Jottings From Journeys

Mountains

There are some once-seen images captured during my journeys that flash inside my mind for years. They are not photographic so much but more like sense-related and they come at me at the oddest times in spinning images until I have to shake myself to return to reality. These images are the milestones on the backdrop of thoughts, and they direct me to literal and metaphysical places inside myself that I didn’t know existed.

I think at this time I’ll start with mountains.

“What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?”

From the Hobbit series, this riddle’s answer is of course a mountain; however, I don’t agree with it totally. Mountains do grow with the help of earthquakes as plate tectonics dictate. Sometimes they even blow their top worse than an irate driver with road rage and they make breathing difficult for the residents miles and miles away. Just remember Mt. St. Helens. Also sometimes mountains crumble into tiny rocks and dust and fill the beaches with black sand.

I think I better stop picking on Hobbit and come to what I experienced with mountains. Mountains anywhere fill me with AWE. That’s it. Awe. Especially when I view them from the top.

During the late sixties when we flew over the Alps, I took photos of them from the airplane with my 126 box camera. On the way back, having run out of film, I just looked out and drank in their majesty. The photos came out great, and I still have them in some obscure photo album on the top shelf of a closet. What never erases from my mind’s eye, however, is their dignity in their solitude.

At the moment, from my hotel window, I am looking up at the rounded hills of the Allegheny Mountains in the distance and looking down at the greenish brown waters of the Susquehanna River and loving it. Although all my life I have been an oceanside dweller, mountains of any type move me to no end.

I felt an enormous awe for mountains while flying into the Tri-cities Airport in Tennessee several years ago. I was reading a novel when the pilot announced we were nearing our destination. When I looked up I was stunned by the view of a spectacular blue horizon, except what awed me was not the sky but the Blue Ridge Mountains rising dome after dome over each other, in a chain, in the distance. The time was toward the evening, but not dark yet, and the sun must have just set behind the mountains because they looked as if they were made of Steuben glass, airy, precious, and dream-inducing.

Anytime I lift my head to look at a mountain, I feel I also lift my spirit, although I’m not much of a mountain climber. In lack of a mountain, I live in Florida, even a good photo is enough to do the same trick for me. Because of that, I have great respect for mountaineering since I feel climbing a mountain is a great metaphor for life.

Just as in life, there are false summits and official peaks on a mountain. A false summit on a mountain has resemblance to pride, unearned fame, or unsatisfiable greed in life. A mountain climbing enthusiast once complained that he and his buddies thought they reached the top but when they looked up, they saw that the peak they were trying to climb was even higher. The best a person can probably do in this situation is to send good vibes to the mountain and try again.
Whether the climbers follow already set trails or are trailblazers themselves, what they are doing is getting the mountain’s grace and injecting themselves with goodwill and serenity.

Maybe the mountain climbers leave too many footprints and maybe it is argued that they are just as destructive to the environment as any other pollutant. Yet, I don’t think so. What ruins a mountain is not the climber, but the miner and the lumberjack who doesn’t know when and where to stop. Maybe that’s why some mountains blow their tops because they can’t take it anymore, as in the case of Mt. St. Helens.

A good climber will start from the bottom up. Lazybones like me enjoys the vista from an airplane, or as once it happened, get put on a mountaintop by a helicopter. An average person’s mountain climbing from sea level usually consists of driving up in a car to a place 800 to a 1000 ft above sea-level, say Jamestown in upstate NY. Now, that can’t be called climbing, can it?

Another thing about climbing a mountain, probably, is not just climbing up, but rather scaling the peaks up and down until one reaches the highest peak, if possible. From the top the view may be awesome but happiness and satisfaction is in the climbing. So even if one hasn’t reached the top, he may have gained something truly important in the process.

Earth is not a perfect planet and its mountains are not set according to a general rule. Each mountain has its own rule, own trail, own rocks, own crags, own slippery surfaces. Each mountain leads its climber to an individual focus and a different understanding of himself against the universe just as each mountaineer carries his own map.

A hiker or a climber finds his own heart and solitude in the barrenness above the tree-line. Once he reaches the top of a mountain, the scenery is not only spectacular looking down but also looking up, for it’s in man’s essence to look up and try to see as high as he can. If he’s up there in the summit and is camping at night, he is nearer to the stars to dream about them. Ursa Minor, Ursa Major, Orion’s Belt, The Milky Way, The North Star, Dog Star and others are all there to make him proud of his purpose but also to make him feel insignificant inside such a vast universe. Even so, despite the clammy mist, blinding fog, the wind and the frigid air, the one who has made it to the top feels his connection to the cosmos outwardly and internally.

