Encounter at Shealor Lake, a story by Ed Brownson

NONFICTION

"Silver-blue, nestled inside a deep granite bowl,
it seems more like a mirror artfully placed to show off its spectacular surroundings."

 Photo by Ed Brownson

Encounter at Shealor Lake
by Ed Brownson

The man is high, 7,200 feet high in the Sierra Nevada, but he is much higher than that. He just spent his first night ever solo camping in the mountains at a Forest Service campground called Silver Lake East, up California’s Route 88. That’s Carson Pass for those who know their California roadways, ten miles from the Kirkwood ski slopes for those who don’t. For someone who has slept in a tent less than a handful of fingers in his long lifetime, who always had that tent set up by someone more ‘assembly-required’ adept than him, it was an adventure he approached with not a little anxiety.

At age 72, in a campsite consisting of a picnic table, a bear locker for food and a chemical toilet up a short hill, he survived and loved it. After months of life tossing shit at him, mocking him for his seeming inability to solve the simplest of problems, he set up that tent, slept in it, and woke to wonder.

Truth told, the man didn’t sleep much his first night. Anxiety, the forest sounds, his overactive mind fretting over the near-inextricable mess he’d gotten trapped in back home, the transfixing white noise of a creek not ten feet from his tent, wondering if he has enough food, wondering what critters he might see, wondering if there are bears in the woods this late in the season. Wondering if he really does have to go home again.

Now, after a breakfast of yogurt, nuts, cranberries and tea, he is going on his first hike of the trip, to Shealor Lake, a few miles down the road from his tent and all that food in the bear locker. The trails app on his phone reports it’s an exquisite high country lake, unique, beautiful and rarely visited. Dean, the host at the campground, had told him much the same. “It’s a climb, though,” he’d cautioned.

When he pulls into the small trailhead parking lot, his ancient Hyundai, aka ‘The Blue Rollerskate,’ is the only car there. Getting out, he smells pines and spruce, hears wind whistling through the trees. He loves that sound. He changes his joggers for hikers, applies the first of many layers of sunscreen and bug repellent he’ll live in for the next week. Lots of repellent. Mosquitoes scare him more than any bear.

If a bear attacks, he’s done. All his problems, solved. No more housing worries, no sick roommates, no outside world behaving as it does, ruining his days and nights. Just an ugly, sticky, painful end. He doubts a bear’d actually eat him, he’s got too many nasty chemicals running through his veins courtesy the docs. But that would likely make the bear angrier, he figures. What would be worse: being eaten alive, or tasted then tossed aside, rejected as bad meat? Not a question he wants an answer to.

If he’s swarmed by mosquitoes, however, all his problems remain and are added to by exquisite physical and mental tortures worthy of the medieval church. He learned a few years back that his extreme reaction is called “skeeter syndrome”—“papular urticaria” for those who prefer their ailments in Latin—a rare allergy to the saliva the little flying Satans leave behind when they suck blood.

Skeeter syndrome is a slo-mo anaphylactic shock to the immune system, which ramps up and up and up in rebellion to the toxic spit, kicking in within minutes of a bite, worsening exponentially, spiraling him into insane itching and agitation physical and mental, even madness. He’ll do anything to get out of his skin. Even peeling it from his bones seems like a viable option in the moment. The only relief is megadose antihistamines. When he goes out to where mosquitoes are known to be, he carries full bottles of Picardin, Deet and Allegra.

——--

The trail starts climbing when he steps off the pavement. Short switchbacks of soil and scree weave through the pines taking him up. Within minutes, the trees and dirt vanish and he is in a cascade of boulders scattered across a granite dome. The rock’s color is so specific to these mountains, it has its own name, Sierra Gray. The few trees he encounters growing on the dome root themselves in the granite’s cracks. Some are just-sprouted seedlings the size of a hand, hoping—do trees hope, he wonders?—to make it through their first winter. Others, bearing the scars life paints on all of us who insist on sticking around for a while, are carved by lightning and wind, drought and snow, into living sculptures of wood and needle.

A lightning struck tree on top of the granite dome.

For once, he manages to stay on the trail. No small feat for a man who has a habit of wandering to look at whatever pretty view or interesting plant or rock or bird or snake that catches his eye, gaining the photo, only to lose the trail when he returns to his senses and turns around. This will happen to him later on this hike. But not yet.

