| The Song from the Mountain
by Diane Thaine Adams |
| I t was cold for November that year, even for November in the mountains, whose pretensions to raise themselves above the mellowed hills expose them, naked, to the bitter lashes of winter’s chastening whips. The morning was buried in thick clouds, undulating in waves of deep gray, softening on their bellies to a whiteness like silver. Clouds that harbinge snow, the first few notes from a dark symphony, were rolling swiftly in from the north. I could hear Dad clattering with the coffeepot in the kitchen, whistling snatches from an old hymn, clanking the door on the wood stove as he encouraged the fire, which had bravely devoured a load of green wood, plodding smokily through the night to reach the morning, sputtering, but alive. M y dad was working then as a lineman for the Back Creek Power Company, and it was his job to walk the mountain right-of-ways, checking for downed lines. Early snowstorms had him working everyday (even Sundays), often far into the night. Many times I had begged to come along with him, but he had always refused, saying that the mountains were too steep, and my legs just plain short for making any time across them. But this morning was going to be different. Dad had gotten a call about an outage caused by a broken line somewhere on the back of Shenandoah Mountain. S henandoah Mountain is perhaps more civilized than some of her lesser known neighbors. First traversed by Indians, who had followed winding deer trails through the thick trees, later used by the settlers as a “gap” to pass through a wall of steeper mountains that ran for fifty miles on either side, and finally immortalized locally by General Stonewall Jackson, who had used the pass to cut off and overwhelm a small regiment of enemy troops camping in the valley to the west, she was a “tame” mountain, well-suited for a child’s first attempt. D ressed in layers of clothing that made me feel like a caterpillar wrapped too tightly in an itchy cocoon, I lumbered out of the truck at the base of the mountain, and watched as Dad fastened on his tool belt, and took up a crumpled paper bag that contained lunch. Never one to waste energy with words when there was work to be done, he nodded briskly for me to follow, and strode confidently into the brush. I felt a flash of fear. I was too small, and the mountain rose before me brushing the boiling clouds with her tree-tipped fingers, laughing at my tiny person, barely a speck against her massive iron-clad sides. I put my head down and followed, grimly determined not to make a fool of myself. T he right-of-way was a shaved line that took the shortest path over the shoulder of the mountain. Mown once a year in the early summer, it had grown shaggy and neglected in the following months. My legs ached as we scrambled through the brush, each step grew steeper than the one before, and I wondered why I had clamored so loudly to come. My dad’s long legs strode tirelessly up and up, never hesitating, never slackening their pace. Scrambling breathlessly behind, my eyes tearing from the cold air, I stumbled on, catching falls with my hands as brambles wrapped themselves treacherously around my ankles and threatened to send me sprawling onto the rocky ground. F inally coming to a clearing that was nearly level, Dad paused and turned onto a small trail that ran, twisting like a spider vein, into the trees. Half running, afraid I would be lost amidst the shadows of the ancient army of trees marching in silent stillness across the mountain’s back, I rushed up to him as he sat crouched beside a small spring. The water seeped out of a sandy cleft at the base of a fold of limestone, making glassy bubbles in the soft earth where it rose. Dad leaned forward and plunged his face into the freezing water, drinking in deep noisy gulps like a horse. Too tired to protest, I knelt beside him, and took a tentative sip. It was as cold as ice water, but without the bother of cubes, and tasted of roots. I swished it back hungrily into my burning throat. K neeling there by the stream, with the virgin waters of a mountain’s insides running in soft driplets from my face and hair I heard for the first time, out of the stillness all around, a song from the mountain. It is not a song that moves the ear, but a song of the spirit. Pulsing gently from every tree, from the rocks and even the sky itself, it is the timeless melody of days long past, and of days to come. The mountains seemed to catch me up with their being, swaying to a rhythm older, perhaps, than music itself. And the song was an enfolding purpose; me, the true unadulterated simple me, and the mountain, both part of a larger tapestry, threads in a weaving, touching, moving apart, but in that moment blended into one. They had always been there, they would always be. Through birth, death, sickness, the aging of the human body, confusion, and terror, the mountains will stand, stretching to heaven, beautiful in their wildness. I t was a song of songs, and the wonder of it rushed into my soul, like a heady messenger outstripping his companions in the heat of his excitement, bringing great tidings from distant lands. I stood up slowly, forgetting to swallow a mouthful of water, and looked out to see the valley far below. Dots of wood smoke rose from little hollows, man’s brief notes in a song begun long before his coming, taken up by the mountains and wrapped into their own melody. The notes of God and man were mingled together, but always the mountains beginning the song, always the mountains ending it. M y dad was watching, and he understood. Years ago he had heard the song himself, and I knew he had brought me here to hear it with him. I can never remember the coming down from the mountain that day but somehow we were back home. Dinner was ready, my brothers were watching a game show on our old black and white set, but I was far away from them all. Now I am a pilgrim passing quietly through the places of men, seeking all the while to find that path again, listening for the echoes of a reality beyond my comprehension. I gave my heart and soul that day to the mountains of my homeland, and this day, hundreds of miles away, displaced in the concrete cells of a sprawling metropolis, I gather scraps of images to remind me of her. A streak of violet in the sky at sunset, a misty morning when the air is cool, the sound of water trickling in a snaky path down a grated drain, all captured fairies that, city-caged, must trust to time to find their true design. I think sometimes, especially in the fall, that I’m still standing on that windy slope of the Shenandoah, listening to the music that encompasses us all, straining to hear the creaking of bare branches in a gust of wind, the falling of a drop of water onto stone, which is the story of ages past, and ages yet to come. Someday when my brief song is over, someone who loved me might take me back, and build for me a tomb in the shadow of that mountain, whose song will only end with that of time itself.
|