My Mother's Mountain

Because there are no mountains, I’d say. This was my answer whenever my mother asked why I couldn’t move back to my childhood home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where she and my stepdad still live. Yet ever since I can remember, I’ve dreamed of a mountain emerging beyond the edges of their lawn at night, erupting like a volcano, its jagged crest splitting the hayfields, the wetlands, and the soft forest floors, its summit rising toward the sky until ice crusted over the very top. 

There had once been giant peaks in these lowlands, I knew. As a mountain-loving child, I’d paced the surrounding woods, searching for long-lost summits, noting the traces of bygone ice age glaciers: the rounded swells, low ridgelines, and watery hollows left by their retreat, the lines their debris had scratched across the rocks, like the marks of dragons’ claws. 

Traces of absence and of longing. 

I’ll build you a mountain, my mother would say, and she always sounded serious. Anything that would tempt at least one of her daughters to stay home.  

*****

All through my childhood, my mother devised local adventures for my younger sister and me. At night, we’d hike through shadowed woods to skate across the moonlit shimmer of a frozen pond. Or else we’d stumble down steep hills toward the murky edge of wetlands to hear the loud chorus of spring frogs. But it was the long road trips north or west with her or with my father that haunted me: how the seemingly endless sprawls of strip malls and subdivisions dissolved back into open fields and dense forests as we left eastern Massachusetts; how narrow paths entangled with roots and boulders led to the cold, misty air of granite summits; how a summer snowfield flashed against lupine and paintbrush flowers or how a glacial lake turned a strange and incandescent turquoise. Everything hinted at otherworlds infused with something nameless, radiant, essential.    

However it happened, my sister and I were both infected with a yearning for heights. I left Massachusetts as soon as I could, near the start of the new millennium, seeking work as a teacher, a journalist, or an editor in places like Mongolia, Wyoming, Montana, and Vermont, where an abundance of summits rippled above the valleys and the plains. My sister, in turn, headed to New Hampshire, Washington State, and finally California, where she became a professor and a writer, often spending weekends amid the sunlit granite domes or deep winter snows of the Sierra Nevada. There, she and her husband taught their young children to hike and ski, just as our parents had taught us. 

Each time our mother came to visit, she scurried along trails and sprang from rock to rock, her own pace quickened by desire. She loved mountains, too, only she could never stay near them for long. She had her home in the Massachusetts town next to the one where she’d grown up, her childhood friends who lived close by. She had the retirement life that she and my stepdad, Russ, had grown accustomed to: the set of routines, quasi-mysterious to me, that included a vegetable garden, birdfeeders, yard work, book clubs, social events, house projects, responsibilities to local friends and family members—and with all that, a sense of rootedness I’d never felt myself. 

So I began to send my mother almost daily photos of the trails I ran, the mountains I skied, the cliffs I climbed: the crimson light of sunset that shone through curtains of suspended ice; the white feathers of rime that sparkled on branches bent like giant wings; the translucent layers of ridgelines that faded to a pale horizon pink. Evidence of reasons to roam. 

*****

When COVID-19 arrived in 2020, I found myself sheltering in place in a house that belonged to one of my mother’s friends, on the edge of the Bangtail Mountains of Montana, enclosed by fir glades and deep snow. On leave from my editing job in Vermont, I’d travelled there to finish the rough draft of my first book. As the pandemic and the quarantines continued, my planned two-month stay stretched on to six. Unable to venture far from the house, I found my topic, the history of imaginary peaks, increasingly apt. 

During the days, I perched in a small, high study, gazing out the window, from time to time, at countless snow-lit peaks above vast plains. I read story after story of the centuries of myths and hoaxes, cartographic errors and persistent fantasies that had once created phantom summits on maps around the world. I wrote about the traces left behind whenever their existence was disproven, of irradicable yearnings for something beyond measurement or sight. During the evenings, I wandered the nearby mountainsides alone, at first on skis across the silent drifts and later on foot along the emptied trails, through meadows bright with glacier lilies. I watched the rays of sunset flicker in and out of the Bridger Mountains to the west, creating a daily magic lantern show. Ever-shifting hues of crimson and violet enchanted the other ranges that rose in all directions. One faraway mountain, higher than its neighbours, became the focal point of my longing. Its summit was shaped like a giant crystal; its facets blazed with alpenglow. It seemed improbable and unearthly, like the peak I’d dreamed of in childhood. 

