'Where you come from is gone, where
you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless
you can get away from it' ~ Flannery
O'Connor, Wise Blood
I’ve set myself the
task of scaling every peak, sniffing out every oddity and over-night’ing in as
many haunted hovels in the region I have come half-reluctantly to call home.
To begin, I set out to
scale Wagner Butte. A big hill near
Talent where you can see for miles across the Rogue Valley (if it’s a clear
day). A butte is a curious term. Is it a hill or a mountain? Could it be a peak? It’s got elements of a bluff, but it’s too
narrow to be a mesa. If in doubt, call
it a butte. Apparently there was a lot
of doubt back in the day because there’s a shit ton of butte’s in Oregon. Black Butte, Glass Butte, there’s even a (you
guessed it) Big Butte, right here in my own home county of Jackson,
Oregon. But I digress…
Wagner Butte’s allure
is that it’s accessible (an hour’s drive from Medford, 30-minutes paved road,
30-minutes fairly navigable gravel road) and from the peak you can see for
miles in every direction. I like a
challenge and a 5-mile ascent of 2,000 feet qualifies as such for my old bones. I’m calling it 5-miles, even though other
reviews call it 5.2 miles. My expensive
GPS watch claims it was 5.2 miles out and 4.9 miles back. I’ve mused over the discrepancies my
expensive Suunto Amibt GPS watch throws out.
Could it be that switchbacks confuse it?
I don’t know, so I round up the decimals and call it good.
5-miles is
5-miles. Flat. But 5-miles up is a bit of a cunt, made only barely acceptable by the vague
promise of a return 5-miles in a generally downward direction. I started out, a mile and a bit in and I overtook
some old quasi hippy (probably from Ashland), made identifiable as a hippy by
the head scarf, walking at a slow and deliberate pace up a steep-ish gradient. I huffed past him and grunted out a ‘how are
you doing?’. Like all strangers, he
avoided my eyes and smiled politely as if a retarded child had just said
something awkward in an elevator.
After another half mile
I came across a mother and daughter coming in the opposite direction with a
child I would judge to be around 10-years-old.
Hmm, I thought. They don’t look
tired. It’s an alleged 10-mile round
trip with a 2,000 feet elevation gain and that kid didn’t even look like he’d
broken a sweat. Perhaps this won’t be
too hard after all.
Lies… I don’t know whether they just went a short
ways up the trail and turned around or the child was drinking some mutant
strength formula, but meeting them just gave me false hope which in turn further
fueled my general vitriolic temper. Thus
far, I’d had two encounters on the trail.
A trail I had taken in no small part to escape humanity, or at least
take a brief sojourn. Instead I met a
hippy and an inhumanly fit child. I was
feeling the old pain in my hip. The
burning in my lungs. The ringing in my
ears. 2-miles in, I remembered what I
always forget: nature gets old very quickly.
Trees are trees. It’s pretty for
5-seconds. After that, it’s just
trees. Then you notice the cracks and
imperfections. The red fire ants
scurrying tirelessly across the trail.
The little gnats that fly under your sunglasses and seek out the
moisture of your eyeballs. And the other
cracks you don’t notice till it’s too late.
The creosote dripping off the bark on the tree you lent your hand on for
a moment to catch your breath.
It’s okay, don’t fight
it. Nature sucks. Just like the city below. There’s no escape. And you’ve got 3-miles to go before you even
reach the turn-around. These are the
thoughts my monkey brain regurgitates with no distractions to keep it from
facing itself. Eventually, I let them
drift past.
About 3-miles in, you
get to a fork in the path with two withered old signs, Wagner Butte 2-miles
that way, or Wagner Gap an indeterminable digit in the other direction. These faded signs and barely noticeable forks
are what makes hiking fun. More than
once I’ve taken a wrong turn and nearly died, cold and alone on a desolate
Butte.
I got to the summit
after about two-hours of crushing my hip flexors and passing a troupe (I shall
call them that collectively) of senior hikers with hiking poles, who commented
on my lack of company (“on a solo
voyage?”). Yes. Yes, I am.
The summit was a pile
of boulders about the size of a large house that you could somewhat
precariously scramble up. At this point,
despite the fact that I once jumped out of planes with a machine gun strapped
to my side, I am not ashamed to admit that I am a little afraid of
heights. Standing on top of a pile of
boulders 7,000 feet up in the air is kind of intimidating. I don’t quite understand how everyone else
who got to the top and took a selfie looks so chillax’ed. I got there. Glanced over the top through a swirl of
cloud. Nodded that, yes, indeed that was
the summit, and then hunkered down into a hollow made by an overhanging boulder
to gather my thoughts.
I was grateful no one else was there. It doesn’t matter where you live, you’re still in your head. And that was the sum of my deep, Butte-top reflection. I set off back down the trail. I passed the old hippy, he looked tired and much more friendly this time. I felt bad for stereotyping him. Then I passed a couple of runners in skin tight latex, whose immaculate tans and chipper demeanors made me wary. I didn’t pass anyone else. It took me half the time to get down as it did to get up. I wonder if that’s a fair analogy for life. We scramble up to get some place we thought we needed to be and then effortlessly descend back to ground, wondering what we learned (or didn’t’).
I learned that we are doomed never to learn from the mistakes of our past. Next on my list, Stein Butte (I'm doing all the butte's).
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