mountain lessons
bitch grit (get some)
When I lived in the mountains, I learned that when you go down into the valley, you will sometimes look back and see that the place you came from is shrouded in steel-blue clouds. It will look frightening, and you will go home to it.
There is a difference between fog and clouds. Fog is a thick, unmoving blur. Clouds are rags that move very fast. Both can block out the sun.
On the day of a storm, everyone will go to the Starbucks in the front section of the grocery store for a little treat. Even when the wind is so strong that it literally blows your car door open as soon as you unlatch it. The line will go all the way through the bakery and back to the registers. Every new person who comes in will smile at the people already in line, who will smile back at them, because it is impossible not to feel cheered up by the uniformity of this behavior (and because everybody really does deserve a treat).
There is always an airplane flying into San Bernardino, Ontario, or LAX. One every 40 seconds or so. One of my favorite things about California: something is always happening. Somebody always wants to be here.
Rockslides don’t just happen when it rains, but also when it freezes and then thaws again. Weather is always movement. Movement is always a little dangerous. Weather is always happening. One theory of fiction (which I don’t like very much) proposes that we like stories because they make us better people and help us empathize with others. A better theory of fiction, I think, is that something is always happening, and turning into something else. In a story, things never go so badly that the world stops happening. Which is the same as danger, and weather. You can’t live in a bunker, so you may as well live on top of a mountain.
Sometimes you just have to learn how to install snow chains in the parking lot of the auto supply store where you bought them two minutes ago, on your hands and knees in the slush, and when the physical therapist on her smoke break tells you an “easier” way to do it, honey, which doesn’t work, you have to go back to doing it your way, which is also the hard way, but is the way that works. Sometimes the hard way is the only way that works.
There are thousands of ways for the sky to be perfect.
When there’s a lot of snow, the biggest problem isn’t how to shovel it, but where to put it.
You will be able to recognize vacationers in the grocery store based on how loud their voices are.
During the year that I lived in the mountains, my poems got better. Much better. From about 2012-2022, I was somewhat estranged from them. I have no idea why. They came back in 2020, but still felt stiff and somewhat self-regarding. But when I lived in the mountains, I found that some new essential quality was there. This could have happened for any number of reasons. It will probably be clear in hindsight that it had to do with some other psychological maturation, a kind of purity test I stopped submitting to. Or maybe there’s a truce you make with weather, movement, and danger. You keep existing, after all.
If a fire gets hot enough, it will begin to burn away the flakes of soot on the inner walls of the wood stove, and they will look exactly like fireworks. You could probably throw a wet phonebook in there and it would catch. That is the actual nature of brilliance: compensatory and gracious.
If you are sliding around on the road in spite of your snow chains and 4wd and snow tires, the only way to get it done is to mutter under your breath: I’m a baaaaaaad bitch. Baaaaad. Bitch.
If you can see a mountain, you aren’t alone.