My Mt. Shasta Happy Birthday!

Mt. Shasta, CA
10/26/10

Taking the Waters of Mt. Shasta

February 16, 2010

“Shasta: lonely as God, and white as a winter moon”—Joaquin Miller, Life Amongst the Modocs

It almost feels as if a new phase of my life is beginning. It began yesterday, with a scalding—a sudden, excruciating burn that I had certainly not anticipated. Because I’d been feeling so bad about Valentine’s Day, I decided to take myself to Stewart Mineral Springs in CA near Mt. Shasta and drown my troubles on Ladies Night. The trip here on my birthday had been such a lovely, sensual occasion that I wanted nothing more than to replicate it exactly.

I should have known better. Sophomore experiences with anything one has placed on a pedestal are generally a huge disappointment. But I was very much in the mood to sit around with other women in a beautiful natural setting and “take the waters.” I thought maybe these world-renowned springs could heal some of my psychic distress, wash over all the depression, anger, and sadness I have accumulated these 2½ years, somehow soften me and help me move forward from this rut I’ve been stuck in.

The drive down was beautiful, as Shasta and several other flanking mountains artfully pierced the sky with their snowcapped peaks. My first glimpse of 14,179-foot Shasta took my breath away, as I’ve never seen it so large and snowy, filling the whole frame of my view. It is a solid, vastly comforting, godlike presence that makes me feel both huge and small. Its generous spirit and snow-covered warm heart are massive. I swoon when I see Mt. Shasta. Swoon that anything could be so large, muscular, and handsome. Swoon that nature can assert itself so dramatically—allowing time and force to burst forth with such powerful cone of earth, brimming with life and swirling with the internal energy of a volcano.

On the road to the springs, cows were out grazing in the field, and young baby calves stared at my car with stunned fascination as I passed them, my eyes meeting theirs in gentle observance. We were fresh sights to each other. They were tiny and still-fuzzy, little brown cotton balls with legs, huddling close to their mothers, grazing away. I slowed down to take them in. On my right was their big open pasture holding an iconic red clapboard barn. To my left, an empty field that seemed almost necessary to allow the enormous presence of Shasta.

As I approached the springs, I noted a fallen squirrel in the middle of the road. He was flat on his back, almost pinned upright, and looked frozen in time except for one trickle of blood spurting from his mouth. So very typical of our world, I thought. Great natural beauty, new life, fresh death—somehow all coexisting on the same plane. As Jackson Browne puts it so well, “With its beauty and its cruelty, with its heartbreak and its joy. With its constantly giving birth to life and to forces that destroy. And the infinite power of change, alive in the world.” [from Alive in the World]

As I crossed the bridge, I looked up to see a beautiful naked woman with long brown curly hair and lovely breasts serenely bathing in the creek water. For a moment, she became a magnificent still life, an angel in the pines surrounding this pond. A sprite.

I was ready to enjoy a wonderful, healing late afternoon, to fully surrender myself to the sensuality of this amazing place—a hot spring resort tucked into pine-covered rolling hills. A chance to spend a few hours in another, almost Edenic time, when people walked in harmony with the landscape and dipped into mountain streams as they presented themselves.

I was greeted by the woman at the front door, who told me that they’d seen my car approaching and had started running a mineral springs bath just for me. “Wow!” I said, “That’s service.” The bathhouse is subdivided into small rooms, each with its own tub and dressing area. The attendant guided me toward my room, and with a few prefatory comments, left me alone with the waters surging against the white porcelain tub. Last time I’d been here, I’d had an exquisitely warm bath awaiting me, its tranquility softly lit by a votive candle set atop an antique shelf. This time, there was no flame, and the room smelled musty and overlooked the Dumpster.

Ah, well.

I disrobed and took a moment to revel in the sensuality of being publicly naked on Ladies Night, with other equally undressed women in the rooms around me. It felt a bit like heaven’s waiting area. After enough water had flowed into the tub, I decided it was time to begin. But as I plunged my right foot in with all my weight on it, I felt the greatest searing pain of my life. It was as if I’d pushed my tenderest bare skin directly into a raging fire. I withdrew it immediately, shrieked, held it for dear life, trying desperately to stop the pain. I couldn’t believe how incredibly sore it continued to be, sending waves of agony up my entire leg. I finally remembered to run cold water over it, but that only anesthetized it for a short while. Quickly it dawned on me that I would not be able to tolerate even the slightest bit of heat near my foot. Not-so-hot springs, anyone?

