The Proving Grounds Prove Unsettling (Or, I am SO screwed.)

I am so screwed. So-so-s0-so-screwed.

To review: four reporters are hiking different sections of the famed John Muir Trail. It was my idea and sincere belief that it would give structure and color to the story to see the trail from different points of view and aptitude.
So, there's the longtime backpacker who's feeling a changing season of life and wants to go to the backcountry where he always finds clarity; a spiritual young woman who in the past hiked the trail while overcoming an addiction and will be returning to a place that makes her contemplate the divine; the hardcore John-Muir-Trail-Pshaw-To-Me-It's-An-Overcrowded-Highway-Give-Me-A-Beef-Stick-And-A-Real-Trail guy; and me, the first-timer.

I thought there was some schtick involved in being the newcomer. I mean, me? backpack? Ha-ha. And so forth.
But here's where the funhouse mirrors have turned me all around. Because even though I did have a certain amount of genuine dread and anxiety (especially compared to my cohorts who are floating through air dreaming of weighing the ounces of their dry goods and fleeing civilization). I also thought my discomfiture was a great setup for a story. I may have even been playing it up a bit (deep down figuring, hey, maybe I haven't backpacked, but I've biked California, I've put my hand in a whale's mouth in a hard-to-reach Mexican cove, I've ridden on a cattle round up, so there!)
I mean you could already see where this one was heading (I thought). I'd grump and growl and fret and start stomping up that mountain only to find Well, By Golly! I had it in me after all! And oh the epiphanies that nature brings. My singing soul. (And so forth and so on.) Right? Right? Haven't we all seen this story a trillion times before?

Except:

No schtick. No shit.

I am in deep trouble.

As I found out this weekend when I hiked to the peak of San Jacinto.

It begins...well, where does it begin? Probably on Sunday driving into Pam Springs. I always look forward to going through the pass between San Jacinto and San Gorgonio the two highest peaks in Southern California. They are sentinels at the mouth of the Coachella Valley. There's a draft between them that powers a Hollands-worth of windmills and blows LA's smog back in it's face. Sometimes there is even an actual line of demarcation in the sky above the pass, one side Inland Empire gray-guck, the other, brilliant desert blue. But, when I drove into the desert on Sunday, San Jacinto was wrapped in ominous black. I looked at the peak, or where I would have seen the peak if a thunderhead wasn't draped over it. I knew there were people up there, and I could almost feel the thunder and see the cracks of lightening. Down below it was 118 degrees. Sometimes the desert just doesn't work at being a people-pleaser.

My friends Shellee and Rich told me that all day the sky had been blue and there had been just a tiny puff of cloud hanging around the top of the peak. Then out of nowhere, the black. To hear them tell it this storm had come up as suddenly as the one in the opening credits of H.R. Puff N Stuff. A real Witchy-Poo concoction.

The next day it's very humid out and the mountain is softwashed in a haze, but no thunderhead. We leave all in a flurry, because we had to go now-now-now-or-we'd-miss the first car up the tram. I did not have the presence of mind to ask why we had to make the very first car or remember my long-sleeved capilene shirt or much of anything else in all the rush.

At the tram I find out that if you miss the 10:00 tram, you take the 10:10. The 10:10! (As I will repeat loudly and drunkenly later that night).

(To be continued, after I go rustle up something to eat)