Tuesday, June 29, 1999

Mailed the boxes this morning. One to Reds Meadow, one to Muir Trail Ranch, marked the way their instructions said, with my name on every side and the date I expect to walk in. The woman at the post office weighed them and asked if I was mailing bricks. I said no, dinner.

The Muir Trail Ranch box has a second bear canister in it, because ten days of food will not fit in one canister no matter how you push. I know. I pushed.

I also put a letter in that box. To me, from me, sealed. I'm not saying here what it says. I'll find out in August, same as you.

Five weeks and two days.

Sunday, June 20, 1999

Thirty-five years today.

I spent it packing food on the dining room table. I put the leaf in. Rows and rows of freezer bags, each one marked with a day in black marker. DAY 14 BREAKFAST. DAY 14 LUNCH. Oatmeal, powdered milk, dried apricots, jerky, tortillas, peanut butter, a little bag of hard candy for every afternoon. And dinners out of the dehydrator: chili, spaghetti, chicken and rice, the lentil soup his mother used to make, dried to leather and crumbled into bags.

We ate thirty-four years of dinners at this table. Every so often I could feel him reading over my shoulder. "Ellie. That's too much oatmeal." It isn't. I did the math three times.

Walt called this evening from Visalia to say happy anniversary, which nobody else thought to do, or everybody thought of and was afraid to. Good old Walt. He asked how much my pack weighs. I told him. He whistled. He said in 1961 his weighed sixty pounds and half of it was canned peaches.

Sunday, June 13, 1999

Half Dome yesterday. Or most of it.

I left Happy Isles at five-thirty with a headlamp and the first light coming. Up the Mist Trail, past Nevada Fall, through Little Yosemite Valley, up the long switchbacks through the trees, up the stone steps on the shoulder, to the bottom of the cables. It took me until almost eleven. I felt strong the whole way. I passed people half my age. I'm telling you that because of what comes next.

The cables go straight up the back of the rock. Two steel cables at waist height and wooden boards every so often to stand on, and granite polished smooth as a countertop, and a line of people going up like ants on a string. I put on the gloves. I held the cables. I went up four boards.

And I stopped. My legs would not do it. It wasn't a decision. I stood there on the fourth board with my heart going and a college boy behind me saying "You okay, ma'am?" and I said, "No, I'm going down," and I went down.

I ate my sandwich at the bottom and watched the others go up. I cried a little, not much. On the way down I decided I'm not ashamed. The John Muir Trail doesn't go up the cables. It goes around. So will I.

Sixteen miles, round trip, or near enough. I'm sore everywhere God put a muscle.

Saturday, May 22, 1999

Two in the morning. I'm going to write down what I'm afraid of, because Bernadette at the group says a fear on paper is smaller than a fear in the dark. We'll see.

Bears. Lightning. Falling on a pass and breaking a hip and lying there. My knees. The river crossings. Getting lost, although the trail is plain and everyone says you can't. Being the slowest one. Being the oldest one. Being the only woman alone and having some man decide that means something. Running out of food. Running out of nerve. Dying out there and Meredith being right.

And then under all of those, the real one. That I'll get to the top of Whitney and it won't have done anything. That I'll come home and open the front door and it will be the same house with the same quiet in it, and I will have walked two hundred miles to stand in my own kitchen.

There. It's on paper. It's not smaller. But it's over there now and I'm over here.

Irma says the only people who aren't afraid of anything are fools and teenagers and she has no use for either one.

Monday, May 3, 1999

Fifty-seven today.

I spent my birthday weekend at Kings Canyon. Saturday I carried the full pack from Roads End up to Mist Falls and back, nine miles or so, with thirty pounds in it: the tent, the stove, and the rest made up with bags of rice and two full water bottles. The river is loud with snowmelt and the falls throw spray all over the rocks. My shoulders ache where the straps go. My feet are fine. The boots are good boots.