I told myself that I would not let this incident spoil my time. But pain has an amazing way of focusing the mind. I could only think of one thing, and that was how to amputate the white-hot poker that had become my right foot. I suddenly had great compassion for burn victims, those enduring torture, abused children—for all who had unrelenting physical pain and had to somehow cope with it day after day.

Several large blisters emerged from the redness, signaling second-degree burns. I should seek treatment. Surprisingly enough, although the bath attendant was very sweet, the facility had no burn ointment, just liquid aloe vera, which did very little. Stubbornly wanting to have the experience I came for, I hung my foot out the side of the tub and immersed the rest of myself in some (very tepid) bathwater. I then hobbled to the next room, where CA’s only extant wood-fired sauna held court. I wanted desperately to take in the soothing cedar fragrance, and carefully wrapped my foot in a towel. But as I stared into the previously romantic woodstove flames, all I could feel was their heat, searing my foot alive. I then walked out to the creek, where surely a dip in the nigh-frozen water would ease the agony. But ice against freshly burned skin felt almost as vivid as the 180-degree bathwater, and I could tolerate it for only seconds.

From there, I made the rounds several more times, bathing in pain and little else, then at dusk decided to hobble myself home. I had intended to stay over, but I knew that the beautiful setting would be wasted on my podiatrically obsessed mind. I honestly wasn’t sure how I was going to drive up an often-gnarly pass in the dark with my accelerator foot so perturbed. But I popped an Advil, tucked an imaginary piece of leather between my teeth, and started driving.

As the pain eased a bit, the evening took on a kind of mystical quality. Shasta and the other mountains seemed to hold me snugly, reassuring me with their soft strength, like a room full of huge white pillows. They seemed to suggest that in time, both my seared skin and broken heart would heal. That if I treated myself kindly and with compassion, took time and care with my wounds, fully felt all that I needed to feel, I would someday come back into harmony with a notion called serenity and carry myself perhaps with something vaguely approximating the dignity and equanimity of a mountain.

Mountains possess both great strength and great humility. They exist in Zen-like states where all impingements—glacial scars, erosion, avalanches, the vagaries of human activity—are endured silently and ably. Even a 593,000-year-old peak like Shasta, which contains a center of molten lava constantly bubbling at its core. It is, as we are, simply a vessel, a container for a myriad of states that ultimately don’t mean anything at all—though humans have invested our emotions with all kinds of import. In the words of the Heart Sutra, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

Why did I scald my foot? I think that question leads directly to another: Why does pain exist? Why can we be going along minding our own business and suddenly be engulfed by a tidal wave of anguish that seems to overwhelm our ability to cope? Some suggest the answer is to make us appreciate the times we aren’t in pain, but that seems a bit simplistic. One thought that occurred to me last night is that pain stops us. It stops us and causes us to slow down and reconsider. It helps call into question the road we think we’re on, and open up to the perspective of the totality. How many times do we say, “I stopped doing that because I got really burned”? Even when the pain doesn’t seem to be apropos of anything specific, it can serve as metaphor for all the other painful situations in our life, drawing our attention toward their resolution.

My friend Paul asked me what was my first thought when my foot was plunged into the boiling water. “MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!” I replied. And maybe this is the point with other sorts of pain, which those of us inured to painful lives are not always able to see so clearly. Sometimes the point is simply to change the pain we are in. To make it stop where we can. To act as our own rescuer, pulling ourselves from the burning buildings of life and treating ourselves with kindness and compassion as we salve our wounds.

Back in Ashland

When I look back to my last post, I feel like I've traveled hundreds of miles, both physically and mentally. I've been in Oregon for 3 weeks now, weaving a web back and forth and sideways across this gorgeous, often magical (and I use that word sparingly) place. I've never seen so much sheer physical beauty in one square on a map. Oregon dazzles me on an hourly basis.

