mountain

It’s dark when I crawl out of my tent. I’ve stuffed my bear bell in my pocket, muffling its sound so I don’t wake the other campers. Across a dirt path is a little wooden shack with the campsite bathrooms. The yellow lights of the shack reach across the grass beneath a deep sky full of stars. The moon has already gone.

I fix my baseball cap backwards and turn the headlamp fastened to my forehead on, pointing it towards my feet. I walk past the many tents that litter the fields surrounding the foot of the mountain. A tall mountain. In the dark, it’s a black mass that I only see by how it hides points of light in the night sky.

I come to the trailhead in among the trees and point my headlamp up to see a jury-rigged wooden cabinet on top of a post. Opening it, inside I find some pencils, posters warning of bears, emergency numbers, and a notebook to keep track of climbers heading to the summit.

I write my name. I write that it is 2:30am. I close the cabinet.

Looking at the beginning of the trail I hesitate. My headlamp only shows me my closest surroundings. The forest feels claustrophobic. I can hear farther than I can see. In the quiet I listen. The wind is bending the highest and lightest branches of trees in long whispers. Everywhere is the sleepy sound of insects. Along the floor of the woods, I hear scuttering. A branch snaps.

Nobody is ever really alone out in the forest. There is something living in every space. But in this moment, I don’t know if that feels reassuring or scary. I pull out my bear bell and hang it from my backpack. Its ring sounds unnatural within the surrounding chorus.

I head deeper into the dark. The way up the mountain.

The ground becomes full of inconsistent steps. I’m thankful for it. It makes me focus on where to place my feet and not on what might be around beyond the light of my little headlamp.

Each step appears only after I deal with the last.

I climb over a tangle of tree roots. Hop up an assortment of rocks. Scramble up steep loose gravel. Duck under a tunnel of bushes.

I put thoughts of spiderwebs and their makers out of my mind. I saw a massive one crawling on my tent before I went to sleep. I saw a hiker trailing a long line of silk from their hat as they came out from the forest in the afternoon.

It can’t be helped, I tell myself.

As I climb, I begin to sweat. Even at night, the heat and humidity of summer is suffocating. Moths and flies begin to gather near my headlamp, bumping into my face and buzzing around my ears. I take the light off my head and hold it in my hand with the strap wrapped around my wrist. It’s now impossible to see without the hand. It looks around for me. A new eye on a long neck.

The ascent continues for what feels a long time. In a clearing, I stop and take my first break. Looking out, the town at the foot of the mountain and the street lamped roads sprawl out like veins into the countryside. On the far edge of the world, the thin glow of sunlight has just begun to appear, throwing the slightest tinges of pink and gold into the yawning blue-black of outer space. It has been about an hour and a half since I started. The climb is supposed to take four. I try looking up to spot the peak, but it’s all the dark shapes of trees shifting in the quickening wind and night above.

I carry on.

Eventually, the headlamp in my hand becomes unnecessary. There is enough light to see the shifting steps without it. But a mist is slowly building the higher I go. Out over the side of the mountain, the land has taken on a lavender hue overhung by a silver fog.

I keep climbing.

A little further and the trees turn to tall brush. The brush gives way to low grasses. The grasses to rock. And soon, the summit.

And I am alone on the peak.

Enveloped on all sides by a heavy mist, I’ve walked into the clouds. The clouds rolling up and over the apex. The world below disappeared.

I follow a non-path up to the highest point of the rim. It’s marked at intervals by spots of paint on an unbreaking line of boulders that I have to climb up and over. On one side of me is a steep and direct way down to the base of the mountain. On the other is a steep and direct way down to a volcanic vent.

The wind is strong here. I don’t know if it’s bullying me or playing with me as a gust tests my balance while clambering along the high ridge.

But I can’t know what the wind is thinking.

And I’m reminded of something.

I used to be afraid of tornadoes as a kid. I was horrified by the thought of a twister coming down and tearing apart my house. Destroying my small room full of all my things and carrying my family away. But I reasoned that if I became friends with the wind, I wouldn’t have to be scared. Because friends are kind to friends. And friends don’t blow away each other’s homes. I would often try to talk with the wind on stormy days to see what it was thinking. To see if it was upset and if I could help calm it down. During nicer weather, I would tell the breeze about my day on walks home from elementary school.

Finding this memory up on the mountain, I suddenly don’t feel so alone anymore. As another gust twists around me, my unease is replaced by familiarity.

And then my hat almost blows away.

You’re funny.

I eventually arrive at the cairn of the mountain. The place where all the others who made the climb before me have placed a stone to say they reached the top.

Here, the wind is surging stronger than before. Picking up clouds and lifting them like breaking waves. Little blue flowers growing between rocks bend in the current.

I can’t see anything beyond the grey-white vapour flowing all around. Everything that exists, exists in the small sphere of vision within the haze.

The wind surges again, shifting the boundaries of the mist. But it still remains the same small world.

I look around and find a tiny stone of my own.

Aiming for the top of the cairn, I toss it onto the pile.

The stone lands.

Rolls down.

It falls into a gap among the rest and is lost to sight.

The wind roars.

It really has been a while since we last talked.

Looking at nothing in particular, I ask,

“How’ve you been?”