Something Hidden

Wonderland Trail

Mystic Lake Camp to Sunrise

9-8-2010

Today is the first day that the sky has officially deviated from the weather forecast I bought my airline tickets for. They were cheap tickets, but with rain today the official vision for what the trip should have been is out the window. The official vision had me, in a mental image that is distinctly svelter than usual, struggling up a verdant slope to see, consciousness clobbering in its immensity, The Mountain. I would face down the Evil Me and beat him until his soul came out his urethra. I would have great overpourings of emotion and catharsis, etc, etc, etc.

That official version is of the same sort of offal that comes from the mouths of people that fantasize about war but have not spent more than thirty seconds with an actual veteran. It's gym offal. Tough guy crap. It's the same sort of offal I tell myself that makes me walk in a box for a few minutes a day before I truck myself off to another torture box where I can point at glowing boxes on a screen for money, moving less than two hundred feet in a ten hour stretch. Gym time has nothing to do with being here, on the mountain, no more so than ten seconds on a rifle range can tell you about 1943 Stalingrad.

On the mountain there is no existential animus. There is no lost maiden, or a skulking ruiner to thwart. There are the sweating trees, my heaving lungs. Marmots waddling across the heath. Stupid youtube songs about the Soviet Union and Tetris. Protein bars. My personal cloud of vaporized water, the molecules smashed into the air by the kinetic energy of my skin. Each and every one of these things is more beautiful, ipso facto, than the phenomenon of the mountain itself, which I have memorized from every possible angle. I hadn't actually seen it very often. It might not even be there. It might be more powerful yet if it were not.

Sometimes I hope I never seen my mountain*, and with that thought another lock turns in the door to happiness. The mountain is in my heart. It can not be claimed or bought or laid off or divorced. The only thing it can do in my heart is be loved, loved more each tomorrow than it is today.

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*So long as it's not just a model made by the Washington Commerce Committee.

"Yah, what yah think would make people come to our godforsaken state, eh?"

"Why don't we build a model of a great honkin mountin, dochaknow. Make pretty videos of it like that hobbit guy did with New Zealand. Then people could come up from places like Florida where they don't have any great honkin mountins".

"WHY?!"

"To see the big honkin mountin, donchaknow"

I am reasonably sure Mt. Rainier is not just a fiberglass model.