Seeing the Mountain

Tucked in small corners, hidden from the road, the portals of chance sometimes open to inquiry new scenic views. And I had found one of many such places. Rather than using the tourist looking glass, I prefer exploring a place and finding more than just a look. That's right, many people just look, then keep going, never knowing what they've missed. "Oh look, there's Mt. Mckinley! Ok, take a picture quick, because we have to be at the campground ( babysat by Park Hosts) before ten" They usually have a book or pamphlet or slick brochure ( with lots of advertisements); someone has printed a glossy brochure telling the adventure group what to do, what to see, what to think and what to feel. Soon, a whole tribe of followers crashes in to specially developed sites along the highway. They take their city manners and their comfort-loving minds to bag more miles and names of places, only to return unchanged. But the secret really is this: we have to learn to SEE, to FEEL, and to KNOW by our own questioning and sensing and searching; not by going over the same old ground. But people don't have to leave the road to experience the depths of wonder.

They only have to throw out the demands of other voices; ones that live in preconceptions--they have to learn to see like a child again. While fishing for trout one day, I stopped along the river to rest and eat. The magnificence of high peaks and the silty flow of the river loomed up large and real. But as I "looked" about ( I am guilty too!), the attraction suddenly shifted to a tiny window of sight. On the far side of the gold-streaked hills, a range of mountains, barely visible behind a shrinking line of hill, a light blue edge of a glacier had formed in a niche of a mountain. I had not really examined this place before. Since the larger strokes of the McKinley Range shut out the delicate tracings of other less imposing views, not paying deeper attention robbed me of another experience. Soon I was looking closer with my binoculars, glassing from side to side, up and back over the rock faces, cracks, avalanche chutes, furtive hills, and the glacier half hidden in a deeper valley. My eyes wandered, slowed in passing over each new form while weaving together the lines of the ridges, shapes of the foreground all the way back to the upper sky. Soon the effects of light and shadow, as well as the dynamics of rhythms and relationships became a visual dialog. Then I imagined that I was up there looking back to where I now sat. Now way up high or on a glacier below a thousand foot slab, feeling the icy blast of wind, the power of Seeing felt good. My mind took wing, soaring around the basin of glacial time, watching the Past to the Present move like a frame of pictures over the ten thousand years of changes. I became a mountaineer, finding the best line of approach to climb each section of rock. I even built an imaginary road to cross the river, ascend the hills to a higher viewpoint for a better location, then rafted down the river back to where I now sat. This I knew was just the beginning of Seeing. The rest would come with practice, in finding new pathways leading from the obvious to the unknown.