——--

His lungs are solid. Despite surviving more bouts of pneumonia than he can count, he’s never had a problem breathing at 7,000 feet. At eight and nine thousand, the rules change, but 7,000 is easy. Smoky air at sea level is much harder on him than the thin clean air in the high country.

The Carson Wilderness is endless in front of him. So much of the forest between Highway 88 and Highway 50, the road to the north skiers take to Tahoe, has burned, and so recently, the land glows orange from roasted wood and soil, garnished by a grimy gray from the lingering ash.

The fires never end in California. Yesterday, on his way to these mountains, smoke from those currently raging in the far north of the state filled the Central Valley like dirty water rising in a bath tub. Now, he sees that same smoke creeping into the canyons below, adding to the burn scar’s desolation.

Still, he is fortunate. Behind him, above him, around, the palette is green and rich brown and sky blue. And that stunning Sierra gray.

He climbs up, step over step, barely stopping to catch his breath, almost dancing along the trail he’s so happy, until he reaches the dome’s crest. Looking down the other side, he gets his first look at Shealor Lake.

Lakes in the high country are usually surrounded by steep-sloped mountains covered in landslides of dirt and shale, a few tenacious lodgepole or white pines clinging to the slopes.

Around these lakes, mini-forests creep down to the lake’s edge. A stream, often fed by a waterfall pouring off a hanging canyon, brings in the water. A creek tumbles out the lake’s other end taking that water to California’s rivers, reservoirs, crops, drinking fountains. Granite boulders are often scattered about these alpine lakes even if no granite is nearby, pushed out of context by the glaciers that carved the valleys eons ago.

Shealor Lake seen from the top of the granite dome.

Shealor looks nothing like that. Silver-blue, nestled inside a deep granite bowl, it seems more like a mirror artfully placed to show off its spectacular surroundings. The lake’s west edge is a sheer wall of granite he guesses is a hundred feet high, maybe two, a must-go destination for rock-climbers if it wasn’t so remote. The north and east are ringed by granite mounds, mini-domes, he thinks, extending into the water like nature-made boat ramps. Only the southern shore has a copse of pine trees winding through massive granite boulders and outcrops.

——--

Standing on the dome’s crest, the man studies the altimeter app on his phone. The trailhead was at 7,400 feet, he’s near 7,700 now. There’s a lot more downhill to the lake below than back to his car. If he goes down, he will have to climb back up.

An easy decision.

The lake is too entrancing, the trail is well marked, the weather is perfect. He has nowhere else to be, no one can find him, contact him, plague him with questions, demands, decisions. He is alone, gloriously unburdened by others for the first time in ages. He is drunk on his solitude. A saying pops into his mind. There is no path but forward. No way out but through. A cliché perhaps, but he grasps onto it, a lifeline.

Down he goes to Shealor Lake.

Two thirds of the way down, the trail rounds a bend and the granite turns back into scrub and scree. Here is where he loses his way, probably trying to take a picture of the lake or the granite dome behind him, or one of those lightning-scarred trees. This happens often enough to be called a ‘quirk’ if he’s being kind about it, a flaw if he’s being real, and is why he keeps a geolocation app on his phone, one not dependent on cellphone towers—there are none for miles—but rather GPS satellites. The app keeps track of his every turn. His path overlaid on a trail map, he can see where he’s strayed from it and how to get back.

Not for the first time he wishes he had an app that did the same thing to help him navigate his messy, maze-riddled life.

He finds he’s wandered so far off the trail there’s no sense trying to make his way back. He’s not lost, not this time anyway. The lake is in front of him and below, the granite dome he’s just descended, behind and up. He can pick up the trail at the lake for the hike back. So he fords a few streams, scrambles down a boulder or three, gets mud in his shoes and brush cuts on his legs, and makes it at last to the forested end of the lake. He walks north along the lake’s eastern edge until he finds the misplaced trail. Re-centered in the world, he rounds a granite outcrop and sits on a boulder in the deep shade to catch his breath.

