This Mountain of Ours (Mt. Washington)

Where I stand: Mountain. The immense formation of sedimentary stone more than three miles deep, pushed up from below by the increased friction of fault lines, the collision of ancient islands 435 million years ago, the shoulder bumping of the continent of Africa into our own. Imagine hearing the slow drawl of that rumble. The range of that imperceptible roar. The lifting of earth, while all the while soil and stone and boulder tumbled down the sides. A mountain shoving its face toward the sky. The slow way such monuments are made.

This mountain covered in hickory, maple, white oak. Ash, sumac and white walnut. Spanish oak and sugar tree. Red oak. This mountain home to humans and groundhogs and squirrels. Chipmunks, earthworms, white-tailed deer, pill bugs, northern ring-necked snakes. This mountain lift for hawks and sea gulls. Chimney swifts, robins, sparrows, and little brown bats.   

This mountain like a giant knuckle on a giant hand. Not a dividing point between city and suburb, so much as a joint connecting one slope of skin to the other. The rivers like veins taking oxygen rich water to the far reaches of the body of this land.

This mountain: first carved with footpaths, then dirt paths, then paths for wagons and trolleys and cars. Buses. Motorcycles. Leaning over the railing from this mountain zenith, I can almost see all of McArdle Road - the asphalt curve that cuts from top to bottom – from Grandview to the shoulder of the Monongahela River.

Earlier, to warm up before meditating on the mountain, I walked the sidewalk that tags along that road – the one that cuts into the steep hillside. To my left is a descent that would be treacherous at best: covered in dry leaves, all manner of litter, the enormous stalks of trees, some standing proud, some fallen, some still supporting the limbs of those gone before them. To my immediate right: a railing and cars speeding past at 40, 45, 50 miles an hour. I know because I drive this road all the time. Walking with stillness to my left and the insane roar of traffic to my right is disorienting. But I like this walk because I feel like I am in the center of a great beast – and I want to know the softness of its skin, its scars.

“To your right!” I hear a man call out behind me, expecting a biker at full speed from the tone of his voice. I gingerly press myself against the blue paint-peeling, rust-covered railing. Then an emaciated man in running gear, fairly sprinting, rushes past me. I am halfway down the mountain. I follow him with my eyes – his white Gortex easy to spot as he moves farther and farther down the steady slope. I watch him until it’s time for me to turn back around and climb up. He is just then beginning to cross the bridge into the city, miles below.

Then my thoughts are taken back in time. I think about that runner as the kind of person who would have been chosen to relay long distance messages – before telephone wires and satellite dishes. I imagine him running as a courier to the fort that sits at the fork of the three rivers. Fort Pitt, Fort Duquesne. Except I suppose, at that time, there wouldn’t have been a bridge – they would have had to catch a ferry across.

When I get back to the top of the mountain and take my place at the railing, I try to find the runner – as if he is a white pixilation among so many colors – but of course I can’t see him. I’m not a hawk. It’s incredible though – the speed with which he traversed the miles, made his way down the mountain and into the city of bridges.

A few years ago, I did some research about my neighborhood of Brookline. It was one of the first outpost settlements to form after the city of Pittsburgh began development. Well before the Liberty and Fort Pitt Tunnels were scooped out, allowing us to slip through the mountain, it used to take people more than six hours to go from my Brookline to the city. They had to go up and over the mountain. The time didn’t include coming back. Now, instead of six hours, it takes me seven minutes to get to the top of this mountain. Ten to get into the city. The long-distance runner, on the smooth concrete of sidewalk - maybe an hour.

And I don’t know what that means, except that it’s pretty incredible what scratching out a road over and around a mountain can allow us to do. Access things more quickly, see more of the world in less time. I wonder what we lose, though. Because energy cannot be created or erased – it can only be displaced, moved around. For all of our speed, have we forgotten how to be slow?

