Rain was in the forecast, a 70% chance of
thunderstorms in the...
Rain was in the forecast, a 70% chance of
thunderstorms in the afternoon. Plans had been made to walk up a mountain, and
plans were changed to lessen the risk of being lightening-bolted off that
mountain. We fled the weather and headed east and walked up another mountain
instead, this on a weekday in New Hampshire in summer’s second half.
There’s weather wherever you go. We ascended
this plan B, up up up, and found ourselves in a cloud, a close and humid
enveloping. Droplets drifted, not rain exactly. They dampened but did not wet. Mid-afternoon,
the light was dim along the path. Heaps of bear shit along the way, fresh and
frequent, alerted us whose mountain this was. Around a bend and a rock
outcropping offered itself. We stepped on the ledge and instead of big views – trees
and peaks and ponds unfolding below for miles and miles, that gasping sense of
awe of being above the world – we were faced with a grey-white nothing, a wall of cloud. Two
close trees were silhouetted and then — blank. It was the color I imagine blindness
to be. Not dark, but a muted, glowing grey. A shadowless spread, endless and
depthless and silent. It was not comfortable.
A scowl crossed the face of the person with me
on the rock, steps were taken back to the path, a disturbance in the
electricity suggested fear had inserted itself into the afternoon, as did the
pace of the words, “let’s keep moving.”
The ocean can gulp you up whole. A mountain
can make you disappear. We moved on. Fear, for me, registered closer to
exhilaration, the feeling of coming up against something vast and rare. What
good luck, to glimpse the abyss. To look upon it, feel it speed the heart and
tighten the guts, make the blood chug faster in the veins, and then, to turn
and walk away. To use the muscles of the legs to move yourself along the path,
press against the solid things of earth: roots and rocks and dirt. But the
energy shifted after that; conversation slowed. We’d climbed and climbed and
focus turned towards landing each next step. It got darker. We worried, separately,
and not outloud, if we’d missed a chance of a flat surface to spend the night.
Fear and the cessation of fear. Tension and
relief. I realized recently: at the start of any extended walk in the woods,
any clamber up a mountain, I always believe the destination to be unreachable.
So when the steps accumulate and a distance is crossed and whoa, here we are!, the sense of thrill is wild, a euphoric sort of
relief.
So it was that night. Later, higher still, a
flat spot was found, the tent set up, the clouds gave way, and a beaming and
benevolent crescent moon appeared. We listened to the wind. It moved above us
with power, flirting with the tops of the trees. It sounded like someone’s
breath in your ear when you’re pressed in a half-light
trance and breath comes quickened and unchecked.
There are no bad winds, someone I knew said
once. Ontop the mountain what we heard seemed less like wind — the
grass-swaying, leaf-bothering breezes of regular days at sea level — and more like pure force, a deep and breathy
whorling. And then, all at once, it stopped. An abrupt and total evacuation of
sound. It paused my heart. The silence roared of infinity, more than the great
grey-white abyss from the rock. It roared of end. I found myself frightened, wanting
the world to start breathing again, wanting to feel the heated touch of the
hand next to me, to know we were still bones and blood, still had heft, and were
not about to be sucked off the mountain and into the gaping silence. Only moments and the wind
started up again, like a lover finally able to exhale, a pause before
the gust.
[Painting: Eartham Woods by Koen Lybaert]
