What if the sun didn’t have to set?
I’ve thought often about this. Suppose, for a moment, that the Earth turned at your own whim. Cool mornings, lazy afternoons, and warm evenings passing in and out as you please. If your soccer game is lasting just a bit longer than expected, you can hold back the stretching shadows of late afternoon as long as needed. If you aren’t ready to say goodbye to the sparkling morning dew in your garden, the gentle, filtering six o’clock light will remain exactly in its place until you’ve had your fill. But then, there is the night. If you moved the sun, would you ever let it set? Would you ever let go of the sweetness of day, ever dip the burning sun below the horizon and venture into the chilly, dark unknown? What if you could freeze alongside the sun – if you could stay a child forever? Would you choose to grow up? These quiet inevitabilities in life – the sunset, the rain, the inexorable process of growing up – are sometimes rather easy to ignore or simply lose to the monotony of routine. Perhaps these are the things that make us human. But if we could hold them off, would we?
Standing on a faint trail in southern Ansel Adams Wilderness in waning twilight, I cursed these inevitabilities. Things like the sunset are easy to forget until you’re rummaging through your pack in the darkness searching for the headlamp that you know, in your heart of hearts, is not there. And things like growing up are easy to forget until you are suddenly and bewilderingly alone.
I stopped being afraid of the dark before most kids do. At age five, my dad sat me down and explained to me that I needn’t be afraid of the stretching moon-shadows and shifting shapes where my closet and my overactive imagination converged. Standing barely to his waist, I believed him. Six-foot-five, broad-shouldered, and well-groomed, there was no insecurity or doubt that could stand up to his reassuring presence. I didn’t need a reason. When Dad was around, the night fled. He shouldered the demons of childhood without fail, as was Dad’s way. His father, another giant of a man, had done the same for him. The Moller men take care of their own. Nighttime became an abstraction, something I could banish with the flick of a switch and the secure latching of the solid oak front door that Dad had built. Growing up, the dynamic between myself and my father was simple – he would lead, and I would follow.
The first time I went camping with my dad, I was six. It was wholly unremarkable, yet it remains burned into my senses like the afterimage of a sunny day after retreating into a dark room. I recall so vividly the spicy scent of pine duff underfoot and the choking dust of the horse trail we trundled along for the flat five miles between California Forest Route 6N60 and Sword Lake. I stopped often to collect sticks. My tiny red outframe pack contained animal crackers – the frosted kind, of course – an old sleeping bag, and a book. Throughout the next eleven years of overnight adventures, I was always encouraged to sacrifice a bit of space and weight to bring a book. “Take a bit of familiar distraction into the wilderness. The darkness is different in the backcountry,” Dad would say. And I would skoff.
But the Sierra Nevada darkness is different. It’s an expansive, inky blackness emblazoned with stars that don’t twinkle so much as they burn. The towering sequoia trees cease to exist in physicality and become frozen columns of negative space. There is no ignoring it. You are acutely, intimately aware that the night is upon you, around you, and within you. The darkness hurts your eyes more than the brightest sunlight as your pupils yawn out at the void, searching for the faintest reflection off of the cold stillness of a lake or the bleached bones of a whitebark pine. In early September, the night lasts ten hours. It is in these ten hours, in that darkest of darks, that I left my childhood behind.
Every culture in every corner of the globe has a rite of passage, a transitional period between childhood and adulthood. In the Brazilian Amazon, boys at age thirteen will don a pair of wicker gloves that have had bullet ants, known to deliver among the most painful insect stings known to humankind, woven into their fabric. The boys will spend ten minutes wearing the gloves, during which they are forbidden from moving or crying out. In Amish tradition, teenagers will be sent out on Rumspringa, a month-long chance for them to experience the world outside of their community unsupervised and unrestrained. If they return home, it is seen as a gesture of commitment and lifelong devotion to the Amish way of life. The Maasai of Kenya give teenage boys a mixture of alcohol and cow’s blood before circumcising them and initiating them into the warrior class. The Vanuatu of the South Pacific throw themselves from 100-foot wooden towers with vines tied to their feet to arrest their fall, while their mothers clutch vestiges of their childhoods that they will later burn. I had read about all of these in National Geographic, and my initial shock had given way to confusion – when would I know that I was an adult? It seems as though Western civilization has blurred the lines a bit, but I certainly knew that some people were adults and some were children. Where did the transition occur? Then, further in the article, I read about Walkabout.
In the Australian bush, Aboriginal boys will go on Walkabout some time between the ages of eleven and sixteen. Lasting as short as a week and as long as six months, this ancient ritual marks the transition between boyhood and manhood. The boys will give a brief goodbye to their immediate family before setting out on foot to an uncertain fate. Early records of this tradition indicate that about three in ten of the boys would not return. But this, to the Aboriginals, is no great tragedy. It is no dishonor to the family, nor a poor reflection on the boy. He was not prepared to make it on his own, and life goes on. The Aboriginals will say, “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.” If a boy did not return home, he had found a different one.
