A westward bound Delta flight, in comfort, well cared for and well fed. The return portion of a trip commenced six days prior. Ahead by some 2000 miles rears the volcanic mass of Mt. Hood as it serves to separate the Willamette Valley from the Columbia plateau, all the while collecting and generating weather systems that at times may beckon and at others repel. Today I already know it is crystalline white, a glorious expression of nature’s geologic forces, bathed in sunshine and a frosty blue sky, cloaked in snow and ice. Information gleaned from my early-awakened Portland teenagers via a rudely early phone call from Atlanta, a brief stop between Miami and the mountain that has been my immediate neighbor and the sentinel on the horizon for twenty-six years. I am also getting to view it in real time on the seat back screen in front of me. It looks nothing like the mountain and weather of six days ago.
From all this distance away I can vicariously land on the summit via Chinook helicopter, I can view the glaciers as seen from a Blackhawk helicopter and I can see the effort and emotions being expended by the rescuers and much of a nation that hopes for an outcome better than yesterdays. As the rescue unfolds I can only appreciate the demeanor of those from the Northwest, in particular the Hood River County Sheriff, Joe Wampler as he/they go about their task on a mountain that does what a mountain does. Indeed as the days and weeks wear on the sherriff becomes a spokesperson of such gravity, humanity and competence one can only feel satisfaction that you are from his neck of the woods. This is a man that could be your dad, heck he could even take you for a flight around the mountain in his super cub….which he is using to aid in the search. Mt Hood can thrill and it can kill. It always has and it always will. It is a mountain after all and is inherently dangerous. He points this out with no lurid touches. With my finger on the touch screen I flicks from CNN to Fox and back. To CNN it is a rescue to be reported factually, compassionately and as news. To Fox it is drama as spat out by someone called Greta, all tight lips and gun slit eyes and she/they are hell bent on making it high drama. Her demeanor the exact opposite of the Sherriff’s. Her entire reporting persona exudes aggression, that and her opinionated self. Their reporting, posturing and postulating makes one despise their mere presence on the seat back screen. The sensitivity of this matter is beyond them. On the mountain, hope for some is completely extinguished while still flickering for others. Fox would seem to treat it like there is blame to apportion, that climbing in winter is reckless, feckless and something to dissuade people from. One gets the feeling that failing dissuasion they would resort to legislation. (As of this posting the nanny staters are already gathering to talk of banning climbs on Mt Hood in Wintery conditions). What an appalling proposition! It is apparent here that we have an eastern seaboard media culture viewing our western surrounds and pastimes with distaste and disdain, not to mention a complete dislocation. They would do well to suspend their inane, segment filling prattlings to consider that it is westerners at this moment using all their resources to search and rescue those from far outside the Pacific Northwest and that what all these men and women are about is most certainly not hiking. It is climbing! In its extreme form! So Fox, go take a hike! On take off in this same aircraft Wednesday past, with the wind, rain and snow screaming out of the west as it has done seemingly for most of the last month we looped north over Vancouver and then south east towards Mt Hood which at the time was fully involved with an enormous mid latitude, mid winter storm. It is just another in a steady stream, part of an unusually violent sequence of weather events that has seen an early onset to the various webfoot syndromes that can afflict residents of the Portland, Seattle area during winter. As the B757 bucked and rocketed over the northern flank of Mt Hood the pilot took the time to have us passengers think on the predicament of the climbers we know to be stranded on the mountain that is lost below us. He reports wind on our tail at the 1100’ level, equal to the summit of Mt Hood, to be approximately 165mph. It defies imagination to think of the resulting conditions on the mountain. Snow cave or no snow cave. Well equiped or ill equiped. It is a somber moment of reflection aboard the flight for many of us. The men below are in a fight for their lives as we all head for differing and likely far more clement points of the globe.
As I write this, just at the moment we are crossing the border of Kansas and Colorado at 32,000 feet I reflect on circumstances and the differences in lives in any such time span. As those on Mt Hood slipped, shivered and succumbed I traversed the continent in ease. I set up a brand new and very reputable relationship for future Rose shipments between Ecuador and Flowerbud’s customers. One that I am delighted in and have full expectations of being so for a long time to come. I sat in the comfort of a South beach cinema and watched Penelope Cruz dazzle in her role in the subtitled movie ‘Volver’. I rode my bike through warm moist air, beneath swaying palm trees and rain heavy clouds. I walked the beach that was laden with the blue sails and sandy tentacles of beached Men O’ Wars, matted mounds of mustard colored Sargasso weed, a few coconuts and a whole lot of freshly emptied plastic water bottles branded ‘Le Nature’. They all are at the end of their respective journey’s and surely there is irony to be found in the latter items of jetsom.
Looking seaward into that area between the wrack line and the sea grass beds I see leopard Spotted Rays cruising north in their quest for food. When I move towards them the fish belly white of their wing tips break surface and they accelerate away. On the ocean blue myself this weekend it is aboard a luxurious multi million dollar motor yacht, fresh in from its two year construction period in a Chinese boatyard and surrounded by even bigger “Mega Yachts”, one costing something in the region of $50M and replete with a crew of twelve. We form a thirty some strong flotilla of “Christmas Ships” parading from the Key Biscayne yacht club to ‘No Name Harbor’, just shy of the lighthouse and back through the Mashta Island Canal. It is a wonderful excursion put on by kind and gracious hosts and I really do feel quite fortunate. Talk at times turns to the mountain as guests discover my being from Oregon. The differing circumstances are unfathomable. In the award for the best decorated boat the accolade goes to Rev. Bud Schroeder of the Key Biscayne community Church in a Boston Whaler outfitted as the nativity scene and crewed by …angels. Complete with wings. Thank the lord they did not need their water wings on this calm and balmy night cruise. It is different on the mountain, the area of descent where the stranded are thought to be is called “The Pearly Gates”.
It is sobering to think on all I accomplished and enjoyed in the same brief time span that three men waged their battle against the elements on the mountain. Extraordinary that I flew over them last week as the ordeal was just three days old, the outcome perhaps pre-ordained and that I will again fly over them this morning, nine days into the ordeal and at a point where slim hope remains for just two. ‘The Mountain’, I can call it such, because to Oregonians and even us long time transplants, that is how we refer to it. It belongs in some small measure to the collective “us”. Although I have never gained the summit I have scrambled around its flanks and up onto its glaciers countless times and in various weathers. All of us who utilize it for the good of body and soul know how capricious it is in meting out payment and penalties. It is, after all first stop to enormous storms that develop in the Pacific and sometimes the Bearing Sea. Its late summer bounty of alpine meadows, butterflies, lazy bears, agile deer and moss covered rocks bathing in gurgling melt waters seem very far away today. Now the mountain spends all winter merely collecting all it needs to reproduce such bounty again next year. Unfortunately there is no one of the three to come off the mountain alive this time around. The mountain has stood in sheer beauty the last two days. Calm, cloudless and gleaming white which makes it impossible for those unfamiliar with the outdoors and the the Pacific Northwest’s peaks to understand the fury and the fear of last week. The same as will resume as early as tomorrow night! The secrets of the last week will likely remain on the mountain, perhaps for ever. Best we imagine compassion and heroics and not dwell on fear and momentary terror as it subsides to the acceptance of ones demise. Still and all, not a bad place to end.From week to week ones circumstances change and there is little forecasting them and likely even less in attempting a forecast. It is a sorrowful set of circumstances for these three that climbed Mt Hood and their families. In doing so they lived on the edge, as some of us are wont to do. Those who take a dim view of this might remember there is a train of thought by which if one does not live on the edge, then one takes up too much space!