First, there was Ricardo, hight El Cabron. Ricardo is a mestizo of precisely fifty percent hidalgo and fifty percent Aztec stock, and a practitioner of the latihan of Susila Budhi Dharma.

Then there was Ronen, who bends the knee to no god, no king, and no country; an Israeli by birth, culture and inclination.

Third was Balton, hight Wrong Way, of German and Welsh descent, dedicated above all else to the High Cause of the Destruction of Capitalism as it is currently understood, and likewise of all the political and economic infrastructure tending to support it.

And, finally, I was there, your humble recorder of events and observer of subtlety and nuance, a fighter more than a lover, a dreamer more than a fighter, a seeker more than a dreamer, a lover more than a seeker.

Day One (Sunday July 21, 2002)
There are more dramatic landscapes, more exciting vistas, and, strictly speaking, scenery still more magnificent. But for sheer natural beauty, there is little in a class with Paradise Valley.

The first leg of the hike, from the trailhead to the river, is a hot and dusty stretch of ground. Nevertheless, the parched hiker feels his cares dropping away as tarmac and internal combustion are left behind and forgotten. Once the river is first glimpsed through the trees, it is impossible for any sane man to recall the barbs and fardels of gainful employment or domestic bliss. It is there, one feels, that the journey has truly begun.

We were in high spirits when we reached the first perfect swimming hole. Luxury! Rapture! Mother-loving cold! Water can't get much chillier without losing its status as a liquid. After just a few moments in that frigid snowmelt we could feel the heat-loss reach our bones; even the powerful summer sun of the Sierra Nevada took upwards of an hour to warm us up again. But that didn't stop us from plunging back in again and again every day of the trip.

It was at our second assay of the river's algid delights that we established the recurring leitmotif of our pererration together: the competitive feat.

The goal was to dive into the river at a point where its current was at its most powerful, swim against the current until we were level with a great slab of slippery rock, cut across the current to the rock and then haul ourselves out, with the current pulling us off the rock and back downstream all the while.

I tried first, and failed. I got to the rock, and was shocked at how difficult it was to get an adequate purchase on it from below in that powerful current. I tried without success for about ten seconds to get a firm grip before my strength gave out and I was whisked helplessly downstream, with barely enough force in my arms to keep my head above water... just so much flotsam.

After a few minutes' rest, I tried again, and managed to haul my sorry carcass out onto the rock. The flush of my victory was somewhat muted when Ricardo went next, and made it look easy, chopping through the current with perfect form and fairly leaping out of the water onto the rock slab. When Ronen tried, he found the current too fierce and wasn't able to reach the rock before concluding that the game wasn't worth the prize. Balton went last, and reached the rock, but there he went through the same horrified surprise I had undergone when he realized that far from being over, the hardest part of the feat remained. The current tore him off the slab and we watched him bob downstream to slower water. He refused to try again.

However, before we moved on to the final leg of the day's hike, Balton set his own tone for the journey by successfully undertaking a tough crack-climb up a tall rock face -- barefoot. None of the rest of us was even willing to attempt the feat without adequate footgear, which we had cached elsewhere along the riverbank.

Returning to the trail, our first encounter with significant wildlife occurred in the last hour of the day's hike, when we saw our first rattlesnake. Not long afterwards, and within a couple hundred yards of our campsite for the night, we saw another rattler, perhaps a little shy of a meter in length (approximately three feet long). We were to see other serpents in the course of the trip.

On this first day of hiking we were quite heavily laden, and it was with great relief that we reached Middle Paradise at last, and set up camp. We brought our platys of wine down to the river to chill them before dinner; we also weighted down and submerged Ziplocs containing sausage and smoked turkey breast to keep them refrigerated in anticipation of the following day's breakfast and dinner, respectively.

