Summit in Decline

Rain and no rain, snow and no snow, for centuries, for millennia. Through the passage of dark and light, planet around its sun, seasons swelling then streaking down a windowpane, mountains grew. Mountains without a name, mountains almost foothills. Mountains that owed their height to the upward push of other mountains. Mountains the subject of many a legend, mountains bereft of storytellers. Mountains without access, mountains miles and years from any nearby town. The shifting of tectonic plates, the demise of warm shallow saltwater seas. Wandering groups of upright talkers and hunters, a species that wore the skins of the slain. Of these mountains had no fear, though perhaps reason to fear; together they could bring down animals much larger than them, but only if they were mortal, had brains, bones, flesh, fur, heartbeat. A mountain had none of these, so perhaps was not deemed mortal. Not mortal, not murderable, hence not edible. A mountain could not be skinned, deboned. A mountain was not warm-blooded, drinkable. Fresh mountain springs were cold. A mountain did not have arms, so couldn’t grapple or fight, didn’t have legs, so couldn’t run. Bears hid within forests and underbrush around their lower reaches, but bears were mere visitors, even if born there. Bears were residents of mountains but not mountains. 

There were many kinds, each peculiar. To a glib eye, they might pass for instances of a type, these masses of rock and escarpment. In their many languages the two-legged walkers, the hunters and finders, the settlers and climbers, described and named them. Maps were made to mock and contain them. Topographic zoos which measured, depicted in miniature scales of height and breadth that did not yield easily to shallow imagination. Campfires were lit, huts and lodges built. Huts and lodges died off, leaving behind motels and cabins and houses. Interstates and back roads glistened serenely after summer rains. The walkers moved among them, became climbers. Mountains became living trophies to gravity challenged and conquered. Mountains became goals, end points, fetishes to be collected. Mountains became graveyards for the unlucky and clumsy. 

Each unaware, each bound to others around it. Each a unrecorded genealogy of squirrels born and dying among trees, of trees standing and split asunder by lightning. Sky and earth, clouds mimicking mountains below: spirits of vapor that morphed and wandered according to the whims of the high winds. Mountains unconscious and therefore free of plague: they could not diminish themselves through comparison. A cloud not even a cloud. A mountain not even a mountain. Others less old, more fearful, more bound to time and mortality may look up, see mountain, then look up further, and note cloud, then note the resemblance, then rate the former less favorably against the latter—a cloud capable of so much more than what’s earthbound and forever south of it. 

Mindless of categorization, genus and species. Unaware of multitudes bound into the singular: gneiss, limestone, quartz, slate, granite, chert, diorite, rhyolite, labradorite, gabbro. None acknowledged as mountains, by mountains, for their business is to embody and not know. Are there parts? Are there names for those parts? Mountains move as one, millimeters and centimeters and inches, which as well they do not acknowledge as expressions of their nature or sovereignty. They do not move to be aware that they’ve moved, changing in order to relieve themselves of sameness. In the eyes of walkers and climbers, they are fixed; easy to chase; bound to earth; beyond heavy; impossible to shoulder and carry, except as little stones and keepsakes. Mountains, unlike such flirts and conquerors, are too dense to be sensitive. Depression is not a mountain condition, nor anger, curiosity, or elation. They are without culture. Their people gather for what seems like eternity but say nothing. The walkers and complainers, bored and impatient, often cover both ends of the conversation: mountain and walker, mountain and complainer. 

A future has returned: centuries ago, it had ventured far ahead. Somewhere, having found nothing it’d gone searching for, it had doubled back and met the evergreen present mid-way. What news, what sights? What had time-yet-to-arrive gained from outpacing the sluggish advance of time-now-passing-then-passed? Nothing that could be told, conveyed by being lived or lost. It had communed a while among a place where mountains waited, as they always had, but no thoughts could be read and no expressions could be examined: chiromancy of stone, no prophecy; geomancy of soil, no insight gleaned from no pattern. Time fed itself its own tail and was for a short while sated. Mountains felt no different, neither full nor empty. They were time’s exemplars, perhaps, potent illustrators of what stood and fell, or perhaps they were time’s most overused cliché. A thing that once died once stated: “While I sought enlightenment, mountains were not mountains…but once attained, rivers were rivers and mountains, mountains.” Naturally, among mountains such sentiments have never had much currency. Sentiments and concerns come and go, stipple the waters of a passing stream like leaves. The eye that looks down instead of up, notices.