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.