What makes men climb mountains?
There will cross your mind, no doubt, the usual suspects: fame, fortune, the sweet/sour rush of the thrill. Some will say that man is but a caricature of himself, after all, and with millenia gone by, still repeating his favorite miscalculations and pet fallacies. “To conquer a mountain is against human nature,” they might say. Or: “Man’s place is below the tree line!” Possibly: “He should be home, taking care of something important!” (These they utter, of course, with profound haughtiness and the ubiquitous upward turned nose.)
But what really, in the climber’s heart, as he suckles his nightly oxygen, fending off the impending collapse of his unmountained lungs, what really drives him? Wanderlust? Insanity? The gross self-absorption of the risk addict? Is the act of scaling the broad, ancient shoulders of the world’s tallest mountains nothing more than the solipsist’s sad, pitiful attempt to prove one’s strength of manhood against the very epitome of strength?
Or could it be the mountains themselves, in their deep-rooted constancy, that call men toward the summit?
Could it be that something of the dust within man remains eternally connected to the granite that grows so mightily skyward? That, just as the waters within cry out to the sea, bearing men with wives and children and devoted pets on foaming, white chariots to their graves, the dust of man seeks the rock of mountain? For we are but dust and water and breath, ever seeking to return to the womb, the ground, the sea, the air. We are as men the walking earth, the breathing dust, the speaking sea; and we are, in the end, but a glorification of the ground on which we tread. And even the earth, in all its eternal splendor, seeks the brotherhood of its own kind, to know and to be known, and in this knowing discover somehow its reason for being.
So the mountain speaks to the hearts of men. It sings a low, manly song, an invitation to brotherhood, a seat at the fire. And some, through the ragged distraction of life-living and ends-meeting, gather the vibrations into patterns, arrange patterns into language, and finally decipher the message. These few know the mountain, and the mountain knows these few; and through their communion, the earth is reunited with its short-lived progeny, feeling again the footsteps of its sons on its long hoary shoulders.
***On August 25, Ray Howell of Florida will scale the tallest free-standing mountain in the world: Kilimanjaro. He climbs for reasons both clear and unclear, rational and super-rational; yet he climbs, ultimately, to answer a low, quiet call pinging his soul, testing the outer darkness for the presence of a brother. Our thoughts are with Ray, as are these words. May his endeavor yield not just the summit, but a brotherhood eternal, and a knowledge of granite.***
1 Comment
26 August 2007 at 5:04 pm
this is quite powerful – thank you