“Let Me Tell You a Story”
A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems
Cliff Williams
PDF file of the whole collection
~~~~~~~~~~
Traveling, 89–112
Sometimes traveling enriches your life immeasurably.
To the Mountains
In early June, 2000, Linda and I went to Colorado for our annual week-long vacation. We stayed in Boulder for a few days and hiked in the nearby Flatirons. The hike was not especially vigorous—not much up and down and not very long. But you could see the Flatirons. They were real mountains.
We saw a bear run across the trail four or five hundred feet in front of us and down into a ravine, though at first we thought it might be a large, shaggy dog.
One day a month and a half later, in late July, it hit me that I had to go back, right then. When I say it hit me, I mean that I was consumed with an impulse that I could not shake off. I felt it when I awoke the next morning, all day, and at night as I lay in bed.
The hardest thing about that impulse was telling Linda. I could easily get into our car and drive west from Deerfield, north of Chicago. But I could not tell Linda without wondering what her reaction would be. Was I crazy, absurd, for wanting to drive all the way to Colorado on a moment’s notice when we had just been there?
I finally got up my courage, and at supper three days later, said, “I have to go back to the mountains, right now.” She exclaimed, “What?!!!”
I threw my camping gear into the car (which I had acquired several years earlier for the yearly hobo conventions), lots of food and water, and left about eleven the next morning. I thought I would probably turn around in an hour when I would get tired of driving.
I made it. Eleven hundred miles. Not to Colorado, but to southeastern Wyoming. I pitched my tent at Nash Fork Campground near Medicine Bow Peak, about 10,300 feet altitude, paid my fee, in that order, drove to nearby trailheads each morning, and hiked for hours and hours.
I was mesmerized. Enchanted. I nearly exploded with awe at the magnificent vistas, the forests, ponds, and boulders. I was consumed by the astonishing beauty of every spot I cast my eyes.
The first night, after I had gotten up to go to the bathroom—an outhouse about two hundred feet from my tent—I lay down on the picnic table at my campsite and immediately gasped at the nearness of the stars. They looked so big and close that it felt as though I could reach out and touch them.
I couldn’t stay on the picnic table for long, as it was in the midthirties, and I needed to crawl back into my sleeping bag.
When I got back home, I immediately started planning next year’s trip. I dreamed of hiking above the tree line.
Now and then I imagined some student spotting me walking across campus and thinking to themselves, “Oh, there goes Cliff with his deep philosophical thoughts.” But it was not that at all. It was, “There goes Cliff with his dreams of pitching his tent in the mountains and hiking all day.”
I went again every summer for twenty years, until 2019, by air mostly but two years via Amtrak. The pandemic prevented me from going in 2020 and 2021. I took care of Linda in 2022 as she lay dying, and in 2023 and 2024, it felt like a big chore to pack a suitcase with all my camping things, a week’s breakfasts, clothes, and little things without its going over fifty pounds per airline limits.
But I still dream of being on the very top rock of a mountain again, gazing at the 360 degree vista. I picture myself lying in my tent just after dark listening to the wind rustling the leaves of nearby Aspens.
Pilgrimage
After going to the Wyoming and Colorado mountains every summer for eight or nine years, it occurred to me that my trips there might actually have been some kind of pilgrimage. I had felt overwhelming awe when I arrived at the peaks of mountains. I had listened raptly to the rustling leaves of nearby Aspens as I lay in my tent at night. I had sat by swiftly flowing mountain streams absorbed by the rapidity of the changing water configurations. I had gazed at high altitude lakes.
I looked up “pilgrimage” and found it was defined as “a journey of a pilgrim.” So I looked up “pilgrim,” and found it was defined as “one who travels to a shrine or holy place as a devotee.”
“No,” I thought. I’m haven’t been a pilgrim in that sense. I have not regarded the mountains as a shrine or thought of them as holy.
An online definition was broader: “a journey, especially a long one, made to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion.”
“Hmm,” I thought. “Was the awe I felt religious?”
Awe is not inherently religious. But it would be religious if it was a reaction to the bigness of God.
And then it occurred to me; “Yes, the awe I experienced had sometimes slipped over into something that was somewhat religious.”
I had sensed the vastness of a divine being as I sat gazing at expansive 360 degree vistas from the very top rock of a mountain peak. I had sensed the boundless knowledge of a deity that could keep track of the precise structure of the changing splashes of water in mountain streams as the water hit rocks in the streams.
I went to the mountains the year after that revelation with the explicit intention of making it a pilgrimage. But it didn’t work. I don’t know why.