While we waited for the wine to chill, dusk fell and Balton began putting his nice new camera through its paces. He was armed with an Olympus C4040, a digital camera of four megapixels resolution (2200x1700) and 3x optical zoom, equipped with three memory cards at 128, 128, and 16 Mb. It was at this time that Balton revealed that, for him, this trip represented (among other things) an opportunity for a technomadic experiment: he was also carrying a computer, namely a Sony VAIO PCG-C1MSX PictureBook (867MHz Transmeta Crusoe, 384MB DDR memory, 40G disk, 1xQuad Capacity battery plus a standard battery; total weight under four pounds (2.2lb for the unit with base battery, an additional 1.5lb for the quad battery); Windows XP Home installed, VMWare for Debian and RedHat linux guests). Technomad gear indeed: his one great disappointment was that he had not had time before departing to hook up with our mutual friend Paul Blair, in order to set himself up with a portable solar panel to keep his batteries fully charged along the way.

With this gear, Balton was able to take over 500 high-resolution photographs over the first four days of the trip; he still had memory space and battery power aplenty after that, but his impulses toward photography had been satisfied to a surfeit by then, so he put his equipment away. [This account is illustrated with photographs from all four of our cameras, but the large majority of the shots I selected were Balton's.]

On this first night, Balton's great interest was in seeing how the camera would handle odd light conditions, so he took a number of shots of fire, slow exposures of what to the human eye was pitch darkness and other odd light effects. [Photographs best viewed with a browser that isn't Explorer, like Opera or Netscape.]

It was as dusk was beginning to fall, and as Balton was experimenting with his camera, that we received our first visit from an ursine guest. I was fiddling about under my tarp when Ricardo said, in an extremely marked manner, "Brother, are you aware that there is a bear out here..?" I poked out my head, and saw a good-sized black bear standing on a small boulder overlooking our camp from perhaps five meters away. I immediately withdrew my head again, to ferret out my camera. Camera in hand, I emerged and joined my comrades, all three of whom were snapping away with their own apparati. It is worth noting that, under the dusky conditions, only Balton's camera captured anything intelligible; his shot is so crystal clear that the smoke from our small contra-mosquito fire, invisible in the twilight to the human eye, is quite visible drifting in front of the bear's face.

Having made my own vain effort to record the moment, I looked around and noticed that Ricardo and Ronen were perched high on a rock; I may be wrong, but it occurred to me that I could detect a certain tension in their demeanors. Balton, standing near me, did not seem tense, but having lowered his camera, even he seemed at a loss as to what to do next. Feeling rather worldly and knowing, I barked out a cough-grunt of warning, modeled on the aggressive vocalization of the langur and well-tested as a sovereign intimidator of unwelcome wildlife. "Och! Och!" I cried.

The bear cocked its head quizzically, and stepped down off the boulder toward us; again, it is possible that I am wrong, but it seemed to me that the hulking brute could accurately have been described as eager as it approached.

The tried and true having failed miserably, I ran toward it, raising my arms over my head to increase my apparent size. It bolted without delay, but after about ten meters it tried to circle back. Instinctively (if uselessly) barking like a dyspeptic langur, I drove it further off by throwing stones and waving my arms about. Balton filmed me doing that, and then felt inspired to follow the bear as it fled, snapping a number of shots of its dark, fleeing form.

The bear was to return twice more that night, and once the following morning. We drove it off again with stones on its second visit, and tracked it as it made a very wide circle around us, keeping under cover but barely visible in the fading light. By the third visit we were wine-mellow (not to mention confident that all foodstuffs were secure), so we largely ignored him, save for a few involuntary pant-hoots from one of our number. When the rest of us heard Ricardo's nonchalant report of the bear's return early the following morning, none of us so much as withdrew our heads from our bags.

Day Two (Monday July 22, 2002)
Our first on-trail morning dawned brightly. Brightly first, then ruddily, then downright eerily. By mid-morning, the sun burned down like a baleful red eye through a yellowish haze, and the bosky mountainside was bathed in a weird red light.

It didn't take us long to work out that somewhere to the south of us there was a forest fire, the smoke from which was filtering the sunlight. We had no way of knowing how far away it was, how large it was, or whether (or how fast) it was approaching us. (It turned out that daft bint Peri Dare Van Brunt had started a fire the previous afternoon in Sequoia National Forest (adjacent to Sequoia National Park, part of the same park system as Kings Canyon, where we were), through severe, potentially chronic incompetence. The fire, though dangerous and massively destructive where it was, was more than a hundred miles away.)

