The Power Pug heaved and gasped for breath. The trail, which we had spent the better part of three hours journeying over back roads and washboard to find, suddenly halted without warning – a deadend and barbed wire after a quarter mile.
All compromises come with, well, compromises. But this one – “Come on, I’d like to hike someplace I haven’t seen,” I whined – turned out to be a big one. The boyfriend found the hike, a meandering trail through the Ishi Wilderness alongside lower Mill Creek, after shooting down my idea to see Bully Hill, a one-time smelter alongside the shores of Shasta Lake.
“Shasta Lake?” he said, wrinkling his nose at the bathtub-ringed lake and the sharpened rocks that line it.
He flipped through a guidebook and convinced me on two counts: A nine out of ten for Mill Creek’s beauty and a two out of ten for its difficulty – forgetting, conveniently, perhaps, about the difficulty in getting over creeks and 20 miles of washboard to get there.
It turned out that the trailhead that we thought we had found, at the edge of camp, wasn’t the trail at all. A local with an ice chest pointed the way to a path marked only with green and white striped tape. Dunk the pug in the creek for a cool-off period and we were on our way.
And the guidebook’s rating suddenly made more sense.
A waterfall poured into a canyon creek pool, which was studded by cathedral-like columns, spires that jutted from the canyon’s edge. Oak trees dotted the valley, which was covered in raffia-hued grasses. And the centerpiece: A towering black rock, aptly named Black Rock, which rose from the canyon floor in swirling patterns, a testament to the tectonic forces that created it.
Equally formidable was a towering pine that grew straight from the base of the rock, a tangible tribute to the tenacity of survival.
As the sun set and spread golden rays across the wilderness, we passed that rock and the pine that grew tall and straight from its feet. The setting sun cast the pine’s shadow across the rock, where it fell and bent with a zig, but not a zag, before straightening out again.
“Do you remember Plato’s The Allegory of a cave?” the boyfriend asked.
“Nope,” I said, wondering what in the heck he was getting at as I examined the dichotomy of the tree, its shadow and the swirling rock.
He explained the allegory, in all of its shadowy detail. (The man has a mind like a steel trap – nothing escapes it once he’s learned it.) How, if you’re in a cave lit by fire, shadows that dance on the walls are not always what they seem. That, if you don’t have another perspective or reference point, you can be confused and tricked into believing something that you see – with your own eyes – is true. Even when it’s not.
And there it was, right at sunset, a crooked shadow that represented, at that moment, a stately tree. But the bend had more to do with the setting sun’s angle and the ragged rock that it was cast upon than the tree itself.
Oh, and the pug, once cooled, managed the hike just fine.
-Christy
Filed under: Books, Butterflies, Christy Lochrie, Outdoors, Recreation, The pug, art, conversation | Tagged: Allegory of a cave, Black Rock, conversation, Ishi wilderness, Mill Creek, Plato, shadows, sunset, tree
