damonjustisntfunny.com

Mount Rainier came to us for the first time through a patch of clear-cut wilderness, peeping over the top of a distant hill like a lost and dirty cloud. We had pulled over for water and a chance to nurse our saddle sores near a rock or a tree stump or something. And to pee: good Lord did we have to pee often. We got to the point where we almost didn’t have to get off the bike to pee. It just came and went with the moving of the pedals.

I pointed to the crest of white in the distance and Ben and I remained motionless in tacit reverence. Mount Rainier was still covered in snow. I say “still”, as if there were a chance that, at some point, it might not be covered in snow, only because I can’t imagine a place where there is snow in the summer time. That kind of heaven does not, as of yet, exist for me. It is a pipe dream.

Mount Rainier is my pipe dream. It doesn’t appear to be particularly tall; height is not its defining feature. But it is massive and wide and expansive. Rising above two lesser peaks (and by that I mean of some 4,000 - 6,000 feet) it looked less like the tip of a mountain and more like the beginning of some heavenly landscape. If God lived on earth and decided to have a summer home in the United States, he would put his house on top of Mount Rainier. He could let his little flying beasts out to pasture on the snowy peaks and Santa Claus could come visit him when the North Pole became too unbearably warm in the summer time.

Now: for someone born in Illinois and raised in the East, a Pacific Coast mountain is no laughing matter. If you have never seen one, I suggest that you do not. Just stay away. It isn’t worth the pain and suffering you experience when you return home. I am currently seeking counseling. When I got back to New Hampshire I actually felt sick to my stomach; as if I had made a conscious decision to spend my life in hell after taking a tour of heaven and being offered a front row seat. And if you have seen a Pacific Coast mountain and don’t understand what the big deal is about a big mountain than do me the favor of putting this down right now and walking into a Starbucks and never coming out.

It was a spiritual awakening, for us both. If we shared any religious belief it is that of Divine Mother Nature — and Devine Mother Nature was showing us her greatest teat. And Ben and I were there to suckle. But this feeling of awe was mingled with a feeling of loss: Ben may have been there with me but #6 was not, and as much as I wanted to share it with Ben I realized then that I wanted to share it with her more. The vastness of Mount Rainier amplified the emptiness I felt inside — it was as if, in a sense, I was attending a funeral on a sunny day. Each second, each breath, each moment of silence was a lifetime of loneliness and solitude for me. I was faced with the greatest of contradictions: I was standing where I had long dreamed I would stand and staring at what I had long hoped to see and yet, my other hope, that I would find #6, had come true and rendered everything else moot.

Previous Page |