The Old Man and the Mountains
I recently received a rejection for this essay, but then a few days later, a personal email from one of the reviewers, who let me know mine was in the final group of essays considered for the Waterman Fund’s annual contest. That was gratifying, and I now share the essay with you all. Keen-eyed readers will recognize that I built this on the chassis of an earlier essay I posted here, so if it feels familiar, do not doubt your cognitive faculties.
i.
No one in my family hiked. We never camped. We certainly didn’t go “backpacking,” which was not even a word that would have made sense to any of us, dwelling in the mill town lowlands of the Merrimack River Valley. “Backpack” was a school supply. How could it be turned into some sort of verb? As kids, on our annual summer vacation to Lake Ossipee in New Hampshire, we would walk the dirt roads with our father and peer into culverts and ditches alongside, but we never ventured onto anything like a trail.
How much weirder and inexplicable it was, then, that I got it into my head as a teenager that I wanted to backpack in the White Mountains. For Christmas when I was sixteen, my parents went to EMS and bought me a starter pack of supplies recommended by the staff there, guessing at the right pack size, and getting me a little candle lantern, and a first aid kit, and a finicky portable stove. They seemed bemused by the entire project, but were willing to drop me off at trailheads and return the next day at a designated hour, presuming that I knew what I was doing.
I dragged my boyfriend along on these ventures. He knew even less about wilderness travel and survival than I did. Everything I knew I had learned from books. Our first overnight, I took us into the Great Gulf Wilderness, below Mt. Washington. We had stopped for a rest beside the trail when a hiker came into view. He was an old man, white-haired and white-bearded. He wore shorts with socks pulled up high, and his legs were ropey with muscle. He carried a large, old-fashioned pack and passed us steady, moving fast. A tin cup fastened to his pack clinked against the frame. The trail went steep at that spot, and he worked straight up the rocks and roots, his body flowing over them like he was only climbing a flight of stairs. The cadence of the cup, clink, clink, did not change. I watched, transfixed. He was taking it in stride. I watched his back until he disappeared into the spruce-fir up high at the next bend. “I want to be that guy when I’m old,” I thought to myself.
I know that memory is not a film reel. That we alter and embellish and falsify our memories every time we retrieve them. I don’t know how many times I have called up that short sequence of the old man with the old pack cruising up the trail. It has come back to me a hundred times, for a hundred reasons. Sometimes, pausing in the middle of a typically shrill pitch of trail in the Whites, I summon him up, and will his unfazed spirit into me.
ii.
This summer, I started keeping track of endings. They seemed to be coming fast, and converging: the last episode of the TV show Endeavour, a lost job, sewing closed the second sock of a pair I started knitting last year, finishing Ulysses, the slip of my sons’ childhoods into adolescence. I was hurrying myself into this state, it seemed, maybe wanting to find out what would happen when so many strands ran out at once. I also knew I was not long out from completion of “the list:” all 48 of the mountains 4000 feet and higher in New Hampshire. My pace had accelerated over the past couple of years, and I only had a few mountains left to do.
Some things have clear beginnings but vague endings, and some things the opposite. My fourteen-year-old cannot believe that I don’t remember meeting his father when I was fourteen. My son now attends the same high school where that unremembered meeting occurred. He seems to think that the occasion should have felt fateful, momentous. He seems to think he would know if he were, right now, meeting his destiny. I cannot even tell him what month it happened, or any initial impressions I had, or where we were exactly, and he shakes his head in disbelief. When I think about how an old man left an indelible imprint on me simply by walking past me in the mountains, it makes even less sense, which seeds land and get purchase, and which sail past on the wind.
I can’t say when I started the 4000 footer list either. I first climbed the highest, Mt. Washington, in 1997, but I didn’t know anything about any list then. I climbed a few more 4000 footers before I became aware of the project. The list, therefore, may have taken me twenty-six years, or eighteen, or ten, depending on how you count things. I know for certain, however, that I finished it on September 2nd, 2023, standing in the small rock clearing on the tonsured skull of South Kinsman. I was prepared for anti-climax and got it. All my other endings and losses pressed in on me for a moment, but then a man came up behind and said, “This is it, huh? North Kinsman was better,” and he walked off. My husband took a picture of me, eyes downcast, arms hanging at my sides, that about sums it up. We stood there a few more minutes and then headed back down the way we’d come up.
I have been looking over my paper list of all the mountains, with my notes on who was with me for each hike. All my best beloveds were with me on at least one. Fourteen of them I did alone. Mostly, the decision to go by myself was down to scheduling. I felt no particular need for solitude, nor a need for company. Just wished to go hiking. Sometimes I was unspooling grief or anxiety or worry behind me as I went. Sometimes my brain was busy with ordinary concerns and I took in my surroundings to a moderate depth only. Often, I would get to the summit, eat my snack or lunch standing up, and turn right back around. I have never been much for lingering or lounging or resting, or even sitting down. Usually, I would faintly criticize myself for this, but march off down the trail nonetheless. Sometimes, I would wonder what I was doing this for, if it was only an elaborate and time-consuming form of exercise. What was I taking in, breathing balsam smell and granite pulver? What was I leaving behind, with microscopic shreds of shoe sole, and aliquots the size of black fly bellies of my own blood?