However, as I reflected on the trips to the mountains after that failed year, I found that when I didn’t try to sense the divine, I actually did. I don’t know why again. But it doesn’t matter, because during the years I did sense the divine, I am inclined to say that I had gone on pilgrimages of sorts even though I did not intend to.
Some Bear Stories
You can’t camp or hike in bear territory for long without encountering bears. I have seen bears six times. Actually, I haven’t seen the bears each of those times, as you will see. Here are several of the most memorable encounters.
Ambling Along the Trail
I was hiking on a mountain trail in southern Colorado, heading back to the trailhead. I rounded a curve in the trail and there, two or three hundred feet in front of me, on a straight stretch of the trail, was a black bear, ambling in the same direction I was headed. It was going about a quarter of a mile an hour, and I was walking about two and a half miles an hour. I could see that I would quickly catch up to it.
“Uh, oh,” I though. “How am I going to get back to where we were staying?” Linda was with me on that trip, and I had visions of her worrying about me not returning. There was no way I could get around the bear, as there was impenetrable bush beside the trail—trees, tangled bushes, brush. I panicked.
But then I thought, “Maybe I should tell the bear I am here.” So I did.
I yelled to it, “Hey, bear. This is Cliff. I am back here behind you, walking on the trail. I need to get past you. I hope you don't mind my passing you. I am harmless, a friendly human.” As I yelled, I waved my arms all around to make myself look big, so that the bear would be properly impressed.
It heard me. It slowly turned its head around, keeping its torso straight on the trail, looked at me, slowly turned his head back, then just as slowly headed into the brush at its right—thick bushes and trees.
I let it go a ways, then yelled, “Thank you, bear. Thank you very much,” then resumed walking. When I got to the place where it had been, I yelled, “Okay, bear, I am passing you now. I hope you have a good rest of the day. Thanks for letting me pass.”
Sniffing at My Tent
One night the wind was screeching through the pines and Aspens and making the fly of my tent flap against the tent. That woke me up several times.
One of those times, as I was snoozing, half conscious, I suddenly heard a panting and a distinct scrunchy sniffing noise not more than a foot and a half from my head. (If you draw air quickly through your nose while your mouth is open, you can duplicate that noise.)
I tensed up, terrified. A bear!!
I quickly reached for my bear whistle, which I had put on the floor of the tent near my sleeping bag, and just as I did, the distinct scrunchy sniffing noise stopped. It had lasted no longer than a couple of seconds.
Why was a bear sniffing at my tent? It wanted food. I had put all my food into the bear box at the campsite. Perhaps it was doing a routine investigation.
However, I had recently lubricated the tent’s zipper with scented lip balm, so maybe the bear had smelled that and, fortunately, decided it was not edible. If it had smelled anything edible, it would have swatted the tent to get at what it had smelled, and I might not have been alive to tell you this story. (I later bought some unscented zipper lubricant.)
A little later that night, I had to get up to use the outhouse. I looked up and down the campground roadway with my little flashlight as I walked to the outhouse. No bears.
The next day I asked the camp manager about the sniffing. She said that a bear had been visiting the campground recently.
Into the Car
It was my last day in Colorado, in 2019, and I decided to get a shower. I took my camp towel to a nearby camp store and paid my three dollars for a shower.
Back at the campsite, I hung my very wet towel on the rearview mirror for it to dry. It was pretty windy that day, and the wind blew the towel off the mirror. I draped the towel on a nearby bush. The wind blew it off there as well.
I didn’t want to pack a wet towel with my other things, so I hung the towel on the front passenger seat of the car and opened the back window near the towel an inch to let the humidity out.
I forgot to close the window before I crawled into the tent for the night. I don’t remember whether I locked every door, as I usually did.
At some point in the middle of the night I heard noises. I was not fully awake when the thought went through my head that maybe a bear was batting the things I had seen on the picnic table at the adjacent campsite.
Someone turned on the lights of their car, and the noise stopped.
A little later, I heard the batting noise again, but I was too groggy to think straight.
I emerged from my tent first thing in the morning to see that the back door on the passenger side of my rental car was wide open. The car was a hatchback, and I had lowered both back seats so as to have room for my suitcase. But there was no suitcase. And all of my things were strewn around haphazardly in the hatchback space.
I thought, “Oh, no! How am I going to get back home??? I can’t check a trash bag full of things at an airline.” (I had brought big trash bags with me, just in case.)
Then I walked around the car, and there in the middle of the campground roadway was my suitcase, open and empty.
I inspected the windows of the car. There were paw marks on them and also on the car just above the windows. Plus there were paw marks at the inlaid handle of the door whose window I had forgotten to close.
