BELOW ST. ELMO PASS

 

BELOW ST. ELMO PASS

We were always below St. Elmo pass.

We were hikers.

We walked while the others climbed.

This is the week the park closes for winter.

Three young trail crew

working, shovel and pickax,

creating runoffs

for next spring’s snowmelt,

and first snow on summit

and you can see the trail to the pass.

a dusting, fresh,

crevasses, rock

visible, clarified,

stunning—it’s early

fog burning off,

and this mist

not missed

stopping us.

This week a different us.

Three Johns and me.

I know. Three Johns.

There’s a sadness in this, permeating this hike.

Glacier Basin, below St. Elmo Pass.

Who’s here, who’s not.

II.

In those days, we came together from two places.

We came from both sides of the mountains,

The Cascades, and we hiked each summer.

The mountains. We were an odd number,

three, and, in flux, flowing.

We were trying to figure it out. Force fields.

Moss, bridges. Ourselves and each other.

Someone made these bridges for us.

The two places where we went.

The Goat Rocks and the Pasayten.

Wilderness areas.

We went into the Goat Rocks

from White Pass and then,

South of Packwood,

out of Chambers Lake with Higgins.

We looked for lonesome places,

high lonesome places

and tried to stay away from horses.

These were the years before the fires.

We were in the Pasayten the first time

when the smoke boiled over the mountain.

Moss angels today.

We were a different three,

and not even three,

we were odd numbers.

When we started 40 years ago

There were 40 hikes.

Wilderness walks.

Vance recorded them, our archivist.

We wrote poems, made jewelry.

The men’s hike.

The wilderness years.

Those hikes were gone a decade and more.

Becoming myth.

Men over time.

III.

St. Elmo Pass is the saddle between Steamboat Prow

(the lower part) and Burroughs Mountain.

We were drawn to Mt. Tahoma.

We always called it that, not using

the name given to it by European explorers.

We called it ours, too, it wasn’t,

We’d say, The Mountain’s out.

St. Elmo Pass is on a climber’s route

to Liberty Ridge and Carbon Basin.

From a hiker’s perspective, it collapses the mountain,

and of a sudden, one seems closer to Muir than Sunrise.

It was here that Major Ingraham, during the early days

of the Mountain’s exploration camped.

During the nightmare they were startled by the St. Elmo fires,

an electrical phenomena.

Going up today,

Winthrop Glacier, even

diminished, mighty. Cracked and crevassed,

and dirty-desolate river of ice.

One year we discovered White River.

White River Campground.

It drew us there and we kept coming back.

We got older.

White River Campground is how we found Glacier Basin.

And from Glacier Basin,

we came to Burroughs Mountain.

All the hikes around Sunrise.

Water sources.

Tom’s Dutch Oven.

So many threads.

Elevation gain to St. Elmo Pass is roughly 1700 feet.

And then Third Burroughs became my hike.

My son and the Vision Quest.

My brother.

The Wonderland Trail.

Tyler was the first. The first death.

Fitted for his mask one day,

delivering his daughter the next.

Then it wasn’t even a week.

The death of Lena.

When the dying started to happen.

Somewhere solitary hikes took over.

Once, in Chihuahua, I got on the train

through Copper Canyon, El Chepe Express,

through the mountains to Los Mochis,

got off in Creel, and stayed in a hotel

until I found a guide who took me

into Tarahumara country, where we found

the native women living in caves

cooking smoke piped out of the rock.

There were children, but no men.

Everything is walking he said to himself.

He was sitting on the porch.

Reading a story by Barry Lopez,

the teacher saying to himself

what he’d just told himself last week.

The last thing, the worst thing.

IV. Years before, defense of theory had concerned him. Not now. ‘I’ve thrown away everything that is no good,” he told a colleague one summer afternoon on his porch, as though shouting over the roar of a storm. “I can no longer think of anything worse than proving you are right.’ He took what was left and he went on from there. Barry Lopez, Winter Count

Marty and Vance brought us to Lopez.

I was the last one to get it.

Walking was no more than this,

What comes up from below

while you’re walking--

and if you’re lucky

you’ll have a match book

in your pocket and a pen

to write with as you walked.

There were notebooks in camps.

Barry carried poems of Jeffers

and I had a bulky Whitman biography.

And then those hikes were gone.

And these are winter counts

V.

The three Johns are Gospel good.

They’re climbers.

They’ve camped at Schurman.

This is how they know St. Elmo,

how they don’t think of the pass

as either high or far. The one John

summitted at 14, the first time.

Above the Basin

we look at the rusted pipe

left over from mining days.

It’s leaking water, still flowing.

The ridge is steep on both sides.

The glacier below to the left.

That gaping mouth gone

in the few years since I

camped here alone on this ridge

studying bonsai trees,

White River loud.

On a spine like this

practice becomes

a kind of belief,

steep talus,

yet for the three Johns

this is a kind of play,

an October get-away.

The last week before the mountain closes.

I feel like the new guy

awkward pulling folded paper

from my shirt pocket

taking out a pen.

For Marty, Barry, Vance

Jim Bodeen

2-10 October 2023