Mountains on my mind

I woke this morning with mountains on my mind.

I’ve spent the past four days in a feeverish delirium beneath a white down comforter. I write, sleep, read, sleep, edit, sleep, walk around the block, sleep, call my boss, sleep. And on the cycle goes. Until this morning.

I woke this morning with mountains on my mind.

There’s a magic moment that transpires in the mountains only a dozen or so times a year, if that many. It’s best when it happens in late-afternoon, and it’s that exact instant, which I’ve experienced only a dozen or so times in my fifteen years of Rocky Mountain small town living, that I felt this morning in my small brick house among the downtown city blocks of Boise, Idaho. I didn’t see it. I was there, and it felt exactly as it does when it happens: big, mysterious, overwhelming and grand. It’s life in your face, a moment bigger than the mountains and smaller than you, nowhere and everywhere, a great swirling of light, temperature, timing, emotion, relief and anticipation.

And, literally, it is something you feel. The sudden rise in barometric pressure in the minutes after a storm passes in the mountains lightens the world–and it lightens the way you see the world.

I woke this morning with mountains on my mind.

The range was nondescript and its name if it had one is meaningless. I was sitting on a high-elevation ridge, below tree line but above most of the trees. Across the valley another range was half-enshrouded in clouds but also reaching toward small patches of denim-blue sky. I was sitting in a happy drift of light, fluffy, freshly-fallen snow, and the world’s hard edges had vanished–tree branches, mountaintops, bushes, the sharp sound of the wind and me–all round and gray and smothered and soft. To the west where the clouds’ heavy blanket had first begun to tatter the sun dropped into a growing tear that revealed the light blue beyond. It was low, both far to the south and far to the west, and it cast long shadows across the rolling drifts. The sun was edgeless, too. It was soft and long and gold–really gold–and as the minutes stretched and the light spread like a growing rumor across the valley I felt the heavy weight of the storm begin to lift. It was easy to see, but there was something invisible, too: something like falling in love or discovering joy, when all the world makes sense, and difficult decisions are easy–if only for a while.

Having spent all day in the heavy depths of the storm, I was tired, but the storm’s flat, blue heaviness had passed, and the world was spun of gold. And I was in love.

I woke this morning with mountains on my mind.

© Greg Stahl