Meeting Tahoma

This unimaginably huge volcanic mountain was not even on my radar till sometime in 2019 when Sue proposed we go. I’ve never been a camper/hiker/backpacker; I did other things with my life and just didn’t think much about the wilderness or “nature.” As a single mom without any outdoor skills, it was impractical and financially impossible. For me, “nature” was a city park, and "wilderness" was something in a book, as distant as Arundhati Roy’s India or Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury. 

Sue’s mother took her children to Yosemite several times a year, and she had them climbing and hiking as soon as they could walk and before they were out of diapers, so Sue has had a very different relation to nature, and I’m learning, paying attention. 

We love reading aloud to each other and discussing what we read, so for this trip, I bought us a copy of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard (Knopf, 2021).

Simard writes expressively about this region of the earth, with creative descriptions of what she sees and how she thinks about it. Describing spring growth, she writes, “Branches burst with emerald new growth over a fleece of jade needles.” Then I go out and I see that. She writes, “I crawled over logs covered with moss and mushrooms, inhaling the evergreen mist. One had a river of tiny Mycena mushrooms flowing along the cracks down its length before fanning along a splay of tree roots that dwindled to rotten spindles.” Then I go out looking for what she describes, and I make some photographs (see extra for some remarkable decaying tree shapes).

Sue goes bounding up vertical trails with proper boots and hiking sticks. I amble through the woods and find things I’ve never seen before, and then we meet and tell each other about our discoveries. I have four days to post, so I'll try to get some blips up before I start catching up on other people's journals.