I’ve been thinking of the mountains and 4,000 footers. After spending the weekend in a resort town I’m missing my Colorado mountains. Not missing them in the sense I want to live there, just missing being surrounded by them and the wilderness.
The cure of the longing is to just head north this weekend and do a hike. I’ve been planning and to-do’ing forever and just haven’t done it. I think the Flume is calling me for a hike tomorrow.
As I piece together all my life’s journals I see notes and thoughts about mountains. Here’s a note and quote from my 2010 journal when I was living in Colorado and working on my book:
Annie Dillard – Pulitzer Prize winning author
I’m reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I’ve never been able to get very far reading this book. I’ve owned it for over 10 years. But for some reason, unknown at the moment, the first three pages brought me into the story. Maybe it’s the changes in my life that brought me to it at this moment.
I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.
This is how I feel about living here, in my tiny condo on the hill. It’s a good place to live and there’s time to think. The mountains are home, my chosen home. And it is good.