Yet by the time the lockdowns eased, I didn’t want to climb it anymore. While reading A Field Guide to Getting Lost, I had come across Rebecca Solnit’s description of “the blue at the far edge of what can be seen. . . . The colour of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.” The summit that entranced me, I’d realised, was one I could never reach: tinted with the haze and fantasy of distance and desire.  

Meanwhile, restless as well, my mother had begun roaming ever more extensively near her house, seeking out each acre of undeveloped forest, wetland, and field along the borders of Lincoln and Concord, looking for neighbourhood walks that she’d never done before. Over phone and email, she shared encounters with unfamiliar bogs and forgotten groves. Searching for more than she could find on modern maps, she used the books and journals of the local nineteenth-century philosopher Henry David Thoreau as a guide to patches of wild that lingered beyond the houses and the lawns. These places were already shrinking in his day, yet still full of wonders vaster than their size. 

Many people, Thoreau asserted, know even less about their backyards than the European explorers did about the remote islands they claimed to have discovered, though such regions were long inhabited (and well-known) by Indigenous residents. Moments of transfiguration haunt his prose, when the miniature becomes the infinite, the inner world exchanges places with the outer one, reality unveils itself as mythology. He described how White Pond and Walden Pond transformed under bright sun into “great crystals” and “Lakes of Light.” His ascent of a white pine, in springtime, opened up views of faraway blue summits to the north and west, mountains that he’d never glimpsed before, “so much more of the earth and the heavens.”The tiny red blooms of the pine flowers, glittering from its high branches, awakened as much awe as fallen stars. 

Often, he imagined himself wandering along the thresholds of some other land hidden within the borders of the town, until the maps he made as a local surveyor dissolved like dim lines on a pane of glass, revealing an indescribable vision. All it took, apparently, was a more attentive gaze, a more open mind, to find something like enchantment—a practice at which my mother, it seemed, was becoming increasingly adept. 

In August 2020, my leave over, I returned to my job in Vermont, but I was haunted by the pandemic deaths of so many of my parents’ generation, and after the state quarantines ended in 2021, I drove south more often to visit my mother and stepdad in Massachusetts. There, she guided me to a few of the places she loved: the quiet corridors of trails under the shadows of white pines; a steep hillside where my feet slipped on fallen oak and maple leaves, slick and deep as alpine snowdrifts; kettle ponds that glowed turquoise like the ghosts of lost glacier lakes. There was more to my hometown woods than I’d thought, but I still didn’t feel as much wonder as she did: there were still no mountains, only their memory and our imaginations.  

That November, at age seventy-five, my mother had a stroke that left part of her face and one thumb without feeling. Within a short time, she learned to compensate for the unusable finger by tying her shoelaces with an elaborate shuffle of her hands. She soon appeared mostly well again. It was as if nothing serious had happened, yet everything had. Our family returned, for the most part, to our usual lives, but with a new, latent dread. We couldn’t ignore what this was: a warning sign. 

*****

In October 2022, I moved to Colorado to work on a second book, still pursuing the idea of ice-coated peaks, as alluring as a flash of sunset along the horizon. Could you do something more practical? people started to ask me, with genuine curiosity, now that I was in my mid-forties. Yet I’d come to realise that after a certain point, it’s harder to settle down than to keep moving. It seemed far too late for me to attempt to go to business or medical school or try to enter some corporate track or steady trade—or whatever might still count as practical in our precarious time. Over the years, I’d become too obsessed with writing, teaching, and editing to quit. And I was already on a path of sorts: an unstable literary life. In its increasing uncertainty, I knew I’d continue going wherever the next promising opportunity emerged. Still, I was starting to hope, as I got older, that one of these jobs, eventually, would lead to more security and to a place I could call home. 

I stopped by my mother’s home along the way. On our last walk of the visit, we passed by a junction where another trail led to Mount Misery, a mere ripple of earth, just 284 feet high, barely distinguishable from the gently rolling woodlands around it, although it retained the designation of “Mt.” on modern maps that other local hills had long since shed. We meandered, instead, toward Walden Pond, and somewhere strayed amid the branching of unmarked paths and dirt roads onto a trail she didn’t recognise. Through the trees, an unexpected jumble of grey cliffs appeared above us. 

