Mount Dickerman
Our game is DUE today…ALL OF IT. So needless to say, my team has been living at work. I’ve been putting in 12-14 hour days while some have been putting in even more time.
I had resigned myself to the idea that I will not be hiking this weekend, but then my buddy Dave called and it took him all of one sentence to convince me to flake out on work and go hiking. He said, “I was thinking about hiking Mount Dickerman.” It was THE hike that I had flagged as my next hike if I had time to hike. In the end, I was very late for work (5pm), people were pissed off at me, but I was stupid happy. It’s hard to feel bad when you have a blog that shows the last time you had two days off was back in June 3rd…and the last time I had any day off was 24th of last month. I ended up leaving work at around 2:30a.m., while I was not the first to leave, I most certainly was not the last. Takes a bit out of the magic of making video games, doesn’t it? I woke up this morning completely disoriented. What day is it? Where the hell am I? Oh yeah, gotta get back into work.
Hiking is so good for my sanity. It reminds me that while life might not be making a whole lot of sense at the moment, I still have me. When you take away everything, it’s just me and trails. The adventuring goes on.
Hmmm...Ivan is in town, while the idea of hanging out with a gorgeous guy sound so good, having some time to get some proper sleep seem so much better.
Mount Dickerman is currently on my list of favorite hikes…the view up top is simply insane. When I have a moment, I’ll put together some pano-shots.
In the mean time, here's a slide.
I had resigned myself to the idea that I will not be hiking this weekend, but then my buddy Dave called and it took him all of one sentence to convince me to flake out on work and go hiking. He said, “I was thinking about hiking Mount Dickerman.” It was THE hike that I had flagged as my next hike if I had time to hike. In the end, I was very late for work (5pm), people were pissed off at me, but I was stupid happy. It’s hard to feel bad when you have a blog that shows the last time you had two days off was back in June 3rd…and the last time I had any day off was 24th of last month. I ended up leaving work at around 2:30a.m., while I was not the first to leave, I most certainly was not the last. Takes a bit out of the magic of making video games, doesn’t it? I woke up this morning completely disoriented. What day is it? Where the hell am I? Oh yeah, gotta get back into work.
Hiking is so good for my sanity. It reminds me that while life might not be making a whole lot of sense at the moment, I still have me. When you take away everything, it’s just me and trails. The adventuring goes on.
Hmmm...Ivan is in town, while the idea of hanging out with a gorgeous guy sound so good, having some time to get some proper sleep seem so much better.
Mount Dickerman is currently on my list of favorite hikes…the view up top is simply insane. When I have a moment, I’ll put together some pano-shots.
In the mean time, here's a slide.
posted by SteakGirl at 9:49 AM
4 Comments:
How much you have to be present to there! These are great pictures. The contrasts, the visual reach of mountains and snows and passes, the almost breathless sense of place. Thanks for taking the journey and for letting us imagine it.
About Cavell – if he sounds interesting, I’d suggest starting with “The Senses of Walden.” This is Cavell’s smallest and richest book – a simultaneously lyrical and philosophical meditation on Thoreau’s “Walden” and its place in our national and psychological lives (how often these are divorced).
Cavell says Walden represents the establishment of an American Scripture that we have not yet recognized. (It is as if our collective imagination holds something like your mountains in repression. Trading them for something like postcards and tourist advertisements.) I think he’s right and that you may live in a place and in a way to put his claims to the only test that matters: Can they be lived?
Of course, you would probably want to read “Walden” at the same time.
One of my favorite passages from Walden occurs early in the opening section, where Thoreau offers the following parable about loss and longing and moving forward:
"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken to concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or to who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves."
--Thoreau, Walden, section 1, paragraph 24
In some sense, I suppose we are all on the trail of Thoreau’s losses. I particularly like Cavell’s reading of this passage, and it provides a sense of his book as a whole. Concerning Thoreau’s hound, horse, and turtledove, Cavell writes:
"I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical sources of those symbols. But the very obviousness of the fact that they are symbols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell us what we need to know. The writer comes to us from a sense of loss; the myth does not contain more than symbols because it is no set of desired things he has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself. Everything he can list he is putting in his book; it is a record of losses. Not that he has failed to make some gains and have his finds; but they are gone now. He is not present to them now. Or, he is trying to put them behind him, to complete the crisis by writing his way out of it. It is a gain to grow, but humanly it is always a loss of something, a departure."
--Cavell, The Senses of Walden, p.51
As Cavell goes on to say, to become more human is to find our way back from losses and from the distances between us and our world. It means to make ourselves present to all occasions.
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