Longmire to South Puyallup Creek Campsite via Pyramid Creek
9-4-2010
Yesterday was a baby day. Three point five miles from Longmire over Rampart Ridge to Pyramid Creek campsite, which incidentally lay closer to Pearl Creek than Pyramid. No sooner had I gotten my tent up at Pyramid than I was beset by insects. When the weather is fair on the Wonderland Trail, you have to contend with the insects. Otherwise you get the freezing rain. I took my food bag and hustled to Pearl Creek to spend a very relaxed afternoon.
When you listen to falling water for a long time it sounds like all kinds of things- a goth-industrial club, laughing girls, your dead father. There is this damn "History of the Soviet Union Told Through Tetris" song that would not leave my head. Then the techno again. There is a reason that these mountain streams always have demigods living in them, in the old tales. They talk to you, and the act of auditory perception can not shake it. If it weren't for science I would think there were spirits there too.
The next day I set out for South Puyallup via Indian Henry's Hunting Ground, and the patrol shack that sat on the site. This was the second day of good weather I was to have on the trip, but I was preoccupied because I had inadvertently swapped my first food drop with my second. My first leg is a bit longer than the second, so I was going to be hungry.
This is not usually a problem on the first days of hiking trips, because I am so wiped that I can't bear the thought of food. It helps drop those first ten or twenty pounds right off. For whatever reason, though, the WT was making me hungry. Probably because it wasn't bestially hot like most places. Also, every day was like climbing Katahdin twice. That will put a fire in your belly.
So I lazily sliced pepperoni with my dollar knife from Wal-Mart. Wow, this knife sucks, I remember thinking as the knife rolled right over pepperoni and down three quarters of an inch into my thumb. Gosh darn it. For the love of Ueshiba I managed to inject myself with raw pepperoni on the second day and pump out a fair amount of the red stuff besides. The last time I saw that much of my insides on my outsides it was on an interstate and I wasn't very conscious because I just kissed a concrete sidewall at seventy miles per hour. Various bits of wilderness survival lore started swimming around in my brain and making me do almost sensible-seeming things. It's not spurting. You can use your water bag to generate a pretty high pressure stream, irrigate the wound, clean all the pizza topping out of there. Don't put peroxide or betadyne inside the wound, it denatures the tissue and necroses for sure. Dry it out, wrap it in gauze, duct tape the flesh flap down hard. Secure with more duct tape. Finish lunch and move on. Oh, and duct tape your heels back together, the skin's coming off. I feel like I should have spoken the previous paragraph in a gravelly SOCOM sort of voice, but this was a sandwich mishap, not another damned bear fight. The phrase "sandwich mishap" immediately robs any situation of whatever testosterone it might have once possessed.
The thumb was on my mind for the rest of the day because it was dripping a bit, but it was always gnawing on the back of my brain for the rest of the trip. When at night I changed the dressing I studiously sniffed the awful thing, checking for the maggoty odor that would send me off trail and into a walk-in clinic. I'm actually pretty amazed it's healing up as well as it did, given the fact that after the fourth it rained for a week, making it impossible to keep the wound dry. But I would be damned if I got put off the Wonderland Trail by my lunch. "Hey, what got you?" "Hypothermia" "'Bout you?" "Blizzard" "And?" "Pepperoni. A pepperoni bagel to you, mister!"
Crossing the cable bridge over Tahoma Creek (Pull y'all up! Ha ha, just kidding, it's pronounced pew-all-up) made my knees go wobbly for thirty minutes. It's a hundred foot span over a hundred and change foot drop, with a particularly uncivilized looking glacial creek thundering below. You can look at it through the bridge's floor, made of loose slats, as the bridge sways up and down, right and left in the freezing wind
(All winds on glacial creeks are freezing because the giant mountain chills the air until it is so cold it flows downhill like water, rushing through drainages like the Tahoma. See "katabatic wind".)
Your hands throb and some blood drips on slats, some falls between the slats down into the torrent below, and you reflect for a moment on whether or not the fall would hurt dramatically. Then marvel on how it is the kindest hurts in life that kill. The cruel ones flense you against the mountainside, against your loved ones, against the rock of the interstate. Like the spirits in the waters, they are speaking also, but what they are saying I am not sure I can accept.
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