I think we should check that out, my mother said. She began clambering uphill directly toward them. I traversed off to the side, following the base of the rock until I noticed a wide rift with scuff marks of previous scramblers’ feet. Halfway up, the steep path passed over bulging stones that had to be climbed. Above the cliffs, I found myself standing on a slab of bare granite, like a mountaintop, gazing out at something rare in this region of dense woods and low hills—a view.  

A canopy of green leaves, marked here and there by rust and gold, stretched out to the horizon, concealing all signs of houses and roads. And at the very edge appeared a watercolour wash of hills tinted violet and then blue. Pale clouds rose above the last ridgeline, also bluish, like even higher summits. Dusk drifted across the sky in a haze of pink. 

I shouted to my mother, urging her to join me. Slowly, intently, she made her way over the bulge, focused on each movement, until we stood side by side, lost in silence and awe. 

We’ll have to find another way home, my mother eventually said. I’m not going down the way we went up. 

I’d forgotten how fragile she had become. 

Still, she showed no sign of faltering as we began our twilit stumbling through unfamiliar woods. Relying only on her sense of direction, we squinted through the darkening air. 

Shouldn’t we call Russ? I asked, and then I clarified, To let him know we’ll be late. 

Later, she said, and I knew she meant: As soon as we know where we are again.      

We’d always been so alike. Neither of us was going to be good at old age. Neither of us wanted to cause worry. Neither of us could let go of our independence or our pride. Neither of us wanted to be assisted or rescued, even if that help just meant my stepdad picking us up from whatever road we reached. 

We kept walking, hoping to glimpse, somewhere beyond us, through the dim, a gap in the trees—where the train tracks would emerge, their lines cutting a swath back toward Old Concord Road or where the shimmer of Walden Pond might appear, still reflecting the fading sky. 

Eventually, we saw the train tracks and the pond shimmer. I don’t remember, anymore, how long I’d spent wondering where we’d turn up when we hit a road—or wondering, illogically, as the shadows consumed all memory of houses and pavement, whether roads existed here at all. This was eastern Massachusetts, of course. The wilds are so small that lost can only ever be a relative and temporary state, more internal than external, as unexpected as an act of grace.  

What remains most in my mind is my mother’s figure ahead of me on the tracks. The rhythmic clatter of her trekking poles on crushed stones, the determined cadence of her feet, her body straining forward, the faint light of her headlamp, flickering like a star, moving as if alone, deeper into the cobalt black of the night. 

*****

I’m not sure we could ever find that place again. And perhaps we shouldn’t try. Later, thinking of that day, I’ve remembered tales of doors that opened, only once, into otherworlds. 

I’ve wondered how much of the apparent enchantment of that clifftop was formed by the approach of dusk, by the filtering of recollections and desires. How much a place becomes reshaped by the telling of it. Maybe, under different circumstances, we would have seen it as just another scruffy mound of weeds and rocks. 

Thoreau, my mother’s guide, had dreamed of climbing a peak in Concord, somewhere near the border with Lincoln, “in the easterly part of our town (where no high hill actually is),” he acknowledged in his journals. He described a vision of clambering up its bare stone crest, past stunted trees, until at last he appeared to cross “an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain.” 

Our clifftop was not his peak: we didn’t climb into the “upper air and clouds,” as he did, only among clusters of autumn leaves. But we, too, had crossed some indefinable, unexpected line, if largely in our minds. Like him, we’d had to seek another way down. And we also felt that our miniature peak, as he wrote, could “never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there.” From the moment we’d left the trail and had begun bushwhacking toward those cliffs, we’d been lost, astray from the maps we hadn’t brought, from my mother’s extensive memory of local geography, and from my own preconceptions about these lowlands and these woods. 

Lost to what we’d call the real world as well, perhaps. And lost in a story we were creating, briefly, with each other. 

*****

Finding the mountain in my mother’s backyard didn’t stop me from continuing out West. I still had a book to write and contract work to fulfil. I still felt that overwhelming yearning for elusive, greater heights. 

In an essay, “Walking,” Thoreau had evoked other phantom ranges, including the golden cloud peaks that only appeared right before dusk, “those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapour only,” lit into being by the last glow of the evening sun. To him, those illusory summits recalled “a sort of terrestrial paradise . . . enveloped in mystery and poetry,” a West that might be perceived only in imagination, like the fabled “island of Atlantis,” the source of so many mythic lands: of El Dorados, Perditas, and other realms of seemingly unquenchable desire, but also of the Isles of the Blessed, where the wandering spirits of the dead came, at last, to rest. 

