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High on the Lolo
Steven Faulkner on God's Pictures of Life & Death & Eternity
I pitch my tent just off the Lolo Trail, a sand-and-gravel Forest Service road that rises and falls along high ridges of the Clearwater Mountains in eastern Idaho, a trail known to history as the route Lewis and Clark followed to cross the Rocky Mountains on their way to and from the Pacific Ocean in 1805 and 1806. It was also the route used in 1877 by members of the Nez Perce tribe—750 men, women, and children with their dogs and mules and 2,000 horses—as they fled their homeland, pursued by General O. O. Howard with his soldiers and his cannons.
I had hiked and mountain-biked this trail just three summers before with two of my sons. This time I am alone.
I gather firewood, break off twigs for kindling, and light a campfire. Tall spruce and pine trees stand behind me in the dusk, but to the southeast I count seven ridgelines, stepping down into the steep Lochsa River valley, then up to a distant horizon maybe 50 miles away, a thin line of rocky peaks that looks like the edge of a flint knife going red in the evening light. That ridgeline is the limit of the visible world. Evening shadows are rising slowly, slowly up the steep valleys as night descends.
I boil water, pour it into an aluminum package of freeze-dried beef stew, and begin to eat, watching as blue sky soaks into the layered mountain ridges, dyeing the entire landscape in shades of blue and charcoal as sky takes possession of earth. That impression increases as the sky deepens to black and the limits of sight give way to limitless space.
Far out in that dark infinity, stars appear.
"Look at the stars!" wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins; "look, look up at the skies! / O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! / The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!"
They inhabit, as do we, that vast, endless vacuum.
Lifetimes in Miniature
It seems to me that we blind earthlings miss these obvious, daily reminders: God speaking in everyday parables to our illiterate souls. It's so obvious, so ordinary, that we miss just how extraordinary it is, ignore the fact that each day appears as a lifetime in miniature. Each morning we rise from darkness and walk and speak and cry and laugh and work our way round again to
darkness.
Far from the humdrum world of asphalt highways and concrete sidewalks where, to use Hopkins again, "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell," the night skies give way to endless black punctuated by burning stars as "the last lights off the black West" go. Then again, as my campfire subsides into coals, for about the 2,490th night of my life, the patient God draws for his child pictures of life and death and eternity.
I crawl into my tent, slide into the sleeping bag, and, as one does every night, I yield to sleep. Soon enough, in spite of the hard sleeping pad, I lose consciousness and this solid earth evaporates. What more graphic image of death could we have? What more persistent reminder? Darkness comes and perception wanders away into the surreal.
Steven Faulkner teaches creative writing at Longwood University in southern Virginia. He is the author of Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts (2007) and Bitterroot: Echoes of Beauty and Loss (2016). Both books are memoirs of father-son journeys that followed the paths of missionary priests: Marquette (in Waterwalk) and De Smet (in Bitterroot).
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