wenden >< wenderstock, switzerland
sometimes the road less taken is that way for a reason. sometimes, avoiding the path of resistance means there is a support network, a mechanism in place that is sophisticated enough to allow you to pursue your life without binding you in the webs of others. sometimes the road less traveled just ends in a cul-de-sac, leaving you to turn and head back.
i can remember topping out on half dome about eight years ago with Alex McAfee. it was later than we wanted it to be, part my fault, and we had very little food and water and just knew it was best for us to get down. walking off of the backside was kind of a surreal endeavor at night with headlamps. there is a great slab, like a sea of granite melting away from you. somewhere in the middle is a walkway with some metal wire handrails to guard the average person from a hideous, yet eventful death. we crisscrossed that slab for twenty minutes expecting to hear each others’ last screams, denoting that we did not find the handrail and not to go toward the scream. eventually we found the walkway and followed it off of the slab and turned to find the trail that would lead us back down to the front of the formation where our bags were safely stowed (or so we thought).
jingling away with rope and rack, probably still in climbing shoes and disco shades, we slowly made our way down picking through the bushes on what seemed to be the trail. the caveat being that too far in one direction could possibly end up in a large fall and a bummer of a story for the other to have to pass on to the park service. let alone the loss of gear that would never be used again. hiking through the thicket, especially around climbing areas, you generally rely on these paths of least resistance, meaning that someone has possibly travelled there before. this is often a good thing. it means you are probably not far from where you should be, especially since you often do not know exactly where you should be, but know where you would like to be. this is often more interesting in the middle of a large rock face when you realize you have climbed two pitches in the wrong direction because you convinced yourself that the topo and description led you up these ‘obvious’ features. that situation, however, is a different story.
in the end, the path that was easiest to follow brought us down safely, though hungry and bedraggled, to our campsite to discover that marmots had clawed holes into Alex’s bag and eaten his snacks. whereas my bag had oddly been unzipped and also emptied of its aromatic contents by some small mammal. thank god tuna comes in a hermetically sealed can. the trickle of water that seeps out of that face and some unstolen snacks got us through the unplanned second evening under half dome. the next day we ransacked the cafe next to the yosemite post office for a three course lunch.
at the time i thought our feat was stellar. two guys who had really never climbed before, minus a quick romp on middle cathedral, had sent the northwest direct route in 14 hrs. now i look back and think, shit, we could have done it so much faster if i didn’t get all scared up in the zig zags and crawl my way through the ‘thank god’ traverse. maybe next time. but i think it would be more fun to free the whole thing and not start stepping in slings.
the moral of the story is that sometimes, to get where you’re going, the path most traveled is requisite. often the journey is the path less traveled with an occasional leg that has seen the wear and tear of others. it is in this moderation between us and society that our true individual path lies.
seeing the news feeds with hints at a partial nationalization of some of the US’s largest banks is what made me think of this path. for we would not be the first, nor the last. yes, true enough, we often aim to forge our own history here in the US. but sometimes there are lessons to be learned from having only watched others. the UK just nationalized a bank, japan nationalized many banks, and there are a slough of other examples. actually what we would be doing probably would not be called nationalizing due to the nation’s anafalactic allergence to socialist ideals.
in some way we need to get the financial sector on track. its hard to put the patients back in charge of the asylum but order is needed. unfortunately, all of the dollars spent on the financial industry in the name of the tarp plan are tax payers dollars. in the end, we want a return on our investment. we cannot just buy bad debt in a new federal-entity and wipe them out. no, we need to get some percentage back from functioning loans and other revenue streams. this is not a path of least resistance by any means, nor can it be the path of most resistance. at least for our nation’s sake.
