Climb
From the opening pages of my next book on the Adirondacks.
This story begins in the 1970s at a small, rural high school where for one reason or another, which may well have involved a pretty girl, I ended up joining the outdoor club and climbing my first Adirondack “46er,” (one of the 46 peaks over 4,000 feet) …coming out of the dark quiet of the forest to a first lookout, feeling that same giddy high I still do—seeing trees shrinking away into nothing more than green stalks far below, the occasional house becoming a small, two-dimensional square of its brown roof amongst the treetop sea of greens, the dizzying sensation of looking out on nothing, on air, clouds, distance, a small essing crease at the lowest part of the valley that must have been the road we wound our way up through Keene Valley to the trailhead parking.
Those first ever high peaks I climbed are many an Adirondack hiker’s firsts, Cascade and Porter, an easy climb I was told, and the teacher/guides in charge, Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes, my shop and English teachers respectively, certainly made it look easy, Mrs. Rhodes especially, who seemed to float across the tops of rocks and small boulders, her feet instinctively landing in the best places, her pace never slowing, while I would slip and catch hold of a tree limb in my crappy boots, pause to look for the next best foothold, feel the blisters steadily forming along both heels. She seemed to weigh nothing at all, to just skim across the tips of rocks and roots effortlessly, while my weight had doubled, as if I had somehow landed on another planet with significantly stronger gravity… Still, upon reaching that first treeless summit, my breath left me for other reasons.
Seeing the world from this perspective for the first time is to see a new world with new eyes, everything magical, mesmerizing, haunting, mystical. I somehow felt concurrently large, vast beyond the reach of my imagination, and small, as insignificant, as distant as the tiny dots of trees, the small black circles of ponds, the black hovering specks of circling ravens we were now somehow above.
Shiva, Jesus, Moses…all ascended tall peaks to seek clarity, to rise above the mundane, ordinary world, gain divine perspective, insight, illumination. While I can’t claim anything on that scale, in my much less significant, mortal way, the humbling experience of climbing those first ever two Adirondack peaks left a clear mark on me, instilling a deep desire to retreat from and rise above what the philosopher Martin Heidegger calls the “average everydayness” of the world (find a post on Heidegger here).
Had I not climbed these peaks, and shortly thereafter many more, I wonder if I would have felt—with such urgency—the need to study philosophy, literature, creative writing, music, art… . Ascending to a tall outlook, while in a more direct metaphorical way brings you closer to the heavens, the transcendent, it also serves as a metaphor for stepping out of the mundane turmoil of your own life, inviting you to see/think in a fundamentally different way.
The road we drove along to get there, going agonizingly slow behind a logging truck filled to the brim with freshly cut lumber, transfigured into a long, curving thing hugging the shape of a river valley out to the edges of my vision, even its quickest vehicles become mere ambling, colorful insects.
The cliff drop-off I could easily walk a straight line along were I not hundreds of feet above the tips of scrub pine became a dizzying, harrowing adventure. Years later, during my first-ever full-time teaching job in the far north of Maine, I will hike along Mount Katahdin’s knife edge and feel this sensation a hundred fold, even the straightest, flattest surface become a highwire act with those sometimes just 18 inches of trail dropping off hundreds of feet on both sides—no handholds, everything edge, no moving back away from it, as I did instinctively on that first trip up Cascade in the Adirondacks.
The wind is different at the tops of mountains as well. Maybe it was that first trip, maybe another—up Giant or Algonquin, Gothics or Dix—where we could lean the entirety of our weight into the wind, and it held you there until it let up a little and you went stumbling forward. On a winter backpacking trip up Mt. Colden, I witnessed a big, snow-filled gust catch a friend’s pack and carry him a few feet up into the air, on through the brittle branches of a small pine….
Climbing, working hard, struggling, reaching a vantage point, everything suddenly appearing new, different, more intense…. what I’m driving at easily reduces to cliché, but these self-same trite words morph into something more profound, unutterable, when you get far enough above, beyond, outside of the normalcy of your life.
Acquiring a small cabin in the Adirondack mountains as I move into the latter chapters of my life was not whim or fancy. The Adirondacks are an essential part of my journey, my life, and sleeping in lean-tos and tents and being out there in the deep quietude and essential beauty of the wilderness have surely shaped me in myriad ways. Quitting a stable teaching job, doing a podcast on the things it seems most miss about the complexity of Hemingway, finally finishing a book of fly fishing essays (to be published in less than a month!), embarking on this new book centered on the Adirondack cabin we acquired in the heart of COVID… all stem in many ways from that first ascent up Cascade and Porter mountains, that first encounter with something more real, lasting, and essential, rising far above the ordinary.
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Took my breath away reading these words.