Man(kind) VS. Mountain
“Now dear, summer’ll be coming along soon. What’ll it be: the beach
or the mountains? Tan and dive into the breakers or camp and hike on the
trails?” Who hasn’t met that challenge, with no losers? My point is: a mere two
hundred or so years past, there wouldn’t have been a decision to make. Water,
preferably the ocean beaches, was the only choice. Long, long ago mankind
made some sort of peace, however uneasy, with the open waters, despite
typhoons, the rare tsunami or maelstrom, hurricanes, and all manner of mere
storms. Almost nobody considered mountains as anything but bleak, uninviting,
even dangerous obstacles to human movement. There's been an obvious sea
change, worth a generous look.
For starters, we can posit two ways of regarding mountains—what they
really are against what they mean to us. In dictionary words, mountains are
minor rugosities on the almost spheroid we call earth. They are also receptors of
snow and rain that feed the rivers that fertilize the crops, absent which, save for
fish, we would all starve. What is miraculously more, they separate languages,
indeed whole cultures. Consider the Pyrenees and the differences between
French culture and that of Spain, or the Alps that sever northern from southern
Europe. Closer to home, think of the massive Rockies and the Sierras as barriers
against the growth of the United States. Finally, look at how the fastnesses of the
Appalachians can separate the however miscalled “hillbillies" from the coastal
and Midwestern peoples, linguistically and culturally. Before technology
allowed us to blast roads out of the rocks or tunnel through them, or fly over
them, mountains deeply affected the course of civilization.
All this speaks to what mountains are or do, not how humanity reacts to
them, a story far more complex, ‘‘Mountains of the Mind," as Robert Macfarlane
so aptly calls them in his book of the same title.
In civilization’s dawn age, quite universally then, mountains, like
rivers, trees, the wind, were viewed animistically as live, sentient realities that
must be worshipped or placated lest they bring harm on bemused, fearful
humanity. Consider, for instance, creation myths, basically all animistic. Among
the Hawaiian island people, Kauai was the early home of Pele, goddess of
volcanoes, who could shake the land, move the waves, explode the mountains’
fire, and help evolve the landscape itself, with its canyons and precipitous cliffs.
Molten lava was truly alive. Many a mountain, the world over, was considered
sacred. Besides Pele’s lava-bearers, besides Olympos and Pamassos, think
Navajo Mountain bordering Arizona and Utah, or the Himalayan Mt. Everest.
In any event, mountains were no playground. If Moses ascended Mt.
Sinai, it was not for exercise or enjoyment. The “high mountain” that Isaiah bids
us to climb is spiritual not physical (x 1.9). There is a fine passage in Virgil’s
Aeneid (XII 684-89) describing a