Hidden Mountains

 

Photo by me, March 2024.

 

What can happen in thirteen years? I asked myself that question as I stood in front of the statue of Chief Sawnee in late March of this year for the first time in thirteen years. The simple answer is a lot can happen.

It was in the fifties as I arrived at Sawnee Mountain late in the afternoon and it was a perfect hiking day. It was a day to walk through the past for me as I had been to this mountain once on a warm February Saturday in my younger short sleeved thirties. I was taking a weekend off from writing my novel Shadow's Gravity and had somehow not gained a pound from when I was a younger man. I had gained the weight of more experience, perspective, memories and countless miles on my legs. Thirteen years can do a lot to a person and a person can do a lot in thirteen years. I was writing my fourth book, had moved out of the city for good, renovated a house, nearly died in 2012 and so much more.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

I started up Sawnee Mountain through the naked hardwoods that reminded me of where I grew up with a mountain behind my house. My mind wandered from the present at the turn of the trail. I was walking miles of memories as much as I was on the stony trail. The trail curved through the woods as life - to unexpected places, with unexpected experiences and unanticipated questions. Sometimes even in a place and in people we thought we knew there are surprises.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Life and its counterpart death always have a presence in the world underlining our existence in permanent ink and teaching us the seasons of emotion from joy, to regret, patience, shame and pain. One begets the other from the birth announcement to the obituary. Three weeks had passed since someone I was close to as a boy had unexpectedly died. I had spoken at their funeral the following week and they were on my mind. 

 

At the funeral I shared a rambling story of us as boys in the mid 1980s involving him spending the night at my house and us hiking to Elsberry Mountain on a summer Saturday. I talked about how he had to find just the perfect walking stick, how long  that took and how he had to have one because I had one. He was competitive, considered a gifted child like me and in this period of our childhood he kind of looked up to me. Though he is gone, the happy and disappointing memories live on with me and others that knew him. I retraced those memories like a mountain trail which my feet had followed before. 

 

Our lives traveled down very different paths as was the case with so many of the people I knew growing up who became strangers. He and I had not spoken in ten years, but one of our last conversations went for hours through the early morning and past the sunrise. We caught up, we reminisced - we were two boys again who had spent so many years together. I had wanted to include him in one of my novels, I planned it and then thought better of it. It was not that he did not deserve to be in them, he did, but the time was wrong.  He remains a mountain behind my house hidden among the trees unseen at a distance, but breaking the landscape when viewed up close.

The view from the top of Sawnee Mountain looking to the north. Photo by me, March 2024.

The area known as the Indian Seats atop Sawnee Mountain. Photo by me, March 2024.

We took in the view of the mountain before us that summer Saturday so long ago. With sweat in our bangs we gripped our walking sticks unaware then how many mountains we had to climb, how high they would be or how low the valleys between them. I cannot say or understand what he saw that day or in the decades that followed, not long after, he chose one route and I another.

Me atop Sawnee Mountain. March 2024.

Thirteen years or a lifetime, I looked at the horizon with the same pair of eyes which had seen the hidden mountains from faraway and up close. His death hit me harder than I expected, there was a loss of balance at the edge of the rocks and that feeling has stayed with me. He should have seen the view.

 

The clouds moved in, the wind picked up and rain was coming by nightfall. I like storms, without them, nothing grows including people.