I hear you breathing out there

You really need to write a comment. Say something. Anything. About anything. But probably mostly about backpacking.
I've written four of these blog entries, and I have only one comment. That was from my cohort Diana Marcum, who is blogging away to rave reviews and comments galore.
It's OK. Really, I get it. I'm part of the over-50s generation. Different idioms. Funky bunions on my feet. Little spider varicose veins on my legs. Indeed, you cannot trust me. I'll tell your landlord. Or your mom. Or the cops.
Let me offer a gesture of generational peace -- a quick story that I just told Diana. It's faintly hip, definitely emblematic of the back country and what the heck.
Photographer Mark Crosse and I were backpacking near Thousand Island Lake on the JMT a few years ago, and decided to spend the night looking at the magnificent headwaters to the San Joaquin River.
Said I: We must be a long way from civilization.
Said Mark: (Actually, he said nothing. He just nodded in one direction.)
There were two men on their knees praying at a lovely camp site. They would later tell us that they make the trip each year to have a spiritual retreat. We tiptoed past, so we wouldn't disturb.
Around the next bend ...
Said I: You don't see that every day in downtown Fresno.
Said Mark: (Nothing again. He's not big on conversation. He just nodded toward the lake and a big rock).
There sat a naked man playing a guitar and serenading a naked woman who was swimming. Couldn't hear the song, but I bet it was something from the sixties, Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds. Who knows.
You run into all kinds of folks out there. People yearn for this kind freedom, communing with nature and God in ways that they find appealing. It's one of the things I love most about backpacking.
Now, really, I've spilled a rare moment for you. I know you have something at least as good as that to say. Go ahead. Push the comment button. I'll go back and see if I can rig this thing to accept anonymous comments. I know you're out there living in the same biosphere as I am.

These are some things I can do without

The license plate holder read: "I love Jesus." It was attached to a car that blasted off the line at a stop light, forced its way in front of a fellow driver, turned right and nearly forced another car up the curb. Amid horns and single-digit salutes, he sped off.
As a wise woman -- my wife -- once said: "Don't put that kind of message on your bumper unless you're going to clean up your act."
When I'm in the wilderness in August, road rage will take a back seat.
So will telemarketers, unless they get the number to my satellite phone.
A few other things I won't miss:
--The solicitors at the front door.
--The kids playing guitars and drums in my garage.
--The dog that yaps in my neighbor's yard at 4:15 a.m.
--The inane comedy, singing and dancing competitions on television.
--The 81-degree warmth in my house because I can't afford PG&E's rates anymore.
--The daily office grind.
--That ubiquitous haze that everyone down here breathes.
You get the picture. I just want you to know backpacking is more than a list of things I need to get done and worry about.
It is so much more. Think about it for a moment. You pick out the unbelievable views of canyons, glacial tarns and granite spires where you're going to spend just one night. Then you get a whole new gorgeous place to stay the next night.
Along the way, you can see how nature has shaped a primitive landscape and witness the struggle for life -- from the gnarled white bark pine tree clinging to a ridgeline to insects swarming for a meal that will let them live a few hours more.
Yes, it is inconvenient, exhausting and even sometimes a little lonely. It is also magnificent in ways that you can hardly comprehend when you're living in your every-day world.
No doubt I will love to get back to my wife, my children, indoor plumbing, hot showers and real food. But I won't look forward to my first drive back into work. And I will look forward to my next adventure in the back country.

Anybody seen a Denny's up here??

To avoid shopping, cooking, dishes and any other signs of adulthood, there was a time when I found comfort at vending machines when I got hungry.

My dunderheaded ways faded quickly when I got to a place where my six quarters and a machine filled with white sugar and salt would not work any more. The back country.

I found jeffrey pine, granite, buck brush, tree frogs and creepy little ants. But I found no vending machines in the back country.

So I still sweat my diet for backpacking, especially for nine days on the JMT.
I confided my obsession to photographer and outdoor enthusiast Mark Crosse who is not a worrier. Crosse knows a guy who knows another guy who eats nothing but Snickers bars on the trail.

Which is no big deal on an overnighter, but this guy did it walking the Pacific Crest Trail. We're talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles. Now he's walking the Continental Divide Trail. And at each food stop along the way, he picks up several dozen Snickers bars and makes every cavity in his head scream for another week -- morning, noon and night.

This won't do for me. If you collected all the fillings in my head, my face would collapse. Plus, I have a disagreeable stomach. Enough said.

So I'm stuffing my bear canister with other stuff. I'm trying to find freeze-dried grub that's light and nutritious. I'm thinking about a five-ounce dinner in a plastic sack that can hold boiling water. I'll bring a 3.5-ounce stove to boil water.
Voila! Shovel it down, pretending not to taste or smell it. And I've had a hot dinner at the end of a mosquito-ridden day, hauling a 35-pound pack over a 12,000-foot pass.

Egad, where will they find my body?

"Yeah, that's the problem," said Crosse, laconically stashing his photo gear. "After a while, you just kind of go crazy eating this stuff."

