Love of High Places

Sierra, Sept, 2000 by Gregory McNamee

A new anthology from Sierra Club Books helps explain our affair with mountains.

There is something about mountains that sends humans into states of consciousness--fearful, reverential, even awestruck--that are far from our normal modes of being. Some of the reasons are obvious, even deceptively so. For believers, mountains are the closest points on the planet to the homes of the gods, connecting the spirit world with our own. Mountains hold obvious dominion over the land, stern royalty gazing down on their lowly subjects. And, of course, mountains are high places, and many people fear heights.

From terror grows a kind of grace. It is no surprise that Saint Francis' notions of "tendance and comforting" should have arisen in the mountains through which he walked, ideas he elaborated while coursing the craggy spine of the Apennines on the way from Assisi to La Verna. The nature of mountains embodies the gift by which God enables us to live holy lives, Saint Francis said. They change our being. Thus, as John Muir observed at the beginning of this chewed-up age, "thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home."

The environmental psychologist Bernard S. Aaronson has noted that "the traditional association of mountain tops with the abode of Deity may be less because they are higher than the areas around them than because they make possible those experiences of expanded depth in which the self can invest itself in the world around it and expand across the valleys," a feeling that resembles nothing so much as extrasensory perception. That is just the feeling experienced by human beings deprived of oxygen, a sure step toward coma, and by those who have survived close encounters with death: most mountain climbers, in other words. Alpinist after alpinist reports returning from the mountains filled with an inexplicable sense of inner peace born of that sensory sharpening, filled with something approaching the religious thump on the head that Buddhists call satori, like Maurice Herzog's epiphany atop the 26,502-foot summit of Annapurna: "I had a vision of the life of men. Those who are leaving it for ever are never alone. Resting against the mountain, which was watching over me, I discovered horizons I had never seen. There at my feet, on those vast plains, millions of beings were following a destiny they had not chosen. There is a supernatural power in those close to death."

In the mountains the eyes become clearer, it seems, the ears more finely tuned; the customary flavors of food take on new nuances; the calls of birds compose a richer music. The first European known to have climbed a mountain for the sheer pleasure of it, the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374), devoted many pages of his journals to describing the odd sensations that overcame him in the highlands, especially on seeing a glacier-lit rainbow atop the small alp Ventoux: "I stood as one stupefied. I looked down and saw that the clouds lay beneath my feet. I felt as if another."

We cannot undo 2 million years of our own primate evolution to dissolve the fears and emotions that lie at the center of our beings. Roller coasters, tall buildings, and good portions of the films Cliffhanger and The Eiger Sanction can still produce those beads of sweat that proclaim our fragility, even though we pretend to be masters of our world. And in that pretense, we are increasingly placing the world's mountains at risk.

Sometimes we do so out of greed. Where two thousand years ago Greek priests climbed the slopes of Olympus and Parnassus to search for signs of lightning, indications that holocausts were propitious and prayers to the gods most likely to be heard, now their descendants build ski lodges. Indian casinos now lie spattered among the sacred mountains of Arizona, California, New Mexico.

And sometimes, with less damage to be sure, we do so out of mere vanity, out of the misplaced drive to conquer nature. N. E. Odell, who accompanied the tragic Mallory expedition to Everest in 1924, wondered whether it was right to climb it: "If it was indeed the sacred ground of Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the Mountain Snows, had we violated it--was I now violating it?"

Whether we climb them or view them from afar, mountains pull at us, calling us home. Watching their peaks pierce the sky in the Sonoran Desert, I count myself fortunate to have their sanctuary, their daily reminder of the generosity of the land, and to be able to yield again to tininess, even to terror, and to the ever-expanding universe that lies in the ranges beyond.

At length I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away; and when, a quarter of a mile farther, I reached the summit of the ridge, which those who have seen in clearer weather say is about five miles long, and contains a thousand acres of table-land, I was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them. Now the wind would blow me a yard of clear sunlight, wherein I stood; then a gray, dawning light was all it could accomplish, the cloud-line ever rising and falling with the wind's intensity. Sometimes it seemed as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments and smile in sunshine; but what was gained on one side was lost on another. It was like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away. It was, in fact, a cloud-factory--these were the cloud-works, and the wind turned them off done from the cool, bare rocks. Occasionally, when the windy columns broke in to me, I caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me. It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus. Such was Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound. Aeschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this. It was vast, Titanic and such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine. There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him, than in the plains where men inhabit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtle, like the air. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty.