Instead, there was a trail led out of town
It may be that, in the beginning, there was intimation of the end: certainly one point connected to another, even by the crooked line of time, share an intimacy as close as any two lovers, perhaps closer. It may be that, when I started out, I had a plan, and that plan imagined an associated arrival.
But while there are some – maybe there are many? – who consciously describe a future in their minds, to then steadfastly walk in its direction, tinkering with the facts as they stray (until, with a flashing grin of satisfaction, and the pride of the accomplished, they arrive where they revisedly said they were going, often at a distance of years and miles from their intended target), I am not one of them. I arrive as errantly as any other, but rarely hold intention consciously, either trusting the currents of the world to sweep what is valuable in my path, or mistrusting my own dim vision to light up enough of that forward way, to set a heading far into it.
And this was just a mountain: I should mention that. In those Austrian towns, cradled or buried as they are along waterways, surrounded by sky-shrouding peaks, there is an urge to lift yourself into the sun. That may have been the extent of my intending. Not: “Oh, if we were to climb up there, we could see…” And not: “I, fit of body, and young both in spirit and years, will try my sinew against this ageless Rock!!” Instead, there was a trail led out of town, along a creek. I followed it.
I carried no flag, other than my obvious American-ness, which lost significance with each passing step, as the ageless Rock could care less which variety of stone carver I was, the silent trees cared little which breed of wood-feller I called my own, and the stream babbled away from spring to lake with the least interest of them all. The path and I were the only ones, the only two, concerned with each another. She led on (“She?” … and where have I gone in this life, that a woman has not taken me?) and on, first away from the cultivated valley with its fruit trees, then away from the lightly-managed woodlots, over and around the watercourse in a gently weaving dance, while the walls of the valley drew closer and then close on either side, the water as we approached its source becoming young as a trickle, the options for going forward narrowing to none.
At what should have been the end of my wandering, there was a stone stair that led out of the valley. (There is more to be said about it: the stag that appeared there, flashing light flanks like the White Hart, disappearing ahead as though calling me on, up and up, finally showing its antlered head at the top of the flight, and vanishing as though it had never been!) Then there were fields leading up the sun-golden flanks of the mountain itself. The town already out of sight, the church-bell tolled its distance at every hour, every hour quieter and further underfoot. The lake was a long dash of paint, as though just so much of the sky had fallen, filled the earth town-deep, and the village folk had gathered at the shore. The air was crisper. The surrounding peaks were less oppressive here, more like comrades as I climbed up on their shoulders, here we all are, then, together. So was there a peak ahead? The trail would run up to the top?
You see, that was never in my head. Later, someone protested: “But of course you were climbing to reach the top! That’s where you were headed!” I suppose it was… like anywhere I’ve ended up, but not something I had considered. You say I was walking backward, and that made it still more difficult.
Unconsidered, that is, until those last few hundred yards, when the massive wall of granite and grass began to give up more of the sky, and the whole valley began to lean outward on the lip of a tulip-glass, with me on the verge. The thinner atmosphere fizzed within me. The edge of the world was a stone’s throw above, no more: not the horizontal edge, whose coastline tempts you into a gravity-bound circle, an orbit; but the vertical edge, where limits give way to feathered lightness, heaven-dreams, and other starry twinkling. That is the moment, when the day’s determined, indeterminate motion had neatly and nearly arrived somewhere, that imagination sparked and could not contain itself.
The top of a mountain? The top of the mountain! And as if orchestrated, the church-bell clanged the hour again, far below me. Its tone muted by distance made an attenuated line right through me, from my dawn in the hospitable village, to here at the edge of Nothing. Thirty paces… fifteen… seven and the grasses on the crest can be seen… four and the crest flattens out to the right and to the left… two and the brow of the ridge is level with the brow of my head… one…
“… and what did you see?”
Line after line of mountains, to the edge of the horizon, each equal to the one I had climbed.