I think about why I like walking down the mountain on a sidewalk not two inches from cars that speed like death machines. Not two inches from maple and oak, tiny nests long abandoned, the remains of soda cans. What it is about walking this thin line between the progress of movement and the stillness of nature that appeals to me?

And now, after all of these weeks of wondering what exactly it was that drew me to my spot up here on the mountain, I think I might have found my answer. Or if not an answer, then a more firm grasp on the intersections of my desire. That I am in love with the world is no secret. But that I seem to find a strange comfort walking the hairline fracture between the human and inhuman world – maybe that love is new to me.  

When I was an adolescent, struggling with existential ideas, I decided that I most wanted to be a hermit. I idealized Thoreau and his escape to, his immersion in, all that was natural at Walden Pond. I thought that if I could just leave the world of humans behind – all that was confusing and painful and destructive (the gossip, the hormones, the insecurities) – then I could be free, happy even. I could just live in a tiny cabin in the wood and write.

But as I get older, it becomes more and more clear that a place of escape from “all that is painful about being human” doesn’t exist. Even in nature. Instead is the realization that these places (and moments and sounds, visions and dreams, words and relationships) can act as a means to remind us of all that is beautiful. And sometimes those places are less congested with reminders of a human presence, and sometimes they are the border between it. Sometimes, like this mountain, they are an apex of it.

Here I stand. On the top of a mountain. An immense old mountain – 430 million years old. It was shoved up into existence well before the world of humans crept across it, and here it still stands. Holding us - whether it wants to or not. Providing a view – of man and nature - as we hold hands, draw paths through the trees, climb from lowdown ground on up into the sky.

Come close your eyes

Today is March 17, 2014, and I have been having dreams of blindness. They are dreams in which I cannot open my eyes no matter how hard I try. I think the dreams are mutations of fear – of my inability to see the future. So today when I walk to my place, I sit on the bench, pull my booted feet up and rest my spine against the solid back. I close my eyes to the darkness and try for solace without sight.

A cool wind whips my hair like thin tassels against my forehead, while the thick sweet smell of cigarillo smoke affronts my nostrils, and they flare involuntarily - opening to take in fresh air still holding a faint hint of snow. A squeak of bird to my upper left; I know there is a tree there. A siren whirl pulls at my right ear, far down where I imagine the Southside slopes to be. The clank of metal reminds me of a boat dock, as the flag clip hits against the pole. Cars slide and race past not ten feet behind me; miles in front, down near the river, they make a different noise – one that sounds like a whisper from the far end of a tunnel. Then I hear footsteps and hasten to open my eyes.

A man is walking by in an oversized green jacket and after we exchange pleasantries betrayed by the sadness of his tone, I think about the way we make connections as people – how we speak to each other of hopeful things, even when we don’t feel them. I fold my hands and look out across the city. It’s the same city I always see, but different. There are little changes I don’t notice and can’t see. There are little people in little rooms making little bits of difference in the world all around me.

I look for the PNC tower now because my dad asked me the other day if I’d noticed the progress of it going up, and I admittedly hadn’t. I search for the outline of an unfinished building among so many whole. And I find it – its top baggy with huge white tarps protecting the incomplete upper floors. It’s settled right next to an enormous 25-story crane that sits like a fishing pole in the center of the city. With all of my looking at the city, I had spent less time seeking the detail and more about studying the amalgamation.

The new PNC tower is supposed to be the greenest building in the world when it is finished. This news is both exciting and unique. It instills a sense of pride in me – both for my city and for the earnestness of humanity. I see us wanting to make good.

I close my eyes again and try to feel the moment of this place – a cold river of air runs along my face. My heart palpitates my chest and moves me slowly like a rocking boat tied to a dock. I can hear wind chimes – a low bass that ricochets against itself and through to me. I think about how sometimes, when I am walking, I close my eyes for long moments as I move and wish that I could guide myself continually without sight – that I could feel safe letting my body move me through the world without always having to rely on sight.

