Thoughts From the Mountain
Honestly, that nature writing class took all my energy my senior year of college. Without it, I’d be far worse at writing than I am now (I’m no genius at it today, but I was certainly a great deal worse before my last semester of school), so I’m grateful that I have the work from the class that I do. However, it’s still not my strongest form of writing. And so it’s eligible for endless throwbacks.
An Old Dragon’s Scar (November 2013)
When it comes to nature, I’ve always been fond of scars. Brassy train tracks overgrown with green grass, dry creeks, and streams with deep banks dancing with clear water. I love walking in the carving. Coming to Wisconsin afforded me a new pleasure, the pleasure of making my own carving through wet, freshly fallen snow. The snow of the west is too dusty to leave a satisfying mark. Some winter mornings, I’ll dress up in black snow pants, two scarves, and heavy boots to charge through an overnight snowfall, armed with a floppy hat and the desire to leave tracks. After I’ve traipsed my way through the field, I’ll look back to see a landscape turned over with muddy snow and blades of brown grass sticking out of the craters like wounded soldiers on the ground. It is satisfying to look behind myself and see tangible proof that I was there, cutting myself into the earth with a scar. And when regret sinks in, there is nothing more charitable than understanding that snow will melt and time will be reset. The sin of wanting to last will be forgiven.
My favorite place as a child was on the side of a mountain. I’m very specific about my mountains, and it takes a great deal to make me fall in love. The hills of the east do not entice me for I have played with dragons in the west. My dragon was a dormant volcano in the east range in Colorado Springs, a strong old girl named Pikes Peak. There’s a stream that runs like a whitewashed scar along her side, knotting its way through the landscape and pocketing into wading pools under waterfalls. A couple miles south from my parent’s cabin in the Springs, there is a tear-drop pool that is the product of Helen Hunt Falls. I spent my childhood summers crawling over the rocks and trees in the forest by that waterfall. In the summers growing up, the old dragon was my playground, my greatest adversary, and my imaginary friend. Her water-stained scar bound us together. In those days, it was always the old girl and me against the world.
Nov. 2008
Justin and I always hold hands. We wandered the playground in kindergarten side by side, hand in hand. In fifth grade, we walked home from school with braided fingers. Middle school biology was particularly difficult with our hands clasped under the table. The eleven hour car ride to my childhood playground was no exception. We left yesterday afternoon just before sunset. Twin notes left on twin counter tops for our parents, two phone calls to the high school feigning illness, and we were on the road. Today is Justin’s first visit to this place, and he is spending more time exploring than I would have liked. I wish I could be like my mother and sit down on the smoothest rock by the frozen bank and let him wander alone, but I don’t have gloves and my hands are cold.
We crawl over the land, tripping our way past the rotting oak dressed in white cotton. It’s harder to keep our balance during the exploration because I refuse to let go of his hand. But Justin is more adventurous than I, and he wants to see the dusty world up close. I look back at the smooth, grey rock by the bank, imagining being curled up there, wrapped in the mustard yellow fleece. In that moment, Justin’s hand slips out of mind as he clambers his way across the frozen stream and crouches on the ground, examining a bit of exposed dirt.
“Justin!” I shout across the ice.
“Just let me climb this tree and I’ll be back,” he shouts back. The area is mostly covered with a combination of oak and Ponderosa pine. The last proper fire was almost twenty years ago, and the only indication of the burn are the scorch marks on the bark of the older trees. I don’t have enough energy to battle my shivering hands and Justin’s desire to run around, so I turn back and settle against the grey rock overlooking the stream and watch Justin bounce around the terrain like an overexcited bunny.
My playground is usually crawling with animals. Mini bears - my childhood name for chipmunks with tails - are always my favorite to chase. They’re abundant, somewhat impervious to danger, and completely able to bounce to inevitable safety from me, so I never feel too bad about sending them tearing into the underbrush. But there aren’t any mini bears today because they’re all hibernating, hiding from the November chill. Hummingbirds are also usually around this section of the creek, mostly due to the amount of Texas sage during the summer. But the bright red flowers are asleep under the frozen earth. Sometimes there are deer in the area, but Justin is being too loud for them to come out of hiding.
