A Deep Well at the Top of a Tall Mountain

"Stander on the mountain,
Looking for the fountain,
To drink some, to think some
About the old days..."

"I think we should climb Bald Mountain with the family," I said, yesterday afternoon.

Many times, I have prayed for a mountain to be moved in my life. Life is like that, they say, and it really is true: it is a whole mountain range, and you can expect to be climbing in all kinds of weather and always with the wrong sort of gear. Mostly, your Guide is invisible, and you'll feel His presence the better for leaning in harder.

I did want to propose something exciting, and unpredictable, and I wanted to pull it off. Lo and behold, my husband said, "Okay, we should do it tomorrow, then."
The thunder rolled and the rain came pelting halfway through the drive to Old Forge. They were all watching me; Mama simply HATES (that's abHORS and desPISEs) to get wet outdoors. It's a quirk, and you have them, too. But I was watching the Adirondacks approach, and ignoring the bag of knitting sitting on the dashboard. Here at home we have elm trees scattered lonely in fields, and lining country roads. About Remsen, the elms mostly grow upholstered in wild grapevines. Then, there are no more elm trees, and it's a lonely pine dotted here and there between the thickets along the highway.
By the time we cross Moose River, I have my grandmother's face before me in the mind: this was her country, and as she was a part of the first thirty years of my life, this must be some of my country, too. We aren't going to the Bald Mountain Colony camp, where Grandma spent summers in the eighties through 2000, or to any of the surrounding village sites we used to frequent together, but I know she had been up Bald Mountain in her young days. This will be my third time, and I am going to the very top. There are three spots that I remember as lookouts along the way, places where you can look over Third and Fourth Lakes, and the channel between will be marked by telltale mist on a day such as this, pointing me to the past that never changes.

I have been trying not to think about the mountains I have faltered on, those I wake up to every morning. I have been focussed on the escape of conquering a physical mountain instead, the thrill of clambering capably up some of earth's bones long ago exposed and long since clothed in scrub and pine forest. It is raining still, and we have scrounged jackets and ball caps or umbrellas. Our feet are wetted with the small stream running off down the trail, and treading through numerous puddles. I know that everyone expects me to have a fit about my back being all damp with the runoff from my umbrella, but then, they don't know that before I had children, in the days of Adirondack summers that is, I was in fact quite good at adapting, and some of my past that is here is equipping me. This is the sort of mountain I can climb.

The rocks have not changed, the roots seem a little more exposed and imposing than the rocks, but the views at the lookouts....I saw the gulls' rock in Third Lake. Whenever we took boat rides from Third Lake through the channel to Fourth, that rock had gull splotches all over it. As if some birds prefer to play at marksmanship. There was the channel marked by tendrils of mist after the rain had lifted. Down below, on this side of Fourth Lake back under the trees but straight before me in a line with this convenient old signpost pine tree, is the house where Grandma was born and lived as a girl until her mother died when Grandma was thirteen. From this spot on Fourth Lake, Grandma went to school up the bank a way, or to town for supplies, by motorboat in summer, by horse and sleigh in winter. Just back through the channel, that's to my right as I look down, on Third Lake she spent summers in a cottage that had once been part of the Bald Mountain House resort. I stayed with her there for a week or more each summer until I was done with college.
I look down at the trees and the mist trails bring to me walks around the campground circle, evenings at the campfires of neighbors, sunburn on the dock, rainy evenings of playing cards, sitting on the porch overlooking the water with cross-stitch embroidery, crossword puzzles, counting boats over breakfast grapefruit, special suppers out at Inlet, church at Big Moose Chapel, the thrift store Fridays at Niccolls Memorial Church in Old Forge. We talked, and we worked together wordlessly some, and she was the only one whose snoring has never bothered me.
She was a mountain climber. Not in the traditional sense, with ropes and boots and hooks. But she lost her mother while young, embraced her aunt as stepmother, moved to a new town and school, married a farmer for love (because she had always meant never to marry a farmer!), began her family in the Great Depression years, saw her brothers and one of her sons off to wars, taught school, lived twenty-seven years a widow, and at the last made it through most of her chemotherapy treatments.
Along the mountain range, Grandma noticed small things and kept them about her. I think these reminded her of her faith in the Good and the True so that she could always recover from a hard climb without sullenness, with genuine good humor.

Somewhere along the range I have lost my good humor, or let it slide down the steep places to languish in ravines. I ought to be scrambling down in the cleft rock of ages after it, and instead I have been trudging along the naked tops, sour and sore. Little cares have become great trials and everything has become personal. I had stopped praying for the strength to stay on the mountain, let alone get over it.

At the summit of Bald Mountain the rain had stopped. From the top of the tower I could see the surrounding Adirondack mountains as so many layers of blue-green glazing on the rim of a gigantic bowl. I need to come back here, now and then. I need that few minutes of being the sole apple in the bowl, the apple under His eye, feeling His breath stir the pine forest, and to be assured that the well has not run dry.

"Stander on the mountain,
Looking for the fountain,
To drink some, to think some
About the old days..."

I am going down now: my family are waiting and there is the downward trek before picnic. I have looked out and shut my eyes a few times, to be sure that the view remains even if I should never open them again. Alright. In a few hours, I will be miles from here on a different mountain range. But it's alright.
I have climbed this mountain, and the mountain has moved me.

I am not a cartographer, but I have travelled some.

This has been a day
when the dam
all but broke
with the pressure of bearing up -
what to contain,
and what to let go.

"Why don't you love me?!"
the last words she said.
I told her, "You're too old
to be tucked into bed."

(And I wasn't just putting her off.)

I figured, I hoped
the ceilingful of
glow-in-the-dark stars
might give her space
to think
at day's end,
how all our day's duelling,
far from dividing,
has brought us together
in a dance hormonally
choreographed.

You slash, and I will parry.
You jab, and I may bleed.
Oh! you had not meant...
to say that.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Oh, do not fear, my darling!
I, too, have laid me down
wrapped in guilt and self-disgust.

The lullabies
you still recall,
the cool of cheek and falling hair,
now the baby takes his share
that sharing cannot
diminish.

Shine, my troubled little star.
I know exactly where you are,
on the yellow-bricked road
to Self.

Do you remember touring
the Secret Caverns,
strung out in a line,
sniggering at the guide
we trusted in the dark?

Let me make this clear:
to you I am a tyrant,
to the others a buffoon -
I make as much sense
as a man in the moon,
with this algebra stuff,
which is to say,
that sometimes we agree
on the value of solving
for variables.