We broke camp and walked the negligible distance to Upper Paradise where we sat down for a brief debate. Our plan had been to establish camp at Upper Paradise, then relax and play in the river -- without actually starting the Revels. There were now countervailing considerations from both ends of the spectrum: Balton wanted to call a small, preliminary Revel that very day, while wiser heads counseled that we should move further up the valley closer to the treeline in case of needing to flee from a terrible conflagration. We looked at one another's faces, illuminated by the Hellish glow of the blood-red sun. Under the circumstances, prudence and circumspection left only one avenue open to us.

We sat down and boiled a tea which we drank together in ceremonial fashion. And thus did we call the first Wild Revel of the expedition.

Never knowing when or in what condition we would return to our belongings, we rushed to erect tent and tarp, and to stow all eatables in bearcans or bearbox so that all would be in order before the madness descended upon us. With hardly a moment remaining we had the camp shipshape. I sat on a log, noticed that neither I nor Ricardo was shod, and stood up again immediately in search of my boots. "For gods' fatal sake man," I croaked, "find your shoes and get them on your feet if you want to be wearing them today, for you've only about thirty more seconds to care enough to put them on." He shrugged, but I said no more, for I was past caring myself by the time the words had passed my lips. A moment later he must have noticed that what I said was true, because he stood up with a start and pulled on his footgear -- only just in time. Like a thief in the night, the Revels had crept amongst us all unseen; now they made their presence known.

Ronen threw back his head and laughed; Ricardo immediately began babbling quietly, ceaselessly, and incoherently; and Balton dropped to all fours as his irises expanded to occlude the whites of his eyes. I myself manifested no outward or inward change, save for a massive increase in the depths of my wisdom and in my powers of observation.

Wordlessly, save for Ricardo (for whose sake that day one might have coined a term with the opposite connotation... acaesurally? omnilocutionarily? antiphimotically?), we made our way down to the river, the pine needles under our feet glowing in the brazen glare. There were we taken by the leaping madness, and we disported ourselves with abandon like holy otters in a land of nereids and river gods. I remember pulling myself upstream along the stones at the bottom of the river, my open eyes singing in the cold current; I remember crouching atop a slab of granite a meter thick, able dimly to intuit the force that had split it into four great shards untold centuries before; I recall standing upright at the end of a fallen log, out over the water, so well able to visualize the leap from my perch to a midstream boulder that it was difficult to be certain whether I had yet made the leap or only just considered it.

The Revel passed, as Revels do, and we regrouped some five or six hours later. Ronen was somewhat injured, having cruelly bruised his heel on too ambitious a leap; thus it is we found ourselves on the opposite bank from our camp, with no obvious feasible way across for our limping comrade. Balton tried the way we had come -- harder to return than to cross by -- and declared it too risky for our friend. The rest of us scouted the riverside until we found a stretch with easy entry and egress from the water, and relatively light current, and made the crossing there.

Back at camp, the order of the day appeared to be roaring fire, hot food, good wine, and deep sleep, in precisely that order. Balton and I used a handy system of log bridges to cross the stretch of river that lay hard by our camp and collected firewood from the bosky grove on the other side.

I built a fire, and then, while attempting to break a stout log too long for convenient burning, laid my forearm open to the muscle in a long and wicked cut. Luckily for me, Ricardo had a tube of superglue in his first-aid kit, so we soon had me sealed. We ate quickly and turned in early, for we had spent a full day and the morrow would require a long hike and a steep climb; we would need all the vigor a night's rest could restore.

Day Three (Tuesday July 23, 2002)
Sore, injured and revel-befuddled as we collectively were, we broke camp early the third day, in deference to the length and steepness of the day's proposed hike. We intended to cover 23 km/14 mi, and to get well up over the supposed "treeline" at 3050 m/10,000 ft (the trees may have thinned out, but we never left them behind), requiring an elevation change of roughly 1000 m/3000 ft. Furthermore, we wouldn't be moving very fast, as we would be trying to avoid aggravating Ronen's heel injury.

We crossed the river on the log bridge, and bade it a very fond farewell. Our path now roughly tracked the course of Woods Creek, lovely but not quite equal to the magnificent Kings.

