Atopos: When the Path Gives Out

When I first moved to Oregon I discovered hiking in the Pacific Northwest wasn’t quite like the hiking I had done in Texas or along the AT in New Jersey. The guidebooks say things like some places are best June through August…they don’t say “can kill you” in March.

On my first really big trip my friend Rob Ayers took me along with my black lab, Rigby, to walk the 39 miles Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood in early July. I was prepared for the trail to be hard- I knew there would be a lot of elevation gain and loss. What I wasn’t prepared for were the number of times we would come to places where the trail simply gives out. Especially at river crossings, the glacial melt changes the flow of the rivers and creeks dramatically throughout the spring and summer completely obliterating the trail at times. The first time this happened I was quite literally bewildered. I felt the vastness of the wildness and the anxiety of knowing I didn’t know how to where to go to move forward and it was too late to turn back. Fortunately, none of this was new to Rob. He was probably surprised at my response but was too kind to say anything. He told me this was when you realized you were on an adventure and just have to move in one way and then another before the trail would be clear again.

I have known this painful, exciting place several times in my life- the place where you don’t feel you can go back the way you came but you have no sense for the pathway ahead. Philosopher Jacques Derrida called this the atopos: the place that is no place. Navigating these transitions requires the courage to be in the middle when the way forward is not obvious, and grit not to go backtrack, and the presence of mind to still ourselves such that we can expand our vision and cultivate ears that hear and eyes that don’t just look but see.

Atopos: When the Path Gives Out

the sun rising over a sea of clouds

Jefferson and his Three Sisters

peaking through to the south.

The trail cuts into the thin alpine dust

marked deep by the many boots

of those who walked this way before us

this path is long and winding but clear. 

Falling down into the jagged

scree of Zig Zag canyon

we downclimb swtichbacks

our eyes seeing the long path down

followed by the steep return back up.

And then we come to our reward:

Paradise park meadows stretch

beneath snowy pumice fields

and the mountain’s loom while

lupines climb, red paintbrush burn

and white tufts of bear grass bloom.

Later we descend through Doug fir

realms with rhododendrons commanding

the undergrowth and come to Romana falls

her thin, white streams of water velveting

over her smooth, black basalt face.

But before all of that the Sandy River

roars through our pathway, two hundred

yards of rocks, wood, and debris on

both sides and something entirely new-

no trail to be seen leading in or away.

Over the Spring the snow melt swells

and ebbs, the river’s course wanders

and these feeble human tracks

are no match, erased, effaced

by the unsntoppable glacial flow. 

With no pathway forward

and being too late to turn back

we find ourselves in a new,

unsettling place. We have come

to the atopos: the place that is no place-

the point where the path gives out.

At first we rush around, our eyes

wide with anxiety, looking to see

any signs of a trail. Then settling down,

slowing our pace, we sat and heard the 

river’s flow and heard that it wasn’t lost

and while we had stepped away from

all we had known and could not yet

see where we needed to go we would

slowly, stumblingly find our way.

When you have come to the point

where the path gives out, the place

that is no place. Slow down. Pause. 

Look around. Go first one way. Then another.

Honor the painful, wild gift of this in between space.