This essay is part of my application packet to the AMC’s 4000 Footer Club. To join, you have to ascend and descend on foot the list of all the mountains in New Hampshire that are at least 4000 feet in elevation. There are 48 of them.
This summer, I started keeping track of endings. They seemed to be coming fast, and converging: the TV show Endeavour, my job, the second sock of a pair I started knitting last year, Ulysses, my sons’ childhoods. 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. 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.
I can’t say when I started the list either. I first climbed 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, 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 of my own blood the size of black fly bellies?
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. I would not attempt to explain this to anyone, this supposedly fun thing I did by choice. It seemed impossible to explain. On the drive home, 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 this poem a couple weeks ago, by Jon Davis:
The Immortals
That they have sidestepped death makes them powerful. That each day is thick with opportunity. That one takes guitar lessons, that one paints landscapes. Another is sculpting her abs in the gym. Most days, they avoid reminiscing. Most days they spend perfecting a minor art. They lunch on a salad of gratitude and bliss. Dine early. Sleep soundly. But sometimes, before dawn, an image from the past flares— betrayal, death of a child, twisted metal, sirens. Something somebody said that was hurtful. Something they thought was theirs taken away. And sadness flames up from somewhere in the chest. And burns there, fading and flaring, almost unbearable. Until the earth tilts. Until sunlight brings color to the roses, and birds begin to stir. And they are called once again to their activities and appointments. Their duties, distractions. And the sadness fades, leaving them efficient and eager and prompt.
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 self-care, 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.
Eventually, you hike back out anyway, 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.
That last, long sentence! The music of “a little weird for a little while.” And the concluding “briefly”series. Wonderful.