why i love Mountains

i have been in this dusty town for eight months. long enough to get going, i figure. there are mountains. i love mountains. for me they’re as impossible to ignore as cleavage. they sit behind the town. on top of one is a bowl like a volcano, and in the bowl are two tall trees. i can see them from far away. the mountains look close, but they’re far away some days. i can see no houses or roads on its sides and i don’t want there to be any. imagine! trees in a bowl on top of a green mountain! i wonder if it fills with water when it rains. maybe there is a pond there with mountain-borne fish. i look at it every day and it doesn't disappoint. in the morning low clouds drag across its face, stretching like the backside of a wave. when i'm coming home from work, the sun is flat, hitting it square, like a spank. it’s blue before the rain comes, and gray afterwards.

but my love for mountains is not unconditional. i realized this in the dry season. i had thought that nature was a sort of alternative to the city, and mountains were like nature’s palaces. looming above ours. but now that it is dry in the city, the palaces of nature are burning. the tops of mountains are the closest to the sun, the farthest from water, and the farthest you can get from life. it begins with the wind. it is a hot and dusty wind that tastes like smoke and pollen. it blows into town from the hills where the fires carve odd shapes. like an alien planet. then the yellow weeds push up through the faces of the hills that are black from the fires. they shimmer in the heat from the sun and disappear behind a haze of smoke that is dark and purple like rain. a hot kind of shade. 

i wouldn’t be surprised if all the animals came down from the mountains into town. it would be like Jumangi, but they would be more like refugees. lines of monkeys coming across the bridge into town. the other day i saw vultures gather around some dogs, scare off the dogs, then pick at the ribcage of a dog that the dogs had been eating. more dead dogs then. it’s a dull feeling of death winning the battle in the middle of the day.

i could have saved myself plenty of anguish by walking over and seeing what my special mountain was all about, or asking someone, but its scary. so i protected the image of the crater-top with the fish still swimming around, until i could no longer hold it inside my head. first i wanted to know its name. and then i was told it had no name. “What?” they replied. “Oh that,” they said. and hell if i didn’t find out that it was owned by some goddamned coffee plantation. i wish i’d never asked.

i was driving out of town the other day and i passed my special mountain. on its flanks there were well-established places with gates and barbed wire with guards that i would have to talk to, and charm to surpass, only to see what i no longer wanted to see. the top wasn't green, but yellow. the trees on top looked like desert palms in a terrible, drying wind. i don’t know what i had expected. just a dark and narrow trail leading to something unique and beautiful everyone else had missed. then i would see about that bowl and those two trees and the summit tidepool with the cloud fish, and so many other things. i still believe it's all there. there’s just no telling until you’ve been, and that's why i rarely go.