the mountains win again

Way back when I was a kid, dad used to take me hunting in the fall. I don’t know why I loved that so much, but I guess it seemed like a manly thing to do, and I could only do it with men. So I must have been manly. Dad gave me a .410, single shot shotgun for my 7th birthday, and let me use it. During the summers, he’d take us to the mountains to a cabin that he and his friends used during deer season, but I didn’t get to go hunting there with him until I was older. He also used to take us camping and fishing during the summers.
I don’t know how long it took me to realize that hunting and fishing were only excuses to get into the woods or a river. It also took me a long time to realize why every mountain and river experience made the next one more necessary. The mountains are absorbent, they soak you up and keep a part of you, and the river washes away a part of you and keeps it for itself – that is, if the mountain doesn’t soak it up as it runs down its side, the way a single tear rarely makes it to your chin, but is absorbed back into the tearful before it falls away.
I don’t think it really matters if you grew up among them, if the mountains get a part of you, you can never really leave them. As Rich Mullins observed, they’re lonely, even in paradise. You’ll look for every excuse to get back to them, to be near to that part of you that they absorbed, took from you, and kept safely among them. But when you go back to be with that part of yourself, they take more. They just keep absorbing you as long as you keep coming. When you find those parts again, they’ve become stronger than even the part of you you’ve kept.
Since I was a kid, a lot of new roads have been cut into the sides of the mountains, visitor centers have been constructed where there used to be nothing, and complete hills have been leveled for Walmart Supercenters and Motels. Those cut and leveled hills contained a part of me that some dump truck carried off and deposited somewhere else. It is still around, and I find myself looking for it up every hollow, under every rock in the river, around every bend in the path.
If you want to become a part of something as beautiful and old as time, to still be here long after you’re gone, lose yourself in the mountains. Find an excuse. Buy a fly rod and stand in the middle of the river. Don’t buy a boat and sit on top of a lake. Don’t stand up on the bank and watch beauty flow by. Stand in the middle of it and flow with it. Become a part of its beauty. Let it take a part of you and deposit it against the bank in the side of the mountain at the next river bend.
This is an exchange.
Montani Semper Liberi? Bogus. A mountaineer is never free from the mountains. Yes, there is a freedom in being owned by the mountains, but the freedom is only felt when you are in them. This paradoxical existence requires that you give yourself away and smile as you wave goodbye to yourself flowing over rocks and under hemlocks.
So if you’re not willing to lose a part of yourself there, stay away. Maybe you’ve got to travel through the mountains on your way to somewhere else. Stay in your car where you can catch a glimpse but not be caught. Look at postcards, read stories. Whatever you do, don’t get absorbed.