Travels With Buddha — 5.9 — Clinging to a basalt ledge, Northeast Side of Middle Sister,
Three Sisters Wilderness Area, Sisters, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, USA
“When I die, Hallelujah by and by, I’ll fly away…
The dude is breathing hard and thin by the time we reach the saddle, 9500 feet, between Middle and North Sister. It is a simple walk-up along a pretty wide ridge from here to the summit of Middle, which is our destination, or at least where we told everyone we were going. Really I’ve got nothing to prove and no one to prove it to if I had, and honestly the dude is having trouble getting enough oxygen to his heart and leg muscles. So, every hundred feet or so, he stops, leans on his ski poles, and looks off wistfully into the distance. It let’s his heart catch up to his breathing. Nothing is going to catch him up, one way or another, to Buddha.
So yes, okay, I admit, I am the dude and it is my heart and leg muscles that are sucking wind trying to make it to the top of Middle Sister (10,047 ft) Buddha is off in the ether somewhere, having levitated to the summit and back again a couple of dozen times already.
He stuck with me (pretty much) as we slid uphill on the cusp between the mostly melted Diller and Hayden Glaciers. I think I lost him somewhere in the scree field after that and haven’t seen him up here on the saddle. It’s just as well, because like many Tibetans, he hates thunder and especially lightening.
While I’m trying to catch my thin breath I see a quick flash and a concussive boom shakes my brain and in a moment I figure out that lightening has hit on the opposite side of the mountain. I see dark clouds coming in from the east, but they are miles away. I can’t see the storm that is hitting from the southwest, on the OTHER side of the mountain. Thusly I am caught in the open, exposed to the sky, and whatever Tibetan Buddhist God (Indra or Attamaskai?) that controls death by lightening.
This is not why I came up here. I have absolutely no desire to be terrified and quick-fried by static electricity. Just a little easy mountain climbing is all I want.
The next thing I know the sky above me is being shattered, splintered, rented, crispy-cracked, fatally fractured by an electrical charge that would no doubt set my hair on end (if I had any). I can feel the shimmer of it on my forearms, the blond fur on my skin stands at attention, my fingernails vibrate. Is this my last ever memory/sensation/terrified thought?
I literally sprint to the side of the Sister (my backpack thumping painfully against my lumbar vertebrae) and squeeze myself under a ledge/boulder/outcrop. The next moment I am actually INSIDE the thunderhead cloud and things are frizzing and popping and booming and it is raining torrents in between sheets of needle sharp hail as I make myself small under the mountain rock and wonder about the iron content of basalt. Is it magnetic? Does it actually ATTRACT lightening?
Well, I wouldn’t be writing this if I had sheltered under a lightening rod. I would not have survived.
Much later in the day, as I come around the blind side of a forest switchback, I find Buddha down near where I parked the van at Pole Creek.
Where were you during all that, I ask him?
He says he miniaturized and crawled down into a marmotini burrow. Sat out the storm with a nice older widow, Mrs Clifford Smiley Chipmunk, formerly of East Obsidian, lost her husband in the blizzard of ’07, made us a nice pot of Earl Grey (double Bergamot), apologized because the biscuits were slightly stale, and we sat out the thunder storm chatting about the nature poetry of Mary Oliver and Terry Tempest Williams.
Delightful day, Buddha says.
And for some reason I want to kill him.
