They stand alone. The Cascades. The volcanic peaks are apart from all else, confident in their solitude, asking for no company. They dwarf the foothills and their white cones latch on to the sky with greedy dominance. Nothing else may command attention for miles around.
They are all like that, made by the same mother from the same rock, each petulant and sometimes violent in a rebellion against peace. Always alone, except the Three Sisters. The belligerent three clumped together north of Bend, Oregon: Faith, Hope and Charity. Well, belligerent no longer, dormant for now and kind to hikers.
I am in a glacier basin below Mount Adams. It is dry in October. The new snow has not yet fallen and the old has already melted. Little creeks are running over gravel and boulders. They are fed by the snow upslope. The water is milky with silt, and frigid. I hold my hand in a stream and in seconds it shoots a numbing pain through my arm. Even the dogs avoid stepping into the waters.
They are sniffing and playing, stretching their legs after hours of nauseous ride over the washboard gravel of forest roads. They ignore the majesty of the volcano. They never look up at the bigger picture beyond their lives. Big things do not impress them. Like most living creatures, even the conscious ones, they bury their noses in the minutia in front of them.
"No, I don’t think we should be together," her text says.
"Ok." I type back. And that’s it.
Should I feel sad? I ought to, I think, after one and a half years of good times, aborted tries, and mostly self-involved lives. But I don’t. Some people are just wrong for each other. And instead I look at the volcano with joy, happy that when I drive home in three weeks I will not have to walk on egg shells. I suspect she is going through a list of my failings right now to someone already marked a month ago. Good luck, man. I’ll take this frigid water and the tempestuous mountain instead.
She is a goddess. The mountain, I mean. The cleanliness of lines and purity of form. The violence implied in its making. I come from the mountain ranges of Altai just north of Mongolia, and then the mighty American Rockies. There the peaks are crowding shoulder to shoulder. They are connected in harmony, supporting each other in an upheaval. Each peak exists individually, named on the map, but seldom dominant in life, just a part of something bigger.
I come from a city. It is also a collective of individuals meshed into an organism that can only survive together. Each piece is interdependent without an option to exist by itself. At best, a person can strive to stand out, to shine through the light pollution of the rest, but never independent, or visible for long. I always thought it a beautiful compromise for people, for me, to give up a degree of freedom and coalesce into a collective which can birth an emergent genius of a civilization. To birth a culture. But now I wonder.
This mountain is alone and it is complete. It shoulders the winds. It withstands the snow. It can muster its inner fire to grow taller. But it can also blow itself up and murder with the same power. Mount St. Helen, the volcano neighbor, did four decades ago. Now it stands damaged. Missing a face. All on its own.
My break up of a few minutes ago feels healthy. It feels good. I feel free and unburdened. Could I take another step and break up with the city and the fast life it demands? Unchain from expectations? Standing alone, like a volcano, tempts me with the romantic self-reliance and a promise of harmony with the world.
But I should not lie to myself. The inner fire that built this volcano is not within me. I need the shoulders of others to stand tall. Not only me. It is how we are as a species. It is what made us. Beware the folly to think you can do life entirely on your own. A grave miscalculation. A hubris.
"Dogs, let’s walk," I call. They trudge along but on their terms, sniffing, licking, biting, peeing. Good dogs. We meander uphill among the boulders. They are immovable, as big as me, but shifted by the spring flows without effort. To nature, these are playthings to toss around in a game of awesome bocce. Even if I am a rock, as solid as a bus, I would lose the game.
Well, Adams, thank you for the time. And thank you for the thoughts. I am heading back to my kind.
A grave miscalculation, indeed.