Tweety Bird & The Skittle Report

I’m spending a couple of days with my son at an old Adirondack camp, Trails End Inn built in the early 1900s in the middle of the High Peaks region of Northern NY State.  It is rich with its own memories, as well as my own. I highly recommend staying here if you like to travel back in time to an era of stately grace and ‘taking the cure’. 

I started coming to the Adirondacks with my dad when I was about 8. My first high peak was Haystack, and I remember sitting at the top in total awe, gazing at the sweeping expanse of mountain tops stretched as far as I could see and thinking, rather indignantly, ‘wait, why didn’t anyone tell me about this before? How could this mountain magic be sitting here this whole time and no one even mentioned it? Why aren’t we always up here?’ 

I really couldn’t understand how something this incredible could have been kept from me for so long (8 years), and how the grownups weren’t orchestrating things such that we lived up there. Part of me still can’t understand why we all don’t live up there.
  
My dad is from a generation informed by the Great Depression, and on one particular trip we drove up from our house near Albany late in the afternoon, arriving well after dark at the delicious and mysterious shore of Chapel Pond, and slept in the back of the Dodge Omni (a car dubbed AshTray by my sister when she was little due to the fact that he’d smoke cigars wherever he drove, and the ash receptacle was more of a mental construct than a physical location in the car. To this day I am back Home whenever I catch a whiff of cigar.).

We pulled over in the parking lot of Chapel Pond and crashed for the night in AshTray, or, if memory serves, just sort of randomly tucked up by the side of the the car on the gravel, edged by the booming cliffs of Round Mountain, tractor trailers blasting past a hair's breadth from our heads on rt 73. 

In the morning, as the sky was breaking a blush of lighter blue over the charcoal mountain tops, my dad heated up clam chowder from a couple of cans on the tailgate, and we washed down the last bits with bright orange powdered gatorade, mixed right there in the same can, and head on out with the dawn. 
  
I relished the chasm between my dad’s get-food-in regime and my mother’s. Here was an unusual and prized moment of being fathered alone  - plain ole canned clam chowder, perched on the tailgate, a luminous glow to everything in the liminal light just preceding sunrise, an aliveness in the big world unmasked without the familiar nurturing of my mother and home. 
  
My dad’s world was not one of gor-tex and built in camelback water systems, but more of a 'here's the water bottle I used when I hitchhiked across Europe with 300 bucks in 1970, and maybe we’ll see a porcupine out there today, and maybe, just maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to fix up a blister with our Swiss Army Knife and a sheet of moleskin.'
  
The particular day I’m remembering we summited Giant (one of the official high peaks of the Adirondacks, photo above). Rather than take the already formidable trail to the mountain top, we bushwhacked (that means scramble, duck, and weave off-trail up a steep slope through centuries worth of accumulated rotten logs, brambles, and a summer's growth of squishy mushroom decay) to the bottom of the rock slides halfway up the mountain, and then climbed straight up the sheer rock face, all the way to the top, the normal hikers peering down at us in surprise as we crested the summit from an unconventional direction.
 

From the perspective of my present age and stage of parenthood, this adventure from childhood seems wild.  I don’t have the inclination nor craziness to head up Giant off-trail when my son and I climb the same mountain tomorrow morning, but, to my 8 year old self  it was simply a day of joy, glittering stone, and learning how my hightops (the white ones with hot pink soles and fluorescent orange laces that I - I am not kidding - spray-painted that color) could hold me on those 30 degree rock slopes if I just trusted my full weight to them. My dad taught me that.

  
Every summer I rent the Boreas Room at Trails End Inn because it has a sleeping porch. A sleeping porch is a marvelous structure that should be immediately added to every residence that can reasonably accommodate one in the US through emergency government funding. They are that good. 
  
The national crime rate would fall and mental health would rise measurably within a few months with no change to national daily patterns except we would, as one, slumber in the myriad healing forces bestowed democratically by the unseen deities of the moon, stars, distant galaxies, and, I add with sensible trepidation, by the unmitigated touch of absolute infinite Nothing that literally reaches down and graces every atom of your body the second you step out from under a roof. 
  
I’ve come to Trails End Inn for 10 years now, and each summer there is the slight demarcation of time passing, kids getting older, the rhythm of life changing, my consciousness calmer and calmer on the whole. 
  
I sat out on the porch two nights ago in an old armchair looking into a black rainy sky.  The ancient bulk of mountains poured through the screens; immense, silent, abiding, a pitter patter of raindrops on the metal roof. I could have sat for 1000 years.
 

I thought about not-knowing, and the Valley of Not-Knowing course that I facilitate, and it hit me, these mountains are the real teachers. I could sit here for a week and soak in their transmission of absolute patience, abidance, and allowance.

