Due to the popularity of Mike’s missives from the Middle East, we decided to add a category for news of the Great North. For anyone who doesn’t know, he packed up his family (all six kids, dog, and Elisabeth) and trundled them off to Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage this past August.
There is a new section on CITM, News From The North, where you can read whatever periodic postings Mike may have time to produce.
I wrote this July 29th, after my grandfather, uncle, father, younger brother, and I made what Grandpa considers his “last hike” — hike in this case being defined as “mostly uphill trek through trackless woods to a lake normally accessible only to birds and deer.” I haven’t posted it until now, because it says, I think, more about me than about Grandpa. But at Dad and Matt’s request (they caught me with a few shots in me, feeling talkative), I’m sharing.
Grandpa, if you ever read this, know that I love and admire you, and every step you took on July 29th seemed full of a foolhardy courage and self-confidence that we will all do well to match when we’re 81.
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When you’re 81, everything takes a long time. Making sure you pull out the brown pill box, with the evening pills, not the white one, with the morning pills. Checking whether this dental floss or that is the preferred kind for these old, soft teeth. Washing your face. Climbing a mountain.
Today, at the age of 81, my grandfather, accompanied by my uncle (his son), my dad (his son-in-law), my younger brother, and me, hiked in the Alpine Lakes backcountry from Evans Lake to Top Lake. Only half a mile as the camp robber flies, we covered more than twice that over ground that rose 600 feet and had no path save that in Grandpa’s memory of his last visit. (“Keep this stream to your right until you reach the meadow, then stay to the left of the rock fall through the saddle at the top — there, do you see that? — and then you’ll drop right down to the lake.”)
But everything takes longer when you’re 81. He takes the night pills the same way he takes a shot of Jim Beam — staring meaningfully into the paper cup, challenging it, knowing well (through years of practice) who is the better man. Then, in a single dramatic swallow (“the night pills, in the brown pillbox; these are the morning pills, in the white one; and the nitroglycerine is in my pocket, here”), a pointed tossing back of his hickory-chiseled head with its still-present but finally graying hair, jerking the water back, the pills rushing ahead, just the same as he finished his first whiskey hours before.
Stopping slowly to throw the now-unneeded paper cup on the fire, he seems removed in a way from the man who just hours ago completed an almost entirely uphill hike through territory marked only in his mind. This man is old, almost tenative; that man moved confidently, for the most part, selecting his sure way with the practice of decades in the woods.
He says he picked Top Lake for his “last hike” because it was easy. If that was easy, I don’t dare imagine the hikes he remembers, with a chuckle, as “difficult.”
Three hours in, picking the way carefully, everything takes longer now.
Fishing Top Lake, I’ve no idea how his old, stiff fingers and tired eyes tied the gossamer-thin leader to the tiny trout fly, but his long slow casts are still accurate, still artistic. I like to think we each paused at least once to admire his motion, and then again to see it in our own casts, three generations of fishermen inheriting the same arc.
No fish.
Because going down will take nearly as long as going up, we had just an hour to ply the waters and submerged logs — a favorite haunt of alpine rainbows — with our flies. The elusive trout didn’t seem much interested even in the real caddis flies floating around, let alone our odd mix of dun-colored dries and just-so sparkling nymphs. Grandpa, fittingly, had the only reasonable strike, accompanied by a triumphant “Ha!” and the narrow escape of a lucky rainbow.
In the two hours back out, taking the steep route, we each fell several times. Grandpa lagged, moving slowly, cautiously, but still with shocking confidence in each step, though perhaps misplaced. Did he feel, as we did, that because we were there he could do this? That’s perhaps the projective arrogance of relative youth. I know I could not have made the trip without both Grandpa and my uncle, who offered subtle advice and numerous course corrections.
Everything is more and simultaneously less important when you’re 81. Every moment you have with your children, your grandchildren, and their children. Every day you can still bend over. Every night you can still recall it is in fact the brown pill box that holds the evening pills. These are victories, accomplishments as worthy of recognition as climbing that ridge to Top Lake, as worthy of acceptance as any award. Acceptance may well be the most courageous of these victories. At 81, even that takes a while.