A quarter way from Lake Tahoe to Yosemite there is Carson Pass, so named for a certain mountain man Christopher “Kit” Carson, whose name is borne also by a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado.

Around the pass is a region of the Sierra Nevada extraordinary for its botanical and geological properties. Igneous rocks suddenly break up the generally granite Sierra cliffs and upon the volcanic rock there grow at least four types of lichen. Aspen groves remind me of my first mountainous experiences in Colorado. Desert plants appear suddenly beside the myriad conifers and other montane vegetation. It’s a surreal amalgam and fraternity and unification of ecosystems which seem elsewhere to exist independently of one another. From time to time I catch distinctly refreshing and edifying whiffs of sage carried by mighty gusts that cause trees to grow in gravity-defying east-contorting shapes, entirely bare of branches on their west faces.

The winds might easily topple an unsuspecting hiker from one of the semi-precarious ridges the Pacific Crest Trail traverses; they visibly and continuously threaten to blow over eminent and wearied pines with trunks two feet in diameter; uprooted trees lie solemnly beside their clinging, swaying comrades, continuing in an apparently different way the unhindered elemental ruthless impersonal immaterial timeless terrible metamorphic yet selfsame flow of energy, visibly dilapidated and disintegrating, yet fueling life just as before.

Weathering Winds

I was never more conscious of the fragility of these pines than after midnight when into my consciousness entered the novel fear that one might topple unto me in my sleep. The ones still standing had stood this long, I decided, before closing my eyes to block the brazen light of a full moon.

Setting up the tent in the little alcove of trees defeated or metamorphosed or yet weathering the flow was the only sensible option to avoid the menacing squalls. All night their whizzing and whirring and beating against everything in their immediate path kept me intermittently awake.

I learned just what “wind” is, vaguely, just a few days ago: it is simply a movement of air molecules from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure. Always flow. Everything, always, forever, eternally. Metaphoric. Visible forms change but “energy” is conserved. But what is energy? And why is it conserved? The question has been on my mind.

At the Heart of Nature

This morning I listened to Richard Feynman’s second lecture on physics from a two-year intro course he taught at Caltech in the early 1960s. Incidentally he mentioned that the first experiments which suggested the conservation of energy were conducted by a biologist, Julius Von Mayer, during the 19th century. I love Feynman’s exuberance and willfully nerdy, just-so-happens humor. He added the probing and poetic reminder that while we humans divide Nature into all our many “sciences,” Nature herself doesn’t care one iota what we call her or her processes, nor differentiate between them or their apparition. Physics, of course, is at the heart of all processes, and of Nature.

Coming up a different face of the mountain, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, “everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious with thee, o Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, o Nature. From thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return.”

The Pioneer Spirit

Atop Carson Pass is erected a severe and plain and direct monument to another mountain man, a Norwegian who emigrated to the States at the age of ten after his father died: John Albert “Snowshoe” Thompson. The inscription below the monument resonated, particularly as it came during an interruption by the crossing of a highway — civilization! — of personal meditations. The highway interrupts the PCT and similarly the monument at the pass interrupted a particular still-embryonic idea regarding just exactly what kind of a pioneer John Muir was. Muir, as it suddenly became clear, had come in the latter part of the 19th century to a region which had largely already been traversed, explored, settled, and to a great extent exploited (I use the word neutrally). The gold rush of 1848-9 had occurred several decades previously, for instance.

What Muir did pioneer was the changing tide of attitude toward the wonders of the flow and conservation of energy so clearly evinced by these lands: their magnificent and binding truth direct and accessible in a way that is elsewhere perhaps more subtle, veiled, mistakable, and forgettable.

The monument resonated also because it expressed a particular idealization of the human spirit: its ultimately aimless and unexplainable yet intrinsic and unrelenting instance of the omnipresent flow of energy. The inscription text reads:

…There ought to be a shaft raised to Snow-Shoe Thompson; not of marble; not carved and not planted in the valley, but a rough shaft of basalt or of granite, massive and tall, with top ending roughly, as if broken short, to represent a life which was strong and true to the last. And this should be upreared on the summit of the mountains over which the strong man wandered so many years, as an emblem of that life which was worn out apparently without an object…

The shaft erected is as described, calling to mind a Washington Monument with the top sheared coarsely off. Have a look at the surrounding region in the attached pictures.