Never had I expected to experience a Walkabout of my own. But life has a way of throwing wrenches in one’s delicately constructed machinery of routine, and when I opened the email titled “Your Stanford Admissions Decision” and saw the word congratulations, I knew that everything had changed. Suddenly, the future was looking me in the eyes in a direct, unblinking stare and I was unable to meet its gaze. The prospect of living on my own, calling my own shots out from under the protective eyes of my parents was daunting. Sensing my angst, my dad took me aside and suggested that I plan something for myself. Using the example of what he considers to be his formative journey, a solo drive down the Pacific Coast Highway from Washington to Stanford to begin his new life, he told me that every person must undertake an odyssey of both time, space, and self before they are prepared to address the world as the adult I hoped to be on my first day at Stanford. I knew almost immediately that a backpacking trip, previously a hallmark of my dependance on my father for guidance, would serve this purpose. I was sure from the beginning that it would be simple. This was to be my Walkabout. I think that every teenager has one eventually – mine just involved quite a lot of literal walking.
I had never planned an outdoor trip by myself before. To be honest, I hadn’t planned much of anything. In the clarity of hindsight, I was woefully underprepared; even after my years of adventuring with Dad, my first move was to sit down and Google “what to take solo backpacking.” I would accept no help from my father. The laundry list I picked up from the first website I encountered was so aggressively comprehensive that, by the time I had gathered, bought, or improvised all fifty-three items on the list, my pack weighed a dry sixty pounds. I refused to let my casually concerned father help me put on the monstrosity, electing instead for ten herniated minutes of contortion before quietly asking Mom for a hand. Twenty-four hours before I was set to depart for Mammoth, I stood in my living room with Dad’s old Kelty outframe pressed against my frail adolescent inframe and wondered if this was the weight my dad felt always. It was a breathless feeling. Planning my route was rather simple, a matter of identifying somewhere that was in California, would take me roughly five days to complete, and was sufficiently rugged as to satisfy my need for danger but not such that I would need to give any serious thought to rescue plans. I landed somehow on a loop through Ansel Adams Wilderness, beginning at Devils Postpile and heading west along the John Muir trail before striking a cross-country route north to hit Thousand Island Lake and cruising back down the Pacific Crest Trail to my waiting car. Had I been to this wilderness area before? No. Had I spent more than a day off-trail before? No. Was I a seventeen-year-old male? Yes.
To add to my growing list of firsts, I had never driven more than three hours alone. And now, staring down a seven-hour pre-Odyssey into the wilds of the great Sierra Nevada in my little Volkswagen, I felt a new wave of apprehension. Facing, alone, tasks that were usually so cheerfully shared between myself and my dad had made them all at once rather sinister. But that was not to be the theme of my Walkabout, I decided. It was seven in the morning, and all was going according to plan. The time had come for me to leave, and after briefly squeezing my mother into a tight hug, I shook my father’s hand for the first time in my life. With a comically overloaded pack and a cooler full of grapes and Babybel cheese wheels weighing in the trunk, I headed east. Miles of increasingly unfamiliar roads unfolded before me until I finally lost sight of the comforting evergreen sweep of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the protective eye of my parents. I drove into the rising sun.
Three hours of Central Valley grassland gave way to the scrubby oaks of foothill woodlands and the alder-choked streams that began to hint at snowmelt. Two more hours took me over Tioga Pass and into Lee Vining, where the haze of the eastern Sierra wildfires had settled over the saline moonscape of Mono Lake, creating a Venusian aura across the landscape. On the final climb out of the Mono Lake Basin, my little Volkswagen faltered. A falter gave way to a hiccup, which gave way to a splutter and then gave way altogether. My dad likes cars, bikes, and backpacking. The first two were fruitlessly impressed upon me at various points throughout my upbringing. The latter is the one that stuck. As my engine heaved and I watched the temperature gauge swing like a compass needle, I wished I had absorbed just a little more of his mechanical acumen. One glance down at my cell phone confirmed my suspicion that I was far from service. The towering granite monoliths around my suffering hatchback would muffle any calls for help I might send, electronic or otherwise. When a park ranger eventually stopped to ask if I needed a hand, I was badly shaken. I had been sitting on the hood of my hatchback watching the sun, which had seemed to bright and so permanent just an hour ago, dip toward the edge of the great blue arc of the Sierra sky. My daylight was disappearing, and I was still an hour from the trailhead. After cooling down the engine and beginning my long climb anew, I coasted into the Devils Postpile trailhead at five o’clock. The sun, I learned, would set at seven thirty. Fresh out of an American public school, I had never had to grapple so fruitlessly with hard deadlines before. Everything had been so easy and so negotiable – and the sunset was neither.
