On Saturday morning I left Linda’s at a quarter past 9 and dropped by the office to pick up my backpack. The plan was to spend the rest of the weekend in the Angeles National Forest, where I could camp freely anywhere along the East Fork River, escape the possibility of anyone making a weekend stop into the office, and recharge from the past few weeks of chaos. I packed enough provisions to last me until Sunday night and headed off.

The beauty of the Angeles National Forest is that it’s so close to the city; one can reach its borders in an hour with minimal traffic. Of course, that’s a downfall as well, since its proximity attracts throngs of people on the weekends. The road to the trail was so littered with cars and tents, one could scarcely find a place to park. The river was lined with families of scantily-clad bathers, hopeful fishermen, and the occasional duo of wannabe miners panning for gold. The Angeles National Forest truly is the three-ring circus of the Southern California wilderness.

When I reached the trailhead, it was hot. Oppressively hot. Broiling, Thanksgiving-Day-turkey-in-the-oven hot. And in the distance, beyond the peaks of the lower San Gabriels comprising the foreground, brewed a nasty array of cumulonimbus storm clouds. This was nature’s way of relieving Earth’s inhabitants from the sweltering pseudo-desert. Looking at the storm, I welcomed it as exactly that, ignoring the inconveniences of a potential downpour.

I had spent much of the past few weeks among the masses of the metropolis. Getting out into nature again was therapeutic, a place I could go to purge the stresses of routine. A place where I could go to hear myself think. The outdoors has become for the modern urban dweller the ultimate in extreme exposure. In the city, our surroundings have been manufactured to conceal our weaknesses. We construct buildings to protect us from the shifts of the elements, devise climate control to sterilize our inside air to the exact degree of comfort, arrange decorations to conceal the homeliness of our labor. We hang paintings of landscape, plant plastic trees in mass-produced pottery, spray foul smells with harmful,  fragrant chemicals. We build an artifice of beauty atop the beauty we destroyed to arrive at that point. We are the lone Earthly agents of this macabre recycling. Our cities are exhibits of this orbit in solutions, arriving us at the same problems we worked so hard to repair. It is an addicting narrative, one in which I am wholly guilty of indulging.

But here, in the mountains, our surroundings were conceived long before anything that could resemble a human blinked his eyes to enjoy it. The mountains are our walls. The stars our ceiling. I cannot help but be humbled by their grandeur, for their solutions are presented to us without granting us the slightest opportunity to conceal them. The only orbit apparent here is that of Mother Earth, revealing with unfailing consistency the scroll of the cosmos, one of the few lasting certainties of our existence. While my relationship to the city is that of a torrid affair with my siren mistress, the wilderness is my loving wife. She is loyal and comely and, in the moments when I slip up, proportionately harsh.

My return to the trees and mountains was therefore a tardy homecoming. The plan was to camp along the river bank, somewhere off-trail and shaded, with enough solitude where I could sleep, read, and possibly fish in peace. Bringing my trout pole and 40-pound bag of gear, I began to walk along the trail. After taking only a handful of steps, I heard thunder sound authoritatively from the horizon. I chuckled to myself, unwilling to be fazed by the overwhelming evidence that my luck for the weekend had been used up with Linda last night.

I walked on. A second clap of thunder reminded me of the dangers beyond discomfort. Namely, the potential for flash flood. A voluminous storm could raise water levels to elevated levels in a dangerous rush, with surrounding low-lying areas engulfed in the precipitous flash, the ground being unable to absorb the runoff. A lone hiker, camped in an otherwise innocuous flat, might find himself with mere seconds to save his belongings, let alone his own hide.

I had found myself in a similar predicament this past summer, canyoneering through the claustrophobic walls of Utah’s Virgin River. The Narrows, as the trail is called, makes up 16 miles of winding gorge, with walls rising over the river up to 2,000 feet. I later learned that I was among the last hikers offered a permit for the canyon that day. And as I reached the seventh mile, I learned why. It was there that the skies began to open up in spellbinding fashion, releasing a spectacular shower and Amtrack roar. I rushed to a nearby platform of land, elevated ten feet above the river, to wait out the storm. As I watched the water shade into a coffee hue and the “tide” inch up onto the sand, I considered myself lucky. Had I been a couple miles down the river, my best shot at higher ground would’ve been a foothold in the rock wall.

I took heed of this as I continued along the East Fork River, reassuring myself that this place was infinitely safer than a slick-walled slot canyon. By the time I came to my first river crossing, I had almost forgotten that I had already been soaking in ultraviolet and sweat for the past twenty minutes of my hike.

Flash flood country.

At this crossing I met a gentleman heading the other way–I seemed to be the only one making his way into the wilderness. He was a haggard traveler, more of the transient ilk than perhaps I appeared. He looked at me, looked at my backpack, and looked back up to meet my eyes.

“Heading in?”

“Don’t you know it!”

“Yeah,” he nodded, directing his gaze to the horizon. “Watch out for them flash floods. You seen what happened in Bagladesh a couple weeks back.”

I actually hadn’t. But I nodded and thanked him for his concern before moving on. His warning was equal parts endearing and eerie, so even though the clouds seemed to holding steady at the faraway ridge line and it was earlier than I had anticipated quitting the trail, I thought it best to start looking for a spot to set up for the night.

I found my camp without too much effort, a secluded spot under the shade of an oak tree, set back fifty feet or so from the river. Under the distant hum of thunder, I set up my tent and headed back towards the river for a swim. Even out of the sun, in the advanced hours of the day, the air was sweltering. Jumping into the water offered a brief respite.

Home.

I toweled off and returned to camp for a nap. An hour later, I woke up sweating through every pore, with a dry mouth and sour temperament.

It was 6pm.

I decided that if it wasn’t going to cool off by this time of day, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself enough to accomplish what I’d set out to accomplish for the time. So I decided to pack up and head back to the truck. I knew the corridor along the road leading into the canyon was shaded, and encouraged through it a gentler breeze, giving its inhabitants valuable degrees of temperature.

That night, I ended up sleeping on a breezy ridge on a blanket next to my car. Nestled under the modest glow of the urban-periphery sky, I began to finally relax again. It wasn’t the wilderness experience I’d been looking for. But even in the company of restless strangers and episodic human noise, there was beyond my conscious acquaintance an unmistakable calm that had settled over me, a skeletal comprehension that I was away from it all. The presence of others was irrelevant, and the noises their rustling around made had no bearing on my being. This was my home.

I fell asleep staring up at the speckled handle of Ursa Major, likening its bowl to the vessel used by the gold-panners I’d seen earlier in the day, thinking that the yield of its kind glow held more value to me in that moment than any clump of flecks in any pan. My gold was the embrace of obscurity. My pan the open sky.

– TOH