I was the one leaving again, and yet I couldn’t help sensing that my mother had already set out on a journey that was leading her even farther away. Already, she and my stepdad spoke of topics I couldn’t fully understand, as if, in ageing, they were becoming residents of a distant country: aching backs, knee and hip ailments, heart monitors, unending medical tests. 

It could have been worse, we all said about her stroke. Take care of yourself, friends and family kept telling her. I reiterated the usual advice that younger people give older ones, like a litany of hope: eat well, exercise, talk with your doctor, stay active. As if the words themselves, spoken often enough, could be a spell to keep her safe. Keep having adventures, I added, for I knew, more than ever, she needed them to continue feeling alive. 

But the unspoken knowledge lingered in our minds that one day, inevitably, something worse would happen. 

*****

In late October 2022, when my mother and my stepdad visited me in Colorado, she lunged up the trails above Boulder, scarcely pausing as she balanced with her trekking poles on heaped stones or crusted snow. By now, she’d learned ways of tying her shoelaces so skillfully, the signs of her stroke were no longer noticeable at all. We stopped below one of the Flatirons’ sandstone slabs, amid drifts of yellow pine needles, winter in the air. She gripped her poles and grinned up at the vast slant of furrowed rock, pointed toward the sky. We could just scamper up that one, couldn’t we? she said. High above where we now stood, I’d once seen a pair of climbers moving upward like dark birds. I pictured what it might be like to return here, with her, bringing my rope and climbing gear, how she might grip the edges of the stone with fingers that still had all their feeling left. 

On the way back, we encountered a group of grey-haired women and exchanged words of appreciation about the weather and the trail. People just go into the mountains all the time here, my mother said to me afterwards, don’t they? That’s just what they do. 

Her wistful tone sounded promising. I reminded her of other retired people we knew who’d moved out West to join their adult children. She spoke gently and vaguely of considering the idea, yet I was aware that she and my stepdad had too much keeping them in place. 

Someday, as their health wanes, I might need to return to Massachusetts to take care of them instead.

Soon, they were headed for the airport, back to their friends and other family members, back to the house they’d prepared so carefully for their old age. I felt the shrinking of the time we’d have together on earth, like the shrinking of a wildwood, still unmapped, but no longer unbounded. 

I’m so glad you live in a beautiful place, my mother keeps saying ever since that visit. I imagine that I’m hearing a new, sharp edge of longing in her voice. I don’t know how much of it is for the mountains and how much of it is for me.  

I need to see more of you, I tell her.

You have your own life, she replies.  

And so, of course, I realise, does she. 

From time to time, as I hike or run on mountain trails, bouts of weeping overcome me: a sense of helplessness at the inability to slow time, an anticipation of the future, inconsolable grief. Whatever remains when the sensory and the physical, when what we call the real, is gone—the hollows of vanished glaciers across a forest floor, the shadow of a woman striding deeper into night, the echoes of her shoes on a dim railroad bed—it will never feel like enough.  

On that October day after she and Russ left for the airport, the sudden loneliness was as cold as a plunge into a glacial lake. Disoriented, I went back to that giant slab of rock she’d liked. Alone, I made my way over its easiest scrambling route, padding up ripples in the ruddy stone, between the pale green lichen and the black. Below me, the air deepened, and the treetops became ever-smaller points. Eastward, the forest ended even more quickly than it did at my mother’s home. Beyond its fringes, cities and plains stretched to the vanishing point, golden with late-autumn afternoon sun, blending with the mauve haze of smog that veiled the horizon. Massachusetts lay somewhere beyond sight or imagination.   

In the other direction, around the corners of Front Range foothills, I could glimpse the fragments of much taller peaks that continued west in sweeps of ever-paler blue toward more tantalising, invisible summits. I thought about the kind of love that is longing for what always recedes into the distance. It was that love for mountains, which she’d helped teach me, that had driven me to leave my childhood home. And I knew then: I also feel that kind of love, now, for her. 

*****

[Scenes of this story take place on traditional lands of Indigenous people, including Massachusett, Abenaki, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Ute, Blackfeet, Apsáalooke, Confederated Salish and Kootenai, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, and other groups. I have discussed similar themes to some of the ones in this essay in my book Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams (Mountaineers Books, 2021).—Author]

*****

Endnotes