Today I sit wi-fing in Ashland's Lithia Park on a picnic table in front of a creek with lots of old trees and rocks strewn along the banks. Children, and often adults, wade in the waters. To my right is a Japanese garden with a lovely reflecting pond. To my left, an open field where moms feed babies, teens play Frisbee, hippies get some sun on their dreads, and it's all a big happy mishmosh of recreating humanity, much as I imagine Golden Gate Park of the 60s might have been. Last night I stumbled onto a labyrinth, walked it, then headed toward the main drag, where I saw a young woman pedaling down the street on a bicycle completely naked. What a fine place to be.

I drove up here yesterday afternoon, after spending the day yesterday in my favorite Mt. Shasta-area town, Dunsmuir. No Cal is still extremely smoke-choked, and Shasta seems a bit down-at-the-heels with all those rings of brown dust obscuring her. But it was great to be back in the funky little town I love and see it still standing, like a hamlet straight out of the 1930s, beautifully preserved, but not prettied up by developers' notions of gentrification.

I was, admittedly, running on a major case of sleep deprivation. Someone could have told me that there was a black bear in a lavendar tutu ready to chauffeur me around town, and I would have said, "Fabulous." The night before, I'd camped at Lake Siskyou camping city, for which the words "unqualified disaster" spring to mind. (Or is it "unmitigated"?) Truly the worst camping experience I've ever had...enough to send me crawling back to another cheap motel. I've never seen such a massive campground in my entire life. Not unlike a massive heart attack. They had an onsite movie theater, arcade, pizzeria, grocery store...need I go on? It was a circus in the wilderness.

Unfortunately, my tent site seemed to be right at the epicenter of the action--and sound travels like quicksilver in the wild. So, just as the bambini and babies stopped screaming, the preadolescents started up, and when they were through, the young adults decided to have campfire chats about their philosophical views on such deep subjects as truck wheel rims...this at 1:30 in the morning. Then there were the young women who began blow-drying their hair at 1:45 am... Meanwhile, I'm in my tent doing all I can to practice acceptance...trying to realize that they're just engaging in age-appropriate behaviors...and quickly losing my equanimity with the passing hours of insomnia.

Finally, a deep, primitive sound began rumbling in my gut, and I was powerless to stop its exodus. "QUIET!!!" I bellowed through my tent. And, by some over miracle, I was heard, and a stillness fell over the entire campground. It was the sound of peace, of children not doing anything remotely childlike, that I hadn't heard in, oh, 3 weeks. I admit, it was among the loveliest sounds I have heard all summer. It left me to my own sweet reverie and a new meditative state: my back against the hard earth.

At 4 a.m., I slept.

At 6 a.m., they woke.

For all the skeptics out there, it truly is possible to break camp alone on 2 hours sleep with 5 little kids watching you in 20 minutes.

Bend

The previous 2 days--which I know have names...but I've been traveling too long to remember what they are--I spent driving down from Mt. Hood, into the fun town of Hood River, through some blazing views of Mt. Hood, into forests so deep that the cell goes away, over high mountains, then down into desert that greatly resembles the New Mexican landscape, then into farmland, and finally into Bend, which seems to be the Cuisinart version of all of that. I spent two days there trying to avoid getting hit by mountain bikes, marveling at testosterone in all of its variegated manifestations, and chastising myself for not having the proper footwear for anything more than the stairclimb to my hotel room. My former compatriots at Outside magazine would be shocked at the disrepair I've fallen into. Bend, it seems, shares much in common with SLO: lots of active young people, some historical buildings, a liking for good clean fun, lots of athletic possibilities, a downtown with plenty of upscale shops and restaurants, a nice body of water running through downtown. It's sort of a remote hotspot in Central Oregon--the only place you'll find for many miles with a Target, a Home Depot, and a Trader Joe's. Oregon has not embraced the big box with the same fervor that other places have, thankfully. However, it was nice to find somewhere I could buy a can opener.

Greetings from Western Oregon

I guess I've been on the road a week now. Time does funny things when you're in funny places. I've been in funny places. Not funny ha-ha. But sehr interessant, as my favorite German teacher used to say. My departure from SLO commenced with a drive through hell, beginning in Livermore, CA, where it had been 109 degrees at 6:00 in the evening, and up Route 5 North, through a landscape that looked like any good Fundamentalist’s idea of Apocalypse (sans Jesus). Hours and hours of thick smoke blankets (2000+ fires burning in CA, most in the northern third of the state) conspired against even keeping my car vents open. Just at the point when the oxygen had completely exited my body, the sun came out, the sky turned blue, and Mt. Shasta exerted its presence like a barroom hussy. Ah, so this is what all the fuss is about. Northern CA mecca.