I looked through the mess in the car. And there it was—an empty, plastic bowl into which I had put my prepared breakfast mix the night before, licked clean by the bear.
Fortunately, I had brought an extra packet of breakfast mix (again, just in case). So I could have my usual breakfast. But what could I eat it in? Certainly not the bowl that had been licked clean by a bear.
“Ah!” I thought. I can use the little metal pot for my camp stove. The lid for the pot had been bent out of shape by the bear, I discovered, but the pot itself was pretty much intact. And my plastic camp spoon was also intact.
So I had my usual camp breakfast except that while I ate it I berated myself for not putting that bowl of breakfast mix into the bear box along with my other food.
Terror
I had been to the top of Medicine Bow Peak in southeastern Wyoming three or four times before. Each time I had seen the large sign at the trailhead warning hikers of lightning. You could die above the tree line, which is where you were most of the way to the peak.
Thunderstorms usually rolled in during the mid to late afternoon. This time I started up at 8:30 in the morning, got to the peak about 11:30, and sat down to eat my lunch.
I was about halfway through when I noticed a clouding sky in the distance. “I better head down,” I thought.
I packed the rest of my lunch and started down.
Then I saw lightning. “Uh, oh,” I said to myself. “I should count the seconds until I hear thunder.”
Ten seconds. Two miles off.
Thunderstorms can travel about twelve miles an hour, which meant that the one near me would take only ten minutes to arrive. It had taken me two and half hours to get from the tree line to the peak. That meant I could be enveloped in lightning, thunder, and rain before I had a chance to get very far.
Instantly, terror struck me. It was sharp and intense. It dominated my consciousness.
There was more lightning and thunder. Still ten second intervals. Still two miles off.
The big thing about the tree line is that there are no trees above it. No forests. No stands of trees to hide from lightning. Just low lying brush, plus lots of rocks and an occasional boulder.
I walked faster. The trail was rocky, and I could not safely run or speed walk.
I rehearsed the procedure I would follow if the lightning got close or it started to rain. Stop. Take off my backpack. Put my keys, belt, and change into it. Put on my poncho. Put the backpack into a large, plastic garbage bag. Dump the backpack. Walk fifty feet and lie down in a gully. But there were no gullies, just trail and flat, rocky soil. So lie down on the trail. Or get on my hands and knees. I wasn’t sure which.
I drilled myself on the procedure again and again.
And again and again there were ten seconds between lightning and thunder.
I remained terrified.
Just as I reached the tree line, and safety, an hour and a half from the time I left the peak, it started to rain, lightly. But by then the thunder and lightning had ceased.
My terror left.
This wasn’t the first time I had felt terror at the imminent prospect of dying.
Twenty-five years earlier, I was lying on the living room couch reading the editor’s introduction to Leo Tolstoy’s short novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I read that Ivan Ilyich had died when he was forty-five.
Somehow, inexplicably, that produced in me a terror so acute that my heart thumped and I gasped for breath. Forty-five was only a few years off. I, too, could die then.
I had been familiar with the common existentialist distinction between thinking about death in the abstract and feeling the reality of one’s own death. I had read statements such as Soren Kierkegaard’s that it is “only a jest if [one] contemplates death and not himself in death, if he thinks of it as the human condition but not his own” (Kierkegaard, “At a Graveside,” in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton University Press, 1993], 73).
I had prided myself on the fact that, unlike the common run of humanity, I had been one who had felt his own death. I had not been fooled into thinking I had done so merely because I had thought about death abstractly.
Yet on that afternoon in my early forties I learned that I had never truly felt that death was something that could happen to me. And when I gasped for breath because of the sharp, almost violent, terror that came upon me, I instantly exclaimed to myself, “No, I will not die then.” Instantly again, I saw this for what it was—a lie fabricated solely to ward off the terror. In spite of that humiliating and deflating realization, I continued, in desperation, to believe the lie.
(Quoted from my Religion and the Meaning of Life: An Existentialist Approach [Cambridge University Press, 220], 47–48)
Lest it be thought that terror has been my only reaction to death, I add that Mary Oliver’s “letting go” sometimes streams into my heart. At the end of her poem, “In Blackwater Woods,” she writes,
To live in this world
You must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
(From Mary Oliver, American Primitive [Little, Brown and Company, 1983), 82–83)
I imagine it is my last hour, my last ten minutes, my very last minute, and I am still hanging on to all that I love and hoping that it isn’t really my last minute.
I imagine saying to myself, “I must give up my hope that what I think is the last minute really isn’t. I have to let go of all I have loved, now.”
