a memory

I saw a view once. I don’t remember much about it. I don’t remember very much about the ten or so backpacking trips I have taken in my life. Maybe it’s even less than ten. I could count them all, just as I could count the number of lovers I’ve had, but I will always forget the numbers and the details. I have been telling friends that I’ve been feeling religious lately, but that I only use “God” as shorthand for the inexplicable forces that control the things around me, and here is one example of this developmentally retarded religiosity: I tell myself that I am unable to remember the number of lovers I’ve had, or the number of camping trips I have taken, or the rules regarding impeachment with extrinsic evidence, because I am not meant to remember these things. God is like the parasympathetic nervous system that shuts your mind down if your mind is only going to hurt you. God helps me feel satisfied with known unknowns.

So I cannot remember where I saw this view, but I remember coming across it somewhere in the deciduous forests of the White Mountains – or the Sierra Nevadas – or western Massachusetts – a view somewhere at midday on a long hike. Might have been August 1998 or May 2000 or May 2002 or August 2002. We had hiked hard the whole summer day under tree cover. Our eyes that day had only seen sunlit patterns of bright calico on the trail duff and the long, snaking lines of elm, beech, and oak trees. No vistas, just trees and dead leaves - envision white noise, on a mountain.

Somewhere close to the summit, we came to a clearing that was a large, smooth granite slope, down which a stream of water flowed. The stream came down the cracks and pooled in the levels of the rock. One pool was exactly the right size for someone to lay on the rock above it and plunge her head into it, and the day was hot and muggy, so we dropped our packs by the side of the trail took turns dunking our heads into the cool water. Others splashed their arms and legs in the other pools. I remember a tall gangly boy in shorts whipping his head around and spraying the rest of us with oily water from his scalp. We were on the west side of the mountain and when I looked out I could see the sun halfway down the sky directly across from me. There were mountains, and mountains beyond those mountains, and more, and finally just indistinct shapes in the distance, and all of these mountains were blanketed with trees. The granite dropped off sharply just down the mountain from where we were and if you followed the slope with your eye you could see a steep valley hundreds of feet below us. The sky was cloudless and there were no structures in sight.

Even as I write this I know it is lacking. The literal description fails to capture what was, I guess, ineffable about that view. I should have taken a picture, but I suppose a picture would only have fixed in two dimensions what is now a flexible abstraction that permits me to perceive differently each time I recall the memory. I would usually resort to metaphor to describe it at this point, but I don’t have patience for it and it doesn’t matter, and I suspect this whole story is some sort of metaphor anyway.