August 19, 2004

• Climbing the Mountain

  
  

   

  
  

  (Advance warning:  this is one of those pretentious ones .)

  
  

   

  
  

  The ~ 2 mile ascent from that tourist mecca “Paradise Inn” midway up Mount Rainer and the high point of the skyline walk, just above the reaching toes of the mountain’s glacial cap, begins on curving pavement, for all the world like a well-tended urban horticultural garden, with the exotic flowers and stunted pines curving delicately away from the verges where the kids tumble accidentally-on-purpose in their game of upward chase.  They are watched indulgently by passing walkers – two little bright-clad nymphs dashing toward the summit.

  
  

   

  
  

  Then after crossing the first chill burbling mountain stream on a thick bridge, the pavement peters into rock-lined gravel, and begins serious stair-steps.  The youngest suddenly (in mid-dash) abandons ‘chase’ for ‘pout,’ declaring “I’m tiWED.  I can’t WALK.”  You raise your eyes to the rising, white-draped goliath above, and breathe deeply of the pine and lupine.  This is all far too glorious for parent-child mind-games.  “Okay,” you say, and presenting your back, boost her up.  It’s even too glorious for the eldest to give voice to more than token grousing at the preferential treatment; she’s soon running upwards again alone, choosing her own of the many branching trails (having apparently inherited your tendency toward the steepest and most upward-directed). The youngest pulls your hat strings.  “Come ON horsey,” she trills in your ear, “FASTER.”  You laugh aloud, too entranced to feel the ache or give way to the least bit of annoyance.

  
  

   

  
  

  Soon you’ve arrived at another burbling outflow, this time unbridged except by strategically-place rocks, and overlooked by equally strategic boulders about which rotund marmots trundle purposefully, gorging voraciously and rapidly on lupine as if there were not fields upon field upon fields of the azure flowers available on every hand.

  
  

   

  
  

  Everyone pauses while the kids wade the stream (“Only in the stream or on the path,” you admonish sternly, “NOT on the green spaces”).

  
  

   

  
  

  Then there’s a parting of the ways.  Even the eldest, wearied after a long day’s travel and hike, is unwilling to continue.  But you, laboring under a serious case of “because it’s there,” for once take up the spouse’s offer of solo childcare, even though you have very serious concerns (later bourn out) about the kids squabbling in your absence.  And you’re off, amazed at this little piece of adult freedom on a long vacation fraught with wifely and motherly duties.  You can barely believe your good fortune.  Each step compounds beauty upon beauty until it seems barely possible to augment the glory one iota more.  Paradise.  Indeed.

  
  

   

  
  

  You only shoulder your camera twice in the next hour and a half of freedom – once when traversing the barely-shoe’s-width yardage through the middle of the glacier’s tongue (how embarrassing would  it be to end up the only of today’s – what? 500? – hikers across this expanse to tumble to the base of the ice and have to be ignominiously  hauled out, underneath that still ring of mountains?).  But finally you abandon the camera altogether as you begin the descent (driven, too quickly, by the knowledge of the familial infighting below). 

  
  

   

  
  

  After all, it’s impossible, isn’t it, to capture the sense of a mountain by mere imagery?  A thousand thousand qualified nature photographers before you have painted and pictured this reaching glory, but there is truly no way to memorialize it.  A mountainview permeates the soul, and only there, glowing in your secret center, can it possibly provide any lasting sense of itself, after you plummet again to more human heights.

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  Final admission of guilt:  the photos are all mine and are unmodified except (I admit) I photoshopped the jet contrail out of the last one – okay, so I’m not one of the thousand thousand, okay?)

  • 1:25 am
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