Mountains are part of the background of my life. From outside the window of a childhood bedroom in El Paso to the horizons around my former home in Montana, and now (in a diminutive way) the hills of Pennsylvania, mountains have defined the spaces of my life. I feel most at home when I am in them, and when I am out in flatter lands I feel lost, adrift, indefinitely disoriented. They stood over the city of my birth, and I am always returning to them in one form or another. And that is what they have been to me: always changing from one form to another.
Their ubiquity is something that I struggle with in my writing and in the bigger decisions I have to make. I do not understand the extent of what they symbolize for me. As a young child, the Franklin mountains dominated the view from my bedroom window, a rough southern off-shoot of the Rockies. I was transfixed by their jagged outline and how they absorbed the red glow of the evening sun. At that age, they were the edge of my world. When my older brother and his scout troop went camping in the Franklins, I stood in our house's front door, staring at the summits, imagining what the city would look like from that height. Reaching the summit, or even coming close, was the pinnacle of achievement to me at that age. We moved out of the state and into Ohio before I was old enough to attempt it myself. And that began what I consider my “valley years.” It would be too long a time before we moved again to another stretch of the Rockies – this time in southwest Montana.
The Gallatin valley is surrounded on all sides by a confluence of three mountain ranges: the Bridgers, the Gallatins, and the Tobacco Roots. There, encompassed by mountains in all directions, I feel a great sense of security. It is inexplicable, but nonetheless real. Recently, I have been thinking about the cliché of “leaving your heart” in someplace you miss. It still sounds tacky and uncreative, but I think I understand it better than I use to. If my heart is left beating somewhere outside of Bozeman, I can feel secure knowing I have the mountains as my stony ribcage. They are the frame of my life. They protect and they define what I still consider to be my home, despite that I have lived in Pittsburgh for the past three years. When I return to Bozeman, I return to the mountains, and in a sense, I return to myself. Fishing the streams of the Gallatin mountains is a form of introspection, retreating into a larger self, probing the waters and searching out the tiniest nooks and crevices. The mountains in my life now are a way I can define myself. They are a body I can adopt and look out from inside. Mountains are where I hide my better secrets and where I go searching for them.
3 comments:
It makes me sad to think of all the ways that we can destroy mountains through our ignorance. Mountains are seemingly the strongest of all landforms, and yet we find ways to eliminate them. They are essential to the natural landscape and your unexplained connection to them resonates with me.
You have an incredible, almost melancholic version of the world, and I want to know more about your experience with the mountains. I want to know what happens when you're fishing in mountain waters 10 years from now. Because I think it's important for me, and for many others.
There's something humbling about mountains, something that allows us to feel our own sense of smallness, put our own lives and selves into perspective, I think.
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