Off to the Mountains

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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An old car climbs a winding mountain road through brown-gold foothills as dark pines and grey-blue granite ranges gather ahead under a high pale sky. — The road climbs out of the flatlands

A small lone figure with a rucksack stands at a dusk trailhead, looking up at granite peaks rising dark against a deep blue sky pricked with the first cold stars. — At the trailhead, the dark peaks wait

Two men sit on a log at night by gear spread on a flat rock, one gesturing as he teaches, cold bright stars over the black shoulders of the Sierra behind them. — Gear on a rock, mountains waiting

Japhy gets this wild light in his eye one afternoon and announces that we are going up into the High Sierra to climb the Matterhorn—a real mountain, the kind with sheer granite walls and thin air, not the European tourist thing with cog railways. He has been turning it over in his mind, I can tell, and now it bursts out of him like a sermon delivered from a half-lotus on a tree stump. We need a driver, he says, and at once his mind goes to Henry Morley, the bookish, scholarly, wonderfully eccentric friend who reads Sanskrit, knows more about Buddhism than most monks, and drives through city traffic with the calm of a man who has already died and come back. Henry, of course, agrees with his usual quiet, amused nod, and suddenly the plan is real: three pilgrims in an old car, headed for the high country at the tail end of the long California summer.

The preparation becomes its own strange kind of joy. Japhy lectures us on the rucksack—not the GI surplus rucksack, mind you, but the proper kind, the kind with the right frame and the right straps—and on sleeping bags and on dried food and on the entire craft of going into the mountains with almost nothing on your back. He speaks the way a Zen master might speak about the dharma, except his sutras are about down jackets and freeze-dried peaches and how to wrap your shoes so they do not get wet. We pile into Henry's car with our packs and our candy bars and we head out of the city. The road climbs. The towns get smaller. The foothills are brown and gold, then the pines start crowding in, and the air changes, and the light changes, and you can feel the granite country gathering itself up ahead of you. We stop in some little mountain store to buy last-minute supplies, and Japhy keeps up his happy lecture the whole time, explaining why a man with a good pack and strong legs is richer than any banker or congressman or king.

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And this is Japhy's gospel, spoken from the front seat as the miles roll under us, and I want to write it down so I never forget it. He says the city is a kind of slow, comfortable death, that people forget what their legs are for, that the only true wealth is the kind you can carry on your shoulders into a place where nobody else has ever been. Money is a joke to him, or worse than a joke—a trap, a leash, a way of keeping your eyes on the ground. The mountain is the real treasure, and the mountain is free, and the air at the top is free, and the silence up there is free, and the only currency that matters is a good pair of boots and a willingness to keep walking when your lungs are burning and your thighs are shaking. He makes it sound so simple, so plain, so obvious, that I feel almost embarrassed I ever thought the world worked any other way. By the time we pull into the trailhead at dusk, with the peaks rising dark against a sky already prickling with the first stars, my heart is hammering with the kind of pure, childlike anticipation I have not felt since I was ten years old.

That night we camp near the parking lot, and the stars come out cold and bright over the black shoulders of the Sierra. Japhy lays out the gear on a flat rock and gives us the final lesson. Light, light, light, he keeps saying. Everything you do not need is a stone around your neck. Cut the handle off your toothbrush if you have to, throw away the book you thought you would read, leave it all behind. We sit on a log and eat our canned food and do not say much, because the mountains are right there, huge and waiting in the dark, and there is nothing to add. Tomorrow we walk in. Tomorrow the real pilgrimage begins. I feel rich as any king who ever lived, and I have not spent a single dime.