"The Path Of Least Resistance Is What Makes The River Crooked"
“Packing my dry bag, sitting in a broken down camp, gives me anxious uncertainty. Not about the wind or the paddle but about what I am returning to. Theres so much friction in the gears of days, I need to simplify the design. The fewer working parts, the less there is to go wrong.”
“Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world”
…You can always find art in its folds
There’s something Inspector gadget-like in pulling a fully capable class IV boat from your backpack…or even more -your noisy muddy pannier a craft capable of your 35lb pack AND your bike! The infamous Alpacka Raft has quickly become the most versatile paddle craft available. Your first time, blinds all others-it becomes impossible to forget the absolute and incredible fun packrafting in rapids alone can be, forget it’s utility. It’s like taking a recliner down a river only this lazy-boy carrys your food, your bed, your shelter and has room enough after all that -for a beer nestled between your feet.
When the cold cuts a bleed from the skin there’s no liquor better than the crunch of snow under snowshoe. Bundled and wrapped, the faint flirt of sun fondling eyelids and the hoof of late winter stomping plumes from your throat. Nothing seems more fitting than a cup of tea under its thawing thumb. Cutting trail, shoveling camp, carving kitchen from snow above the silence of ice edging into river and the creak of tree leaning into the swing of a warm hammock.
I can almost smell the aroma wafting through camp. The river as slow as bread is to rise. A little flour and water, mixed over a hundred years ago, bubbling in a jar in a dry bag, just waiting to be as beautiful as its surroundings.
“I rolled up some bread and tea in a pair of blankets
with some sugar and a tin cup and set off.”
When asked what kind of bread he took to the mountains,
John Muir replied,
“Just bread.”
The culture of suspended droplets, riveted in sheets to the mountainside, swarming, congregating, propositioning and quiet.
Quiet I say, as an arrangement of behavior unbecoming of quiet. Quiet muddying the compass needle’s point, stung by the frost, common looking quiet, until required to step through.
and the curves, the swooping crowds of white pouring from the raked face of Allender Mountain, pour us as well, appearing from its folds without lack of clarity, we rummage through the vaporous waypoints.
“
Crooked Blue Line 
