Learning to Hide

Go Slow

Gray rivers of Seattle roads and highways still roared through my mind as I stumbled out of the car and along the path into Esmeralda Basin, on the edge of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in the Central Cascades of Washington state, lands of Coast Salish, P’Squosa, and other Indigenous peoples. Soon, I felt lulled by the wind in the brittle whitebark pines and the rhythm of footsteps on dry August earth. Again and again, I paused, mesmerized by the purple and red hues of petals beneath the rusting grass: I was trying to see this place through the vivid prose of the guidebook writer I was reading.

In 100 Classic Hikes in Washington, coauthored with Ira Spring, local conservationist Harvey Manning described his regrets about hiking through the area too quickly, completing a fifteen-mile loop in a day. “More than one hundred fifty species of flowers were in bloom,” he wrote, “and in my hyperkinetic rush I could do no more than