Sep 6, 2016
By Matt Davenport
Feeling Insignificant on Serene Mt. Rainier, USA
The feel of snow in August is a unique experience reserved for those in either extreme latitudes or significant altitudes. Mt. Rainier certainly qualifies for the latter category. I had taken a break on the side of the Mountain to prep for my final push towards Camp Muir, a staging area which sits about 4,000’ short of the summit of Mt. Rainier at 14,411’. Although I needed to catch my breath for the climb ahead, this task seemed figuratively impossible given the breathtaking vista surrounding me. To the south lay the smoke-obscured teeth of the Tatoosh range, and beyond them the still-visible volcanic peaks of St. Helens and Adams. Looking to the West, I saw the Cowlitz Glacier dissipating to thin waterfalls that collected in the valley below. But it was the northern view that was the most commanding, as this sight contained the camp, the summit and a blinding stretch of steep snow that constituted the rest of my hike.
Moments like this take me back to a line I overheard in Seattle just a few days before my hike: “The great thing about nature is how it makes us feel small”. I disagreed with the speaker, at least in part. If the feeling of smallness was truly all we sought in nature, there really would be no reason to travel there. Smallness is so much easier to find in a cubical from 9-to-5, a fact I am well acquainted with. Three months prior to this evening and this hike, I was living a comfortable life in Boston with a good paying job. Stability, activity, and the prospect of upwards mobility were all luxuries I enjoyed, but it was still a small existence, a fact intensified by my oppressive anxiety and frequent panic attacks.
Conventional wisdom would have recommended, at times like this, that the weary worker take a vacation and “get your head in order”. I took the wisdom, but neglected the conventionality, boarding an Amtrak train in Boston and seeing where I could go over the next few months. This eventually brought me to the Space Needle in Seattle, where I got my first good view of Mt. Rainer. The thing was big, not just in raw mass, but with understated gravity. It gripped my attention and demanded personification, quietly scoffing at the Needle I was standing on. I left the elevator with a single conviction in mind, one that brought me to my break point on the side of Mt. Rainer, just a few hundred feet below the camp.
If ever I had sound reason for suffering a panic attack, this would be that time. I was by myself on one of the deadliest hiking trails in the country, where the afternoon sun was opening crevasses below my feet and cutting my friction-less progress to a negligible sum. What if my exertion led to a heart attack, where would they take me? Or if a storm rolls in and I lose my sense of direction? These thoughts and more could have easily crossed my mind, but none did. Instead, my focus lay in just placing one foot in front of the other until I arrived on the stone-carved steps of Camp Muir. And then I saw how small I really was. But this feeling of smallness was different than the one I knew three months prior. This experience was expansive, elevated, the kind that makes you breathe easier with a younger smile on your face. I was, in that moment, entwined within something bigger than myself without being absolved into it.
Suffice it to say, I never did return from my vacation, at least not to the job I had before. There was many more moments that lead to that decision, but the encounter with Rainier demonstrated something that I once had, had lost, and must work to awaken again. The path from here remains uncertain, but it is now a path that does at least go on..
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About the Author
Matt Davenport
I left my job in Engineering to travel and rediscover a new career path. This took my on a three month tour of America on Amtrak, followed by a three month tour of England. I'm currently living in Taunton, MA working as a teacher in a private school.