I was there as a new teacher at a Rocky Mountain boarding school, leading ninth and tenth graders on their orientation trip. We were hiking part of the Four Pass Loop. Long miles. Heavy packs. Thin air.
It was our third day on the trail. The students had already climbed steep switchbacks, slept two cold nights above 11,000 feet, and learned how hard it is to carry weight at altitude. Blisters had formed. Shoulders were raw.
It had rained all night.
In late August in the Rockies, afternoon storms are common. I suggested we take the longer route down through the valley. More miles, but lower and less exposed. The pass promised better views and a quicker exit. So up we went.
We climbed for two hours. Step by step. My eye on the clouds rapidly rolling in.
Near 13,000 feet, the sky split open.
The thunder did not roll. It cracked.
Rain slanted sideways. There was nowhere to hide. We were the highest things on the ridge. The gap between flash and thunder was closing.
“Spread out!” I yelled. “Stay low!”
We moved into lightning position. Packs on. Crouched on the balls of our feet. Heads down. Spaced apart along the trail.
Even crouching, you feel exposed. Your legs shake. Your calves burn. You try to make yourself small in a place that does not shrink. The rain whipped my face and dripped off my nose as I stared at the grass and counted out loud.
Gary Snyder writes that “the wilderness can be a ferocious teacher, rapidly stripping down the inexperienced or the careless” (The Practice of the Wild, 25). That day, the lesson was simple. The mountain did not care about our plans. It stripped us down to breath, bone, and the ability to endure.
Some of the students were crying. The wind stole their voices.
“Count with me,” I shouted over the wind.
1-1001.
1-1002.
1-1003.
Three seconds. Too close. Stay down.
Counting gives the mind something to do. It creates order inside chaos. There were moments when it felt as if we were inside the storm itself—when the pause between flash and thunder was too short to measure.
Val Plumwood calls her crocodile attack “a cautionary tale about survival and our relationship with the earth, about the need to learn to recognize who we are in different terms that acknowledge our own animality and the ecological as well as ethical context of our lives” (Being Prey, 91). On that ridge, I felt the limits of the ethical sphere alone. Staff hierarchy, confidence, even gender—those belonged to our cultural world. Lightning belonged to another order.
The rain the night before had been a warning. Wildness speaks. The question is whether we listen.
1-1001.
1-1002.
1-1003.
Thomas Berry writes that “we are most aware at such moments of transition that the world about us is beyond human control” (The Wild and the Sacred, 7). Waiting between flash and thunder, I felt that in my body. The storm was not punishment. It was weather moving through a system in which we happened to be standing.
Eventually the interval widened.
1-1001.
1-1002.
1-1003.
1-1004.
1-1005.
Five seconds. Farther away.
We sighed. We stood. Legs stiff. Packs heavy. We crossed the pass. The views were there. No one stopped to admire them. The march down to the trailhead was humbling. We were a cold, wet, tired line, putting one foot in front of the other.
A week later, I learned that the nausea, the headaches, and the deep fatigue I blamed on altitude were something else. I had assumed the thin air was responsible. I kept walking. The students were watching. Leadership meant steadiness. One foot in front of the other. Again and again.
My body had already begun building another life.
On that ridge, crouched against the lightning, I was not one body but two.
I did not yet know the story that was beginning.
The sacred shifted for me that day. It was no longer the triumph of standing high and looking out. It was the humility of lowering myself close to the ground. It was the counting. It was the responsibility of keeping fragile bodies safe—my students’, and unknowingly, my own child’s—in a world that does not bend to our pride.
Above tree line there is no hiding. Not from weather. Not from illusion. Not from the truth of who we are. I carry that kind of courage with me still—the kind that lives between flash and thunder.
Citations
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, p. 25. Val Plumwood, Being Prey, p. 91.
Thomas Berry, The Wild and the Sacred, p. 7.
