I returned from traveling in Oregon over new year's week, where I was reminded of a decades-ago familiarity—with mud, overgrown ivy, brambles, willows bare and amber along the banks of the river where I used to walk. But what was unfamiliar was how warm it felt, the sun felt so strong by noon that I walked in a t-shirt. As I passed people in puffer jackets, stocking caps, knit gloves, scarves, an annoying, cold-adapted ego thought of everyone as cos-playing cold weather. And I began to think about mountains.
When you fly into Anchorage, about the last hour or more of the flight is over mountains—endless, infinite ranges. So many it is always astonishing to witness on a clear day. As we reached farther and farther north, the slant of the sunlight was low in the sky, illuminating every ridge in a blush of cold fire. And my thought was: ah, home.
For a long time, I felt a bit overwhelmed and lost in the ever-expanding view of the mountains. So the strength of that home feeling was a surprise—to find that view feeling more familiar than that I just left and had missed for so many years. I felt a sense of self or belonging with those ridges and remote slopes—a landscape both far and near.
When I was homesick for Oregon, it was the trees I missed the most. Oaks reaching tall into the sky, looking wise, rooted—camas growing beneath remnant groves from centuries of prescribed burning before any wagon crossed into its valleys.
Thankfully we have some of the largest trees that grow at this latitude near our house—birches, cottonwood. But in truth, many species of trees here look like they spend their whole life dying—black spruce leaning drunkenly in bogs like curled pipe cleaners, barely more than six feet tall, many even smaller, crippled by latitude. They live on the threshold of what they can withstand to survive. They would make me feel sad and resentful, evidence of how hard it is to live up here, just barely able to get by for so many.1
When I was working here in jobs that made me feel soul-starved and conflicted, no matter how hard I tried to work against the current—archaeology for a private engineering firm whose only mission was profit, then a museum job that became a cultish hellscape before I had to get out—I felt like the black spruce was a prophecy, something I couldn’t escape becoming. Like I too was trying to eke out an existence on what I could up here, having to give more and more time to work, but determined to be present in my son’s life, let alone my own. It felt precarious and crippling, like I’d never reach past a threshold of survival.
Another emblem of a harsh landscape to me was the endless mountains, cutting off any way to leave by road.
When we first lived here we were friends of friends with an Irish guy, Jared, who had climbed Denali twice, had rescued others on one of those trips, and had also climbed Mt. Everest. He was jovial, cheeky, gregarious, and kind, telling me when I was pregnant that Guinness was just fine, it was what Irish mothers drank instead of milk after all…. I still abstained but appreciated the sentiment.
He wasn’t able to climb K2 successfully one year and had to retreat. The next year he tried again and made it, calling his girlfriend from the summit when he reached it. Soon after he tried to help others who were injured, and was never seen again, heading into a blizzard towards China.
For many years, the mountains felt haunted with his (and others’) death. More evidence of an unforgiving landscape.
In Mountains of the Mind2, Robert Macfarlane writes of the shifting ideas of the sublime in the enlightenment—of how (in a very narrow survey of western history) mountains were historically seen as imposing, off-putting, dangerous. They were places where witches lived, trolls, dragons—where sometimes, a god might live but would resent any intrusion. No one climbed or considered mountains as an object of beauty until the romantics of the eighteenth century.
But people have long revered mountains, they just didn’t always seek to make them into parks that moved out the Indigenous people who lived in them so white people could gaze at them as ideals of the sublime3. Mountains have not always been an object to gaze at, a thing to be conquered.
Conquering is a disease and a plague.
Mountains are sacred spaces across cultures, countries, and centuries—houses of divine spirits, spaces reserved for those who can channel the divine, shamans in need of important medicine and vision. I remember having to conduct archaeological survey work near Crater Lake in southern Oregon years ago, and along the ridges of the Columbia Gorge, and felt how incredibly intrusive it was to be at these summits, places of sacred reverence and blasphemous to climb.
How easily we grow up being fed ideals that were made in an era when nature and those closest to it were something to control and extract.
And mountains were not just ominous lands of monsters before the romantic ideals of the sublime. Mountains were seen as places of strength to cross—necessary traverses because of hunting and too often, war. And thus the association of mountains with strength, and overcoming trials, was born: mountains are a place where battles are fought, animals are killed, and ascents are conquered—without an enemy in sight, other than oneself.
As early as the fifteenth century, “entire populations began to present themselves self-consciously as mountain people4,” and ideas of strength and hardiness in mountain-proximate people have been persistent. But significantly, mountains are admired from a distance, and it was those at a distance who began to record an adoration of mountains in print and in art.
Medieval writers in the 1400s identified the Alps as the symbol of Europe, the continent’s water store and earthly paradise—albeit alpine. Heinrich Glarean (1488-1563), in a Description of Helvetia (1514) gave praise for “the love of freedom, the hardiness, and the warlike spirit the Swiss derived from their harsh alpine surroundings.5” …These early characterizations as an alpine country continued to shape Swiss identity to the present day, and extended to the identity of most mountain-like places. By the eighteenth century, Scotland began to identify as a mountain country—the source of Macfarlane’s first mountain (like) love.
