Musing the Mountains

Riding the crest of hills, as a ship caresses the waves, I'm drawn to my home.  I look out of the airplane window to take in the darkest green blanket folds, for I am a child of these mountains, of their cool dark hollows, their rivers that can be silent deep pools, or agitated whitewater, tumbling and crashing against ancient stones. I see, too, border-crossing roads, snaking in and out of the folds and side-winding to the isolated family farm, as well as the company house of a coal camp, or the river bank community that provides drugstore, bank, school, and church.  

From my window seat, I imagine the magic to run my open palm along the velvet treetops.  The chenille ridges from this vantage point are soft rivulets, gracefully synchronized, just as the ridges along the sandy bottom of the sea. My gaze skims the peaks and slides into the valleys.

To the children reared here, the mountains are the most enticing of playgrounds.  When I felt their pull, I would hear my mother warn:  "Don't leave the paths; the mountains here are honeycombed with miles of abandoned mine shafts, and flooded by years of rain runoff."  The top layer could easily give way beneath a child's weight, and send her tumbling down to be lost forever.  These warnings were hard to remember once the wild grape vines became impromptu swings, the mountain pools and shade wonderful respite from pre-air-conditioned summers' heat, the mountain paths passageways into Indian explorations, or to the best of hiding places.  

Being within the hollows of tightly ruched mountains, some folks from the flat lands can feel claustrophobic, cut off, just as the hollows squeeze the daylight, leaving us in extra shadow-hours until the dark of night descends.  However, many of us from these hills, given the expanse of the ocean or the prairie, feel exposed and vulnerable in such openness, and the unfiltered sunlight harsh in our eyes. 

Yes, from these hollows, to see the sun midday, I must look directly above or else through trees that line the hilltops.  An observation from a white-headed philosopher friend from long ago, his arm resting against the back of his front porch swing, and speaking in time with its rhythmic slow-motion squeak:  "If I didn't have these mountains to rest my gaze upon, my eyes would get tired." 

There's a softness and musical grace of evergreens, and of oak, elm, and maple, of whispered lyrics from the tall branches of her hills, no less fine than the towering monsters of the American West, which themselves are the cymbal crashes, the climactic outpouring to the solitude of the plains,  and also, very different from the staccato snares of the Sawtooths.  But here in my home,  the soft green mountains are the melody, the sweet song of my heart.  

The mountains and the  New River  from my West Virginia front yard.