"'You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?' We didn't understand his question and it was a damned good question." ~ Kerouac

“I need to take!” I yell down to Shane. We’ve been climbing all day, a group of us, and we're on our last route. I’d ascended a wicked crack in the rain and I’d had a handful of good falls on rocks well above my grade. On overhang you don’t fall against anything that feels real -- you fall into space and you swear goddamn fucking christ and then you have to get creative and swing your way back to the mountainside. But on this last climb, which should have been a smooth jaunt up, I'm full of fear and I'm not looking where to go. I'm staring at the knot of rope that keeps me from plummeting to my death. And wondering what my body will look like after crashing against the forest floor and the sound it will make when it happens.

“Just push through it, Ken!” Shane hollers up at me. He thinks I'm tired, but I just need to let go of the mountain and lean away from the cliff to see for myself that the rope will hold me and that my death is all in my head. But I'm too terrified to argue with him and I don't have much choice but to keep moving for he won't let me down without a fight, not before reaching the top, so I mutter fucking christ and put my faith in the sound of my breath and in the feel of the rock.

The night before our day climbing Skaha bluffs we are laying in the hot tub looking at the stars. I’d just arrived from Alberta and I don’t have an answer for him when he asks how long I’ll be staying this time. He strokes my legs and after a while asks if I feel lost.

“Oh yes,” I say.
“Do you like it or does it concern you?”

“Both.”
I relish the feeling of being in water.
“They say they strangely miss me.”
“Who?”
“The yogis I parted ways with,” I say sadly.
“They told you this as a group?”
“No, one at a time. A handful of them. And their exact words have all been ‘I strangely miss you.’ Why should it be strange?” I ask him defensively, sitting up. “It makes me feel it’s strange others should miss me as though they’re surprised it’s me they miss.”
“I don’t think they mean it like that... You have a way of creating intense connections with the people you meet,” he says. “They’re surprised by it now that you’re gone.”
“Oh,” I say. “Well that makes me feel better...”

Last night you could have found us at this party of perfect strangers. The owner of the lovely house that we are partying at is unnerved because I tell him what I think of him when most people would have been making small talk.

"This girl will know you before you even speak to her," says a friend of mine who hasn't liked me since he met me until yesterday. Nobody likes feeling exposed.

But I like the man whose house we're in. I'm endeared to him and I like the look on his face when a deer decides to swim in his pool. I was unaware deer could swim. Our host jumps into the pool holding a baseball bat and an extension cord with which he is trying to lasso the previously calm animal. I stand there in a daze listening to the deer and feeling everyone get hyper and electric and I wonder how I got to be with these people.

Emboldened by the frenzied crowd, he bum-rushes the deer in the pool and and I don’t think I’m breathing and I can’t decide whether I love this life or whether I despise it that we all exist together to experience emptiness and call it a story.

Next thing I see the deer is bouncing haphazardly across the lawn and now the owner of the pool is the hero and the king and we all revere the greatness he has made for us in our minds. The king of the party is trying to convince me I am a hippie for not wearing deodorant and for not giving a flying fuck and I am rip-roaring drunk, celebrating the life of the deer and rebelling against my better judgment. We get childlike on that happy lawn making headstands and handstands and forearm balances and half moons. And I think the night is swooning because we are young and witless and know-nothings.

Somewhere near Jasper Provincial Park near Lake Louise

When it was time to leave Alberta I drove to the Okanagan. There I chucked rocks into my grandfather's truck for gardening purposes.

Listen here -- Time to Pretend by MGMT

“Come on,” Japhy yelled down to me. “We only got another hundred feet to go.”
“I’m staying right here! It’s too high!”
I nudged myself closer into the ledge and closed my eyes and thought “Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,” and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, “When you get to the top of the mountain keep climbing.” The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah’s straw mats. Now it was enough to make my heart pound and my heart bleed for being born at all. “Besides,” I thought, “rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything.” Suddenly I heard a beautiful broken yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity in the wind, and looked up, and it was Japhy standing on top of the peak letting out his triumphant mountain-conquering Buddha Mountain Smashing song of joy.
~ The Dharma Bums, Kerouac