Paul mailed me a headlamp and a card that says "For the early starts." Meredith sent a little first-aid kit, a good one, with moleskin and a space blanket and a whistle on a cord, and a card that said PLEASE BE CAREFUL MOM in capital letters, and under it in small letters, "I'm proud of you." I have read the small letters a number of times today.

Saturday, April 17, 1999

The house smells like cooking again.

I bought a food dehydrator, round, with five trays that stack, and it has been running on the kitchen counter for nine days straight. It hums. I find I don't mind the hum. Chili, spread thin on the trays, twelve hours. Spaghetti sauce, ten. Cooked ground beef, rinsed and dried until it rattles. Apples, which the neighbor boys ate faster than I could bag them.

I haven't really cooked since February of last year. I ate crackers and cottage cheese standing up at the counter and called it supper. Now there is a big pot on the stove every other night and the windows steam up, and it's all for a woman sitting on a rock in the Sierra in August. Meredith would say that's a strange way to start eating again. I suppose it is. It's a way.

Sunday, March 14, 1999

First night out. The class camped at Millerton Lake, where the hills are green for about five minutes every spring, and Lyle, our teacher, who is sixty-eight and has walked the whole John Muir Trail four times, had us each pitch our own tent and cook our own supper and sleep alone in it.

Eleven people within shouting distance and I was as scared as I have ever been. Every sound was a bear. There are no bears at Millerton Lake. The coyotes started up around midnight, a whole choir of them, and an owl on top of that, and the rain came at three and drummed on the tent six inches from my face. I lay there with Roger's compass in my fist like it could do something.

I slept maybe two hours. In the morning the tent was wet and I was stiff and the coffee was the best I've had in my life. Lyle looked at me over his cup and said, "Well, Ellen. Now you've done the hardest night." I asked if that was true. He said, "No. But it's what I tell everybody."

Friday, February 19, 1999

I have a permit.

They take reservations a certain number of weeks ahead and my start date came up yesterday. I sat at the kitchen table at seven in the morning with a cup of coffee and the telephone and pushed redial, and pushed redial, and pushed redial, for an hour and ten minutes. Busy, busy, busy. Then a ranger picked up and I got so flustered I gave her my zip code instead of my phone number.

Happy Isles, Thursday, August 5, 1999. One person. Exiting at Whitney Portal.

One person. She read that back to me in a perfectly ordinary voice and I had to put my hand over the receiver.

Wednesday, February 10, 1999

One year.

I got up at the time he got up and made the coffee the way he made it, too strong, and sat at the table. I opened the newspaper to the weather. Rain in the valley, snow above five thousand feet. I read it all the way through, the high and the low for every town, Bishop and Mammoth and Lone Pine, the whole list, the way he did every morning of our lives.

Then I went for a walk in the rain. Seven miles, out along the canal and back. She was high.

The children called. Irma came across at noon with a coffee cake and didn't say anything and didn't need to. At the cemetery someone had already been there and left carnations. Walt, I think. He won't say.

A year ago I didn't know how to put gas in the car. I mean that. Roger did it. Now I know how, and I know how to set up a tent in the dark, and I know what a contour line is. I would trade every bit of it back. Nobody is offering.

Sunday, January 10, 1999

New year, new name for this page. It was "After February." Now it's "Two Hundred Eleven Miles," because that's where I'm going and I'd better start saying so. Paul showed me how to change the title over the phone. It took us forty minutes and a lot of "No, Mom, the OTHER window."

Stamps went up to thirty-three cents today. I've got a sheet of the old ones and a roll of one-cent stamps to make up the difference, like an old lady. Which, I am told by my granddaughter, I am.

The class starts Saturday. I've taped a calendar to the refrigerator with the training on it. Walk every morning, longer on weekends. Stairs twice a week: the parking garage downtown has six floors and nobody minds a woman in sneakers going up and down them with a daypack full of water jugs. A hike somewhere every month. By June, a full pack.

Two hundred and seven days. I counted.