No fishermen angle for trout. No hikers bask in the sun, no one in technical gear climbs those impressive granite walls, now proved to be taller than he’d thought when he looked down. There are no sounds of cars or motors or chatting hikers. No phones ping, no needy others demand he tell them what to do next. The air is still, the sky deep azure, the burnt areas of the forest out of view. The world is the lake; the lake, the world. And he is in it, alone, relieved, happy.

The world is the lake; the lake, the world.

After a while, he has no idea how long, so lost is he in his surroundings, an awareness breaks into his reverie. His sixth sense triggers, the one all humans, all creatures on this difficult earth possess, a sense alerting us to a change nearby, a possible danger. In our ‘civilized’ world, we learn from a young age to push that sense aside lest its constant triggering drives us mad. But it’s still in us. It takes places like this, the man thinks, to remind us we still have this special sense of awareness.

What have I alerted to? he wonders. Not a smell, not a change in the midday breeze. A sound? A movement just beyond his perception? He’s not sure. Struggling to put words to what he is feeling, he realizes he is no longer alone.

He looks around.

Seen from the shadows, sunlit areas in the high country are color-stripped and bleached into a blinding white. Seen from those bright areas, the shadows are black, detail lost to the human eye’s narrow range, especially during mid-day. This is true of all higher elevations but it is especially true of the Sierra Nevada. Better writers than he have devoted chapters and books to the unique brilliance in the ‘Range of Light.’ The man thinks this stark contrast is a sort of blindness, a blindness induced by too much beauty.

Something alive, something familiar, four legged, aware, curious, stands still in that bleaching light. It is looking at him. He looks back. Not a deer, the legs are too short. Not a bear cub or mother. Too small. A wolverine? They’ve been spotted in these mountains for the first time in a century, but nowhere near here. And unlikely. Even the Carson wilderness is too busy an area for those solitary creatures.

A canid, he decides, definitely a canid. But what kind?

Questions, hypotheses, rejections, fears, wonder, even joy flood his mind. The creature brings to mind a coyote. They’re all over the continent, in the high desert to the east, the cities to the west. A group lives on the hill down the block from him back in San Francisco. They’re as likely to be seen in Massachusetts as in Nevada. So why not the mountains?

But maybe not a coyote. Not quite. This one’s larger than the ones he sees regularly on that hill back home. And the ears—he’s starting to notice details—the ears are upright, pointed. Coyote’s ears stick out at a near 45-degree angle. A wolf then?

But it can’t be a wolf, he tells himself. True, wolves are back in California too, but only a few, and only in the far north, at least according to the wildlife experts who keep track of their every move like teenagers following Tik-Tok influencers. Or is that old news? Wolves tend not to pay attention to how humans say they are supposed to behave or where they are supposed to go. Canids, all of them, have their own compass.

This canid tilts his head at the man sitting on his rock in the deep shade, studying him back.

The man should worry about danger but he doesn’t. He doesn’t really care, he’s stupid that way. He’s a lot more fascinated—thrilled, really—than afraid to encounter anything non-human. As he watches, he sees the canid is as curious about him as he is about it.

Then a moment of clarity, in the light and his mind, and the mystery is solved.

The large, healthy German Shepherd standing not six feet from him is as surprised to see him as he is to see her. Her head tilt is at the precise canine angle Otto used on him during their 17 years together whenever he tried to figure out what his damn human was up to next.

Context is everything, the man thinks. Coyote . . . wolf . . . Shepherd? He never would have made the same mistake back in the city.

The man lets out a startled, “Hey!” The canid tilts her head the opposite way, still taking him in. “Hi there,” the man says, gentler this time, welcoming, genuinely glad to see the shepherd. “What are you doing here?”

He always talks to dogs. Truth, he talks to every animal he encounters. The jay in the tree above his tent wanting a snack, the camp chipmunk cleaning up after his meal. He says hello to lizards and gives a ‘hey!’ to snakes and cows and deer he comes across on trails everywhere he goes. If it’s a critter he talks to it. So much easier than trying to communicate with other people. So much more satisfying.

“It’s ok!” A voice rings out bouncing off the boulders. A woman’s voice, high pitched, cheerful. He looks around but sees no one. “Don’t worry!” the voice continues. “She’s friendly!”