As we quit Paradise Valley, the landscape rapidly changed, offering a more alpine view. Sublime grandeur was the order of the day.

Up above 3,000 meters the air was noticeably thinner; on the other hand, the trail was steeper so at least we were breathing harder. Ronen, of sea-level stock, felt the altitude change the most keenly.

Probably because the day's hike was so demanding, we conducted a fierce debate over what path to take. Our options included stopping at the Rae Lakes for two nights; stopping at Rae Lakes and then hiking through the next day; pushing on for the steep climb to the Sixty Lakes Basin and staying there two nights; stopping at Sixty Lakes one night and then moving on the next day; stopping at Rae Lakes and then moving up to Sixty lakes the next day; or bush-whacking a trail to avoid the high pass at Glen, cutting the loop trail and our excursion short. I, of course, had conceived the original plan, which had been to stop at the Rae Lakes two nights, but had been willing to change to Sixty Lakes at the suggestion of the Freddie at the trail-head, and remained open to any itinerary modification that made sense. Still, we failed to reach a consensus before arriving at the first of the Rae Lakes.

The great beauty of the lake system and the surrounding countryside immediately decided the issue of where at least the coming night would be spent. However, despite the invigorating effects of so much natural beauty, the thin air, steep climb and long trail had extorted a heavy rent on our energy reserves. We were all moving slowly once we threw down our packs at Arrowhead Lake in the early afternoon -- when we were moving at all. Each one of us spent a good half hour lying on a sun-baked rock before turning to any other business, and even then our undertakings were marked by noticeable economy of effort. We tended our wounds, stretched our tired limbs, and took our time over routine camp chores.

Late afternoon saw the descent upon us of the most ravening and persistent mosquitoes we had yet encountered in the Sierra, which essentially decided the question of whether we would spend the following night at the Rae Lakes or indeed anywhere in the area. But we hardly needed the little bloodsuckers to drive us into our tents before even the sun went down; we were utterly bushed. We indulged ourselves in a game or two of Settlers of Catan under canvas until the sun was hidden behind the high rock wall to the west and we could honorably call it a night.

Day Four (Wednesday July 24, 2002)
Our marching orders for the day were to get over Glen Pass (elev. 3,651 meters or 11,978 feet) and find on its other side a location suitable for a two-night basecamp, from which to launch a second Revel. Where we would end up remained a moving target throughout most of the day; indeed, the possibility of bushwhacking to some isolated off-trail spot remained on the table until a final decision was reached.

As we approached Glen Pass, for the first time in the trip, we began to encounter other hikers with significant frequency. Several different trails converge near the Pass, including a number with trailheads in the more-traveled eastern Sierra. We were thus able to canvass people's experience with a number of sites, and to determine that several relatively bugless spots were open to us; we also discovered that Sixty Lakes would have been as bad as or worse than the Rae Lakes for mosquitoes.

The day's hike started well, with a lively political discussion occupying our mental energies as we navigated the trail.

Setting ourselves the goal of developing a political platform for a hypothetical Rationalist Political Party, we found that, starting from a very small set of first principles (government policy should always optimize benefits less costs, the social welfare of persons lacking wealth is of equal importance with the social welfare of persons possessing wealth, the social welfare of persons yet unborn should not be subordinated to the social welfare of living persons except where necessary), a fairly comprehensive set of policies emerged as clearly necessary elements of any such endeavor. We were in agreement on almost all points.

We agreed that the United States should drastically cut its own defense budget (with most of the cuts to come from the development of new weapons technologies, vehicles and equipment, and the smallest proportion of cuts to come from personnel salaries and benefits) and encourage other countries to do the same to theirs. We agreed that the United States should significantly increase funding for pure science, for directed research, and for the education of American scientists and researchers. In particular, funding for the exploration of the greater solar system -- with an eye to producing energy and acquiring raw materials in space -- should be made a priority.

We agreed that tax codes should be still more progressive than they currently are, and that new tax brackets should be added, taking larger and larger portions of incomes that exceed reasonable bounds.

We were each in favor of universal health insurance.