I don’t teach The Valley of Not-Knowing course, more accurately I sit on the lip of the abyss and whisper ‘hey, look that way, there is it, right there.’ I’m more of a doorman, or usher, and often the class participants are in way deeper than I, and we trade roles, they beckon, and I enter.

  
The hills had a particular lesson in store that evening.
 

After sitting a bit, the mountains somehow melting into pure Nothingness by means of their immensity, I was pulled to the beautiful old bed on the porch. I succumbed to the pull, and cozied up under a pile of quilts and afghans. As I closed my eyes, the pillows synched up just right, there arose a pervasive energy of deep calm and quiet. The entire mountain range, an undetermined bulk of solid rock, silent and still for millions of years, seeped into the open windows, though the blankets, into my bones. 

One doesn’t refuse a mountain bath so proffered, and all night, whenever I happened to rouse and roll over, it was there, steady, slow, and thorough, pouring through the night like black liquid Quiet carried on the echos of Barred Owls and backs of underwater rocks.
  

How long could my body drink of this substance? Was there an enormous reset button hidden in the recesses of my reptilian brain getting slowly eased back to center? Were the quantum particles of my interstitial fluid being taught an older, stately dance of well-being and communion? How does blood and marrow understand this mountain medicine? 
  
This morning my son and I are headed up Giant. The weather is slated to be bright and sunny, and I look forward to that long haul up the exposed rock, the arctic biome perking into our noses with each foot of ascent.

My father takes great satisfaction in my son and I coming up here. His days up Giant are over, and now I get an inkling of his satisfaction. I imagine my son and his kid heading up Giant, the mountain unchanged in the flitting decades, and my heart is happy. 
  
Fast forward to the next morning...
  
I’m sitting on the front porch at the Inn once again, my boy and I summited Giant yesterday and my legs are stretching like a cat every time I let them, all on their own. He’s sleeping on our porch, the same early morning breeze that plays across the lawn and slips around the doorways, carrying secret messages of mountain life and decay curling around his sweet dosing head, singing to him of ancient seas and eons of glaciers past in his dreams. 
  
When the kids were little my daughter and I dubbed him “Tweety Bird” on the trail because, given the proper allotment of miles walked, skittle blood concentration level, and pine duff nasal saturation, he would enter a continuous stream of conversation that, when listened to from the roll of legs up rocks and over roots, had the effect of a bird’s sweet prattle - something you might tune into for a moment, but not continuously, a pleasant accompaniment to the walk. 
 
For years my daughter and I received ‘Skittle Reports’ from my son every minute, on the minute while we hiked which would alert us to the current state of each skittle’s life journey from whole to swallowed, and all  stages in between. These reports were delivered with an air of astonishment, each new crack in the sugar shell and each infinitesimally lighter shade of color a thing to be shared and celebrated as if we, too, really cared about each candy's progress.
  
For several choice years (this made my heart sing) we also received periodic Tree Consciousness Reports; my son would lay his palm on the trunk of a tree for a millisecond longer than usual as he walked past, close his eyes momentarily, and then tell us how the tree was doing. This was not invented kid-stuff, the reports were exacting and deft. 
  
About halfway up the trail yesterday (we’re back in 2023 now)  he observed that Tweety Bird mode had been activated in me this time, and on a moment’s reflection, I saw this was accurate. I was chatting away about who knows what while the sparkling rock faces, amply braided by flat rippling streams from the previous day’s downpour, and the horizon casting farther and farther away to a blue seen only in these mountains framed our hike in high Adirondack flare. 
  
We flew up that mountain. We have officially transitioned out of the phase of parenting where I provide continuous little encouragements, a good bit of my daily energetic output allocated to mentally getting us up the trail, and into a new era of hmmm, my kid is faster than me and loves this too.
  
And now, this morning after our hike, the first happy pip of instant coffee adding it’s brushstroke to the landscape, I can touch the mountain transmission of Peace at will, but have to consciously drop a toe into it to tether myself there as I write. I hope it comes through to you. 
  
Really, I think that is why I love to write, I love the idea that just the words can perhaps have the power to elicit the same experience in you. This is a true thing to give another human.

Maybe, if I ask, the mountains will know how to pour themselves and that bulwark of unmanifest Being and Mystery straight through me and into you. 
  
Or perhaps you already know the True whisper of the Unknown, the real thing that the mountains were radiating into me all Monday night, and the fear and terror we ascribe with wild tosses of the ego to that pure abyss will melt and reveal itself to you for what it is - a thing too good to capture with words. A thing that, if you even barely touch it, and perhaps you have, will bring you to your knees with Joy and relief and a cry of  
  
‘My God. It's Real.’