Camille Cusumano

In my middle years
I’ve become rather fond of the way.
Sometimes I go alone through the forest
to see things that only I can see.
I follow streams to the source
and sit and watch clouds come up.
Or perhaps I meet another [backpacker] and
we laugh and sing and I forget the way home.

Adapted from a poem by Wang Wei, 8th century (Tang Dynasty) poet

With the exception of a couple of tango-related interruptions, I have backpacked through some mountain wilderness every summer since 1992. This summer following a two-year hiatus due to my living in Argentina, my brother Chuck and I resumed our annual trek. We set out late July 9 on the John Muir Trail in our ritualistic silence, each absorbing the message of our great effort in her or his way.

As always backpacking is a meditative art just as tango is. Both can be summed up as “just walking.” In backpacking, as in tango, you either find the walking to be a rich and infinitely deep experience. Or you are phenomenally bored, see only the bugs, dirt, and broken-rock trails, find the 40-pound weight on your back insufferable, find digging your own latrine vulgar and distasteful. Those averse to tango, similarly, find the inescapable intimacy with other frightening or a turn off.

However, it doesn’t follow that every tango dancer will love backpacking—the skeeters were hell this year and it was hot and the way was difficult. Most tango dancers probably would wisely rather save their feet for the work of scuffing polished wood floors. But, like the poet, I am called to the forest, to the paths deep into wilderness, away from “tired, nerve-shaken, overly civilized” folks that John Muir noticed in populated parts. (I am befuddled by the latest scare-du-jour—that our birthrates, in Europe in particular, are falling dangerously low. I see no evidence—except at some milongas, maybe—that human beings, who are making a mess of the planet, will be in short supply anytime soon. Would that they were.)

Chuck and I met at Tuolumne Meadows and were on our way down Lyell Canyon on the ever-popular

JMT. The Tuolumne River was very low as were all the many stream crossings (which would be no problem if there were fewer humans). Our first day was an easy initiation to the art of walking with your whole survival kit on your back. We did only five miles. But the second day—due to our mis-planning—we climbed way too many miles on feet and legs hardly broken in.

“Llamas,” I kept bleating to Chuck’s shadow. “Llaaa-maaaas. . .I told you we should’ve taken llamas.” Actually, I hadn’t. But as I studied the trail of ground dust and the footprints of many hikers before me many stories took shape in my wide open mind. My brother was always way ahead of me so I only came to know that I had taken the right turn at a junction by his distinct kidney-bean-shaped waffle prints, which I now know like the back of my sunburned hands.

On day two, we began our ascent of 12,235-foot Mount Lyell, Donahue Pass, in good form. But there was so much up, up and then down, down that we were in pathetic shape by mid-afternoon. Just as in tango, when the dance is not feeling as rapturous as I know it can, I did not blame the form. I didn’t even blame the emptiness. I simply kept mindful of the moment, of my surroundings. I watched my breath. My knees, feet, and back muscles hurt. But the beauty of the scenery, which the photos below barely capture, was never lost on me. I recited the names of a rainbow spectrum of wildflowers I saw, which have bloomed early this dry year, a litany of distraction from pain:

Mountain Heather; Wild Azalea; Columbine; snowy flax or phlox (?); rock flower; penstemon; Mariposa lilies; corn lily (or false hellebore); Johnny Jump-ups; asters; monkey flower; lupine; larkspur; tiger lilies; sierra arnica; mule’s ears; cinquefoil; buttercups; groundsel; goldenrod; Indian paintbrush; owl’s clover (?); swamp onion; shooting stars. Ommm. Ommm. Ommm. Oh my ‘aching’ twisted karma . . .

I hoarded my breath, sniffing in the aroma of lodgepole pines, white pines, red firs, as if I could carry it home and revel in it for another week. I watched their tree roots that became steps in the middle-earth. I studied the position of glacial erratics, reminders of the cataclysms that only recently quarried, scoured and shaped this landscape. I drank straight from high streams of snowmelt thinking how they all lead back to ONE—all branching streams of the snowpack in its granite keep.

As in tango, I thought often of my axis or balance. Any jarring turn of my head up or to the side would throw off my weight now distributed in an unfamiliar way—and I’d be like a flailing turtle when I fell (don’t tell Chuck, but I fell twice when he wasn’t looking). With my backpack laden with a bear canister, tent, sleeping bag, food, water and such, my center of gravity shifted from my third abdomenal chakra to my solar plexus one, the crucial one in tango connection, and as in tango, I always flexed my knees—especially on the downhill. My trusty French Vasque hiking boots have to go now, though. They are too worn from many miles, many years (left). And they badly bruised my big toenails, the cumulative pounding equal to one swing of a sledge hammer per toe.

