Fourth Saturday's Loneliest Liberal

Reflections on the sources of fear

By James Knudsen

As a native son of California I’m quick to extol the state’s many virtues. Our topography: we are home to the highest and lowest points in the lower-48. Our 840 miles of coastline is second only to Florida, but that coastline has the disadvantage of being in Florida. And then of course there’s our myriad of habitats—scorching deserts, rainforests, beaches, rolling hills, glacier carved valleys, snow-capped peaks towering over alpine meadows...alpine meadows. I’ve been to a few of those.
    One area where we fall short, in the eyes of many, is weather and seasons. The key to being successful as a weatherman in California lies in learning to say “sunny and mild” and make it sound interesting. But occasionally we do get weather. It still doesn’t rise to the level of the lake effect snow storms of the Great Lakes or the Category Five twisters of the Midwest or even the monsoonal downpours I experienced during a summer in Tennessee. But when you’re accustomed to sunny and mild eleven months out of the year, it doesn’t take much to get your attention.
    Monday night I stepped out of the college theatre to find the pavement wet—wet, in August! I drove home under a lightning-filled sky and arrived home to find the power out. A few days earlier I had snapped a picture of thunder clouds in the eastern sky just after sundown. It has been a very hot and strange summer for weather.
    Some people like rain. Women tend to like rain. Film directors like to shoot scenes that involve a long-anticipated kiss, in the rain. I don’t like rain. And I particularly don’t like thunderstorms. It wasn’t always that way.

I’ve ridden out my share—there was the drive from the ruins of Chichen Itza back to Playa del Carmen in a VW Bug. That didn’t bother me. The tropical storms of Martinique and Chiang Mai were no problem, and I don’t recall giving the Tennessee frog-stranglers, which seemed to arrive every Friday afternoon, a second thought. The storm in Cincinnati would hadn’t bothered me except for a tornado siren that went off and I didn’t know what it was. Even the storm that I should have been worried about, I wasn’t.
    In August of 1975, I headed into the High Sierras with my father, fellow columnist Jim Rix, and his son Leland. After two days of hiking, we arrived at a high alpine meadow called Ferguson Meadow, with Ferguson Creek, teeming with Golden Trout, running through it.

L-R: the author, Leland, Morris (the author's father), Jim

One day's catch

Leland (R), and the author holding the skull of the steer found on a day trip
to Summit Meadow, a relic from the days when cattle grazed the meadows

Lying at just just below timberline, the temperatures during the day were considerably cooler than the scorching valley we’d left behind two days earlier. Our first night found us dealing with the possibility of rain. Dad had been exploring the Sierra Nevada since the early fifties. His first backpack frame was made of wood and he did not believe a tent was ever necessary.

James's sister Morissa and their father
on another trip to Ferguson Meadow
(photo provided by Jim Rix)

    In the parking lot from which we had set off Dad had insisted that Jim, then living in the Pacific Northwest and very familiar with rain, leave his tent behind. Jim did. Our campsite, several feet above the floor of the canyon on a granite outcropping, had an area some distance away from where we ate and slept where we built a campfire. That night, with the wind howling down the canyon, fanning the flames of the fire to lengths measured in feet, it began to rain. And there was thunder and there was lightning. Jim kept track of the time between flashes and thunder-rolls with his then state of the art LED watch. I believe it took two hands to tell time. Through it all I was never worried. The fire kept us warm and somewhat dry as I remember. And Jim had the foresight to pack a huge green, plastic tarp that he fashioned into a tent. When we returned to civilization we learned that that very same storm had struck the popular tourist attraction Moro Rock, killing one and injuring three. In researching this story I found the picture in the article, “Decades later, hair-raising photo still a reminder of lightning danger”.

Michael McQuilken, right, was 18 when he and his brother,
Sean, 12, climbed California's Moro Rock in 1975

But 38 years ago lightning didn’t bother me. ​The sight of Jim roaming the meadow dressed only in sunglasses probably did. I'm not sure, I'm still sorting out that childhood trauma.

