Autumn, late September, beginning Mount Rainier’s Alta Vista Trail from the Paradise Lodge parking lot. A cold, silver fog blows down from dense, swirling mists above. At the lodge, my wife Aimee feeds our 18-month-old, firstborn son George, about to start his daily nap after a morning of eating oatmeal and apple, playing in the morning dusting of snow, running around the lobby of the Lodge, climbing its stairs, standing by the fire, shaking the tiny bottles of gold in the gift shop. I told my wife Aimee I should be back in two hours. My plan had been to climb 5,000 feet to 10,000-foot Camp Muir, but as windy and snowy as this week has been, my new plan is modest– Sliuskin Falls. I don’t know if I’ve been there or not. On Rainier, one reads maps and ventures out, then arrives at things without signs, goes back, consults the map again, and wonders where one had just been.
A couple asks, “Can you see the summit?” No? He continues upward; she returns. People can come here for years and never see the summit. Even upon the mountain, we look for “the mountain,” and find the high, thin trees of the mountains, its rocks, slopes, the blueberries and salal characteristic also of Puget Sound lowlands, and listen to the music we hear when we pine for our mountains, from near and far.
Why am I not higher up? I wonder as the trail leads across the slope, looking down a sleep slope racing with strong, faucet-size streams of the hard rains of two days. The trail abruptly curves back and up the slope and veers through clumps of trees onto the ridge. According to my reading of the map, Paradise Glacier or the Reflection Lakes might be on that plateau. I’m wearing the only pair of pants I brought, my only footwear and jacket, and realize I’ve gotten soaked and will not return any the warmer or dryer for abstaining from climbing higher. I see no glacier, but familiar terrain from previous hikes, the treeline in sight among the hills and rocks. Maybe this gulley of streaming slush is still the trail. I haven’t seen the sign that the trail has ended.
“See him? Leather jacket, jeans, wide-brim hat? No camera, no equipment? Pretty wet!”
Two bears comment from some trees just below.
“Yeah, he’s been coming here since the ’70s. Never prepared for the weather! Hardly changed a bit.”
The Lodge was built two centuries ago. Before my lifetime, cars once parked in these wildflower meadows. Golfers played Paradise’s novelty course.
A new century finds us, parallels of last century’s first pioneers, they whose children would drive those cars into these since-restored and protected meadows, fight their nation’s wars, become our parents, take us here.
Our children we bring here every year, before their memories begin, hopeful of shaping their intuitions, their instincts and inclinations, to possess the second nature to come here and breathe the rich, sharp, fine, alpine air of Cascade Mountain slopes, trees, streams, rocks, waterfalls. While we can shape our childrens’ destinies, we attend to our desire that they will be immovably at home in The Great Northwest among our mountains and oceans, that they will naturally climb, sail, fly, and explore, and not dismiss or neglect our own particular Paradise right outside Seattle’s southeastern door.
“I first came here as a baby, to the Paradise Lodge,” George Finn will say, God willing, 50, 75, 100 years, from now, with his own children there– here. As a century begins.