We camped in four beautiful spots—five miles up Lyell Canyon, in a high meadow just the far side of Donahue Pass, at Thousand Island Lake, and at Rosalie Lake. We found a lake or stream each day to soak away most of the dirt and some of the inevitable inflammation. This is the segment of the Sierra backbone that inspired Muir’s moniker, Range of Light, due to ubiquitous light-reflecting waters, rushing or still (did you really think I’d get through a post without mentioning The Light?). Unlike previous trips, we saw no bears, but Chuck let a marmot get my sesame sticks one day—my favorite day food in the backcountry. Oh, but I made that marmot’s fur stand on end, tapping my walking stick against the rock crevice where he thought he was hiding from me, that varmint. “You get your tail out here right now, marmot, you hear me? I’m going to tan your hide . . . “  Tap, tap, tap. I dressed him down to no avail. Other yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) were just as brash but thereafter I kept my own eye on my own victuals.

We came out of the woods on Sunday early, exiting at Devils Postpile National Monument on the east side of the Sierra, amid overly civilized (albeit very clean-smelling) day trippers, the sound of cellulars piercing the silence. We had been immersed in the rapture of the wilderness, five days worth, so it was jarring at first. We got long hot showers at the ski lodge at Mammoth and were once again one of them.

I never rush back to the city so I spent the night at Lee Vining (Mammoth Lakes felt too overrun with the nerve-shaken), a city to love for its location fairly on the banks of the big blue Mono Lake with its crunchy pillars of tufa (taffy?). LV had many French tourists and I loved listening to them speak, a foil for the vernacular of a lot of tatooed bikers. The latter are no longer intimidating—as they were in my youth back in chemical Rahway, NJ. I sat next to a couple of them at Bodie Mike’s, the ribs place in town—and eavesdropped on their very low-key conversation. BTW, the food at Bodie Mike’s is decent for being what it is, not fancy, just meat and potatoes. The salad bar—iceberg lettuce style—was welcome fresh fare after five days of dried foods.

The next day I was up before dawn, so attuned to breaking camp early. I strolled a trail at the Mono Lake Visitor Center until the red desert sun poked above Mono Lake turning the salty water and tufa taffy pink. Travel Tip: Make your own French roast coffee in your Lake View Motel room, then carry it over to the Garden House Coffee spot next door; sit outside near the scorching rows of dahlias and other terraced flowers and plants. This is a great meditative spot. The coffee is too weak and tasteless, but the baked goods—I had a bear claw—are fresh and good. It’s at 30 Main Street, Lee Vining (tel: 760-647-6266). Oh, don’t let that one loud cell talker screaming chitchat to someone in L.A. diminish the setting.

Back in San Francisco my blackened toes stopped hurting after a couple of days and to my surprise  I could soon step into my tango heels (above, next to retired boots) without any pain—good feet genes. So I danced at a lovely new milonga—Olivia and Jonathan’s at Four Points Sheraton in San Rafael (first and third Thursdays). It was quite enjoyable dancing under the twilight sky on a decent floor. Many thanks to Jeff, Jonathan, Alex, Krys—my wonderful and creative partners.

On Saturday, I attended the Dharma Talk at San Francisco Zen Center, the grassy smell of tatami mats my virtual route back to wilderness. Shosan Victoria Austin, one of my teachers over the past twenty years, told some engaging stories of the Buddha—Siddhartha Gautama—and his entering into enlightenment, or liberation, which I like to call it these days. Before he became “Buddha” or Awakened One, Siddhartha recalled a moment of unprecedented equanimity experienced in nature as a child. So he sat down under a bodhi tree and discovered it again. And a world religion was born. That simple. Nature, wilderness, tatami mats, wooden dance floors—the good news is that equanimity, liberation, rapture are always at hand. Vickie recited the above poem by Wang Wei (which I at first mis-heard as One Way). It so well suited how I feel—about backpacking, tango, and life. When I forget my way back home, it means I forget to pick up the bones of suffering, of aversion or craving, of prefab idea. And I slip my feet painlessly onto the earth where they are, just laugh and enjoy the dance, no matter how far it may be from what I think the path should be.

Follow this link to a longer essay How Bears Take Their Coffee about another backpack trip with Chuck, from my in-progress collection, Wilderness Begins at Home, about life amid the wilds of a big family.

Marmot photo above is from Wikipedia. All other photos are from Chuck or me.

Almost to Donahue Pass, 12,235 feet (mas o menos).

Looking back down Lyell Canyon you see the cursive messge of a river.

Wow, sunset at Lake Rosalie—following a big thunderstorm.

That’s Banner Peak seen from Thousand Island Lake

Glorious shooting stars.

Thousand Island Lake

Oh, deer. That’s all.