Shasta

This will be interesting, I say aloud to no one at all as I step out of the Jeep.  It’s three in the morning at a rest stop somewhere south of Redding, where a twenty-two hour day came to an auspiciously located end.  The original plan was to drive all the way back to Seaside from Mount Shasta to be at the office as City Hall opened after the Independence Day holiday.  While the on-time goal was achieved with the 3:00 a.m. wake-up, the original plan got sidetracked by just how long it takes to plod up and down a Shasta-sized mountain and (there’s no delicate way to put this) the amount of time it takes for a gastro-intestinal system to react to the shock of real, post-wilderness food.

Up and down Mount Shasta, starting at 2:00 a.m. at high camp and ending at 6:00 p.m. back at the Jeep, leaves unknown carnage on the lower extremities until I take my first steps.  I roll out of the passenger seat / most luxurious bed I’ve slept in three nights and walk over to the driver’s seat to start the last of the drive back.  Most everything seems to be working just fine.  The oldest pair of knees to summit the mountain yesterday don’t even squeak.  Cool.    

Big, steep and windy will be the remembrances.  The wind was steadily blowing at 50mph and gusting higher above 11,000 feet.  The day before might have been worse.  The only team that summited started their climb at 11:00 pm, and then got pinned down on the summit for hours in a zero-visibility storm.  So, while the wind was brutal, at least I could see.  Which helps. 

What doesn’t help, except to keep the summit from being a crowded place, is how steep the mountain is.  Except for two small camp sites and a plain just below the summit, there ain’t nowhere to go but up.  There are crazy-steep parts, where it seems impossible snow and ice could accumulate.  Hence the name “Avalanche Gulch”, I suppose.  Here’s how it works.  Take step.  Slide down.  Take step.  Slide down.  Take step.  Slide down and have to self-arrest.  Repeat for eight hours with crampons and an ice axe if you want to reach the top.  Know going in that you won’t get to see the top until the last half hour.  Down is all the more fun.  Nobody falls up a mountain.  They fall down mountains. 

The whole enterprise is really quite preposterous.  As is my custom, this didn’t register until after the fact.  Arriving in the dark of night, I didn’t see the mountain as most people do - driving along I-5 - until I got back on the highway to head south after the climb.  As you turn through the on-ramp, Mount Shasta dominates the view.  It is, essentially, the only thing you can see.  It’s enormous, standing alone in the landscape.  The first reasonable thought when you first see it, is to be certain people couldn’t get to the top of the thing.  It was my first thought as I saw it while getting onto I-5, and that was after expending three days of effort to get to the top of the thing.

I’ve not yet encountered anyone with a good reason to climb mountains.  In person.  In print.  At the movies.  Via semaphore or Ouija board.  There’s no good reason.  There will be some babble about alpine beauty (that’s true) or man versus nature (spoiler alert; anyone trotting this out is a lunatic) or testing one’s mettle (try curing a disease, volunteering at a soup kitchen or something otherwise useful instead).  There really is no good reason.  Oh, “it’s there” all right.  But there’s no actual reason for “you” to go “there”.  Climbing mountains is the very definition of preposterous; contrary to reason or common sense; utterly absurd or ridiculous.

Wait for it.

Which is why I rather like it.  I’m a big fan of preposterous.  Getting out of a wheelchair.  Leaving for college with $83.  Founding a charter school.  Making a Midwest manufacturing city relevant in this century.  Stopping a riverfront ballpark from flooding.  Promising every kid who graduates high school a college scholarship.  Buying out a casino on behalf of a community.  Being adaptive and curious about boundaries is my stock in trade.  It is what gets me hired and keeps me employed.  So, standing at the bottom of this ridiculous slope with my crampons and ice axe, looking up?  Cool.       

And it ain’t just me by a long shot.  All the really great stuff was preposterous at the start.  Fire.  Transcontinental rail.  Electric light.  Electric guitars.  Manned flight.  Skyscrapers.  40 hour work week.  Jazz.  Civil rights.  Round ball, round stick.  JFK putting a target on the moon.  Public Defenders.  Supermotos.  Graphical user interfaces.  Aircraft carriers.  Vaccines.  Peanut butter – and I can’t stress this enough – inside a small chocolate cup.  Hamilton.  The Replacements.  Inalienable human rights. 

Make your own list.  The point is to realize the difference between can’t and won’t.  Try not to let can’t be a replacement for won’t.  And try not to use can’t at all, because you probably could if you set your mind to it.