How Far the Mountain. Robert K. Swisher Jr.

me. They all want something that isn’t me,” she said, weighing her words carefully. “They want me because of my job. Or the way I dress. Or my smile. Or my eyes. My hair.” She forced a giggle. “Okay, okay, my body. But, at my age it’s either the young ones who need a mother, or the old ones who need a bauble. My luck, huh?”

      She noticed the man and woman and the two children walking toward a white minivan. She wanted to wave, but it did not seem quite right. “I’d like to be in love,” she said to the headstone. “Or maybe I’d like somebody to love me. I don’t think I would have to love them if they loved me. Really loved me.”

      Picking a blade of grass that was taller than the others she twirled it between her fingers. “I’d even like a good male friend. Somebody I could go dancing with, or out to eat, somebody with no demands. Don’t laugh, I know—a man with no demands. That’s a joke.”

      Standing, she brushed the grass from her pants. “We were good for each other. I want you to know that,” she said. “And I want you to know I’m fine. I can take care of myself. You always said I was strong and independent and could take care of myself. You were right.”

      For a brief moment she could see his face as he was dying and the tubes, like veins, running into his deflated body. “You are strong, I love you,” he said, through the drug haze and the pain.

      The family in the minivan drove away. “Poor lady,” the woman said to her husband. “She is probably alone.”

      “Will you get us an ice cream?” the young girl asked her father.

      Sheila started toward her car but stopped and went back to the grave. “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “I’m going backpacking up in the mountains by myself. It’s my birthday present to me. I’m taking a week off and going up to the mountains. Doesn’t it sound grand and brave?”

      After a few moments she went to her car, noticing for the first time the chorus of singing birds that filled the air. In the car she saw two men begin pitching a tent by the freshly dug grave. Starting the car, she thought, “I loved him but now he is only a memory, a warm memory, no different than a joyful dream, or a pressed flower in a book.”

      But, she knew he was more than a memory.

      Driving back to the house she was making a mental list of what she must buy for her backpacking trip to the mountains and pondering where she wanted to go. She was excited about her adventure. Not happy, but strangely content and trying to be brave.

      The Mountain Before Time Remembers

      The mountain is not a special mountain even though it is the caretaker of the bones. It is not one of those majestic mountains that people speak of with awe in their voices. When it comes to mountains the mountain is like a small unassuming town that people speed through on their way to the big city lights of Chicago, New York, San Francisco or Denver. The small towns that people only stop in when the car needs gas, or they need a quick bite to eat, or a child has to go to the bathroom.

      The mountain is only a hill compared to the other mountains that loom around it. The other mountains have imposing granite snow capped peaks with haloes of clouds circling them like wise old men’s beards—the old men peer down on the mountain like it is only a gangly teenager in the company of worldly adults.

      The mountain is also a nuisance to those journeying to more dramatic mountains. A temporary distraction they must navigate to reach parts of nature worthy of an adventurous human being’s time.

      But still, it is a mountain. A beautiful mountain in its own right, even though its top does not rest with the clouds—a mountain that has been a salt water ocean bottom, the shore of a fresh water sea, and bubbling rivers of molten rock. It has been the resting place for a great scouring glacier that reduced it to level land. But it tenaciously pushed itself up from the rubble to once again become a mountain. The mountain has been home to clams the size of truck tires, sharks as large as modern whales, ferns that would shade the largest of houses, fish beyond imagination and dinosaurs from the size of rabbits to four-story houses. Now, it is home to deer, elk, beaver, grouse, blue jays, bears, pine, spruce, and cedar trees, with a few scattered clumps of aspens on its sides as if a lonely giant tossed them there only for his pleasure.

      It is a mountain that, although mostly ignored, a few have journeyed to—people content with the simple things in life, satisfied to sit on its sides and say, “This is a nice mountain. I like it, it suits me.”

      When it comes to mountains, it is only a hill that on a National Geographic Survey Map states its top is 8, 182 feet. Looking at the map a person can see the dotted trails that meander along its sides and lead to the other postcard perfect mountains, the ones people climb to try and talk to God, as if God really wants to listen.

      The old-timers, living in a small town in the valley, do not have a name for the mountain. It is simply a bump that somehow got mixed up with all those real mountains.

      But, even being insignificant, it too has been plundered in its time. Its sides were stripped of its huge pine and blue spruce trees—trees that were so large three men could not stretch their arms around the massive trunks. But the forest has grown back among the huge stumps that lay rotting on the ground like the remains of gigantic hippos—young trees reaching for the stars even though they are only a few feet around—if left alone these trees could also bring wonder to the minds of men with their size and tenacity, and maybe, a few of those minds will realize how small we of the human race really are—how small and fleeting.

      The mountain has been fortunate that gold or silver was never found in quantity in its veins of quartz, or uranium in its silted rock underbelly. Many dug and blasted but the mountain was barren in the eyes of the fortune seekers—as if not having enough gold or silver is an embarrassment.

      And through it all—the salt water ocean, the fresh water sea, the glaciers, the molten rock, the creatures as big and powerful as tanks, and the fortune seekers—the mountain has endured.

      If it is true what many wish to believe, that the earth does not live, does not breathe, and sustain, or nurture—that the earth is nothing but rock and water, here for our will to dig and probe and cut and smash, then the mountain does not care, or feel, or hope, or dream.

      It is only a small mountain, a random shape made from silt and volcanoes and the slipping and sliding of the earth’s crust. It is only time—endless, senseless, enduring time.

      But, to some, it is more than a hill, more than a circle on a National Geographic Survey Map, it is a living breathing world. A world with a soul and a heart, even though at times its heart is black and uncaring.

      In the world of mountains it is not much of a mountain, but to a man and a woman, unknowing to each other, it will be a climb to both heaven and hell and a source of redemption.

      The Man To Touch The Bones

      Bill Johnson was by the gate to the corral. Weeds now grew where once ten horses had galloped and whinnied when he approached. Opening the gate Bill ambled to the water tank, making a disgusted face. The tank was half full of green, stagnant water. In the murky water, thousands of mosquito larvae wiggled in their evil birth dance. With little effort he pushed the tank over on its side and found great satisfaction in knowing the mosquitoes would all die. He hated mosquitoes. He hated mosquitoes even worse than flies. God must have been feeling ornery when he created mosquitoes and flies.

      Bill went to a red, tin, horse barn and brought back a hose from one of the dusty stalls. Connecting the hose to the outside spigot he washed out the inside of the water tank. Finished, he curled the hose over a post and leaned back against the corral. He looked disdainfully at the barn—at the water tank—at the house. She had loved it all, ten acres of heaven she called it. After working and saving for years they bought the ten acre lot, built a nice two bedroom house, the corral, added the tin barn with horse stalls, fenced it all, and settled in. They had enough money and invested wisely and though they were not rich, they were comfortable,