Go Put Your Hand Upon a Mountain Part 2

Continued from part 1

My own growing was gradual, because it took a while for the mountains to work their spell on me. They are fascinating in their variability, because they reflect the weather happening all around them. Sunny days diminish them to one-dimensional haze, overcast days bring out their contours, rainy days obscure them in clouds, and snowy days frost their peaks in brilliance. Never has a sight remained with me as vividly as the entire range on fire, burning a slowly lowering ring of threatening radiance. The ash-filled air created billowing fuchsia and violet sunsets to offset the charred ridge tops. In a few years, small and pale scrub bushes dotted and then filled in the charcoal, where once the deep emerald pines had spread, ascendant.

Photo credit: Elizabeth.Poscher for Google Earth

No matter how these Catalinas were robed or what they were called, they were an immovable constant in each of my days. In a deep and hidden part of myself, I wanted to be like them. I wished to be outwardly unpredictable, transformative and reflective of life's changes, even if that required vulnerability. I wished to be inwardly forbearing and abiding of all of that change. I wanted to be shaped by both forceful upheaval and slow reckonings. 

The woman I met was mountain grown with her dramatic uprootings, disasters and daily ploddings on foot. When I dropped her off at her apartment on that night, I held back the impulse to offer to take her to the foothills, the base of her longing, and wished her well. It was even harder to refrain the next time I saw her.

I was cleaning out my car, and a slip of paper fell from the passenger's side door to the exact center beneath the car. I had no idea if this paper was important or timely, so I backed the car out of the garage and then picked it up. It was a certificate made out to her from her chain hair salon for the highest earning stylist in the city for that month. When I had some free time in the coming weeks, I showed up at her location and waited with others in a first-come first-served promotional the shop was running. I didn't want to startle her or refer to our private exchange in front of a bustle of customers and co-workers in the full light of day, so I decided to ease into a chair and cool my heels. 

Her hair had changed from black and straight at shoulder length to a short and curly blonde bob. But there was no mistaking her, and I gleefully watched her chatter and laugh with her clients, in the same salted honey voice that had filled up my car. When my turn came, I sat in her chair with the certificate on my lap, and answered her lively questions about my hair. She was playing with it, and not looking at me, but soon in the mirror I watched the dawning of recognition and a flush of shyness as she covered her grinning mouth with both hands. She took back the paper and fanned herself with it. I had to ask, and the answer was still no, she had not yet visited a mountain.

Once again, I badly wanted to offer to drive her, but I listened instead to my anxiety each time that idea occurred to me. Upon reflection, I realized that what I was offering was to take over her story, with myself at the wheel, seeing all of her reactions and slurping up her gratitude with a sense of importance. She needed to keep moving herself toward her goal, and I needed to remain simply a fellow person who gave her a ride and returned her lost property. I needed to stay on my own course of learning forbearance.

There's no doubt in my mind that she made it there. Maybe her hair was styled differently again, maybe she was alone, maybe she was accompanied by her husband only or maybe she invited a crowd of old and new friends. However she showed up, I can see her palm, fingers together and then spreading out, finally home, and in her element.

Photo source: Vintage Everyday, Yosemite National Park

Into the Mystic by Van Morrison