I grew up at the seashore, and to this day I reach an internal peace through walks on the beach watching the waves scatter and throw their white caps about. I love to feel the sand under my feet and smell the salty air. Yet, mountains tease me, entrance me, and fill me with awe and curiosity. Maybe it is because I think of them as waves too. Mountains can be the waving of the earth’s crust to the rest of the heavens as if to say hello. Just like the waves, mountains can fold, fault, and become residual. Just like Tsunamis, for miles and miles around, volcanoes blow up and drown everything in sight inside their ashes.

Maybe that’s why their majesty has inspired myths to be crated around them as Mount Meru in the center of the Himalayas was thought to be the axis of the universe as Mount Olympus was where Zeus resided. Hindus and Buddhists believed in the divinity of the mountains and assigned each one as a home to a god.

As well as serving as residences to gods and being the sites of sacred revelations, mountains are also regarded as portals to the underworld and, according to Icelandic folklore, people believed that the Christian priests who took on the role of mythic heroes were able to open these portals. Mountains are also thought of being inhabited by supernatural beings, some of them demons, who send climbers to their deaths. Even today, some consider Mount Hood as the operating center of an alien race and Mount Shasta to be the home of an old race that dwelled in Atlantis.

To the question, “why climb a mountain?” Sir Edmund Hillary answered” “Because it’s there.”

But a mountain can be fickle. A mountain has moods. One never knows when the temper tantrum will strike. A seemingly safe rock with holds, nicks and crannies for the mountaineering gear suddenly will turn slippery with ice; the overhangs on ridges will abruptly break apart sending down stones over once passable routes; a grey mysterious fog will stick to one’s breathing passages; hail and lightning will batter the eyes, the face, and anything else in sight; the word avalanche will make the climber tremble with fear, for it will maroon people and villages for days at an end.

To live and work among the mountains offers a linkage to nature in a truly strange way. Even when one has debts to be paid and mortgages to be settled, mountains are around for comfort, encouraging the dwellers on them to enjoy a hearth and home decorated with Alpine rose, edelweiss, gentian, and anything else that may grow at the foothills or through the snow, to wake up in the morning and lift their eyes and souls to the primeval majesty of high peaks, to watch the plethora of green fir and to go after the timber to be gathered. Wood is put to good use among the mountain dwellers. Tools and utensils, carriages, carts, blades and axle for waterwheels, homes, sheds, weaving gear, cuckoo clocks, sometimes are all made of wood.

While most any place is losing its battle to an uncivilized civilization, inside and around Alpine forests, there are nature preserves where the flora and fauna remain undisturbed. Hiking on or around the mountain valleys in spring to see the roots of birch trees grab a boulder and to listen to the warblers’ and finches’ songs mix in with the hoarse croak of the vultures, to make way for a red deer followed by its fawn on the green tinted meadows and maybe discover a treasure of insect and plant life provides an unaccustomed sense of content.

Yet, the seasons on mountains do not depend on the time of the year as much as they do on the altitude. The higher one climbs the colder and the lonelier it gets. Soon the tree line is gone and what are left are rock, ice, snow and the majestic mountains holding their windy heads inside the clouds.

Resembling mountains, memories come in waves, positioned inside ranges and cordilleras. They come to us without space and time following their own personal laws and just like mountains there are memories too hard to climb and conquer as there are memories to enjoy the magnificent view from. Yet, they also fail and betray us sometimes, similar to what an avalanche does to the mountaineers.

Speaking of memories and mountains, my farthest memories of mountains are of the Alps, though not of snow and solitude at first, but of patchwork of fields surrounding quiet villages, small churches, simple doll houses shouldering steep roofs, freshly mowed hay draped in piles over cylindrical racks to dry and me feeling like Heidi among the goats; then, also, the earth rising to the sun with stupendous force; steep, craggy, brown, black, and purple heights breaking the ground with touches of green toward the peaks; and pine forests at the skirts of the mountains. Why these mountains ever rose with such keenness has puzzled many for centuries. The answers may be hiding in those small quiet villages that have survived, formed and re-formed through millenniums and centuries of mountain building activities of our blue planet. When I was very young those villages and the people in them were the most important to me.

Only later on, I came to witness the white caps, snowy shoulders, and white wondrous splendor of solitude during our early spring and late winter visits. Alps do not span a large area. They could fit with ease inside two East Coast US states such as Virginia and Maryland, but as far as mountains go, they are rebellious, frozen, wild youngsters who haven’t lost their sharp edges. They are also the spoiled brats of history with riches of legend, romance, and majesty.