None of us disputed that the United States should take the lead in helping the international community stabilize the human population of the world. We agreed that such an initiative must include cheap, effective contraception, and rational family planning efforts globally (particularly in developing countries) -- as well as funding for advancements in medical science to reduce infant mortality, and global women's literacy programs (since it is in countries with well-educated women that the so-called "demographic shift" from large to small families takes place without need for government intervention).

We agreed that, on balance, we were in favor of free trade, as generally doing more good than harm -- with the important proviso that the next round of the GATT should include rules permitting tariffs to reduce trade in products or materials produced through environmentally unsustainable processes or under environmentally unsustainable economic conditions. Similarly, the international courts should be made to accept environmental protectionism as legitimate, right up there with health and safety and child labor issues.

We were all in favor of the United States government setting up the conditions for the rapid creation and development of environmentally sustainable technologies, including tax incentives for the development of sustainable technologies, research and development funding for sustainable technologies (and prospective bans on R&D funding for nonsustainable technologies), government purchase programs for early marketable "beta" versions of sustainable technologies, etc. We agreed that, in this regard, particular attention should be paid to the technology of agriculture (sustainable irrigation methods to increase crop yields while decreasing water consumption and salinization; low-input crop management to reduce erosion; reduction of dependence on pesticides; advancements in aquaculture; advancements in food distribution methods); forestry (massive global tree-planting forest-reclamation plan, taking local conditions and need for diversity into account; implementation of selective tree-harvesting techniques; elimination of clear-cutting and other destructive practices), energy (reduce dependence on automobile specifically and fossil fuels generally, and break the link between automobile and fossil fuels; switch from coal and oil to natural gas; improve efficiency of natural gas pipelines; recover methane from landfills; capture waste heat and other byproducts from industrial processes; set up tax incentive system for cogeneration; pursue efficiencies in manufacturing and inventory management; solar and wind energy; advancement in energy storage and distribution technology; financial assistance to ease transition from nonsustainable technologies and fuels to sustainable ones), building technology (modify homes and business facilities for energy efficiency; change building codes to require efficiency), and waste reduction and recycling (redesign production to take future recycling into account; correct design flaw in sewage management which permits mixture of waste water and storm runoff; pursue advancements in waste treatment).

We were all in favor of increased and more effectively implemented aid from rich countries to poor countries, with special attention to the environmentally sustainable use of such aid, beginning with the deep pockets of the United States.

We all advocated decriminalizing the use and possession of most controlled substances, and the rationalizing in particular of laws prohibiting the use and possession of the so-called "soft recreational drugs" such as marijuana, MDMA, psilocybin, and cocaine (i.e., regulating their manufacture, distribution and use only to the degree the manufacture, distribution and use of alcohol is regulated).

We were all in favor of relaxing restrictions on international immigration policies, with the proviso that "brain-drain" from developing to industrial countries must be kept under observation and control.

We were all vehemently in support of a comprehensive and ubiquitous change in the economic "rules of the road" by which we measure (or fail to measure) the impact of our political and commercial decisions on the environment. That is, to: (i) change the definition of Gross National Product to include environmental costs and benefits (i.e., the transformation of a forest into lumber available for commercial use should not be calculated as pure net gain; the depletion of the natural resource should simply be recorded as a cost against the profits earned on the sale of the lumber); (ii) change the definition of "productivity" to take into reflect calculations of environmental improvement or decline; (iii) eliminate the use of inappropriate discount rates which currently undervalue the future consequences of our economic decisions; (iv) quantify the effects of decisions on future generations; (v) stop subsidies of nonsustainable practices; (vi) improve reliability of Economic Impact Assessment techniques and standards (and make the results of such EIAs universally available); (vii) require full disclosure of the environmental impact of the business practices and decisions of corporations; (viii) revise antitrust laws to address and prohibit environmental harm; (ix) incorporate standards to protect the environment into treaties and trade agreements; (x) require the World Bank to integrate environmental concerns into its grant programs to developing countries; and (xi) encourage industrial countries (beginning with the United States) to increase "debt for nature" exchanges to increase good ecological stewardship.

