In the Shadows of Mountains
These Mountains, I like them.
I like these mountains.
Peaks flying in the clouds,
Feet pounding away
At the ice cold waters
Of the rivers flowing below.
How wisely they live,
With such stable, unchanging
temperaments.
I like these mountains.
-Gulzar (Translation by Pavan Verma)
Over the last two weekends, I have been running in the shadows of the Rockies. I70 runs through them and around every bend are those distant snow topped peaks that are quiet in their dominion over the landscape. Mountains are these awe-inspiring entities and I have always been humbled by them having lived in the plains for almost my entire life. A mite fearsome in the way they rise up suddenly from the side of the road and kiss those clouds. But this is starting the story from the navel up. Let’s start at the beginning.
In my humble opinion, mankind has to answer some very important questions before it can think of making any real progress. And one of the most pertinent questions, faced by me at least, is whether or not to wake up early to go out on a holiday. I usually mull on this for the first half an hour or so of every trip I do early in the morning. It was half past six when we left and it was cold. There were five of us and the road. But I did not get to reminisce on my old theory of holidays much. Because half an hour out of Golden we were weaving around the Rockies. The roads ran like scars across the side of the mountains. We were going up the other side when I saw the diagonal slash across the chest of the mountain in front of me that we were just riding on. I looked up at it and wondered whether it bled at all.
What does a mountain bleed, I asked myself. Rivers? Forests? Will o’ wisps? I do believe they have hearts. Stone ones, but hearts nonetheless. They see, feel, hear every iota of happenings around them. But that is all they do. They are experiential souls: they do not react. They let things happen to them. And that is why we can make roads on and through them. I looked up at the mountain and I saw it smiling. Maybe it was just the sun bouncing back off from the fresh snow, who knows. The road went on and so did we into the laps of the Maroon Bells. But before that, a quick detour.
Twin lakes are just exactly what their names say that they are. They are twin lakes. I am not sure, but lakes, among the water bodies, do seem to be slightly shady characters. They are large, still and more often than not, they hold secrets. But there is an allure to them: still waters take up all the worries of the world from the surrounding and drown them somewhere irreplaceably in their shallow depths. It is serene up there. Small waves, come rushing in and kiss my feet, the tall mountain pays obesciences in reflections and the skies come back again on earth. For a small moment of time there, I understand satiety. But then I see the still water and the tiny rocks at my feet, and I am a man again; yearning.
We skipped stones. All people, who come to lakes with no other intentions than seeing it, usually do. There are so many insane number of things that make us all instinctively the same but nobody seems to recognize them. Maybe it is because that they are very obvious, and hence undecipherable from the humdrum of life. Maybe. I did, however, for sure picked up some wisdom from this naive act of mine. And here I sum them up as The Zen of Skipping Stones.
I look around the shore for the right stone. It is like most human endeavors: we look for something we are not sure of. And we keep looking until we find something that looks like what we could have been searching for. I found a stone. I weighed it my hand, felt it through my fingers and practised my swing. And then I threw it long and flat over the lake’s surface. The stone skipped. One, two, three, four, plonk. I do it again. One, two, plonk. Plonk. One, two, three, four, five, plonk. At the fifth skip, I find myself believing to have achieved miracles. And the next one, almost always, goes straight down. But there are a few other things that strike me as I do this.
No matter how many stones I skip, the lake is not going to overflow. We usually think of things with an ever present bias: the bias about things being related to us. And each action of oneself will have consequences. It is not true. The lake and I are not isolated. The ground is with it and the skies and the entire universe. To think one stone by me could change the level of the lake would be foolish. The universe would exist in spite of and despite of me. But there is a flipside. Individual actions matter. We cannot live lives letting the chips fall where they shall. Well, they may fall where they want, but that should not preclude me from rolling the dice the way I want. Every stone I picked up brought to the surface the stone below: and maybe there was a universe on that stone under the stone I picked and all it needed to move on and evolve was for somebody to come and pick up the stone I picked up. I learnt that my actions mattered and did not matter. I was confused, and I knew I was that. I find that to be wisdom.
