Girding Up

Jeremiah Johnson
Made his way into the mountains
Planning on forgetting
All the troubles that he knew . . .

So go the lyrics to the soundtrack of Jeremiah Johnson, a great Robert Redford movie in which Jeremiah heads for the Rockies to become a mountain man.  Jeremiah is ill prepared: he cannot find food, his horse freezes to death, and his clothes are inadequate for the Rocky Mountain winter.  But Jeremiah meets Griz, an old mountain man who takes him in and teaches him how to live in the mountains.  In one scene, as the two are fleshing a grizzly skin, Griz points at Jeremiah.

“You’ve got some work to do,” he says.  Griz may as well have been talking to me.

And work is what I’ve been doing – mental, mechanical, and physical.  I brought two boxes of books and papers about mountain men and the Walker Expedition.  How did the frontiersmen hunt buffalo?  How did they store the meat?  What did they wear?  What did they do during storms?  How did they set beaver traps?  What type of guns did they use?  Where did they spend winters?  What route did the Walker Expedition take?  And how do scholars purport to know these things?  I’ve been working on these questions, taking notes, and making some progress.

Duke and I have been readying our gear and getting accustomed to it.  This morning, I strapped Duke’s pack on him.  The pack suspends two red pouches on either side of Duke’s ribcage and stays in place with three straps running under his torso, like girthstraps on a saddle, and one strap running across his chest and between his front legs like a horse’s breaststrap.  I loaded it up with water, my GPS, a notebook and a compass.  I also brought the booties I bought for Duke in case he couldn’t stay clear of the prickly pear cacti that I saw yesterday.  I laced up my own long-unused hiking boots, and Duke and I went for a ramble over the hills and ridges north of the truck.

Both of us walked well.  Duke didn’t mind the pack, and my boots still felt comfortable – no blisters or hot spots.  We saw a coyote, about a million grasshoppers, and a few doves that made me wish I’d remembered my shotgun.  I’m out of fresh meat and a dove breast would be excellent about now.  I saw two pheasants yesterday, but we didn’t bump any today.  I keep hoping that somewhere in my mountain man literature I’ll find instructions for rigging a snare.

But Duke had trouble staying out of the cacti.  On three occasions, I had to flip him over and pull out the spines with my Leatherman.  The prickly pear didn’t seem to hurt very much, and the spines were easy to see and remove (unlike, for instance, the cholla, which has thousands of tiny spines), so I didn’t put on Duke’s booties.  Duke is a smart dog, and I keep thinking that he’ll learn to avoid cacti.  Clearly, the coyote we saw doesn’t wear booties, and I doubt he runs around all day with prickly pear spines in his feet.

It was also a day of gear repair.  Last night’s mosquitoes alerted me to holes in the camper’s bug screens, so I patched a couple of those with duct tape and epoxy.  Because my carbon monoxide detector went off a couple days back, I also opened up the propane heater and stove and applied thread-sealing tape to the propane seals.  Then, to be safe, I installed a backup carbon monoxide detector.  I slept last night in my heavy down bag – the one I’ll take to hiking –because the nights have gotten cold, but I sneezed through the night and wheezed some this morning.  That probably means that dust mites, to which I’m allegoric, have collected in the bag.  So I’ve opened the bag up and lashed it to the hog-wire fence around the base of the windmill beside the truck.  I hope this prairie breeze will air it out.

I had no problems in this morning’s short hike, so I thought I was probably in decent shape.  But just to make sure I was adjusting to the elevation – I’ve traveled from the coast to about 3900’ – I stripped down to my boxers went for a run in the 80° afternoon sun.  And, damn – I have got some work to do.  I ran until my lungs started burning, then walked, then ran, then walked, then ran back to the truck.  I didn’t go far.  Duke trotted alongside me in mocking ease.  Basically, I got schooled by a slightly overweight Labrador with unnaturally short legs.  I am going to have to get into shape.

I am also going to have to adjust to bathing in cold water.  I dunked Duke in the metal water tank underneath the windmill, then pulled him out, lathered him up, and rinsed him by pouring water from my cooking pot over him.  The water was cold, but Duke took it like a man.

I figured I could too, but I appear to have overestimated my personal badassitude.  When I dunked my head in the tank, the water was so cold that my scalp actually hurt.  And when I dipped my pot in the tank and poured the water over my torso, I literally lost my breath.  When I poured the water down my backside, I actually got a cramp in my abdomen.  I was gasping the whole time.  Duke stood back and looked at me as if to say, “you [derogatory word].”

But all in all, I enjoyed the bath and have enjoyed the day.  After I toweled off, I stood still in the prairie with the grass beneath my toes.  As the sun and wind dried me, I felt cleaner and cleaner.  I thought of the lyrics of Willie Nelson’s hymn There Is a Fountain: “. . . and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.”  I guess I’ve got more stains than some, but groundwater and camp soap have made a good start.