My rock has a dimple next to my right knee. It has a corner and with my finger ghosting over the groove, it feels like a little capital L in the stone. I slip my left hand under my green knit scarf and drag my fingers over the indent under my ear. I thought the marks would match, but they do not. The surface of the rock is cold and unyielding. The malleable crevice on my neck pulses with life and warms my icy fingers. The rock is bleeding the heat from my hand and stealing the feeling out of it. I don’t remember getting my scar, I was only a baby when I did, but in the solidarity with this old stone, this is the moment I stopped hating the puckered flesh.
“Hey,” Justin says as he returns to the rock and sits down next to me, burying his hands in the folds of the blanket.
“Have fun?” I ask him, slipping my fingers in between his. He nods and begins telling me about the various tracks he saw, insistent that it was a huge, black wolf slowly tracking an old bison. Justin would have never been good at tracking. Wolves don’t come to this area this time of year, and there are never any bison around. But his voice is dancing with excitement and so are his eyes, so I let it go and shift so my back is against his front and close my eyes, listening to his excitement. A wolf tracking a bison makes a lovely story.
It starts snowing; the daily afternoon shower is not immune to the cold.
“Hey. Stand up,” Justin says to me. I do with minimal complaint to the chill that is swirling around me. Justin takes my waist and pulls me close to him, tucking my head under his chin and turning on the spot. He smells like stale cigarettes and fast food, and it’s unfortunate, because if we were in a movie, this would be romantic. But my hand that’s wrapped around his shoulder is starting to turn blue, the wind is picking up as the afternoon storm is begging to be noticed, and the rock is slippery. We give up after a couple of minutes because of the uncooperative nature of the world and sit down side by side to share the blanket and stare at the glassy stream until the sun sets and it’s time to go back to Missouri.
May 1996
You’re not supposed to, but sometimes Mama lets us sneak up to the waterfall. There’s a sign that says it’s dangerous because you could fall in and die, but the waterfall likes me. I can feel it in my bones. Today, Jess pulled my hair into braids and they are bouncing on my back, hitting my shoulder blades like sandy rocks on a string. I snuck out of the cabin and came straight to my waterfall. There’s a raven watching me. My daddy says that ravens are smarter than people sometimes. They can find food anywhere. There are tree nuts that have shells too hard for an ordinary bird to crack, so most birds will just leave them alone like a rock, but a raven will take that nut to the top of a pine tree and drop it on the ground until it opens. This raven looks grumpy. Daddy says nature knows when we break the rules, and that’s why we have to be careful. But the raven is probably from somewhere else so he doesn’t know that this waterfall is mine. It’s okay.
Daddy also says I can’t own the waterfall. Water is never in the same place twice, so I’d have to own all the water in the world before I could own the waterfall. But my daddy is stupid. This waterfall picked me and I picked it. It’s mine just as much as my new green sandals or my yellow shorts are mine.
I looked over at the raven. He’s still frowning at me, which means he doesn’t like what I’m doing, but I ignore him and start picking my way over the rocks to my waterfall. It’s May, and there is so much green here. Almost as much as there is in Kentucky when the magic moss grows over the cars that sit outside for too long. The Christmas trees are rough and prickly, and the sleeping trees are wide awake and wearing their best green clothes. The rocks are wet and brown with freckles like mine, and I take care not to stomp. I slip on one of them, and I have to take off my green sandals to get closer to the water. I put them in front of a hole in two rocks, which must be a home for a big killer snake. It’s quite the adventure.
The water is white and smells like the mountain. I sit down on a big rock close to the water and let it splash my face. The water is cold, like moving ice, but the sun is bright and there are no trees right here to block it. The sun is hotter here because we have less air to cool it down. I know everything about where I am, just like my daddy knows everything about our cabin. He built it a couple years ago all in one summer, and then he had to rest in bed for a week afterwards because his back was tired. But it was worth it, he says. Just like it’s worth it to get in trouble for sneaking away and coming to my waterfall. We have to leave early this year on account of Daddy having to go back to school to study the Japan Bomb in the Great War. I don’t know why anyone would want to study something so sad, but he says it is interesting and important. Mama says we also have to go back early because I’m starting school next week, but I think she is just saying that because she misses the sticky trees back home. My mama likes the sticky trees, but I think I would want to stay here where you could just sit by the waterfall and be in forever.