How crazy?

After he and I walked to the top of Mount Whitney a few years ago, we stopped at Denny's and ordered a mushroom omelette the size of Baltimore.

I don't remember eating it. I don't remember paying. I don't remember the song we sang afterward. The authorities assured us that we conjured a mad rendering of "Rocky Racoon," and the locals loved us.

If we did all that for a short jaunt to the top of the highest peak in the lower 48 states, just think what we will do after nine days and 75 miles? By all means, consider this a desperate plea of some sort.

My guru's ears touch the ground

"How can you do this day after day?" I asked her. "You're outside. No toilets. No air conditioning or heater. There's no Starbucks. For crying out loud, woman, there are bugs out here."

She stared back, kind of drooling.

Molly, my 13-year-old basset hound who loves the outdoors and won't come inside, always knows how to deal with my moods. She sniffed my hand briefly, hoping for a treat. Then she left to see if anything edible fell out of the fruitless pear tree.

I went back to setting up my bivy tent. I hadn't taken it out in a year. I had to see if it works.

It had that musty kind of summer-in-Fresno smell. One of the fiberglass tent poles snapped when I got the thing standing up. That got my dander going, buddy.

"I spent $49 on this tent only four years ago," I hollered over to Molly. "I've got holes in my socks that are older than this tent. What a stinking ripoff."

Molly knew it was just nerves. She knew I wanted my bargain-basement equipment to be in tip top shape for the Muir backpack. Heck, she had been sitting right beside me when I ordered this three pound, 10-ounce tent.

She responded swiftly to my tirade. She rolled on her back, growling in delight as she rubbed her snout on the hybrid bermuda. She snorted and sneezed.

"OK, you've made your point," I said. "I'm chilling out. But now I have to get another tent pole. What? No way. I am not sleeping out like you do. Are you kidding? There are bugs, bugs, bugs."

My argument fell on deaf ears. Sleepy ears, actually. She fell asleep on her back, listening to me. She snored.

This is the kind of angst I go through when I'm planning a backpack. Everything has to be right, or Molly hears about it. I knew I shouldn't have compromised and bought fiberglass tent poles. Molly knew immediately that I should have gone for the aluminum. But no, I was saving a buck.

I reconsidered the basset hound's advice about sleeping out. Should I use a tarp and a mosquito net? Then I could just sleep out in the elements, just like my stout, long-eared pal in the back yard.

"OK, what happens if it rains sideways and gets me wet underneath that tarp?" I asked her. "What if I lose the netting and run into a swarm of blood-thirsty mosquitos who eat me alive? Huh? Yeah? What about that?"

She stared again.

"OK, I'll think about it a little more and decide later. But what do you think about the sleeping bag? Down or synthetic?"

Molly placed her head in my lap. Gobs of drool made my shorts soggy. She sighed. I had pushed her patience too far.

"You're right again," I said. "I'm obsessing."

I tossed her a treat and she got her exercise for the day, chasing it down and gobbling it. I watched. What a dog. What a friend. And how silly of me to worry about this stuff with such a wise old chum.

On the other hand, maybe her mood will pick up enough to discuss Gore-Tex versus nylon for my rain slicker.

OK, this hurts

Ilio tibia band syndrome. I have no idea what those words mean, but trust me that's what's going on in my right leg. I mention it here only because I can't tell anyone close to me. They would worry. So I'm telling the rest of the world. I'm injured, not badly, but injured. Will one of you look up this injury and tell me if I'm spelling it right?

How do I know that no one I love will read this? I've been writing for 30 years, mostly as a newspaper reporter. I've written columns, reviews, features, news stories. I've written free-lance magazine stories. I've written in academic journals. Hey, my book on the Sierra Nevada was published in 2000. No one in my family reads that stuff. No one in my extended family reads that stuff. Reading me is like saying, "I'd rather read the soup label, but I'm all out of soup."

Only acquaintances, some friends and total strangers read me.

So, here we are and my leg is really beginning to bug me. I want to work out every day. This August, I'll be taking off on my leg (sorry) of a tag-team relay on the John Muir Trail. Three other writers and I are dividing up this 218-mile trail. One writer is in her 20s, one in his 30s, one in her 40s and then there's me. The guy with the "ouch leg" in his 50s.

The only reason I know my leg is injured is that I've been a runner for the last 20 years or so, and I've had lots of injuries. I notice they happen a lot more now than they did 10 years ago. Along the way, I've learned some of their names. Nice thing about being in your 50s: You forget almost everything except pain.

Well, I haven't forgotten the name of this ilio tibia whatever because I just had it in 2003 before a half marathon. I got through that, I ran the half marathon. I got an elbow in the chest from a 20-something woman passing me in the last five yards of the run. And I re-injured my leg, leaving me with a very lasting impression of this pain.

I have to heal. Train. And then go out there and backpack in August. Those younger writers will have an easier time, I think, of getting in shape. But I've got something they probably don't have. I have experience. I have pain. If my wife read this, she'd advise me to forget the leg and have my head examined .