After a very cool few hours in the town of Mt. Shasta, where I dined at the Billy Goat Tavern and had an extremely fun conversation about the state of the artist with the proprietor of the Velvet Elephant art supply store, I stumbled around the corner to Dunsmuir, possibly one of the funkiest towns I’ve ever been to. Ever, ever. Part of the State of Jefferson, once a historical district comprising northern CA’s Mt. Shasta area and southern Oregon. The funky folk who live there still retain a certain hardcore segregationist mentality, much like what I imagine Southerners hanging on to the Confederacy continue to propound. I’d never been to the Pacific Northwest before, so excuse my wide-eyed oohing and ahhing. I really thought Northern Exposure was simply FICTION. Then I bump into Dunsmuir, a former logging village…and Yreka, an old mining town, very much retired, and now I feel like I’ve been to Alaska without ever having had a trip in a bush plane. (more about my imminent trip to Alaska to come) I spent hours taking photos, which I'll post soon, in this area, and that night, met two folks named Danielle and Kit, who encouraged me to come see the band at the local bar. A few hours later, everyone in the bar was dancing to this German blues band--I guess that's not an oxymoron ( in fact, some days, I'd say it's utterly redundant).

Next, I headed to Ashland, OR, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and scene of the crime for 5 plays/day, and lots and lots of thespian types, earnestly creative kids, cultural tourists, people tossing on vaguely Shakespearean garb...and...to my English-majoring despair...one young man who was typing a letter home and couldn't figure out how to spell Shakespeare. Ah, well...Spell check ate the spelling-bee star... I liked Ashland a lot. Passed a nice evening at the Black Sheep Pub, as authentic a British pub as you're likely to find in North America, then wandered around and drooled at some of the historical buildings. Ashland has an excellent health food co-op, many potential Obama voters, metaphysical stores (the kind that don't exist in SLO), and my new favorite bumper sticker: "One Nation Under Canada."

After 2 sweet nights, I decided to fulfill a lifelong dream, and stayed in a yurt. It was the perfect "gnome home," right on the Rogue River in southern OR, and I took several hikes along the river and explored nearby Grants Pass, which may well be the kids-on-meth capital of southeastern Oregon, otherwise undistinguished.

The next day, I decided to continue the places with kids on bad drugs theme, and headed for urban Eugene, OR, where I stayed at a "guy drinking Bud on the bed"-type motel right on Broadway and got accosted approximately every 45 seconds by the progeny of the Grunge generation, who apparently are majoring in panhandling at Southern Oregon University. I don't think I've ever encountered a city I've despised more than Eugene--and I've been to some good ones in my day, let me tell you. I hated it more than Newark and Clifton, NJ, combined. I walked around for 3 hours looking for photo ops and took all of 3 pictures! Couldn't wait to get the heck out of there.

Going for the study-in-contrasts effect, I then proceeded north and west to Silver Falls State Park, where I've rented a cabin for 3 nights in the midst of total paradise: incredible old-growth forest with trees higher than you've ever seen and a trail with 10 different waterfalls. It's in farm country (aka, the middle of nowhere), about 25 miles from Salem, not too far from Corvallis, and close to the teeny-tiny town of Silverton, where you can plunk a dime in the meter and get 2 hours of parking time. Yesterday I stopped in to an old-fashioned coffee house right on the river, where I felt like a total geek for pulling out my laptop and wi-fi-ing. (The realization that the alternative would be no Internet or cell access for 3 nights helped me bag the Thoreau trip.) The guy behind the bar was talking about going swimming in the swimming hole after work. It's a different world here. The kids who aren't on crystal meth are just so...dare I say it?...seemingly innocent. Incredibly refreshing.

Today, I did my camp chores, then drove into Salem, which is a completely different town from Eugene--very civilized and fun, with good photo potential, which we LOVE. Here, I've purchased my Alaska Milepost, helping me start planning my trip WAYYY up north. (I told you I was traveling!!)

On Friday, I head to Portland, to explore the big city that everyone tells me is just perfect for me, with Margot, who is being a hugely good sport and meeting me there for 6 days of Oregon travel.