Peeping Through the Quarter Moon: A Mountain Meditation
In May 1986 my friend and I flew on a prop plane from Talkeetna, Alaska up to the Kahiltna glacier where we were going to start our climb of Denali, North America’s tallest peak. “The Great One,” in one of the Native languages. We were greeted by a few of our fellow climbers, already dropped off, and the sight of one simple reminder of the built world we had all left behind. An open air, wooden shitter sitting there on the snow.
We called it the “Kahiltna Throne” and sat there like the lords of all creation. Another plane came in while I was enthroned and I was non-plussed. I watched an avalanche, so far away on another peak that it seemed to be happening in slow motion.
“Have you gazed on naked grandeur,” poet Robert Service asked, “not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver?” We quoted him a lot. Had he seen what we were looking at, he might well have written “Have you gazed naked on grandeur?”
We knew from that point we were going to have to get over any squeamishness about carrying out our private business in front of others. My friend, thinking about this, said “I can’t hold it for three weeks.” As we worked our way up the mountain, in the days ahead, we got fairly complacent about it.
At the end of a climbing day, when we arrived at a promising place to make camp, we’d poke holes with our ice axes testing for possible crevasses. When we felt sure an area was secure we would stake out the perimeter with wands. Then we would go ahead and set up our tents and the space for our little al fresco kitchen and, right next to it, the collapsible toilet with the bag underneath.
That meant we could be doing meal prep and another climber might be sitting there, next to the primus stove, poly propylene under layer and wind pants down to his ankles. We got used to such strange juxtapositions. The sublime right next to the earthy and the comically human.
I don’t remember having any particularly deep thoughts at the time about our place in the universe or our common humanity. I’m no one’s Ansel Adams and didn’t have a very good camera thirty four years ago and still don’t know how to pretty it up for the internet. I just wanted to remember how it was.
I hadn’t looked at the photo for years, until recently, and I realized one could do a lot worse than ponder that wilderness tableau for an uplift in these times. The pandemic has brought up some divisiveness and simmering hatreds, but it surely has shown how much we are mostly alike.
We all need to eat and we all need to shit. Grocery stores have a halo around them now and bidet sales to Americans have gone through the roof. By pondering the elemental, we can often see the transcendent. There are the major, important, really big events that happen and there are the common, humble, underfoot pleasures. The breathtaking and never to be repeated alongside the quotidian and oft-repeated.
A few lines from Bobby Bare’s Ode To the Little Brown Shack Out Back might help us meditate.
It was not so long ago that I went tripping through the snow
Out to that house behind my old hound dog
Where I would sit me down to rest like a snowbird on his nest
And I’d read that Sears and Roebuck catalog
Oh I would hum a happy tune peeping through the quarter moon