Sept 2010
The third time I stole a car in my life was an hour ago, when I needed to get out of the cabin and to my waterfall. I understand the relative insanity of suggesting that this block of land or the water that flows through it is in any way mine, but right now it’s the only place I can breathe. I spent the night feeling trapped inside the cedar cabin, sliding between restless sleep and staring at the ceiling as I choked on the dry air. I gave up trying to rest an hour ago and slipped out of the house. My father left the car keys in his sweatshirt, which was draped over the rocking chair. I grabbed the forest green fleece and pulled it over my shoulders, padded my way across the porch and climbed into the Jeep, started it and shushed it as it roared to life. The noise of the engine is enough to startle the hare who was scrounging in the brush, and he ran off.
Ten minutes later, the Jeep is parked in the visitor center parking lot of Helen Hunt Falls, and I am at the top of the hill watching the sun rise. To the northeast, I can see the whisper of deep red as the beams of light kiss the exposed Triassic redbed in Garden of the Gods. I’m facing west, toward my dragon, and trying to understand my mood.
Before I stumbled up here and planted myself firmly against the aspen tree, I was unable to breathe. That’s something that seldom happens here in the sparse air of the Rockies. I needed to get out of that cabin, I needed to get away from my parents, I needed to get here, to my waterfall, so I could sit with my knees in my chest and my eyes focused on Pikes Peak. The air was too thick back at the cabin. It was heavy with the impenetrable fact that I will die, and if I’m very lucky, leave a scar. But, honestly, a scar of mine is unlikely. I was never a grenade. Oh, my family will be sad. If I have friends, hopefully gathered around me in my old age, they’ll mourn. But I cried when Howard Zinn died earlier this year. I curled up in a nest of pillows and blankets on my bed and wept. My heart shattered for an old man I didn’t know who wrote a book that impacted my father’s life but hardly grazed mine. And this feeling of loss hasn’t gone away yet, I imagine. I always knew I was going to die, but I always thought I wanted to leave a mark. Now I’m not so sure. Howard Zinn’s death broke me. It left me like a grenade. It rendered me with chemicals sloshing around inside a cold, indifferent outer shell, ready to burst apart at the slightest tug. I don’t want to break some stranger the way Howard Zinn’s death seemed to break me.
I watch the water tumble over itself into the basin and smooth out as it slides away from the point of impact. There is vegetation cropping up on the falls, little shoots of blue and white lupine flowers with smooth leaves and rough stems spotting the water with a delicate color scheme. I lay my head on the nearest available tree trunk, and close my eyes. At first, the roar of the waterfall is all I can hear, but then the wind picks up and the trees are talking to one another in the breeze, and I can hear the scratching of a mini bear picking his way across the ground looking for breakfast. I can hear the steady crunch of footsteps. They stop in front of me, and I can smell Old Spice and doughnuts. I open my eyes and look up, and my father is standing between me and the mountain. He sits down next to me, hands me a chocolate sprinkle, and pulls out a bear claw for himself.
We sit in silence other than our chewing and look at the mountain painting itself alive with the sunlight dressing it. It is grey at the top, spotted with white where the snow never melts, and then it blooms to green at timberline and fades into the earth. Dormant volcanoes dress like this in the morning. In the afternoon, she’ll mute and the transition from desolation to teeming with life blurs during the five o’clock shower. In the evening, she burns red in the sunset before going black and casting an impressive shadow in town, making the daytime uneven. But right now she is all hard lines and the quiet demand to be noticed. A needy mountain who is demanding my attention. The old girl can dress herself up, powder alabaster across her nose and hide her scars under permanfrost. One such scar is the road that goes from base to summit and is invisible unless you’re on it. Sitting by my waterfall, I can pretend the road doesn’t even exist, that she doesn’t have that scar or that she’d never met humanity. When the road was being carved out of the old girl’s side, the builders wanted to provide humanity with the opportunity to scale the mountain in a couple hours. They wanted to shuffle tourists to the summit, parade them around the top, show off the view, and then herd them back down the mountain, digging deeper into the scar.
There are approximately 117 billion dead people who have ever lived. That’s about fifteen dead people for every living person on the planet. Fifteen scars already made by fifteen people who, for at least one moment, tried to change the wager. I trace my blue veins, sticking out of my hands in the cold weather and imagine fifteen pale crevices across my skin. It’s the wrong wager, I think, my throat closing. Humans won’t last. Humans shouldn’t last. They should whisper along, dancing quietly across the landscape, and disappearing without a scar.
