A Tale of a Brittle Gray Hair

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I’m filled with total contentment and maybe even a little bit of joy.

It’s my second morning on Hat Creek near Lassen Volcanic National Park. I’m reading Emerson, pressing too many cups of coffee, and chatting with local fishermen as they cast for trout.

I’m still glowing from the previous day’s hike at Butte Lake, one of my first since an ankle injury six months earlier.

Life is pretty damn good.

Then I notice something: A brittle gray hair on my Darth Vader sweat pants.

The last year has aged me.

One week into my fifth meander. I’m thinking back over a half-year, maybe more, of difficulties of my own making – and how I’ve finally gratefully pulled myself out of it.

Depressed. Fallible. Mortal.

Publishing one’s feelings on the interwebz brings interesting reactions. My post about my disorientation after Saguaro Man brought tons of likes (yay likes!) and positive comments from friends and from the Arizona Burner community.

It also brought an email of concern from my counselor: “I find myself wondering if you might be depressed.”

Hell yes I was depressed. And, depressingly, I don’t know where it began. I suppose it was gradual, but it’s been impossible to pinpoint the exact genesis of my difficulties.

When I was at my bottom in May, I was struck by this line from Robyn Davidson’s Tracks: “I did not understand the change, did not realize that I had become isolated, defensive, and humourless, did not know that I was lonely.”

Yup.

The last year has aged me. After so many years of forward progress dating back to my eruption in 2009, I haven’t handled recent reminders of my fallibility and mortality with grace.

I fell off my game more than a year ago and never got back on it for more than a few weeks at a time.

I succumbed to anger over Trump. I succumbed to fear over my health, my financial security, my seemingly-imminent punishment from under-performing. And I succumbed to arrogance. It may not have seemed so outwardly (or maybe it did), but I could feel it growing inside me.

Then there were the reminders of my mortality. There was the gum surgery and the sprained ankle that refused to heal. There was the dad bod that refused to be tightened. There was the unstoppable creep of my Tinder search parameters past 40 to 41, 42, and on.

And, there’s the aforementioned brittle gray hair. Aged indeed.

Facing It. Always Facing It.

I’ve known things were off for a while – maybe as far back as last April (like, April 2016).

In March, I sat on the bank of the Colorado River during a kayak trip and prayed for release. Unfortunately, I wasn’t ready yet to do the work. I wanted GUSS to fix things, but I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain.

At times, I thought I had surrendered to the process. Instead, it took two more months before I was finally beaten into submission.

And sitting alone, utterly alone, in an apartment during a two-week solo trip to Boulder in May, I got that email from my counselor with this quote from Joseph Conrad: “Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.”

When I returned home from Boulder, I finally began to put in the work. By the time I hit the the road a few weeks later, I was fully ready to face it.

And facing it has made all the difference.

A few hours after the encounter with the brittle gray hair, I’m hiking around Lassen’s Manzanita Lake when I experience my first instances of childlike wonder in more than a year.

The volcanic peak is still covered in snow and reflecting beautifully off the lake’s surface. But it’s the birds that do it – robins, Steller’s jays, Canada geese, red-winged blackbirds.

These birds are the Sierras and Cascades to me, and the Sierras and Cascades are my church, my playground, and my sacred spot to face it all – depression, fallibility, mortality, and even a brittle gray hair.

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