After long and intense discussion, we realized that an important underlying principle of a Rationalist political platform must necessarily be that the preservation of the environment should be one of the central organizing principles of our society and our civilization. With that principle in mind, none of us could dispute the necessity for: (i) imposing a CO2 tax on industry; (ii) imposing a "virgin materials" tax on industry; (iii) modifying all government purchase programs to rigidly adhere to sustainable practices, taking full life-cycle costs into account; (iv) implementing higher mileage requirements for cars, trucks, SUVs; (v) requiring significantly higher efficiency standards for manufacturing; (vi) implementing utility rate reform to incentivize conservation and efficiency; (vii) implementing tree-planting programs; (viii) accelerating the global phase-out of ozone-destroying chemicals; and probably most importantly of all, (ix) eliminating all government subsidies for the use of pesticides and herbicides and for the practice of monoculture.

Indeed, we all admitted that an important Rationalist plank must be the elimination of corporate welfare as we know it, not just of corporate welfare for Big Agriculture.

To the surprise of some of us, we were ultimately persuaded to be unanimous as to the desirability of the United States helping to fund a global education program. A better-educated citizenry is less likely to countenance war or mass destruction, less likely to accept totalitarianism, less likely to brook the degradation of the global environment, less likely to tolerate the abuse of human rights, internationally as well as internally.

Finally, we all called for the rationalization of United States foreign policy: (i) all alliances predicated upon collaboration in the so-called "War on Drugs" to be re-negotiated and re-worked on a drug-policy-neutral basis; (ii) every dollar in aid to Israel to be matched -- with great public fanfare -- with more than a dollar in aid to the Islamic world; (iii) condition aid to Israel on Israel's good faith in resolving the Palestinian question and removal of illegal settlements; (iv) immediate cessation of policies designed to increase the misery of the Iraqi people; (v) not mere reduction but elimination of United States dependence on Middle Eastern oil (and in as short a time as possible on oil from any source whatsoever).

However, we broke down into bitter, ultimately insoluble internal dissension on the question whether the common law or a civil law system was more likely to lead to increased social justice.

As we left the wooded lakes behind and climbed ever higher, the great peaks looming over us and the valley spreading out beneath, we came gradually to the realization that one of our number was not taking the same pleasure in the austere beauty surrounding us as were the rest. The altitude was really getting to Ronen; his features were pale and drawn, and he was dragging himself at a frighteningly slow pace. He reported nausea and a savage headache. Still, unless he seemed in danger of actually passing out, there was nothing to do but press on, get him over the high pass and back down to lower elevations, with as little delay as could be arranged.

It was a tough climb in the thin air for all of us, so it must have been excruciating for Ronen in his state.

When we reached Glen Pass, it was quite apparent that Ronen was suffering. The others suggested that we take a long break for lunch there before asking him to move on again.

"Not a bit of it," says I, "not a bit of it. Ronen, to a large degree the intensity of your symptoms are the result of your brain trying to get you to stop climbing higher. That is, your brain is exaggerating its response to the altitude because it is panicking that you are just going to keep on climbing. If we hurry on down the eastern side of the pass now, by the time we descend 100 meters your system will notice that we're dropping instead of climbing, and it will ease up on making you so sick. Mark my words!"

My counsel carried the day (the gods alone know why, given my track record), and we hurried down the mountainside. It may have required a descent of 200 meters or so, but it really wasn't long before color returned to Ronen's face. When that occurred we stopped by a lake we had seen from above for a very late lunch, and Ronen himself mixed up a batch of hummus for our meal. We fought over it like vultures over the last zebra bone.

The descent soon had us back under the treeline, and it wasn't long before the trail was once again offering us that lush and generous Sierra view to which we had become accustomed.

At one point we stopped at a place where the trail afforded a grand vista, overlooking the great valley below us, and hashed out once and for all what we intended to for the night. Ricardo was a strong advocate of bushwhacking to some remote and secluded spot in the valley, shortening the distance we would have to cover (if substituting rougher for gentler terrain) and giving us the isolation we would prefer for our Revels. I floated the argument that should someone be seriously injured in the course of the Revels (or injured to any extent that impaired the ability to walk), getting the injured man to medical attention would be enormously more difficult offtrail. That argument ended up carrying us to a consensus, albeit an unenthusiastic one. We finally devolved to finding a spot somewhere in the vicinity of Junction Meadow (hard by the junction of East Creek with Bubbs Creek, and a short distance off the main trail), largely because we thought its elevation and its lack of proximity to any body of standing water would give us a good chance of avoiding vicious bloodsucking insects.

