Snow White

I was probably wrong to conclude that the old man sitting on a huge rock surrounded by dozens of birds, squirrels, & marmots had seen the best years of his life come & go. Not that it was wrong of me to make such conclusions, but rather that this particular conclusion may have been incorrect.

I was miles into the hike when I stumbled upon the old man. He looked like Snow White from some parallel universe where everything is flipped upside-down. Because (although he had rodents eating from his hands & birds pecking at scraps near his lap) in this altered non-fiction fairytale, Snow White was a decrepit old man that could barely sit upright. His spine with its petrified forward-fold was perfect for handing snacks to woodland creatures arching their own backs as they ate from his hands and near his feet.

Though they were all aware of my presence, none of them acknowledged me. And so, far be it for me to disrupt this feast of friends. I slide past them as if the best thing I could do was act indifferent — as if I was as unimpressed with them as they were me. But I wasn’t. I was intrigued. My thoughts ran the gamut from everything including parallel universes to “what the fuck was that?”. And perhaps my most incorrect thoughts were those pertaining to Snow White’s better years having passed him, along with all his friends & loved ones having been reluctantly replaced with rodents & birds. …so I imagined.

And then I recalled the great philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, having been considered mad after he snatched the whip from the hand of the man beating his horse with it & then commenced to beating that man with his own whip; how he too disappeared to be alone in the woods, only to be visited by other great thinkers. I thought about how I myself could not wait to get away from the mass of people waddling around the edge of Crater Lake for selfies, group photos, & commentary on the snacks in their hands instead of the beauty in their presence.

Perhaps, I later wondered, these are the best years of Snow White’s life. Perhaps he anxiously waited all the years prior for these days when he could be the mad man alone in the woods, visited only by these great thinking creatures.

Perhaps…

Whatever the case, it was still a fuckin’ trip to see.