All to say, I have a hard time with the adoration of mountains because of that legacy—of climbing, conquering, an object to gaze upon or seen as a dare to prove one’s strength and hardiness (and equipment); of the idolization of mountains that has led to the theft and exclusion of people from their own lands over and over again. Mountains named for white men who never saw nor stepped foot near them. Mountains as something to be bagged, taken, possessed, exploited.
I love to be in the mountains, but truthfully not all that often. I’ve taken to stubbornly refusing to climb to summits on hikes, instead stopping to nap or write—to be in and around them.
There are so many mountains surrounding Anchorage that it’s easy to begin taking it for granted. But most of the time they still manage to take my breath away—often in mundane moments—a small dogwalk around the neighborhood when the light hits a certain way turning a corner, or driving south from town on a return home, where the highway opens up to a wall of mountains to the east, across Tutl'uh (otherwise known as the horribly named Turnagain Arm), to meet more arms of mountains from the Kenai across the south, almost like a bit of a hug. The landscape hugging Tikahtnu (better known as Cook Inlet, that bastard…) like a protector.
It’s the now familiar look of the Chugach mountain range ridges peeking between the trees on clear days that becomes the backdrop as I write, when I am at home. Far enough away to know something of their shape, but also near enough to note the measure of their snow, or in the frosty green appearance of lichens, expanding like sponges after a rain in the early fall, becoming visible with the retreating vegetation. I know them by proximity, by the distance between them and myself.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes:
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.6
What struck me as I saw the view of the mountains from the plane last week was a sense of belonging—of longing that is familiar, that stretches and leaves room for wonder. A sense of longing that has become a part of our selves. Mountains had become a part of me in a way that was, for so long, unfamiliar—a sign of loss and intimidation, resentment. What made me feel lost was what now made me feel found.
Solnit writes in a different essay7 of a friend that told her that the Wintu of north-central California,
don’t use the words left and right to describe their own bodies but use the cardinal directions… a cultural imagination in which the self only exists in reference to the rest of the world, no you without mountains, without sun, without sky.8
Extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory until it is known, a part of yourself. No you without mountains. Without sun, without sky. It’s the sense of being a part of that distance, rather than separate from it.
Solnit goes on to write:
..it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing….If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed…9
The slant of light this time of year is especially beautiful across the mountains—the slopes covered in snow, the shallow long light that casts its glow across the mountains as if in conversation with one another. The sun, rising in deference to the mountain ridges as its winter boundary in the darkest months, their own dance of distance. It’s cold, it’s dark, but there is fire between.
In Waiting for God, Simone Weil writes:
What is more beautiful than the action of gravity on the fugitive folds of the sea waves, or on the almost eternal folds of the mountains?10
When I looked down at the mountains from above in that plane, it was as if I could feel gravity pulling us back to land—a kinship with the same forces that created the mountain ridges fading into blue shadow.
Moving to a new place, learning its ways after many years of feeling at first as if in exile is having to expand the boundaries of what self means. It feels like getting lost, its disorienting, it’s stressful. For so many black spruce years I could find nothing of charm in this land (as ironic, embarrassing, and un-romantic as it is to say it). And yet those moments of feeling lost are when you look more carefully at what is distant, and slowly the two begin the dance of exchanging places.
When I see the mountains now I see the constancy of things eternal in times of acutely finite feelings. It’s a gravity, a beauty, an awe, a feeling of the sacred, a reminder of distance, and the warmth of familiarity at once.
A longing that feels like home.
Even though I know this is a horrible way to think about trees that grow many, many years, adapted to exactly this environment… but I was resentful….
Macfarlane, Robert. 2004. Mountains of the Mind. Vintage.
David Treuer’s article in the Atlantic on returning National Parks to Tribes is an excellent read for further details about this history.
Korenjak, Martin. 2017. “Why Mountains Matter: Early Modern Roots of a Modern Notion.” Renaissance Quarterly 70 (2017): 185.
Ibid.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2005. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Penguin Books. p. 41
Ibid, p. 17
Ibid. p. 17
Ibid. p. 30
Weil, Simone. 2009. Waiting For God. Harper Perennial. p. 76
“When I see the mountains now I see the constancy of things eternal in times of acutely finite feelings. It’s a gravity, a beauty, an awe, a feeling of the sacred, a reminder of distance, and the warmth of familiarity at once.” You, in real sense, are a poetess Freya. Thank you for this beautiful gallery of pictures. I would never have known such landscapes existed if it weren’t for you. It brings me so much joy to be able to see it as you see it.
Thankyou for taking the time to give time to the mountains. the rock and the stone. Where I live it is upon basalt, which i have found is a bossy rock with a loud voice. I am grateful to be able to listen as well. there are no tops to climb just a big bass rumble.
And may you always know your own way home