What the Mountains Keep

I went to the mountains for the first time when I was nineteen. I didn’t know then that I was the kind of person who needed them. I thought I was going because a friend insisted, because travel was something you did when you were young and restless and hadn’t yet found reasons to stay put.

But the mountains did something to me that nothing else has quite replicated since.

There is a specific pressure that lifts when you gain altitude. Not just air pressure — something older. The accumulated weight of being known. In the city, everyone who looks at you has a theory about who you are. The mountains have no theory. They are entirely indifferent in the way that only very large, very old things can be — not hostile, not cold, just prior to the whole question. You are a temporary arrangement of warmth moving through their permanent geography.

I find this deeply restoring.

Every poem I have written about mountains is trying to recover that feeling: the specific relief of being unwitnessed. Not lonely — loneliness requires the absence of something you wanted. This is different. This is the presence of something that wants nothing from you.

I keep going back. Not always physically — sometimes only in the work, setting a poem in that altitude, that quality of light that is different from lowland light in ways I still can’t fully articulate. Thinner. More specific. Like the air itself has been edited.

Maybe what the mountains keep is the self you are before anyone taught you to be anything else.

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