And so in imagination I do. And that imaginative letting go makes me believe that when the time has come for me really to let go, I can.
Moreover, because I believe in life beyond the grave, I add anticipation to my mix of feelings about death, not knowing what that future life will be like, but hoping it will include some of the loves I am supposing I will have to leave behind and believing it will include new and wonderful loves as well.
On a Mountain Peak
If you took a flying leap,
You would end up mangled,
Maybe alive, maybe not.
You don’t leap, of course.
Your gaze is fixed
On other mountain peaks.
Your mouth is open,
Partly with awe,
Partly because the air is thin
And you have just climbed
A mound of boulders,
Itself a little mountain.
You are worried that a thunderstorm,
With the chance of lightning striking,
Will move in before you have
Gotten back below the tree line.
So you leave after thirty-five minutes,
But not before you have
Eaten your sandwich
And sat for a few minutes
In the rock windbreak
To keep yourself from shivering
In the sharp wind.
At the top of Mt. Audubon in Colorado
A Rural Mexican Funeral
San Jose del Pacifico is a tiny town 132 kilometers south of Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico. I had traveled there on a careening, jolting, second-class bus on January 4, 2006. When I got to San Jose, I found four small cabins just off the main road, one of which I rented for $10 a night. The bathroom for the cabins was down an outside walkway and behind a door that was open at the bottom six inches and at the top eighteen inches. The water for the shower was hot, but it was cold in the two sinks just outside the bathroom.
Early in the afternoon on the day after I arrived, the church bells rang. There were two rings—an insistent high-pitched jangle and then a lower-pitched peal. Not long after both had ceased, I heard music coming from the single road that goes through the town. I left my cabin to see what was going on.
A procession of about seventy-five people was making its way up the road. I walked after it and soon saw that at the head of the procession a casket lay on the bed of a slowly moving pickup truck. Behind the truck there was a nine-piece band consisting of four saxophones, two drums, a trumpet, a bass trumpet, and a tuba. The band played a tune for twenty or thirty seconds, then walked for a couple of minutes as the procession wound its way toward the town’s church. The large horn of the tuba rose above all of our heads.
When we got to the church, everyone stood outside its entrance for close to an hour, waiting for the funeral to begin. The women held flowers they had picked. The band played now and then, and the town misfit arrived and sung haphazardly and unceremoniously. The night before he had done the same in the local restaurant I had happened to be in. That morning I had seen him sleeping on a pile of wood—sprawled, dirty, and unkempt.
Finally, the funeral was ready to begin. Two men moved the casket to a wood frame. Four men, two at each end, picked up the frame and moved it and the casket to the front of the church. Everyone followed.
The church was typical of Mexican Catholic churches. There were paintings on the walls, statues, and an ornate altar, though the church was not nearly as ornate as the cathedrals in Puebla and Oaxaca. The pews were made of plain wood, with merely two horizontal slats to support one’s back. There were no kneelers. At the appropriate time during the hour-long service, everyone knelt on the hard, ceramic-tile floor. I did as well. The misfit stood in the back of the church, singing inappropriately. That did not, however, last during the whole service. Either he was guided out or he left of his own accord.
After the funeral, during which I recognized only two words—”Amen” and “Alleluia,” about half of the people who were present went to the front to view the person in the casket, which had been open since the beginning of the funeral. After the casket was closed, six men carried it to the pickup truck. The truck moved toward the dirt road that ran past the church, and everyone followed it. By this time the group had increased to over a hundred Mexicans with one lone American trailing along at the end.
The procession made its way slowly to the cemetery, while the nine-piece band played intermittently, mostly the same tune. It was not in a minor key, as I would have expected, but neutral and even bright. Traffic on the road had to stop and wait for the procession to pass.
At the cemetery the casket was set beside the grave while two men prepared to lower it into the grave with two long, blue ropes. They lowered it, then pulled the ropes back out. A flower or two were thrown into the grave, and a large plastic bag was thrown into it. The bag looked as if it contained clothes.
Two men then took shovels and started shoveling dirt into the grave from the large pile next to the grave. After ten or fifteen minutes, two other men relieved them. It took thirty or forty minutes to shovel all the dirt into the grave and form a large mound above it. I found myself crying a couple of times while the shoveling was going on. Again, the band played intermittently.
After the mound of dirt next to the grave had been thoroughly leveled, six large plastic buckets were placed on the mound of dirt that had been built over the grave. The flowers that the women had been holding were placed into the buckets. Then two long candles were placed into the dirt and lit. They were at least two feet long, so that the flames on them were nearly level with the flowers. At this point, the priest said words, probably a prayer. When he finished, someone blew the flames out on the candles and pulled the candles out of the dirt. All of us gradually dispersed as the band continued to play. Then it, too, left.