When I open my eyes this time, there is a man a hundred yards down and leaning against the railing, he gazes through a telescopic camera lens. He must be trying to find something small – something beautiful – in the bigger picture that is this city. I understand this notion. I wonder if I will keep having dreams of blindness. If I might be missing some enormous building, and I simply have yet to notice. And to be honest, it wasn’t really the inability to see that made the dreams so terrible, but the frustration of wanting to despite it. So maybe my place here on top of this mountain holds some answers. Because it’s clear that even when our eyes are open, there are certain things we don’t see. Maybe it’s the same with my future. I’ve been looking at it for far longer than any other place I know, but I could have never foretold all of the beauty that was in store.

Old, cold winter

The sun is bleaching the snow a blinding white and where the sun is kind enough to leave it alone, not hit it quite so hard, it is blue – a washed out blue – like the snow is tired of itself. Like I am tired of myself, and the snow.

When I step out of my car, the flag clangs against the cold metal pole as if announcing my arrival. It bellowed the last time I was here, so I notice the repetition like an omen. I’m hardly out of my car, before I get back in. It’s windy and cold and I’m in a bad mood. I’ve forgotten my notebook and I’m resigned to write on an old Dunkin Donuts bag that is on the floor of the back of my car because I don’t like to throw things away when I know I can compost them. I try to write and the pen is stodgy and difficult. It barely writes. My cursive looks like Morse code. Today, I want a divorce from my place. It’s ugly and unloving. Today I need sympathy and it’s kicking me in the shins.

I think about the rants we read for class this week and I wonder if my utter hatred of the cold is enough of a justification to go off on a tangent about my distaste for the cold. I hate the cold. I hate this city in the cold. I hate I hate I hate it all.

But that sounds more like a tempertantrum, than a well thought out rant. It doesn’t seem… insightful… not like Jamaica and her post-colonial rant - or insightful, the way Gessner asks us to be creative, step out of our comfort zone, out of genre, out of specialization and into the grand expanse.

Rants can be of fire, but if they burn the skin instead of melt the snow, it’s as bad as a desert sun, no?

I moved to Florida once. For a year and a half, I lived with muted seasons. There was division of time, sure, but it was less         murderous, less        devastatingly long

And I was blessed to be there during a season without any personified storms – no hurricanes, just torrential rains… rains that dissolved into sunshine and the shimmer shiver of rainbows in the humid air. And it was good there. Beautiful in a way that beautiful is – easy to see, easy to love. And easy to romanticize. Especially now, when every bit of my bones feel heavy as lead, soaked through with cold.

When I moved back to Pittsburgh, it was the middle of December. It was the coldest recorded winter in 80 years. (I’m sure you can imagine the comments I got about that… Every northerner hates the cold, but we never make the exodus. We just stay here and bitch. But Why? In March, I always wonder why?) That was four years ago and the winters seem to have gotten worse. But I grew up here. I should be used to this cold, right? Well, I’m not. I think it might be because humans are dumb sometimes. By dumb, I mean: We say we are adaptable, but adapting means change. We haven’t changed… we haven’t grown more hair, thicker skin, higher body temperatures, a better way to store fat. No. We simply pretend we’ve adapted… and suffer instead. We build houses and shiver in them. Or roast and waste our resources. Either way, we’re not the bears or the birds – they are at least smart enough to hibernate or get the hell out.

Anyway… Not all birds fly south for the winter. There are birds out today. Tiny little palm sized sparrows. Are they dumb too? Or aren’t they cold? How aren’t they cold? For all their chirping and soaring, they don’t seem cold. I’m not chirping, and I’m sure as heck not soaring. I’m slumped like a turtle without a neck under a coat and a scarf, my feet are tired of posing as Clydesdale-feet, furry hooves clodding about. But maybe they are… cold, I mean. Maybe they’re chirping a rant. Maybe they’re talking about how stupid birds are – the ones that stay in this inclement weather. How sparrows should learn to adapt – grow more feathers, fatten up. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe their chirping about how beautiful the view up here is – like I was last week, and all the ones before.