Some years ago my family, and a friend and I went for a long day hike to the high lakes around Truchas, Las Trampas and Santa Barbara in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Santa Fe. At a gorgeous but icy mountain tarn more than 11,000 feet high, my quite large friend plunged into the clear turquoise water. His splash boomed through the thin air and created a wave that bounced off the far shore. He emerged shivering but with an ecstatic smile of pure triumph.
That incident occurred to me as I was reading a new book about the mountains of northern New Mexico, A Walk Around the Horizon by Tom Harmer (UNM Press, 208 pages, $24.95 in paperback).
In it, Harmon describes his feeling after plunging into No Fish Lake on his way to climbing Truchas:
“I’m shivering but grinning, too, more alive than I’ve felt in a long time. Crouched like a naked animal dripping on a rock, heart thudding, lungs inhaling great gulps of sweet mountain air, I felt altered, baptized, purified, wholly immersed in the wilderness at last. Connected to the natural world as never before.”
Throughout this slim volume, I related Harmer’s experiences to my own. He watched fireworks over Albuquerque from Sandia Crest as I once did. He circled through the canyons and mesas adjoining Bandelier National Monument as I have often done. He struggled to the 13,000-foot peak of South Turchas as I have done. On the way to mountain tops, he saw a bear, herds of elk and many Rocky Mountain sheep, heard the close call of a mountain lion and watched a hawk chasing a squirrel around a tree trunk—animals hunting and being hunted. He suffered from cold and rain and fatigue, aching shoulders and sore feet, as I have done more times than I care to remember.
This is an imminently human book, one of small defeats and victories, the story of a rather ordinary hiker doing some not very extraordinary things because…well, because at 62 he still can for a while, which is exactly how I feel today when, at 73, I am still proud of doing some of those things that to the world at large may not seem terribly extraordinary but put the glee of life into my soul.
This book begins with Harmer observing from his Santa Fe home four high peaks that loom on the horizon north, south, east and west of Santa Fe. He conceives the idea of a solo 250-mile, weeks-long hike around the horizon to climb all four peaks. As practicalities take over, the venture mutates into something quite different. A series of shorter hikes, each a few days long, sometimes alone sometimes with his wife or a friend, takes him to the top of four mountains held sacred by the Tewa Indians of northern New Mexico—Sandia to the south, Chicoma to the west, Canjilon to the north and Truchas to the east. He does succeed in climbing all four peaks, sometimes by circuitous if seemingly needlessly difficult routes, for some of the peaks can be reached by road or with a short stroll. His indirect jaunts around northern New Mexico thus become more of an exercise in personal struggle rather than merely fulfilling by rote a preconceived plan.
Here and there in the book I relished his moments of personal revelation, as when he plunged into No Fish Lake, and wished for more for these moments that were for me the highlights of the book rather than the descriptions of geology and flowers and storm clouds.
After climbing Truchas, he relished “the endless immediate moment and a feeling I’ve only rarely felt before—a calm sense of well-being…. I feel I could live like this forever.” Anyone who has submerged himself completely in pure wilderness will recognize this feeling.
Beginning a new day in the wilderness, he writes, “Once I’m on my way, free from worries, doubts or distracting thoughts, all I have to face are the immediate real-world decisions of life outdoors. All the crap of modern life is stripped away. Everything is simplified, purified, and pretty much up to me, alone. Life in other words, is sweet again.”
Hiking, living, camping in the wilderness is all about doing what you have to in order to live through the next few minutes and hours. The future is foreshortened and the past irrelevant; the present is everything. I enjoyed reliving this experience while reading “A Walk.”
At the end, Harmer writes, “Having accomplished what I set out to do, I am at peace.” His book made me impatient to return to those mountains, to that peace.
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