Mirror at the End of the Road
Heather Wiedenhoft
LOST
Pushing a lightly penciled note into the ranger’s hand and hoping for a miracle
A borrowed Book, lost, left behind
Misplaced
at one of many makeshift camps
After many miles of…
hiking trails sounds too kind
Bushwhacking, really
Our small feet and blistered skin
Have traversed peaks and meadows, now blurred into distant lines.
Triumph? or mere survival.
The Pasayten Wilderness
FOUND
Wilderness waking. Coaxing tired legs to scramble atop a nearby ridge
Our camp seen from afar
just a small smudge of light in the now dusky valley
As the sun sets, poetry read aloud from a human well versed in grammar
Our high school English teacher,
the true owner of the lost Book
For the first time, with the mountains aglow
and glacial winds in my face
I finally find meaning in this space
that is bigger than my seventeen-year-old world.
LOST
A teenage ego has no place here in the wilderness
Nature does not care about your peak pedigree,
climbing resumes are irrelevant.
Wilderness seeks to neither harm nor help
It is human hubris that sets out to conquer, needs to possess.
In the end, nature is a game you will eventually lose
if you continue to play.
Only now, I feel a small sense of betrayal
Somewhere in its tangled undergrowth it has absorbed The Book.
FOUND
Tangled limbs. It was my first real relationship,
and we were trying to share a tent.
Stealing glances on the trail, keeping things on the down-low from others.
She impressed me with her adaptability to the wild.
A city slicker, soft around the edges,
Proved stoic when yet another trail became blocked.
Our despair hanging thick as the wet forest fog
losing daylight as the group crawled through sodden deadfall.
She was to me a delicate flower, beautiful and stylish and clean smelling
I was delighted to find she could embrace the mud,
smile through a curtain of bugs.
LOST
Hanging over all our humbled heads,
graduation day loomed before us.
All good things must come to an end.
No longer would we gather as a high school hiking club,
chicks to the mother hen, guided down the road less traveled.
We giggled and sighed deeply as our English teacher, wilderness guide, and spiritual guru gruffly incanted words
from Kerouac,
Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Edward Abbey.
Words that weren’t taught
Within the confines of our school,
We digested them greedily as their truth settled over us in the stillness of the woods
Shedding the innocence of childhood
And beginning to think for ourselves
FOUND
Digesting greedily
A smashed rice crispy treat found buried under a first aid kit
Day 10 and our food stuff sacks were deflated
Only bone hard noodles and random spice packets had survived this far
Any semi-soft chocolate, oily thin glistening pepperoni slices long gone,
fed into our hungry adolescent maws before even halfway through our journey
We emptied the last dregs of our food storages into one big communal pot
we called it “country stew”
Ate one last communal meal together under the stars
Someone passed around the misshapen rice treat and we each savored 5 or 6 crispies
bathed in glorious vanilla flavored chemicals
The sweetness made us cry, being too soft for this type of deprivation.
We wanted home
LOST
Tucked in my camp “home” of thin nylon, a suggestion of safety
There under the stars, I wondered
Was I still just a foolish child?
Not ready for the responsibilities of being entrusted with a sacred object
The loss of The Book at my hands stung like a betrayal of trust.
Perhaps I was distracted
Facing the abandonment of family and friends
Over a perceived “threat” ...
The object of my desire...called unhuman, not she but “it” ...
My heart both full and full of despair,
A Dickenson reality “... it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness”,
running through my mind.
FOUND
The object of my current distress
was a weathered paperback, pages dogeared slightly mildewed from my teacher's farmhouse.
Sensing a newfound independence in me,
he was bestowing his personal copy of “Mirror at the End of the Road” to his budding English student.
Magical words of a self-journey, a path to revelation.
It offered a different path from the small-minded suburban horror
I was living
A newfound future and trust in oneself, my judgement, my survival
Autonomy
LOST
Day five and our path bloomed before us with midsummer lupine blushing blue
Two intrepid members of our group
young boys high on fresh air, possibility
Had gone ahead of the pack
We didn’t realize their wrong turn
Until night set in, and a late winter storm falled flakes covering our tracks
Beautiful but deadly to be caught out
Without shelter or warming fire
FOUND
Picking our way homeward, we found the boys
ahead on the trail, taken in by a horse packing camp
Scared, with bellies full of bacon.
Then came across the same ranger, tracking our progress skeptically
A gangly group, me wearing a destroyed pair of Converse,
blistered sunburns on faces and frostbitten toes
No longer smelling “fresh”, no longer feeling immortal
But perhaps (suppose?) the note had worked!
I want to believe The Book had made it safely back to the ranger station,
Retrieved on our way out of the wilderness…. but memory fails me on this point
In the end, the words are what stuck with me throughout the years.
And my worries of being untrustworthy proved to be unfounded,
as my English teacher continued to bestow upon me more of his private collection,
Beloved hardbound first editions.
LOST and FOUND
Because we did all survive, and so did my new relationship
And the books allowed me to grow, and abandon youthful innocence.
In those woods, that year before graduation
I finally understood I could let go of material things.
Heather Wiedenhoft
Heather Wiedenhoft was born and raised in Seattle WA. She wrote an investigative piece on the significance of drag king culture in her life and for other queer youth for Oregon Humanities. When not giving love to local drag artists, Heather plays with the freedom and form of lyric essays.