Mountain Memories

Sensory triggers are weird. I mean, how is it that a swig of day-old, room-temperature water from a plastic 20-ounce Mountain Dew bottle should send my mind floating back 30-plus years to summer days hiking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northeastern New Mexico? 

The Abreu staff, from left: Me, Ken, Mark, Bill, John and Matt.

You know how it works: a whiff of soapy apple scent conjures memories of a girlfriend who shampooed her hair with a potion of that fragrance; a passing face resembles your grandmother, but seeing as she's been dead six years you know it can't be; that first caramel apple of autumn launches you into a reverie of childhood hayrack rides and grade school Halloween parties.
So it was that the lukewarm water at my desk tasted like the refreshment imbibed on a mountain trail three decades ago. After all, while that iodized stream water might be ice-cold in the morning when you fill your bottle — which is how you want to remember mountain stream water — it's taken on a seeming thickness from half a day baking in the Southwestern sun at 8,000 feet as it sloshed in the upper pocket of your backpack.

I’m a nostalgic sap. Those who know me know it, so there’s no sense in attempting to hide it from the rest of the world. If only my past were exciting enough and I could recall enough detail to write a captivating memoir – something more honest than “A Million Little Pieces” – I’d be set for the rest of my life. As it is, I’ll indulge myself and maybe some of my friends will be entertained in the process.

That swig of warm water earlier this week opened a floodgate to memories of my teen years from early high school to early college, when I traversed the trails for Philmont Scout Ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico, as a scout camper and staff member.  Oddly, as influential and foundational to my being as my Philmont experiences are to me, I’ve shared precious little with others – even family – over the years. I guess it just seemed too personal somehow. Like nobody else would really understand, unless he or she had been there and experienced it, too.

For whatever reason, I feel compelled to share now. So I’m beginning a little writing project. It’s lacking in form and focus, but I need to write. And while the lack of form and purpose might logically consign writing to a personal journal, the narcissist in me needs an audience. I need to know, or at least to believe that I am being read. So forgive my indulgence. All I can explain at this point is that I’ve compiled a playlist of tunes that in some way tell of my Philmont experience. 

‘One of these days I’m gonna climb that mountain…’

 

I can still picture my first camp director, Bill Tsukalas, kicked back in a chair in the Abreu cabin, lip-synching the words to the opening line from Alabama’s “Mountain Music.” It must have been my first night in the backcountry camp. I’d started the 1984 camp season around mid-June as a trading post clerk in base camp. Toward the end of the first week I was approached by trading post manager Eric somebody, who started  an odd conversation.

“I hear you like the South Country,” he said.

Philmont, 214 square miles of wilderness dotted with a couple dozen staffed camps and several more unstaffed sites, roughly in the shape of a dancing Snoopy, is generally divided into three sections: North, Central and South Country. The North is most mountainous, Central Country is the rockiest part (if it’s possible to declare that in northeastern New Mexico) and the South Country tended to be a little more barren and arid, sprawling eventually into the plains as the Sangre de Cristos petered out.

Frankly I’d always been more partial to the mining country to the north, but I was eager to carry on a friendly conversation with the boss, so I agreed.

“How would you like to work there?” Eric asked. “They need a cantina manager at Abreu.”

It seems the guy who was supposed to sling root beer and bags of chips in the adobe Cantina Del Duke backed out of the deal, leaving Philmont high and dry in need of a cantina man. I jumped at the chance. To rise from base camp to backcountry just like that was an incredible boon.

Cantina Del Duke, Abreu, 1984.

Ironically, while I looked on the opportunity as a blessing, I was told later Eric had asked several others and all had declined. Years later I read comments by past staffers who called Abreu the “armpit of Philmont.”  Ouch. Sure, it lacks the mountain glory of Baldy Town and the lush meadows of Beaubien cow camp. The front yard of the staff cabin was a freakin’ dessert. But it was backcountry – a damn site better than base camp in my opinion.

Just a couple days into my first summer in the backcountry, though, and I wasn’t really appreciating the honor of the appointment. Honestly I was feeling homesick for my new friends in base: Pete Steinhoff and Tom Bolland. We started in the TP together. Pete and I met on the bus west. Pete’s brother Wayne was at Philmont, too, hired as cook at Cimarroncito, a rock-climbing camp in the Central Country. I’d made new friends and I hated being separated from them.

Sensing my unhappiness, Bill introduced me one afternoon to one of Abreu’s non-program activities: fly fishing. The official program at Abreu (technically New Abreu, Old Abreu having been abandoned after the Flood of ’65) consisted of adobe brick-making and burro racing. But with the Rayado River burbling through our locale, campers were given the opportunity to cast a fly. Of course, few pursued it; Fish Camp, which specialized in fishing, was just up the trail.

Something in the camaraderie of that couple hours of fishing before dinner that evening calmed me and assured me I was in the right place. Bill deserves a lot of credit for that. Pretty amazing for a college guy who wore a moose hat and lip-synched to Alabama and the Oak Ridge Boys.