If you are over 50 you likely remember the classic movie hit parade of the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s — those annual TV screenings of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory just after New Year’s, Mary Poppins in the spring, The Wizard of Oz near Thanksgiving, and It’s a Wonderful Life in December. Then there was The Godfather around Easter for reasons I never understood, but only after you were deemed old enough to handle the horse head in the bed. And, if you had really smart parents, Psycho. What better way to nip those lengthy teenage showers in the bud?
But the one I most looked forward to each year, back in the dark ages before the internet or even video stores, was The Sound of Music. That flick hit all my buttons. Raised Catholic, my young-girl dreams vacillated between the nunnery and romance. Enter Maria, so beautiful in nun-cut hair, proper and funny in her postulant’s pinafore, sent off by a saintly Mother Superior to fall in love with a handsome captain. My step-dad was an enlisted man, so a captain was a seemed like a to me.
I skipped right past wanting to be any of the “Do Re Me” singing Von Trapp children, even the budding Leisl. No – I yearned to be Maria, flinging my arms wide open, belting out “The Sound of Music” in the foothills of the Swiss Alps.
I knew the movie pretty much by heart. But in rewriting it with my Barbies over many years, I extended the last scene so the story ends with Maria marching her merry family of curtain-dressed singers up, up, up and away from the Nazis into the snow capped Alps and then down, down, down into the lovingly neutral arms of the Swiss.
So, when my 10th grade class bussed across the Alps during our end-of-year ski trip, I sat glued to my window with streams of “The Lonely Goatherd” and “Edelweiss” dancing in my head. I would have exchanged my fur-lined pink snowsuit for Maria’s black and gray-striped habit in a heartbeat, and the snow outside for that wide grassy knoll from the opening credits.
I kept this to myself of course. A self-conscious wallflower, this trip was my debutante debut. It took place the Monday after I got my first Farah Fawcett haircut. The pink snow suit, which was the tightest thing my mother ever bought me, won me the “snow bunny” award during the ceremony at the end of the trip – to my great embarrassment and secret thrill. As soon as I got home I begged my mom to throw out half my baggy closet. The Alps, cinematically scoring my childhood, now pushing me toward womanhood.
Travel forward 40 years and what I wouldn’t give to be trekking in the Alps right now.
I’m sure I am not alone in this. But wishing doesn’t seem to be getting me any closer to Austria in these endless days of travel bans and quarantines. So, rather than strangle myself in melancholy for foreign trails – and just for fun – I Googled “Alps near me.”
Low and behold!
Who needs the Swiss Alps when you have the “Issaquah Alps” a mere 15 miles from your doorstep?
Turns out that is the unofficial moniker of the slopes along a 40-mile stretch of Interstate 90 east of Seattle. According to wikipedia, these Alps include Cougar Mountain, Squak Mountain, Tiger Mountain, Taylor Mountain and all other mountain-ish, ridge-y areas from the North Cascade foothills through the highlands of Issaquah (a suburb of Seattle).
A week after our 2021 Snowpocalypse here in the Puget Sound, the confused daffodils stood up, the cherry blossoms shyly ventured out, and someone painted the sky blue. And just like a whole slew of other Seattlites, Posie and I took this as our cue to run for those Alps. After a week of Zooming eight hours a day into rooms with 15 people or more, I was yearning to commune with nature in solitude. My soul needed a practically unpeopled walk. Somehow I chose the 6-mile Longview Peak and Far Country Lookout Loop.
As we neared the trailhead, I assured myself that the dozens of cars lined up bumper to bumper along I-90 were filled with people heading to other trails. Apparently I missed the bit on the website where they said the loop I chose is one of the most “heavily trafficked” in the entire trail system.
A fairly easy hike, the route was, in so many ways, the medicine I needed. Waterfalls, lush green forest, a well-kept path, wildflowers, birds. What more could I ask for in all that brilliant nature?
How about this: blessed aloneness. Half a mile in I realized that wasn’t going to happen. Every few minutes runners dashed past Posie and I in a rainbow of brightly-colored LuluLemon runwear.
Posie likes to nose around a path, so going at our snail’s pace we ran into – and sniffed – no less than 20 dogs and their humans as we made our way up to the lookout. I felt a wince of annoyance as the humans passed — that they got the same itch I did to take a hike, that they were too slow donning their masks, that the bloody virus continues (and continues and continues) to make that quick-cover maneuver necessary. If a gal screams in the woods….
When we got to the viewpoint and stopped to take a breath, I noticed Posie poking at me with her own bothered eye. She has a way of arching her brows such that you can almost hear her sighing, or reaching into her inner-Yoda for the right admonishment.
What I heard was: “Get over yourself. You aren’t the only one whose parade got a little rain today.”
I looked around the rest stop. All in all there were about 10 other hikers there taking a breath. Mostly, I noticed, they were couples. Since I was once half of a couple (sigh) I got Posie’s point. They too were likely hoping for some alone, unmasked, time.
But here we all were, healthy and more than six feet apart with a good breeze blowing any COVID germs out of the picture. Far from put out, the people around me looked happy, glowing, oxygenated, relieved — as if they’d just come out of a bunker and up into the air.
And we had – all of us – done just that. Not only have we been COVID-locked for more than a year, we were all snowed in just a few days before – and rain promised to keep us in again the next week. What a blessing to come up out of our bunkers and see other humans – not standing on 6-feet-apart floor stickers in the Trader Joe's, but instead using our innate sense of safe distance in a forest.
I nodded at All-knowing Posie, which is my telepathic way of saying to her: “Your right. Get over myself, indeed.” I gave her a beef bit.
What she heard, of course, was: “Oh wise dog, I worship you and lay my morsel gift at your feet.”
Which is mostly true.
As we looped back I put my headphones in, opened Spotify, and hit play on The Sound of Music soundtrack “50th Anniversary” edition. It’s actually 56 now, but who’s counting?
All these years after my first viewing of that film, I was flooded with happy memories. The popcorn my dad made, my siblings and I singing along, jumping up and racing to the bathroom during commercial breaks and scrambling to get back in time. The wishing myself into Maria’s shoes. The tromping up a hill with snow-capped mountains just ahead. A classic movie, a cherished childhood memory.
I can’t get to the Swiss Alps right now, but the Issaquah Alps are an awfully nice alternative. Just as easy to imagine myself in my black and gray-striped pinafore or dancing with Captain Georg here as there.
My enthusiasm must have been infectious because I passed an older couple heading up to the lookout, they stopped and started to clap.
Only then did I realize I was singing out loud. Very loud.
We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men... But in every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the Universe is through a forestwilderness.
— John of the Mountains (John Muir, naturalist)
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