The result was a long downhill hike, the vegetation becoming more and more lush as we descended. On the eastern side of Glen Pass we also began running into more and more hikers, most of whom had started at Eastern Sierra trailheads outside the National Park system. We fell in with one such group for a stretch of trail; they asked us what our goals were for our outing.

"Why, we've come out to the wild places to celebrate their beauty in the manner traditional to our people," I replied.

"'[T]he manner traditional to [y]our people'?!" their spokesman rejoined. "Who are your people?" Something in his manner implied that, if forced to hazard a surmise, he would have guessed that our people were bisexual, drug-using, Communist freaks.

"Ah, I'm glad you asked that, my friend. Our people are the one-percenters, the denizens of the far end of the right-side tail of the distribution. We speak for peace when the wardrums beat, for war in times of peace.

"Ours is the greatest Tribe of them all, for no tribe is alien to us; we have been one People in all places and through all ages. It was our Tribe that provided the sculptors of Akhenaten's reign, it was we who undermined the Vichy quislings, who placed the infernal device of November 5, who kept the Book of Kells. We preserved the pagan ways of knowing when the Christians came, fostered heresy when the Christians conquered.

"We are the guerillas, the revolutionaries, the heresiarchs; intellectuals, crackpots, mystics; we stand for rupture, for nonconformity, for chaos and wisdom.

"It has been said -- many times! -- that ours is a voice that will never be heard on the grand stage of the world, for our principles and predilections keep us forever from forging any bond of unity that might make of us a force for political change. Not so! Consider Aaron Burr; consider even his enemies. America itself is our experiment more than that of any other party, for all the greatest men among this country's hemp-smoking founding fathers partook to some extent of our craggy kind.

"Consider, too..."

But there I broke off, for I had noticed that I was alone. A quick glance at the tracks left in the dusty trail before me was enough to tell the tale: first the hikers we had encountered had hurried off, leaving only their spokesman who had been my interlocutor; then Ricardo had followed them, apparently on tip-toe. Balton had left next, surreptitiously lowering himself down the cliffside outside my field of vision, employing an ingenious system of pulleys for the purpose. Next the hikers' spokesman had backed away from me before turning on his heel and running pell-mell downtrail. Finally Ronen, whose efforts to hang himself had been frustrated by the absence of any suitable gallows, had cobbled together a makeshift hang-glider out of twigs and leaves, and had launched himself into the air just seconds before my emergence from the fog of rhetoric.

I caught up with my comrades some way downtrail, where they were relaxing by the river. No mention was made of their recent disgraceful conduct; none was necessary.

We realized that we still had some distance to cover to reach Junction Meadow, and no idea what we would find when we got there; we realized, too, that we did not have much remaining light in the day. We picked up our pace accordingly, ceasing to gawk at every waterfall we passed by.

The faster pace proved Ricardo's undoing, for he threw out his knee almost immediately. In considerable pain, he hobbled down the trail until we reached the trail junction that marked Junction Meadow. There being no suitable campsite in view, Ronen and I left Ricardo with our packs, Balton, and the brandy to keep him company, and went off in search of a place to spend the night.

It was just as darkness was beginning to fall that we found a log-crossing a short distance off-trail, on the other side of which was a wonderful campsite complete with fire-ring. We pitched our tents in the dark, and prepared a very welcome dinner of linguine with white wine and clam sauce, followed by stewed cherries with a shot of apricot brandy. But for all that we had eaten heavily at the end of a long, exhausting day, we did not sleep immediately, so transfixed were we by the night-time beauty of the spot we had chanced upon, the glow of the moon on the surrounding peaks, the gurgle of running water, the scent of pine.