From the time I had joined the procession to the time I left the cemetery it was three and a half hours. I felt as though I had witnessed something deeply profound.
Seasick in a Mexican Kayak
I decided to take a week’s trip to Arizona and Mexico in January, 2008. I found a place that rented kayaks on a beach in San Carlos, Mexico, on the Gulf of California about 250 miles south of the border. Ann, who graduated from Trinity College in 2004, had arranged for her sister, her sister’s boyfriend, and two friends, Jonathan and Emi, along with Ann herself, to go with me. I reserved kayaks for six. We drove from Tucson, Arizona, to Guaymas, Mexico, found rooms at a cheap hostel, and drove to the beach at nearby San Carlos the next morning.
Four of us had single kayaks, while Ann’s sister and her boyfriend took a double kayak. We set out in the middle of the morning and landed forty-five minutes later on an island inhabited by seagulls. We spent ten minutes there, then set off toward another island. We could not land there, so we headed for a small beach on the far side of an enormous rock that protruded from the sea.
After a bit the wind kicked up some, not hugely, but enough for small waves to begin to form. My kayak swayed, and my stomach began to get queasy. I could not paddle well, and I began to wonder whether I could make it to the beach. All of the others were far ahead of me, way out of shouting distance. If they landed without me, they might not have been able to find me, as kayaks are not visible from a distance on the open sea.
Soon, however, Ann noticed that I was lagging behind and paddled back. I told her I was seasick and felt weak. In another minute I told her I might throw up. It happened. Fortunately, I had picked up a large paper cup on the sea half an hour earlier, which I used to catch my breakfast. If I had leaned over to dump it into the sea, I would have fallen into the cold water, as kayaks have high centers of gravity.
Having my stomach empty helped some, but it wasn’t enough, and I had to use the paper cup a second time. I was still weak, though, and could not paddle well, so I suggested to Ann that maybe she could pull me with a shoelace. She tied one of her shoelaces to her kayak, then to mine, and tried paddling. It didn’t work. The shoelace was too short and my kayak kept hitting hers.
I was, fortunately, able to paddle a little, and eventually made it to shore, where the others had landed some time earlier. There I lay on the rocks behind a windbreak for about fifteen minutes. I had felt so bad while on the sea that once, for just an instant, when it felt as if my kayak would tip me into the ocean, I didn’t care whether I lived or died. I just wanted the awful feeling to go away.
When it was time to return, the others decided that I should go in the double kayak in case I got seasick again. Ann would go in it too. She took the front and I took the rear.
The water near the shore was fairly calm, but further out the waves were bigger than before. From trough to crest, they were one to one and a half feet high, with an occasional whitecap. That got me debilitated again, and I had to land.
We found a small beach and landed. I lay on the sand for ten minutes, then Ann pushed herself into the sea. She and the kayak were promptly covered with a splashing wave, but she was able to keep going. I set off walking along the cliffs beside the sea.
I made it back okay, and so did Ann, though I was struck with panic several times when I lost sight of her among the choppy waves. We met at a shallow pool near our destination and took turns dragging the kayak along the water at the beach, barefoot, wet, and happy to be alive.
Eating Grasshoppers
You find them in the downtown market
in Oaxaca, Mexico—three sizes:
too small to tell that they are grasshoppers,
large enough to fly,
and in between—heads, legs, bodies, and
nascent wings clearly visible.
They are sold by a peasant woman who has
harvested them herself.
You buy half a handful of the small ones
for five pesos,
then pop a pinch of them into your mouth.
They are heavily spiced
and do not taste like grasshoppers
(or what you thought grasshoppers
would taste like).
Nor are they crunchy and squishy like
the ones with bodies and legs.
You bid goodbye to the peasant woman
with a little wave
and walk out to the crowded street,
delicately holding your bag of insects.
All Night in a Country Cemetery
It was country dark, with only the Milky Way
casting pale shadows of trees and gravestones
onto the dead.
I lay near one of those shadows
over Margaret and David Ryerson,
who had been lying there for several decades—
first David, then Margaret some years later.
It was easy to fall asleep, once my anxiety subsided,
easier, no doubt, than it had been for
Margaret and David to die.
I woke at first dawn,
gathered my dew-wet sleeping bag,
and left my sleeping companions
as quietly as I had joined them.
In Britt, Iowa, during a trip to the annual hobo convention there.
© 2024 by Cliff Williams