It was a good year for mountains. The girls and I bookended the summer with two: Mt. Abraham soon after school got out, just before they embarked on their respective summer adventures, and Camel’s Hump in late August when it was all winding down. Camel’s Hump is my favorite mountain in Vermont, and it was fantastic to get up there with the girls, to stand windswept at the southern drop-off and watch cloud shadows crawl like lumbering slow creatures across the landscape below. And then sit on the ledges and take silly pictures of each other.
I love the the intimacy of mountains as much as the vastness. The one nested within the other; and not always the intimacy within the vastness, though more often that. Of the pictures I took that day it was not one of stone, wind, and distances that rose to the top.
Though stone, wind and distances are pretty great too.
On the Saturday of Columbus Day weekend I head for the White Mountains. A friend and I are hiking the Franconia Ridge loop trail, my favorite hike in New England. I am assured by mountain-forecast.com that it will be sunny, if windy and cool. The drive over is promising. Brilliant early-morning sunlight ignites foliage from the side, setting hillsides and cliffs on fire. But halfway up Little Haystack a steely cloud cover settles in, and several hundred yards from the top we climb into a heavy, roiling mist. We pull on every layer we have and stop for food on top of the mountain, then set off across the ridgeline towards Lincoln and Lafayette. This ridgeline, nearly two miles long and encompassing three mountain tops, is magnificent. The views are extraordinary. The ground falls away sharply into deep valleys on either side of the trail, with Cannon Mountain off to the west and the Pemigewasset Wilderness to the east. Alpine plants a few inches high carpet the earth among the rocks. Ahead the trail drops and rises, drops and rises, over multiple peaks.
None of this can be seen today. Massive walls of mist are blowing over the ridge at thirty miles an hour. Huge tendrils of it snake up ravines and curl over the trail. Figures disappear into the mist ahead of us or appear as though from nowhere moving toward us. It’s cold, and many of those traversing the ridgeline have gloves and winter hats along with hiking poles. The only colors are the tannins of alpine plants, the cyan green of lichens, the dark gray of the rocks and the whitish-gray mist.
It is spectacular! It is in fact far more beautiful than the last time I was on the ridge–a stunning, blue-skied sunny day around this same time of year that showed the foliage and the mountains to grand effect—but with nothing like this sense of raw power and mystery. Occasionally the wind blows a peak clear of mist, and we can see down into a valley. As we watch, new masses of cloud gather at the bottom of the slopes, as though waiting for the right moment to strike, and then hurtle up toward us on the ridge. The effect–the day–is utterly exhilarating.
Watching these formations of mist and the mountains emerging and disappearing again, I think of the book Existence: A Story, by David Hinton, the translator of classical Chinese poetry and Taoist texts, whose Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape is one of my favorite books about mountains.
Existence is a meditation on the portrayal of mist-clad mountains in classical Chinese brush paintings, and the related art of “landscape practice”—a phrase that is resonant for me in my own climbing of the tree, which I have always thought of in those terms without having quite the right words for it. Chinese artist-intellectuals “dreamed mountains, and built their creative lives around them,” Hinton writes. They “saw in the wild forms of mountain landscape the very workings of the Cosmos.”
Mountain landscape is where “existence itself is most dramatically present as a cosmology of elemental forces, where the intermingling of heaven and earth is most immediately visible. In mountains, one can see earth rising up into heaven, and heaven seething down into earth in the form of dramatic sunlight and mist and stormy skies.”
The rich creative potency of Absence manifests in mist and air and darkness; Presence appears as the “rivers-and-mountains landscape emerging from that emptiness of mist and cloud, water and sky.” In the painting which is the meditative touchstone for the book, “this is true of the mountain ridgelines suffused in mist, the valleys wholly lost to mist, Inkstone-wanderer and his attendant, and even the summit rock where they stand.”
I am Inkstone-wanderer, at least for today, as I watch mist curl up the slopes of Mt. Lincoln, valleys lost to clouds below, Lafayette vanishing and reappearing along the ridgeline ahead of me.
And this inner play of Presence and Absence, writes Hinton, of stone and mist, the visible and the invisible, tells the story of the churning existence-tissue, of the unending moment-by-moment birth of existence. Immersion in and contemplation of this is landscape practice.
The tree offers its own form of landscape practice. Landscape practice on an intimate and daily scale, for those of us who cannot live on a remote mountainside. Known in the dark, or in twilight, it offers its own version of Presence and Absence, of what is and what is not. Climbed in mist or rain, it appears or disappears. It exudes membranous leaves and sheds them again; fills with golden light, catches days and months and years in its arms; opens itself up to stars and the Milky Way. I leave the ground and climb up into a region of the between, where Heaven and Earth meet and and their interplay is the existence-tissue and I am swinging through it.
Halfway across the ridgeline we shelter from the wind for a few moments at the Gargoyle rock formations near the peak of Mt. Lincoln. The scale of perception in this quiet alcove of stone abruptly shifts from the vast and the windswept to the intimate; from the macro to the micro. A small gem of brilliant color presents itself, a still center in this world of churning elemental power.
