Mountains speak.
Anyone who says differently has not been intimately introduced to one, or perhaps, doesn’t understand the language.
At 1:30 in the morning, closer to the stars then my legs had ever carried me before, body wind-licked and watery, wet with sweat and moisture from the air, belly empty and mind closer to the nebulous nothing nirvana I’ve always wondered about, I swear I heard voices. Not words, not even a language by any fixed definition I know, but definitely voices. Musical laughter comes to mind, but that diminishes the singularity of the sound. I’ve heard musical laughter many times. I had never, until that moment, heard a mountain speak. It was, of course, probably the water from the internal streams trickling through the rocks, tiny waterfalls here and there punctuating the silence of the night, and the deeper, richer bass hum of the subterranean rivers roaring and rushing below. And below the rivers the silt and sand and rock, the very bones and blood of the mountain. We hung to the side of the mountain, above tree line, exposed, little creatures in a huge expanse. I felt, looking at the stars, which seemed to move to their own music, that we were cradled in the very center of a palm, just where change settles, where the crease of the lifeline crosses, where water pools.
Stars dance, and mountains speak, and the night is a huge hand that holds all gently, together. If you climb high enough, the universe begins to take shape.
The thing was, it wasn’t all romance and poetry. We were clinging to Mt. Washington - home of crazily erratic weather and some of the scariest hiking stories of which I’m aware - at 1:00 in the morning after hiking for eight hours already, up and down, to find friends who had separated from the group to prove a point, or bolster their ego, or something.
The trip had stared out well, but quickly devolved into a petty battle of wills. Mine was most closely aligned with the two sweaty, exhausted bodies panting beside me, pulling their weight over boulders in the cold white light of mooned night. The two missing, for whom we searched, took a more casual approach to hiking and had as a result, decided to find their own way and their own pace. Unfortunately, they had declined to hold their own warm clothes or water or food. As angry as I was, my concern trumped the irritation every time I thought of them, defenseless little birds naked against the night and shaking with thirst. My legs found their pace when I thought of our missing comrades.
Mountains, when you’re halfway up, don’t seem like huge endeavors, but rather a collection of steps. We stopped to rest in a hollow of rocks. The wind chilled sweat froze on our clothes, and for just a moment we paused, back against the mountain, face to the sky. The fullness I found in this hollow seemed almost too much. We pressed on; the cold of night wouldn’t let us be still for very long. When you’re high enough on a mountain, far above vegetation, the very rocks you climb become your trailblazers. There is the occasional spot of spray paint on a rock here and there, but mostly, piles of stones, placed by earlier travelers, mark your path. How often I mistook a stone pile for a person in my exhausted delirium, I can’t recount.
Mt. Washington, before the arrival of European settlers, was called Agiocochook, or Home of the Great Spirit. The natives who called it such must have felt the majesty of its vastness. They also feared its tendency to surprise and create its own system of weather. One can feel the energy of the possible on that mountain; the possible glories of reaching the top, and the possible misfortunes that can befall one before reaching. If I felt like a small thing in the palm of a hand, if I felt held, I also felt the possibility of all that I was held from. It wasn’t fear exactly, but a buzzing of senses, a clarity that made me dizzy with the realness of our environment.
Maybe it’s mountains in general, or maybe it’s just this one, but it has a way of getting into your head and opening up thoughts you thought you had long ago shelved, for better or worse. As we walked, I thought about God. I thought of the vastness of perception and the smallness of intimacies that is God. I thought about the boy with whom I was in love; the hollowed out feeling he left when he was gone, and fullness I felt in my longing. I thought about the pain of muscles and the ache of emotions, and how sometimes when one increases, the other is diminished.
I thought and thought, pieces of my self coming to the surface, almost as if hiking for eight hours was sweating it out of me. It was peace. It was purgative. At one point, shakily balanced against the star-flecked sky on a ridge line, I knew, beyond knowing, that our friends, for whom we searched, were well and safe. It was a sudden sharp realization and I was stunned with the sureness of it. If the night was so vast, so like a hand holding us within it, then surely it was the same for them. I knew they were held as I was, in something more permanent than even the mountain we scaled.
We reached the top, simultaneously weary and exhilarated, and broke into a creaky old historic building. We signed the guestbook, and slept, curved together like three sugar spoons in a drawer, beneath old dusty table clothes we found. The next morning we woke with the rising sun in spite of our lack of sleep. We stumbled, muscles thawing from the freezing night, joints aching from the cold of the floorboards, into the observation building that was already bustling with through hikers and workers. We told our story, leaving out the delicate points of hiking through the night and breaking into the historic building, both of which are discouraged, to a rather nice but suspicious kid who called the front desk of lodge at the base of the mountain where we had parked our car. Sure enough, two grizzly, sleepy, and mildly disgruntled men were just emerging from a very uncomfortable night of sleeping in their car. Mission accomplished; we found our friends. They had reached the top at sunset while we looked for them the first time. They had walked the service road back to the car, hungry and scared, but perseverant. They split a piece of gum for sustenance and talked loudly against the night to mitigate its heaviness. That morning they drove up the service road to pick us up and we spent the day reveling in each other’s company. We felt lucky to be alive, and happy to find they were as well. We ate, we laughed, we went back to CT by way of the coast of Maine, and then we went home to our separate lives. We didn’t speak much of it; too much had passed to articulate in words. We had brushed against a stranger, larger, and more exact language in which none of us were fluent.
For weeks after, I walked around with an undeniable space within me. I felt as if the hugeness of that night, the majesty of the mountain, had somehow found a place at the very center of me. I also walked around in the shadow of the mountain. It was within and without; it continued to give me the heady feeling of perspective. It was my senior year of college and my entire life was on the verge of breaking into a thousand irreconcilable pieces. There was no way I could have known that when I fell asleep that first night off the mountain in my bed, safe, depleted, head still spinning. When it did happened, when everything I had come to assume as my permanent reality began unraveling, I knew beyond knowing, that the center of everything is somehow always a still resolution of opposing forces; vast yet small enough to exist within, empty yet full. The best word I know for this place where all converges and finds completion is Agiocogchook, the home of the Great Spirit.
Some things we learn just before we need to know them, some things we learn as we need them; but everything, no matter how huge and insurmountable, is only a collection of steps, one foot in front of the other.
Mountains speak, long after one comes down.