Throughout Walker Percy’s 'The Loss of the Creature', he uses many different stories to try and prove a point about the things we see and miss in life. The point he tries to prove is very well argued with these stories, and he even goes into detail with his own thoughts and opinions on these many stories. One story I have that could connect to two of the stories he mentions is the one about the Grand Canyon and the couple that got lost. In my life, there have been many times in which I have been in situations like García López de Cárdenas was seeing the Grand Canyon and situations where I have gotten lost in the wilderness like the married couple, but this one story is one where both have happened.
Since I was 11 years old, I have gone on vacation in the Adirondack Mountains during the summers. We stayed at a resort up there on Lake Pleasant in Speculator. For the first three years, we only went up for a week and then went home or went to the beach for a week. Once I turned 14, my brother and I went to a two-week wilderness camp with no connection to the outside world other than handwritten letters and newspapers that had to be mailed to us. We had no electricity in our cabins and tee-pees, and we had to bathe in the lake that the camp was built around. During my second year there, the age group I was in lived on an island in the lake a quarter of a mile away from the main camp. That year was interesting because it was different from living on land near the main camp. We had to wake up at 6:00 every morning, run 2 miles, and got to watch the sunrise. It was beautiful, but at that point I did not see anything to the degree of beauty I was going to see later in the second week.
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After the first full week of camp, the kids who live on the island, also known as islanders, have the weekend to relax and have a lot of free time; however, just like a student would get nervous on a Sunday night knowing they would have school the next day, the islanders had the same fear, but for a different reason. The next morning, the islanders would go on a three-day, two-night hiking trip up in the northern Adirondack Mountains, or as the locals like to call them, the High Peaks.
Monday morning, I woke up at 5:30 to start the drive up to a couple of these High Peaks with my hike group. We started our journey around 8 a.m. and had a very interesting first day. To start off, we had to hike 5 miles of overland to get to our first mountain and then even start climbing it. The trail was long but still marked by trail markers. Once we got to the beginning of the trail for the mountain, we realized it wasn’t one of the trails that had markers on it. We started hiking up the first of three mountains that day. It was long and the trail was hard to keep track of because they were unmarked. When we finally finished all three, it was very dark out, and hiking down was terrifying. As we kept going down, the trail started getting harder to follow. When the sun went completely down, we realized we had veered off the trail and had no way of finding it again. We knew that there was a river that ran perpendicular to the trail we had to reach, so we worked on finding that river. We eventually found it and started hiking again. Walking parallel to the river was not tough, but the hardest part was yet to come. At one point, the river turned into a waterfall with a 20-foot cliff. We had no way of getting around it without walking directly next to the cliff. At one point I slipped and almost fell, but I grabbed onto a tree and kept my balance. At that point, my light shined on the actual waterfall and I was awestruck. The waterfall was gorgeous when the light hit it; the rushing water flowed so majestically down the cliff that I couldn’t believe my eyes. Seeing that view directly correlates to when the couple got lost in the wilderness and ended up having a life-altering experience that most would not imagine having in their lives. Being on the edge of that cliff, inches to death, and the all of a sudden change in views from peril to beauty is how I imagine the couple felt when they stumbled upon the tribe. They probably thought that they were on the verge of death, only to be invited in and allowed to have an experience of a lifetime. After the end of the second day, we made camp and had to hike another 4 miles to get to the final mountain on the final day. To cook our food, we had to use a portable gas grill with one tiny flame. Our counselor finished cooking and still had a good amount of gas in the tank, so he poured it out into the fire we made and set the fire ablaze. It was a great way to end the second day; however, since our pickup time the next day was at 3 p.m., we had to wake up at 3 a.m. to pack up camp and finish the long and treacherous hike. That morning it started to rain and we all put on our rain jackets, except for our one counselor who forgot to pack them. He had a trash bag, so he made a makeshift poncho, which should have worked given the rate the rain was falling. It was a light drizzle and had no signs of raining harder, so we went along and started climbing the first of the last three mountains that day. As we got to the top, the rain clouds started to part and I saw one of the most magnificent sights of my life. Since all 46 of the peaks in the High Peaks are above 4,000 feet elevation, the views are fantastic, and this was one of those views I will always remember. This memory also made me think about García López de Cárdenas discovering the Grand Canyon. The beauty he saw in that canyon was incredible and no one would ever see it like he saw it that day. The same is true with the mountain and the person who first saw the view of that mountain. The people who hike it will never see it the same way the person who originally saw it, but can still take in the beauty like I did. The rest of the story is a terrible situation in which the rain comes again and causes my counselor to get hypothermia. We skip the rest of the mountains and go to the pickup location. We ended up reaching the bottom by 11 a.m. and waited for the van that would take us back to camp. We planned to use the stove for our heat source while waiting, but once we got to the bottom and set it up, we realized that our counselor poured out the rest of the gas on the fire the night before and wasted the rest of the fuel. We ended up sitting in the middle of the woods by the parking lot for 4 hours waiting for the van and were freezing the entire time.
Looking back on it now, it was probably one of the more interesting and fun experiences of my life, knowing that I went through all that in a span of three days. I will never forget that three-day period for the rest of my life. Those three days reflect who I am today and showed me how to live in the moment.
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