. . . I am writing a travel-based essay. I call it
Mountains, but you may call it what you wish. So without further adieu,
Mountains
“Fat bulges of mountains,
barely visible whales in the fog
of smoke-- the burning
of their cousins'
barnacles.”
Last summer, fire swept through the open
spaces of Montana. The smoke blew clear down to Utah, and probably beyond. It’s
makes for a lousy summer day, when you can’t see your own mountains, even when
you live in a small valley. It does make for unearthly sunrises though. The
haze takes away the familiarity of the landscape, hiding mountains, trees, and
buildings. And it glows golden, shimmering as the dawn crescendos into normal,
bright day.
I drove through Montana with my parents
that summer, clunking along in our massive brown Dodge Ram van that’s about
thirty years old. The fire was somewhere close, if the smoke was any
indication. The setting sun shattered its rays through the smoke, and
everything outside glowed red. We could even look at the sun, it was so dimmed
by the smoke. But the strangest things were the mountains. Black in the fading
light, they seemed to swim through the shrouds of smog like whales through
water. They seemed majestic, immovable creatures, covered with barnacles of
trees and rocks. Their cousins, where the fire was, probably had all those
barnacles burned off. Kind of like cosmetic surgery, only for fat bulges of
land smashed upward out of the ground.
I wondered how the sun rose on the
destruction of whales, and set on the small towns in the valleys, so absolutely
neutral above the clouds of smoke that keeps us invisible to it. But seeing as
the answer was confusing, all I did was write about it. There is nothing new
under the sun, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire, just like there’s always
been.