My two hours of daylit trail were dusty. I stopped a few times to take hubristic selfies, staring off into the distance into what I believed to be the blinding light of my shining future. As it turns out, it was the sun. More accurately, it was the sun setting. After covering just over eight of my targeted ten miles in my first two hours on the trail, I was on top of the world. My muscles were flexing like well-oiled pistons, and the spiced earth and pine duff churned up by my voyaging boots smelled to me like the loftiest ideals of adventure. But all things must end, especially the daytime. Amidst the thick and stoic green of a lodgepole pine forest, the loss of daylight is a bit like the boiling of a frog; it occurs little by little, with such differential changes in the shifting yellows and oranges of the obscured skyline that a person can be completely unaware of his predicament until the pot has boiled and he is plunged into the inky darkness of the Sierras which he thought he knew so well. A glance to my watch told me it was seven thirty, and a glance around informed me that if I didn’t have my headlamp out in the next two minutes I might lose the world altogether. There was no moon. A rapid and far-from-comprehensive survey of a pack which I could no longer see as it rested two feet in front of my face revealed to me that I had forgotten a headlamp amidst my smorgasbord of “what to bring solo backpacking” items. It was at this moment that Dad would solve the problem – either with a backup headlamp, a well-timed saying about the beauty of the night, even a goddamn rollback of the sun. But I was alone, and it was my decision what to do next. A quick glance around me revealed uneven terrain, rocks, and the protruding knobs of tree roots. The cold wind slithered mercilessly over the ridge I had just summited and between the fibers of my fleece jacket. My dad’s old Kelty pack was crawling with thick black ants from the nest upon which I had set it down. This was fine, I told myself, this was fine. I asked aloud what my dad would do, what he would tell me to do – but I heard no providential inspiration. I heard my own breathing, faint above the angry wind.
Since coming to Stanford, I’ve faced snap decisions, bewildering turns of fate, and dark nights of the soul... and in those times I always harken back to that moment – standing in a moonless expanse of tree-choked wilderness with no source of light but the sparkles of panic racing behind my wide, seventeen-year-old eyes. I did what I knew I must. Without another glance at the yawning unknown of the trail ahead of me and the possibility of a campsite that didn’t involve angry carpenter ants, I set up my tent. I had no safety net and no clear path forward, metaphorically or otherwise. I had only my churning gut to consult on the matter. After fifteen minutes of breathless tent construction and wild glances into the abyss beyond the faint light of the old yellow Garmin GPS which I wielded in front of me like a beacon, I dove into my meager shelter. Too miserable to be hungry, I swallowed adrenaline for dinner and came down to a dismal, dismal low. Was this self-reliance? Was this panicked grappling with the unknown what my father felt every time he took me into the wilderness as a child? Is this what I was to look forward to as an adult? Sobbing by the gentle light of the Garmin and hardly noticing my own tears in the darkness, I laid my head between the tree roots and stared restlessly at the heaving canvas of my tent.
I do not remember precisely what I thought that night. I believe I may have descended through a few levels of Inferno. The words of my father – seventeen years of pride, disappointment, wisdom, and awful jokes – rumbled around the swaying trees and flitting shapes outside my tent. I searched through them, sifting through piles and piles of defunct wisdom about the structural dynamics of bikes, the right way to boil an egg, how to get over my first heartbreak. I realized that he and I had never covered absolute loneliness, physical and emotional isolation like I was feeling here in my canvas coffin. Why? Why hadn’t we? It seemed that Dad, even in his infinite wisdom, had skipped a lesson in the book of life. But then I realized – he knew I was coming home. I had left on my Walkabout, yes, but from it I would return. I wasn’t out there to begin a life alone. No, I was there to understand where my limits lie, to test my mettle and find it to be strong – and then to come home to those who knew and loved me for my failings and for my dependence as much as for my strive for self-fulfillment . Faith in myself went only as far as my faith in those behind me, those who made me. My dad had felt this way on his first solo, but he knew he had a supportive father waiting at home to hear about it. I glanced at my watch. It was 8:30. Dad would be sitting in his overstuffed chair, likely with our overstuffed cat. He would be thinking about me. I smiled into the void, and slipped into the softer darkness of sleep.
I awoke to the sunrise as I had never seen it before. Just as the oppressive and unavoidable darkness had driven me to explore the depths of my existential dread, the proudly rising sun brought my eyes to the heavens when they had previously been fearfully roving the earth. When I saw that glowing orb rise above the granite peaks to the east, I felt a trust not unlike that which I felt in the company of my father. There is a steadiness to the sun, a consistency that is neither flashy nor obvious, but always and infallibly present. As it illuminated the treetops and warmed my grimy face, I had my answer. Adulthood was uncertainty, yes, but it was a beautiful uncertainty – an uncertainty that makes us the imperfect humans we are. Calling my own shots did not mean never relying on my father or on the light of the sun. Leaving home to walk the trails of my own insecurity did not mean I could not, in good conscience, then return back home. As that late summer sun had waned and burned itself out over the dusky green-black pines, it had marked the end of something that had been with me for a long time. It didn’t leave with a bang or a fiery blaze as I would have expected my childhood to close. There was no holdout, no parting words. As surely as the earth moved, my life did too. I was walking forward into a great unknown as countless others had done before me, but in my pack I carried the lessons of my father, and of his father, and of his father’s father. There have been dark nights, nights when I beseech the cold reflection of the moon for guidance and receive back only silence. There will always be those. But the sun, my fiery Sierra sun, has always risen again to greet me in the morning.