Day Five (Thursday July 25, 2002)
When the sun came up it shone through the smoke of burning forest once again, but by this stage we were unmoved by any sense of danger and, indeed, the smoke soon cleared and eased the harsh and brazen glare.

After a leisurely morning and a little preliminary scouting, we determined that our site was sufficient to serve as basecamp for our second Revel, but that the Revel itself should again take place offtrail. Without much ado we prepared our ritual tea and meditatively, ceremonially drank it off. And then we entered the country of the oreads.

It would be an error not to make the observation that Balton led the Revels that day. He was everywhere, scampering fearlessly across chasms spanned by fallen logs, up rock faces, leaping from stone to stone across the river. The rest of us followed more cautiously, struck by an unwonted, unexpected diffidence. Perhaps two Revels in one week is too many for most mortal men, but whatever the reason, it was not until the very end that the rest of us felt the leaping madness flood our veins with power, and that we surged up vertical rock faces like demented gazelles.

We returned to camp in the glory of the afternoon sun, in high spirits but still quite strange from our exertions. Strange we all were, but none stranger than Balton, who leapt atop a boulder and cried out loud, "What is this fetish we have for lopping off our victim's ears?" just as a pair of aged hikers, man and wife, stepped into our campsite.

They had come through in the morning, after we had left camp, had followed the trail past our riverine Revel unnoticed, and were now returning to the main trail. The man was Robert A. Phinney, Professor of Geosciences (Seismology) at Princeton University, and his wife, who quite clearly had not made out the connotation of Balton's barbaric yawp, greeted us with relief rather than disapprobation. She did not delay in telling us of the awful time she had had crossing the log-bridge to our side of the river, and how little she was looking forward to crossing back over it. It was the work of a moment for Ricardo and I to step forward with smiles and strong backs, to offer our services in assisting them across the river.

By the time we had escorted them through our camp to the river's edge, Balton had recovered his composure sufficiently well to join us there, and all four of us chatted briefly while Professor Phinney attempted to take our measure. He cannot have suspected that our bearded, stinking crew collectively held six advanced degrees from prestigious research institutions, including three doctorates (ten if undergraduate degrees are included), and our wild stares cannot have created an overly reassuring impression, all things considered; it is also possible that he had made out some part of Balton's unfortunate bellow. Certainly afterwards Ricardo and I agreed (if Ronen and Balton did not) that a certain tension, however slight, passed over his features when I took up his wife's pack and carried it away across the river.

But, of course, Mrs. Phinney's trust was not ill-placed, and we ferried them and their belongings across without incident. She offered us a beer, on her husband's behalf, the next time we found ourselves in New Jersey, and we parted friendly, with good wishes on both sides.

From our encounter with the Phinneys we passed on to our chiefest preoccupation: the competitive feat.

When feats were done, we passed on to tales; I related the Icelandic saga in which Thor encounters the cunning and resourceful Utgarða-Loki; Ricardo regaled us with a number of Aztec tales. And from tales we passed on to games, and from games to food and drink, and from there to dreamless sleep.

Day Six (Friday July 26, 2002)
Our packs were absurdly light, our legs like coiled steel springs, the trail easy, our surroundings lovely in the extreme. And yet, of course, it was with a feeling of melancholy that I covered the last few miles of trail, for this was our last day of freedom from the workaday world. I attempted to postpone the inevitable by refusing to take advantage of any of the many bridges the trail passed over, instead traversing all waterways by means of logs and stones.

And yet, all too soon, we found ourselves hailing the Freddie at the trailhead, and thanking Ricardo, who had forged ahead of the rest of us, for the cold beers he pressed into our hands. The hike was at an end.

Epilegomenon
We set up tents to claim a carcamping area, amazed by the crowds of fat Griswalds, and by their fat cars. We drove out of the park to the nearest bar, and stayed there until well after midnight, throwing darts, drinking beers, and easing our way back into civilization and its discontents. On the drive back into the park, our headlights surprised a large adult mountain lion, who streaked under cover of trees before we could bring the car to a stop.

Upon our return to the designated camping area, we slept out under the stars after loudly and drunkenly insulting all the surrounding Griswalds. And then we bade Kings Canyon a very fond farewell.