I did the Bonds by myself, as an overnight. I usually forget, or disbelieve, how fast I hike, and I allow myself far more time than I need to get places in the mountains. As a result, I got up to Mt. Bond in the very early afternoon, and only needed to get a little ways farther to Guyot campsite for the night. I knew I had many waking hours still to live through before dark, and likely a mostly sleepless night too. Looking around on the summit, I began to cry. I was swamped with dread and misery. I took my phone out and took some pictures. Then I recorded a video that I never watched again or showed to anyone. I remember that I narrated into the camera, speaking as if to my husband and kids. I tried to keep my tone upbeat, but my voice was tight with tears. There was no way to reach them or send the video to them, and I don’t think I ever intended to. I just could not bear the irrevocable loneliness I’d self-inflicted. I hated being out there by myself, and dreaded the night ahead of me. The vision of the old man striding alone, sure-limbed, came back to me then too, along with a rush of shame. I was failing to be as stoical and calm as he was. I only glancingly considered that I was enlisting him to help my self-lacerating, misogynistic part berate me for getting “hysterical.” What did it mean, anyway, that my patron saint of the mountains, the future vision I formed at sixteen of myself in old age was not a woman, but a man?
I would not attempt to explain my dread, my regret, to anyone, to justify my fretfulness and sobbing while doing this supposedly fun thing I chose of my own free will. It seemed impossible to explain. On the drive home from the Bonds trip, I saw one of those Ben and Jerry’s bumper stickers that reads, “If it’s not fun, why do it?” which is an absurd sentiment for a lot of reasons but that still made me feel embarrassed. How to talk about this thing I do that I can’t really say I always “like” or “enjoy”? How to explain I don’t find the misery purifying, and I am not a masochist or a martyr? How to explain that I don’t really even feel like I learn anything about myself in these bouts of lonely dread and suffering?
I found a poem a couple weeks ago, by Jon Davis, called The Immortals. It opens with two stanzas conjuring up our optimizing culture—people bustling around, making efforts at self-care, at wellness, at a cultivated optimism that feels cheerily and briskly American. Then, the third stanza hits, wide-eyed in a bout of pre-dawn insomnia. Regrets crowd in, remembered horrors, betrayals, minor losses and major ones, almost unbearable griefs, shame. But then the sun comes up, and all the satisfying tasks need to be done, and the distractions lead one to the next, and the people are lulled and rocked back into soothing efficiency, and the sadness is shooed and swept away.
The poem was shaped like a hinge, in my mind. It creaked open with the third stanza, the insomniac dark, the sadness flaring. And then, like a hinge, or like a book slamming shut, it’s quashed again, shoved aside, or down, or swallowed. It’s so abrupt that the last stanza doesn’t even get to be four lines like the rest. It’s bitten off, clipped, and we move on to something else, purposeful, pleasant, some entertainment, a satisfying chore.
I couldn’t sort why this poem was recalled to me every time I thought about the list, and the mountains, and the mountain dread, until I thought about the hinge again. Going far out in the wilderness is like electing insomnia. It’s voluntarily extending a bout of 3am wakefulness into a day, or two days. It’s forcing the hinge open to let the sadness be, and it’s only almost unbearable because you do bear it, because you have no choice, and you don’t die from it.
I’ve been hiking and backpacking in the Whites for almost thirty years now. I am about mid-way in age, I’d guess, between the girl who saw the old man walk by, and the old man himself. I was of the age then when you believe that adults have themselves fully figured out. That they are wise, and sure of themselves, and unshakeable, and never self-conscious, or anxious about what other people think of them. The old man must certainly be dead by now, though he still dwells as a fragment in my mind, pulled back up from time to time, resurrected to walk that same 200 yards or so up a tumble of rocks and into the next col. Knowing what I do now, about growing up, I wonder what was in his mind as he climbed. What he might have been seeking to walk off or through. What drove him to do it alone—preference or necessity? And when, not whether, he felt the fear or the dread or the loneliness that lying alone at night in the mountains at least sometimes brings.
The old man gave a vision of possibility when I was a kid with no guides or mentors in wilderness adventuring. I saw it as possible to just keep hiking, keep backpacking the Whites until your body gave out. That I could do this now, and when I was old too. He’s become more human, though, each time I’ve called up his memory. I imagine he talked to himself when his courage or his strength was flagging, just the way I do. I imagine he had to sometimes bargain with the part of himself tantrumming and demanding to be picked up and delivered home somehow, demanding to know who was responsible for abandoning him in the wilds. I imagine he also was out there for many, often contradictory reasons, and sometimes longed for nothing so much as the sound of the cars on the road and the glint of windshields through the trees at the trailhead, and the promise of home.
Eventually, the interminable night ends, and you hike back out, and you go get a beer, and you drive home listening to a podcast, and you lull back into your life, and the normal comforts and pleasures feel briefly miraculous, and you feel a little weird for a little while, like the day after an especially vivid and strange dream, and you know you can’t explain it because it’s so boring to everyone else, you describing your dream, but the real world feels less substantial, for a time, and the dream more substantial, and you were briefly open, briefly porous, briefly, unhinged.