Mt. Greylock: Letting Go of Views

"When you come to the place where you are practice occurs."  -- Dogen

On October 1, 2013 I drove west on Massachusetts State Route 2 to North Adams, MA to hike to the top of Mount Greylock. I descended into the mist-shrouded Hoosic River Valley in North Adams... sun above, clouds below. The river and town were completely blanketed in a flannel-like cloud. I expected visibility to be nearly nil at the trailhead and was not disappointed.

Mount Greylock is the highest peak in Massachusetts at 3491 feet. The trail I chose to follow is aptly named Thoreau's Footsteps as it is partially the route that Thoreau took to the summit. It follows the Bellow's Pipe Trail to the Appalachian Trail South to the summit. On the way down I took the AT North to the Bernard Farm Trail back to my car. This is a 9.6 mile roundtrip hike.

I found much of the early part of the trail to be like the image below... a narrow, soft, leaf strewn path through a forest of mostly green but changing deciduous trees. It was much like the trails I remember hiking in the Cherokee National Forest when I lived in Greeneville, TN (2000-2006). The sun was burning off the fog, but every surface was wet with dew. There were several rills on my right carrying water downward. These did not appear to be creeks or brooks, but rather shallow waterways cut by erosion as water drains off the slope. I encountered robins, blue jays, juncoes, frogs and toads as I made my damp way upward. 

As I proceeded upward on the increasingly steep trail I climbed toward and through autumn in full swing. There were Mountain Ash, with their large, bright red berries, Large-leafed Goldenrod, Yellow Birch, Bartram's Shadbush, with their five-petalled white flowers (mostly gone-by), and Balsam Fir.

This hike, while quite steep in places, did not offer the challenges of, say, Monadnock or Katahdin with their great piles of stone and exposed rock faces in the wind. The passage to the top was ultimately a pleasant walk through the woods where I flushed out a few ruffed grouse and watched, at length, as a chipmunk rooted about in the leaf duff and scurried back and forth to an unseen den with nuts and nuts and nuts.

Emerging from the forest near the summit, I crossed a road (one that motorists may take to the top) and encountered, on my right, a group of motorcyclists, I hesitate to say bikers, in full regalia and, on my left, a phallic tower with what I can only describe as a giant light bulb on top. The tower is a memorial to WWII veterans. On it's side is a plaque describing the mountain. 

The summit was a bit of a disappointment as it was overrun with cars, tourists getting their pictures taken with the Great War penis, and folks filing in and out of Bascom Lodge's restaurant. A bus full of high school-aged students pulled in and they poured out over the summit, cell phones pointed "inward" to get that selfie with the mountain for Facebook. Okay, this is the age we live in, but when "experiences" of nature, especially mountains, seem so packaged, easily accessible, and, ultimately disposable, is it any wonder that our wild places are at risk? 

I ate a lunch of an apple, a pear, and PB&J sandwiches, read a few poems, and headed down the mountain as the cooling sweat dried on my back. I was feeling let down as I crossed the parking lot, but as I reentered the woods, I found that with every step I began to let those feelings go. I realized that I'd come toward the summit with preconceived notions. I knew in advance that there was a road, a tower, and a lodge. The disappointment was with me before I even began the hike. I'd created it in my mind and carried it with me, an extra weight in my pack. That view perverts the essence of the project which is not only based on hiking and mountains, but also on a non-attachment to outcomes. Not only does it pervert the essence of the project, but more importantly it inhibits my perception of reality, to see what is before me as it is as opposed to how I expect it or want it to be. So I attempted to return to the present moment, and remembered what Dogen said: When you come to the place where you are practice occurs. 

Walking down the mountain I took particular notice of the elaborate root structures of trees, alive or otherwise. Twisting and spiraling, spreading out like the hem of a voluminous gown, displacing stones, or blanketed in moss. They put me in mind of a question/koan that my first zen teacher, Barbara Rhodes, put to me when I was a fledgling zen student: Where is your original root? A question like that cannot be grasped with thinking. I don't believe I ever answered it, even adequately, let alone "correctly." I always tried to figure it out. Here in the forest, on the side of Mt. Greylock, I let this question burrow into the ground along the innumerable tree roots. I did not find an answer, but rather a letting go of the need to have one. Better to live the question.

I continued down the trail turning onto Bernard Farm Trail seeing trees dotted with fungi and great boulders of quartz. These were the little moments that interrupted my thinking and brought me back to the present moment. For despite the above thoughts on letting go (and the actual letting go), the reverie on that very subject continued to unfurl in my mind... trying to articulate it, to find the words to describe what is ultimately outside of language... like trying to make straight the very twisted root that woke me up in the first place. So it was like this... think think think... caterpillar! think, think think think... fungi! Let Go!! think think think think think... quartz! Let Go!

Not far off the trail I encounter a truly surprising sight; something that I never would have imagined in a lifetime of imagining; something so unexpected that it stopped all thinking like nothing else I'd yet experienced on the trail... a real letting go of preconceived views...

The wreckage of a plane crash! It had obviously been there for some time. I have been unable to find any information about it, but haven't really tried that hard either. I prefer to let it be, to let it go, and move up and down these mountains, a point moving in space.