Liess Vantine, whom I've lost track of now, said he'd sometimes wake up, finding his arms full of a dozen or so books on the Spanish Civil War or a similarly esoteric subject. His life embraced sprints. Now we might say binges, as in binging intellectualism.

Liess was a true intellectual, and went through a marriage or two because of it. I respected him, and still do. He was a truly interesting and frightening person. He could instantly bore me right to the edge of gasping helplessness. I was a mere phantom lost in the beam of his massive searchlight of intellect. Liess once told me that I was far more cerebral than he. Dig it. That's where I live. In my head.

I once heard of a person who moved to Alaska, and stayed there, because it was a place where a man could still piss off his front porch, he said. I think because I am. I piss because I need to. I like to piss in the dirt. I like to eat on the ground. I like to sit in the dirt while I eat. I wade up streams, camera pack on back, 13-pound tripod as a hiking staff, searching for the meaning of meanings, standing for hours in one spot, searching for it, searching.

I bathe in lakes, sweat while embraced by a pack, hike alone through remote backcountries, sleep in a hammock. Joy is four days on the beach, in winter, alone, in the rain, thinking. Eating, sleeping, reading. Get up at eight. Finish breakfast by 10. Walk around. Start lunch by two. Walk around in the early dark. Go back to bed by five and read, listening to the wind, listening for creatures of the dark, next to the tide groping my way.

Two recent experiences live on, as mileposts in my life, both on Mt St Helens.

November on the Plains of Abraham.

The first, in November of 1997, when I hiked up Ape Canyon Trail to the Plains of Abraham, a flat under the cinder cone, to its northeast. Past the elk hunters, up higher, I was alone. The fall was dry, and there was yet no snow. At that time I didn't know the mountain well, and took an exploratory walk across the Plains westward, across what had earlier been called Abraham Flats. (Before my time -- I've known the mountain only since 1995, long after its destructive self-recreation in 1980.)

No matter how far I went, there was always something interesting lurking over the next ridge. There's no finer feeling than to be out in the open and totally alone. Under the brow of the cinder cone on the mountain's shoulder there is a wide flat valley floored in pumice and scattered boulders and otherwise bare but for a sparse beard of green herbs. When wet the gray stones turn inky black and lie on the ground like doorways into empty space on the ivory carpet of pumice. (continues)