We went on. There is this place called Maroon Bells. Interestingly, two of mountains. And a lake of pristine blue in front of them. And a rather long and an icy hike over to the crater lake. The latter, at that point of time, did concede the fact that destinations are overrated. All destinations are boring. Phenomenally boring. You know why ‘mountain climbing’ is a sport and not ‘mountain tops’? What’s on the top anyways? A view from the top, clouds below your feet and an overpowering sense of loneliness. You need to climb down. Mountaintops will not sustain sanity for long. Exhilaration is momentary. A sense of aimlessness is perpetual. It is like a single car stuck in a traffic jam with itself. There is only a finite amount of pleasure derivable in a given life. Destinations have a trend of dropping from pleasure to melancholy in three hundred seconds. The only constant feeling in life is that of struggle. And there is nothing like betting your wits against the blind curve of life. And the question still remains: then you succeed, what then? The hike was beautiful, while crater lake was losing a battle with winter. But the feeling of reaching the place after the hour long hike was exhilarating.
The bells were much closer up here: icy, cold, aloof. We let our eyes rest on their majesty for some time and came back to the lake. A couple of ducks had everyone’s attention. I wonder what brought them there. They had a lake to them, a few mountains and what food the lake could manage. They had nothing else in that place. Or so I thought for some time. Then I realized that they needed nought else. They lived where people flocked to find solace. I fought with myself to seek the patience the ducks so easily had found. Very reluctantly, I turned back. There is a pleasure of reaching the destination and there is a pleasure of reaching home at the end of the day. When I am wiser, I will ponder over which of them is better. For now. I realize that both of them exist and with that I ended the day.
The next week brought us to the Hanging Lakes. The little trail led up the mountain in a winding, curving way. The road was seiged with beauty: trees lined everywhere, shade sweet as the first summer rain,trees of yellow and red and green marching like an army of colors, and air was pregnant with the sound of flowing water. It led to the top of the mountain, the end of the road. The hanging lakes are a geological marvel in themselves and the view down is unbelievable. You could see for miles and miles, clouds under you, the sky above. It was how heavens saw the earth. And I was torn between the two: the top and the road to the top. Choice between two beautiful things, is not an easy one. All around me were mountains taller and trees on it that stood proud and upright looking down on me. It almost felt like time itself was looking down on me from the top of those mountains. A small walk up from the hanging lakes is the crack in the mountain from where the waters that I had seen trickling as rivulets all the way down started. Mountains and water are these polar opposites that are always together.
I looked at my reflection in the waters that came gushing out of the mountain. It came there a minute ago and would be washed down in time with no memory left of it after I leave that place. The tree in front had seen tens of generations of humans come down and look at the place where the water gushed out from. To it, we were all the same: a life form, and generations and races and countries and nations meant nothing to it. It stayed there, lived its life and died. The water itself had seen the tree sprout its first leaf, the first rain, the first spring. It had consoled the tree in its first autumn. It was much older than the trees: having known ancestors of all of them. The mountain was even older. And more than the mountain was the sky. It had seen the mountain come up from the oceans that were raging. I was not even a heartbeat in that landscape. And I recalled a poem I had written some time ago, at another set of mountains, a couple of continents away.
Rocks and trees and soil and sand,
Mountains tall, dark as hearts of men.
The old, wise river endlessly flows,
What then are the little lives of men?
A sun blazes golden brown on sand,
The moon shines silver sleep at nights,
Tales they have begin may never end,
What then are our squabbles and fights?
Fires of old old timbers burn and glow,
Blaze and heat they give till they last,
But they too die at dawn, as ashes blow,
How then can a man’s passion last?
In the country of eternal presences thus,
There is no place for men like us.
I wondered what must people have felt when they came upon these places for the very first time. An undiscovered land, no roads, a tall mountain: and a lake of turquoise water at the top. What it must have been to come into the shadow of these mountains. One can climb down a mountain easily, but one cannot get back from the mountains. A part of me will still be there, in their cool shadows, for the rest of my life. And everywhere I go, I will carry these mountains with me. As poems, and memories and songs. But they will always be with me. These mountains, that I like.
PS. A shout out to the awesome people I went with: Maaz, Shalaka, Gandhali, Akash, Abhishek and Dhrupad. It would have not been as good trips without them. Some pictures (and definitely the ones with me in them) are courtesy them.
