Everything is a poem about isolation. I wrote it during the covid pandemic and I tried to compare the feeling of lockdown to the places I’d been where I was the most alone. There are three isolation scenarios in the poem and two take place on Mt. Rainier in Washington State, where I hiked as a young man, climbing thousands of feet up a steep mountain trail until I reached the large glacier at the top of the mountain.
I imagined what it would be like to live on the mountain for the Summer, keeping watch in a fire tower and I was surprised to learn that electrical storms on the mountain are so strong that you have to be insulated or risk being fried. One of the accounts I read described a chair with glass insulators for feet, so I incorporated that into the poem.
Another imagined scenario is watching the sunrise in Antarctica after months without sunshine. I read accounts that mentioned the brilliance of the first Autumn sunrise. The calendar there is reversed from ours, so their Spring comes in our Autumn. Do Antarcticans celebrate Christmas in the middle of Summer?
The true story that’s central to the poem, is about a hike I took, starting at a place called Paradise, which is pretty amazing in the Summer. It’s covered in mountain wildflowers and marmots strut around, unafraid of the hikers. There’s a big lodge at Paradise that’s occupied most of the year, but in Winter the snow can fall fifteen feet deep or more, and it doesn’t melt until late May, June or even July.
Mt. Rainier makes its own weather. It can be cloudy at the top, while surrounding skies are clear, and it can be above the clouds in sunshine while Seattle is locked in clouds. What’s always the case is that Rainier is one of the most isolated places on Earth. Most people don’t hike very far. If you keep going up the trail, you come to a huge glacier that’s nested in Rainier’s volcanic caldera.
Did I mention that Rainier is considered an active volcano? It has seismic activity and although it hasn’t exploded in recent history, an eruption could happen anytime, so the farther up the trail you go, the more you have to trust the mountain to stay calm. Fifty-seven hikers lost their lives on Mt. St. Helens when it exploded in 1980.
It doesn’t seem too risky though, because there’s no smoke and no lava. The caldera is filled with ice year-round. Any sense of risk is overcome by the magnificent views. On a clear day, you can see Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Shasta and Mt. Baker – the giants. It feels like you could reach out and touch them. Volcanoes aren’t particularly steep either. The trail is a constant grade, but you’re never in huge danger of falling off a cliff. It’s more a problem of rock slopes and boulders. Some of the boulders are humongous.
I stopped at the glacier, because the cracks and crevasses in the summer snow looked dangerous, but I spotted some hikers on a trail ‘cross the glacier. They were headed for the Summit, which does have some cliffs and some tall spires that look like rock giants. You might need gear to reach the top or the trail might wind right up there. I don’t know, because I turned back.
I turned back to civilization and people and community, but out there on the rock, on the edge of the glacier there was no one. It was the quietest place I’ve ever been. If anything happened to me, there would have been no one to help. There’s no cell service up there, but I wasn’t afraid. Maybe it was the low oxygen levels, but I felt exhilarated. I felt alive. I felt ecstatic.
Maybe that’s why mystics say “Go to the Mountain.” I contrast that with life in the town or the city, with all its bustle and racket. On the mountain, it’s just you amid all that beauty. The sun even seems brighter up there, and yet we need our communities, we need other people, so at some point we have to descend.
I look at this from a pandemic perspective in the poem. We are alone, isolated, but one day we will rejoin community and it will be wonderful. I remember my friend, Kurt Hoffman. He was so smart that when he joined the Navy, they assigned him to a nuclear submarine. He spent entire years under water.
I think of my cousin, Hal, isolated with myalgic encephalomyelitis. He spent his life building community and now he can’t rise from his bed. Isolation is time to think, it’s meditation, but we need community too, so please try to balance those two in your life.
Isolation is time to create and it’s time to make plans. When isolation ends, that’s when we dive in, hit the ground running and make sh*& happen! That’s the point of Everything. Every moment is a chance to make something new happen, to renew your life, to start the project you’ve always dreamed of. For me, it’s writing. Being alone isn’t a curse, it’s an opportunity to collect your resources, then when you enter the village, you can build, build, build.
Read Everything, a long-form poem in Flywheels of Interdependence, out on the Ingram, Barnes and Noble and Amazon platforms.