The skies are blue and the clouds look fluffy. The air is crisp and the water is chilling. The mountains appear to touch the sky and the leaves are rich shades of green, red, and orange.
I walked along out of service train tracks that cut through this mountain. Literally, through it. The tunnels started on the West Shore of Donner Lake and followed the ridge of the mountain all the way to Truckee. I hiked a half a mile from the highway up to an opening in the tunnel. For a few hundred yards the tunnel was riddled with broken bottles and worthless graffiti. As I walked further in, the garbage began to disappear and the graffiti became thoughtful, artful. It became darker and darker until I could only see the circle illuminated by my pin flashlight. On one spot of the wall someone had written the entire first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone. Someone had drawn a white line. Just a white line and I was so intrigued by it. People wrote stories of the lives. "Im kevin, my gf broke up w me now im gay" or "Im pat. i got dmt and then i got aids" and "im kaylene. thats it." Someone sprayed a **** pipe on the wall of the tunnel and it was green. They paid very good attention to the crystals in the bowl and the smoke rising from it. A young girl with black hair had her lips on the pipe and she was breathing in. Written under it was "Remember, remember, the 5th of November." Some one else had sprayed a cowboy. One half of him was black outlined with white and gray detail and the other half was white outlined with gray and black detail. Next to it was written "Childe Roland to the dark tower come." Some one else had sprayed a devil. He was red with pure black eyes. It was signed "Self Portrait." Halfway through there was a drain and creepily enough a faint light was shining from underneath the thick grates. Above it some one wrote "I stashed my **** here for three years." Under that someone had wrote "Gateway to hell."
The rocks jutted out in straight lines. Some were smooth and others rough. The mountains cleansed me. They wiped away some of the grime this small city has polluted me with. The crisp air exfolliated some of the smoke from my lungs and the water pulled the dirt from my skin and the hike massaged my sore feet and the graffiti swept through one eyeball and took all the garbage in my brain out through the other eyeball. The mountains saved me.