Driving through Franconia Notch on the way to Pittsburg always gets me thinking deeply about something. Sometimes it's, "Gosh, how the hell am I going to hike up that mountain today without rolling over dead", other times it's "Yes!! I cannot WAIT to ski, even though the wind is whipping 8000mph, I'm probably going to complain the whole time and fall down the entire Gary's trail". This time was different though. So I had been stuck in traffic for like oh 3 hours- absolute nightmare if you know anything about my relationship with traffic, it's not a friendly one by any means. I'm coming up on the beautiful part of 93, around exit 32 and this MASSIVE bank of fog completely engulfed the entire mountain range. The fogs billowing belly swept up the roads, and everything that I was so looking forward to looking at. Greattt. I'm like blind driving at night (my friend Jason learned this about 2 weeks ago when we were driving at night and I didn't have my glasses on: our light was red but dang the red was so bright on my poor little eyeballs that I just focused on the green facing the other direction. Jason was like Molly, red. Molly, red. Molly, red. huh? Red light! Oh, yuh can I have my glasses?). So on top of the blindness from glares, there are moose and deer everywhere. AND It was only like 5pm at this time- totally unfair to take away an hour of my vision from me with the fog. Anyways, I'm royally pissed off at this point- thanks a lot traffic and fog. Then like out of the blue, the fog totally cleared. It was the most incredible thing ever because this fog was so thick I could barely see in front of me. But right when I got to Cannon Mountain, it just completely cleared and all the gorgeous colors just took shape. So then this is when the deep thinking came into play (mainly thanks to
Bon Iver,
Gregory Alan Isakov, and
Mumford and Sons playing on my ipod). I started thinking about my school (oh god, right?) and a lot of the girls that go there. They spend all this time in the morning caking so much makeup on their faces that they look like plastic dolls to be this view of what is "beautiful". But is that really beautiful? I'm sorry, but beautiful to me can't be found in a bottle of foundation (granted, I like wearing makeup on occasion because it's like painting your face and since I suck at painting paintings, at least I can kind of paint my face nicely). Anyways, that's besides the point. The point is, beautiful was the fall leaves taking their color. Beautiful to me is how alive you feel when you breathe in the smell of wet leaves, fresh snow, spring flowers, and summer tides. It's exploring the world around you. Feeling alive isn't when you finally wake up from a 3 day hangover (sorry UJS), it's having a grizzly bear within 10 feet of you. It's sitting on a rock with your finger shaking on your trigger as you hear that stick break and see a deer ear coming up the ridge towards you, only to find out it's a doe and her two fawns (if you're me, you drop your gun and grab your camera!). It's finally getting to the top of a 4000+ foot mountain and scanning the landscape. If you can find satisfaction in that, you will be happy and feel beautiful and satisfied everyday, whether or not you look like a plastic face. I just recently read the book
"Wild Men, Wild Alaska" and there was this great Henry David Thoreau quote in it (which is not the one I'm going to use because I found one better) BUT it got me looking into more and here we go this was basically my life decision as I was driving the rest of my way up to Pittsburg for a weekend of fishing: "We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to
explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious
and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and
unfathomed by us because they are unfathomable. We can never have enough of
nature". Anyways, I made it through the fog up to camp, and I'll write more about fishing soon (it was frickin awesome). "Many men go fishing their whole lives without knowing that it is not fish that they are after"
Driving through Franconia Notch on the way to Pittsburg always gets me thinking deeply about something. Sometimes it's, "Gosh, how the hell am I going to hike up that mountain today without rolling over dead", other times it's "Yes!! I cannot WAIT to ski, even though the wind is whipping 8000mph, I'm probably going to complain the whole time and fall down the entire Gary's trail". This time was different though. So I had been stuck in traffic for like oh 3 hours- absolute nightmare if you know anything about my relationship with traffic, it's not a friendly one by any means. I'm coming up on the beautiful part of 93, around exit 32 and this MASSIVE bank of fog completely engulfed the entire mountain range. The fogs billowing belly swept up the roads, and everything that I was so looking forward to looking at. Greattt. I'm like blind driving at night (my friend Jason learned this about 2 weeks ago when we were driving at night and I didn't have my glasses on: our light was red but dang the red was so bright on my poor little eyeballs that I just focused on the green facing the other direction. Jason was like Molly, red. Molly, red. Molly, red. huh? Red light! Oh, yuh can I have my glasses?). So on top of the blindness from glares, there are moose and deer everywhere. AND It was only like 5pm at this time- totally unfair to take away an hour of my vision from me with the fog. Anyways, I'm royally pissed off at this point- thanks a lot traffic and fog. Then like out of the blue, the fog totally cleared. It was the most incredible thing ever because this fog was so thick I could barely see in front of me. But right when I got to Cannon Mountain, it just completely cleared and all the gorgeous colors just took shape. So then this is when the deep thinking came into play (mainly thanks to Bon Iver, Gregory Alan Isakov, and Mumford and Sons playing on my ipod). I started thinking about my school (oh god, right?) and a lot of the girls that go there. They spend all this time in the morning caking so much makeup on their faces that they look like plastic dolls to be this view of what is "beautiful". But is that really beautiful? I'm sorry, but beautiful to me can't be found in a bottle of foundation (granted, I like wearing makeup on occasion because it's like painting your face and since I suck at painting paintings, at least I can kind of paint my face nicely). Anyways, that's besides the point. The point is, beautiful was the fall leaves taking their color. Beautiful to me is how alive you feel when you breathe in the smell of wet leaves, fresh snow, spring flowers, and summer tides. It's exploring the world around you. Feeling alive isn't when you finally wake up from a 3 day hangover (sorry UJS), it's having a grizzly bear within 10 feet of you. It's sitting on a rock with your finger shaking on your trigger as you hear that stick break and see a deer ear coming up the ridge towards you, only to find out it's a doe and her two fawns (if you're me, you drop your gun and grab your camera!). It's finally getting to the top of a 4000+ foot mountain and scanning the landscape. If you can find satisfaction in that, you will be happy and feel beautiful and satisfied everyday, whether or not you look like a plastic face. I just recently read the book "Wild Men, Wild Alaska" and there was this great Henry David Thoreau quote in it (which is not the one I'm going to use because I found one better) BUT it got me looking into more and here we go this was basically my life decision as I was driving the rest of my way up to Pittsburg for a weekend of fishing: "We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to
explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious
and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and
unfathomed by us because they are unfathomable. We can never have enough of
nature". Anyways, I made it through the fog up to camp, and I'll write more about fishing soon (it was frickin awesome). "Many men go fishing their whole lives without knowing that it is not fish that they are after"
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