early pathmaker in the park. These cairns comprise two vertical rocks topped by a horizontal stone—resembling a doorway-- and a smaller rock on top. Hiking near the top of Gorham Mountain Trail, picking my way over the smooth pinkish gray granite stones resembling hardened folds of dough, I paused to appreciate the views out over the Atlantic. It was then I noticed the warning signs which made me feel like a sheepish child scolded by her mother for having had an enjoyable romp in the mud: Cairns are carefully placed piles of rocks built by trail crews to mark trails and guide hikers. Adding to cairns or building other cairns or rocks detracts from the natural landscape, causes soil erosion and plant loss, and misleads hikers. Do not add to or build cairns or other rock objects. Leave the mountain and the rocks as you find them. The cairns had given me satisfaction, community, aesthetic inspiration but now the ranger signs in Acadia gave me pause. In ethics class in college, my professor used to offer a sort of comical counter-example to the argument "What if everybody did it?" He would say, yes, well, what if everyone on earth went to the college post office this minute? Disaster would ensue. Still one must consider the collective effect of each action. In Acadia, one of the most popular parks in the nation, the power of numbers becomes clear. The more popular trails there get an average of 245 to 302 hikers daily in peak season. Rangers refer to the alteration of the cairns through addition or subtraction as "rock relocation." Rock relocation had been the very activity I had hitherto so admired, whether on Mt. Tam, Peterskopfl, or the Sonoma beaches. In Acadia the damage from collective transgression cannot be ignored. The National Park Service did a study of the Bates cairns and found that prior to installation of warning signs, on average 62% of existing cairns lost rocks within every five day period. On average 41% of existing cairns had rocks added. Also, on average (and more pertinent to my own interests), one copycat cairn was built every five days, though the number is too small for statistical accuracy. For the park service, the rock dislocation is a problem because of the natural resource degradation it causes; in other words, the very landscape that hikers come to enjoy becomes damaged in the movement of rocks. Ad hoc cairns no longer seemed so innocent after my visit to Acadia. Back home the next year, we picked up my son from a remote northern California soccer camp and headed near the Oregon border to hike and explore. In Lava Beds National Monument, petroglyphs from early inhabitants decorate what was once the edge of Tule Lake. These pictures, primitive images of people along with other indecipherable symbols resembling waves and circles, were drawn by Modoc people from a period 2500-4500 years ago. The cliff itself was created when fragments of lava were blown upward and landed in layers, still visible as varying shades of sandstone in reddish beige and grays, like a faded Georgia O'Keeffe painting. As water levels fluctuated, waves eroded the sides of the island in shelf-like ridges, and still today you can roll your hiking boots over these ridges. When the lake was here, the Modocs floated boats to the volcanic island and created their petroglyphs along its sides. A barbed wire fence now borders the dry ground at the cliff's edge, which was once the island's side. I tried to interpret the pictures ten feet above on the cliff face, but they remained an inscrutable scribble of carved out squiggles, zigzags and dots. Although they meant little to me rationally, they offered much more in their connection to humans of the past. "I was here," they proclaim. Like the mountain cairns, the petroglyphs represent more humans making their mark on earth's offerings. Yet I was separated from them by a barbed wire fence. In the 20th century modern Americans began to vandalize the petroglyphs: graffiti carvings and even bullet holes mar the original art. Japanese characters dating from nearby WWII internment camps add to the melange. The troubling line between graffiti and historical value became more blurred as I gazed up at the rows of scribbles, unable in places to differentiate exactly what was modern and what was ancient. The Modoc's petroglyphs add meaning; carved initials do not, but somewhere in the middle, the interment camp's traces made me uncertain. Possibly even the original petrolyphs could be considered graffiti. As I left Petroglyph Point, I recognized just how murky the choice to leave a mark can be. After driving less than two hours south, my family pulls into the parking lot nearest the peak of Mount Shasta. At approximately 7,900 feet, the parking lot is still 6,500 feet below the summit, situated more like a belt buckle than a barrette on the mountain side, an altogether much longer way to the top than Mt. Tam or Peterskopfl. Above us patches of glacial snow like the filling of an oreo spread down the dark volcanic peak. Extracting myself from the car, I amble over to the park service's ubiquitous brown wood informative placard, but am distracted by a large stone circle to my left. A labyrinth. Someone has created a stone labyrinth about 30 feet in diameter, with ten spiraling interior circles. It beckons, and I cannot resist. I stroll the course to the center, eyes to the ground, guided along by a border of stones the sizes of cantaloupes and oranges. The spirals reverse my direction, and I find myself led back out into the world, the grand expanses of Californian beauty, a sprawling vista of distant mountains and valleys lay before me, a meditative journey both symbolic and soothing in its process. As I emerge from this labyrinth I notice a few feet away a grouping of stones arranged into letters like the signs in a Flintstones cartoon, each about one foot high proclaiming: "MY, LIFE IS AWESOME." Whether it was the crudeness of the execution or the language, the Flintstones sign jolted me. In the juxtaposition of these two creations of rock relocation--labyrinth and sign--I begin to intuit my answer to the issue of cairns. A desire to leave a mark is understandable but ego-driven. What matters more to me now is my absorption of nature's offerings to me, my own experience of participating in the bounty of the outdoors. I don't begrudge my classmates' additions to Mt. Tam's conical cairn, nor the beach artists' temporal contributions of cairns and walls, nor the Peterskopf hikers' army of cairns. What would happen to the petroglyphs of the future if we were to ban every expression of human beings celebrating the gifts of nature? Sometimes when humans sign nature's guest register they leave something of beauty and commonality for the rest of us to enjoy. As for me, I won't be adding to any more cairns, and you probably won't even miss my rock. But I was there.