With Me On the Trail

I cannot live without books.

Thomas Jefferson

On a bottom book shelf in my bedroom is a collection of books that have always been precious to me. Most books are precious to me, but these books are especially so, and I keep them there so that if my house is ever beset by wildfire and I need to leave in a hurry I can quickly pack them in a satchel and be on my way. I also appreciate having them close to my bed so that when I retire at the end of the day I can easily reach for one of them and read a passage that I have marked in the pages or maybe just the fountain pen inscription my mother wrote on the inside flap more than sixty years ago: “For Colleen, just because we love you so much, November 1957.” Many of the quotes you read at the beginning of each post are contained in these books, carefully underlined and with the page flagged.

Each one of these books tells a story. Well of course they do, they are books. But there are two stories in each one of them, the one that is told in the text and the one that tells of where it was read, what I was thinking about, what mattered to me fifty years ago when I was a solitary hiker on the trail.

Most of them, though not all, have accompanied me on the trail, several of them more than once. They reflect the rough and tumble impact of a long backpacking trip: being stuffed into the bottom of my pack each morning, the faint dots of raindrops on the pages, yellowed and weathered with age, a flattened mosquito, a bloody thumbprint. Then there are the passages I have underlined, the stars in the margin, sometimes just a giant exclamation point to remind me that this passage matters. Some of my favorite books have literally come apart at the seams and are held together with a rubber band. Almost every one of them could be replaced, but I would not think of doing so. I remove one from the shelf. I hold it in my hand. I am taken back to the Pasayten River. Sometimes I think I can even smell the meadow grass and hear the sound of the river as it flows by.

It is sad that over the years publishers have made paperbacks bigger and therefore heavier. My cherished copy of Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey weighs just four-and-a-half ounces and measures four-and-a-half by seven inches. It fits nicely in my hand. On the face page is an inscription I wrote on July 25, 1990. It says simply, Pasayten River. Below that inscription is another one with a little more detail: August 5, 2007, Smith Lake, Popo Agie Wilderness Area, Wind River National Forest. It will forever tell the story that it spent time in the water. The pages are wrinkled and water stained.

As my regular readers know I carried a very heavy pack for most of my hiking life. Since my pack was already over sixty pounds a few ounces in the form of a book or two did not matter much and brought me great enjoyment in camp. But as I have aged, I have had to downsize that oversized pack. A book was one of the last things to go. When I hiked the Pacific Northwest Trail a few years ago, which involved twenty mile days, I had to get serious about shedding pack weight, so instead of a real book with real pages I opened up my cell phone to the large collection of novels I had with me. It makes perfectly good sense of course, but good sense does not fill me with that feeling of satisfaction I experience when I pick up a real book and hold it in my hands, when I smell the paper, when I hear the sound of pages turning, when I love a book. Fortunately these stories remain on my bedside shelf.

As an aging hiker I have to consider the possibility that there may come a time when I am no longer able to backpack, perhaps not even able to hike. I think about that possibility more often recently as I try to ignore an aching hip, insisting that it will not keep me off the trail this year.

But if that day ever comes, and I hope that it does not, I can pick up one of those books from the bottom shelf, perhaps The Immense Journey. That would be just right. The anthropologist Lauren Eiseley tells the story of our long evolution from single celled organism to standing upright and walking on a trail. Its crinkled water damaged pages also tell the story of that time I fell while crossing the Popo Agie River and was tossed about in the current. I had to remove my pack so that I could get out of the river safely, then go back into the water to retrieve it. Later I spread the book open on a rock to dry the pages in the hot August sun. There are many kinds of stories that hikers have to tell. Mine are told on the bottom shelf in my bedroom.