In the summer of 2000 I again found myself in the High Sierras. I had begun backpacking again in the nineties with two brothers whose sole reason for going into the wilderness was to fly-fish. The value of their fishing gear and assorted attire and paraphernalia numbers in the thousands of dollars. I went along as the resident cook and photographer. This was before digital imaging had taken over and so I would lug two 35mm, SLR bodies, plus lenses everywhere I went. Believe it or not, there was actually a time when my brawn exceeded my brains.
    The trip of 2000 would be the last one I enjoyed with this group—not because of what happened: I’ve just had other things occupying my summers since then. We had decided to go to Blackcap Basin. It lies at the western edge of the Sierras and is accessed via nearly twenty miles of trail from Courtwright Reservoir. Twenty miles with fully laden packs on a relatively flat trail was still a long way for the horses we rode into the alpine meadow that would be our base camp.
    The Blackcap region is a series of smaller basins with lakes that have names that follow a theme. One basin has a military theme, and the lakes are named Division, Regiment, and Battalion. Another follows a church theme, and they’re named Chapel, Portal, Cathedral, and Midway. What Midway has to do with churches, I have no idea. [Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, perhaps?] Our first day trip was toward a pair of lakes with a motivational poster theme named Ambition and Valor. My companions, brothers Jeff and Clay, were eager to try out their latest piece of gear—a new tapered leader, fly pattern selected to match the insect hatch that was going on, or maybe it was a new reel. I mainly wanted to record the lakes photographically. To do this I would scramble up the bowl of broken granite until I was high enough above the lake to get the entire body of water in my viewfinder. And then maybe I’d chuck a dry fly in the lake with my $25 spinning rod and reel.
    We fished Ambition Lake and I’m fairly sure the fishing was poor or else we would have stayed. Clay and I moved up to Valor Lake while Jeff remained below. Once at the lake I made a beeline for the talus above the lake to get my shot while Clay worked the shore. Periodically I would check the viewfinder to see if I was high enough. I turned, focused…almost there. I turned back to resume my ascent and heard the tap. It was a sound like a finger being rapped on a piece of cardboard except that in this case it was a raindrop on the brim of my boonie hat. I checked the viewfinder again to see that I now had the necessary elevation and took my picture. In that picture, the sky beyond the horizon is solid blue. I called down to Clay, “We’re going to have to get out of here.” He replied something to the effect that he agreed. He was after all holding a fly rod made of graphite, the same material used in spark plug wires. I called out again, “Don’t wait for me.” I wasn’t being brave...or valorous, I just knew that I’d catch up. Years earlier on another trip Clay had remarked that his knee was “barking” at him after several miles of downhill trail.
    Remember that blue sky? It was disappearing, fast. I was bounding—I could still bound over granite boulders then—toward Valor Lake, where I would scamper along one edge and begin the drop to Ambition Lake. At some point I caught up to Clay, and now back at Ambition we found his older brother Jeff. We had to decide what to do—keep hiking back to our base camp or ride it out here. We chose the latter. Except the latter was a cluster of trees and the flashes of lightning and the cracks of thunder seemed right on top of us. And I was scared. This is where I grew to dislike thunderstorms.

And this is where I leave that story. It all turned out all right. We saw more lakes, ate well, caught fish, drank whiskey, and told stories. But for me a question remains, that of fear. What, why, how is it that we come to fear?
    Now, I don’t have children. So some of what follows must be viewed in the context of someone who just doesn’t get it because he’s not a parent. But it seems that for all the progress we’ve made since FDR delivered his Four Freedoms speech, we still struggle with fear. Actually I don’t think we struggle so much as carry on a very unhealthy relationship with fear. It’s become that sabotaging girlfriend I read about in Cosmopolitan magazine. (Why I read Cosmopolitan is a topic for another Saturday.) I asked a friend, with children, if he thought children needed to be taught how to fear. Perhaps I didn’t phrase it well because his reply sounded very much like a yes. And I separate being scared from being wary or cautious. There are plenty of things to be wary of and cautious around: exposed electrical wires, hornets nests, bulging cans of tuna. I know how to deal with those things. But who hears or uses the words “caution,” “wariness,” “mindfulness” anymore.
    When I think of fear, I think of riding my motorcycle and smelling—just smelling—rain and having my body tense up. That’s a primitive bodily reaction completely removed from reason. I didn’t learn that. None of the higher functioning recesses of my brain—assuming any still remain—were accessed. Fear should be something that just happens, like love. You don’t know why, you don’t know how to explain it but something is demanding your attention.
    A friend/former friend whose father was a high ranking police officer related a piece of advice she’d been given by her dad the cop. He told her, “You have a gut, listen to it.” Now I know that recently we had a President who made decisions regarding global warming and WMD’s based solely on a “gut-feeling.” I’m not advocating that. I am saying that I suspect that in this modern world, where we are free to speak and worship and are free from want, we fear that which we’ve been told to fear.
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Copyright © 2013 by James Knudsen

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