Sierra Crossing: Day Four (11/2)

Life teems at edges.  Pelagic life abounds in the shallow margins of the oceans where the sun penetrates the water.  Bobwhite quail congregate at the edge of forest and field, as every good bird dog knows.  Coastal creatures like crabs, redfish, minnows, and shorebirds thrive in the zone between the tides where the land is submerged at high tide and dry at low tide.  Stream-living trout lurk downstream of big rocks where the slack water of an eddy abuts the turbulent water of the main channel.  Everywhere, there is life at the edges.  Side-by-side habitats produce more life than either habitat in isolation.

I readjusted my pack and stood to catch my breath at the edge of a taiga-rimmed lake.  The day was clear-skied and calm-winded, so the water lay still.  The surface reflected the blue sky and the green conifers that encircled both the lake and the heavens.  A perfect mirror.  If I had stood on my head, the view would not have changed.  Or if I had wanted to see what a skinny white guy looked like when he did not bathe, brush his hair, or shower for several days, I had only to step up and lean over the lake.

I stayed back and peered into the water through my polarized sunglasses.  I was looking for an excuse to catch my breath and rest my aching knee.  A school of minnows cruised through the shallows until they encountered my shadow, then darted to deeper water.  Further out into the lake, but still within seven or eight yards of the shore, two trout lolled over a bed.  They had cleared an oblong patch of lakebottom of sticks, leaves, and algae, leaving only light sand exposed.  The patch was only a foot or so long – just large enough for their bodies.  Their torsos were greenish-brown, their backs spotted, their lower fins bright orange and tipped in white as though they had swum too low over a paint can.  Cutthroat trout, humans called this species.  They finned the water languidly, rising and falling in a rhythm all their own; slowly circling each other.  The piscine equivalent of necking, I figured.  I looked up and down the lake’s margin.  There were trout all along the edge, lovy-dovily lingering over their beds.

Fertility along the edges.  So it is with nature, and with human thoughts.  The most intellectually innovative cultures in western history have been trading empires, where ideas from afar clashed – places like classical Greece and Elizabethan England.  And where academic disciplines meet, progress often results – for example, modern economic theory, having butted up against sociology and psychology, seems on the verge of abandoning its centuries-old assumption that people make economically rational choices and may produce more accurately predictive models as a result.  Ideas thrive on the edges, where multiple mental tools can be brought to bear.  I stood and watched the trout.  They were beautiful.  I would not have appreciated them nearly so much if I had not just been hiking.

One of the lakes in the area known as "Ten Lakes."

Looking down on Ten Lakes.

Later that day, I reached the cache, where I had stored extra lunch meat, extra tortillas, extra cheese, and one Coors Light.  Guess which of these food groups I had was happiest to find.