The dog looks back. The dog’s human comes around the same boulder the dog did. A young outdoorsy woman wearing hiking boots and shorts and a pullover designed to protect against the high country UV rays, a sunhat on her head, and a happy grin on her face.

“No worries,” the man says. “I like dogs. A lot.”

She smiles, he smiles. The dog, seeing her human relaxed and friendly, relaxes as well.

There is nothing else to say. Neither the man nor the young woman came to Shealor Lake to talk to another human, he’s sure of that. The man watches her go, at ease and home in her surroundings. She reminds him of his sister in her young years, at peace only when she was surrounded by solitude and mountains. She’s still that way. It runs in the family, he thinks.

He wishes he hadn’t taken so long to realize it; his life might have been easier. He laughs. ‘Easy’ has never been on the roster, not for him.

He moves to one of the granite mounds on the lakeshore and sits cross legged, meditative, in the sun, taking in the beauty and serenity around him. He hears a splash. A quarter of the way around the lake he sees the dog leap into the air from another of the granite slopes and dive into the water chasing after a stick the woman has just thrown. The dog brings it back to her, does the inevitable shake, drenching her. She laughs, and together they repeat the toss and fetch.

After a third throw the dog puts down the stick and passes some signal to the young woman. She pulls something out of her pack and sets it on the ground. It’s kibble in a portable dog bowl. The man can hear the canine’s crunching echo off the lake’s granite walls. His heart fills with joy and envy at the two, the human and canine, so close, so at peace with each other.

He decides to go back. He knows he should stay longer, he has the time, the weather is as perfect as the place. But he’s still wound tight from the life he leads 7,200 feet below Shealor Lake. He can’t really relax yet. He’s not sure he even remembers how, peace seems to have slipped from his body, from his very cells. He wonders if he will ever be calm again. It will take a lot to get there, this he knows for sure.

He doesn’t lose the trail on his way back to the car. His lungs and legs continue to work well, he has no problem climbing the 500 feet to the top of the dome.

At the crest he sees a couple, both older than the woman with the Shepherd, though not as old as him. They are using walking sticks and are flushed, their breath labored. They exchange the usual ‘hellos’ and ‘how is the trail?’ and ‘is it worth it?’ The man of the couple seems hesitant when the man tells them the lake is further down than the trail head behind them. The woman says she’s not sure she wants to go all the way.

“You’re almost to the crest,” he tells the stick-walkers. “At least go that far. You won’t be disappointed.”

He passes one more group just before he gets back to the trailhead. They barely nod as he passes by. They are too new on the path, they have no stake in their hike yet, no connection to the land and the critters in it. Not even the human ones. The feeling will come to them, he thinks. Or it won’t. Some people can walk miles and miles and never get away from where they started.

Back at his car, he grins with joy at his first morning in the mountains. His lungs and body are fine, his feet, a bit tired but functional. All is good.

His camp space is as he left it. Nobody stole his tent, no one of ursine persuasion wandered through and picked the bear locker lock. Half the sandwich he bought the day before in the valley below is in his cooler; he eats it. He looks around, happy, alone except for his camp-assigned chipmunk.

A few other campers wave as they walk by with their dogs. Most campers seem to have dogs by their side, he’s noticed, bigger ones for the young and adventurous like the woman and her German Shepherd at the lake, small ones for the older folks sitting in front of their RVs.

“Again,” he says out loud. “I will do this again. And with a dog next time. Definitely with a dog. And I’ll leave people, and their demands and their cruelties, seven thousand two hundred feet below.”

Author's Note: All photos were taken by me.

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Ed Brownson’s plays have been performed in California, New York and Italy, with many developmental and staged readings along the way. His latest, Tap, Tap Tap, about a woman confronting a horrible past, was selected for production as part of the Playwright Center of San Francisco’s Fall 2021 ‘Best of…’ series. He has studied playwriting at American Conservatory Theatre, Central Works Theater Company, Theater Artists’ Conspiracy and many informal venues. Recently, he has been working on essays and long and short fiction, ‘attending’ numerous pandemic-inspired Zoom classes and groups to help him along the way.

Other works in this issue:
Nonfiction:
Cat and Dog

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NONFICTION

Encounter at Shealor Lakeby Ed Brownson

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Encounter at Shealor Lake
by Ed Brownson