Three - The High Country
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The High Country
AT a turnout on the road we stop, take some record photographs to show we have been here and then walk to a little path that takes us out to the edge of a cliff. A motorcycle on the road almost straight down beneath us could hardly be seen from up here. We bundle up more tightly against the cold and continue upward.
The broad-leafed trees are all gone. Only small pines are left. Many of these have twisted and stunted shapes.
Soon stunted pines disappear entirely and we’re in alpine meadows. There’s not a tree anywhere, only grass everywhere filled with little pink and blue and white dots of intense color. Wildflowers, everywhere!
These and grasses and mosses and lichens are all that can live here, now. We’ve reached the high country, above the timberline.
I look over my shoulder for one last view of the gorge. Like looking down at the bottom of the ocean. People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.
The road turns inward, away from the gorge and into snowfields.
The engine backfires fiercely from lack of oxygen and threatens to stop but never does. Soon we are between banks of old snow, the way snow looks in early spring after a thaw. Little streams of water run everywhere into mossy mud, and then below this into week-old grass and then small wildflowers, the tiny pink and blue and yellow and white ones which seem to pop out, sun-brilliant, from black shadows.
Everywhere it’s like this! Little pins of colored light shoot forth to me from a background of somber dark green and black.
Dark sky now and cold. Except where the sun hits. On the sun side my arm and leg and jacket are hot, but the dark side, in deep shadows now, is very cold.
The snowfields become heavy and show steep banks where snowplows have been. The banks become four feet high, then six feet, then twelve feet high. We move through twin walls, almost a tunnel of snow.
Then the tunnel opens on to dark sky again and when we emerge we see we’re at the summit.
Beyond is another country. Mountain lakes and pines and snowfields are below. Above and beyond them as far as we can see are farther mountain ranges covered with snow. The high country.
We stop and park at a turnoff where a number of tourists take pictures and look around at the view and at one other. At the back of his cycle John removes his camera from the saddlebag. From my own machine I remove the tool kit and spread it out on the seat, then take the screwdriver, start the engine and with the screwdriver adjust the carburetors until the idling sound changes from a really bad loping to just slightly bad. I’m surprised at how all the way up it backfired and sputtered and kicked and gave every indication it was going to quit but never did. I didn’t adjust them, out of curiosity to see what eleven thousand feet of altitude would do. Now I’m leaving them rich and sounding just bad because we’ll be going down some now toward Yellowstone Park and if they aren’t slightly rich now they’ll get too lean later on, which is dangerous because it overheats the engine.
The backfiring is still fairly heavy on the way down from the summit with the engine dragging in second gear, but then the noise diminishes as we reach lower altitudes. The forests return. We move among rocks and lakes and trees now, taking beautiful turns and curves of the road…
- from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig