Nice To Meet You, Rainier

When I got home from watching "Jaws" at 1:30 a.m. last Friday night, I had a facebook message from a girl in my program inviting me to go to Mt. Rainier the next day. It took me about 2 seconds to reply in the affirmative, and a few hours of sleep later, she (Mary), her partner (Lindsay) and I were heading down the 5. We basked in fall sunshine the entire two hour drive down there, only to encounter mist, clouds and fog the minute we entered Mount Rainier National Park. We didn't actually see the top of the mountain the entire time that we were on the mountain, but we did see a variety of stunning waterfalls, fluorescent red and orange plants that lit the cliffs on fire, and a dramatically rocky river bed. Lack of memorable vistas aside, it felt so good to be out of the city (even though where I live feels so much less "city" than what I'm used to) and out hiking. Rainier is cool because it's not part of a mountain range - it's just its own isolated mammoth self. It feels like a lonely and personal mountain that you can wrap yourself around. I figured the time that I spent bonding with him and connecting with the nature all around would accelerate the writing process on the paper I had to write that night. And it did ... kind of. On the way home, when we were about 30 minutes outside of Seattle, Lindsay gently aroused me from my car nap to have me look out the back window: there was the glorious top of Rainier projecting out of its cloudy lower half.