In the Mountains, Birdsong

A journey through love and nostalgia, from Alaska to Guangzhou

On May 18, 2019, my flight from SFO to Seattle to Anchorage leaves at 1:55 p.m. Outside of the security check, I bury my head inside my boyfriend’s soft winter coat. He tells me “I love you” for the first time in our two-month-long relationship, and I say “love you too” back for the first time in my life, and without knowing what it means.

The next day I meet you on the Palmer campsite in Alaska, a piece of flatland surrounded by rocky black mountains topped by snow. Mountains that are unlike any others I have seen before. Mountains that silently summon us towards them. We are about to leave for a one-month wilderness leadership summer course of sea kayaking and backpacking. Even though I have never camped or even slept in a tent before, I sign up for the course to give myself some space to grow and find new directions for my future. All my college friends are toiling away at internships at big companies during the summer. Meanwhile I wander on too many career paths without settling on a single one. I want to find the one true path — the one I can commit to for the rest of my life.

You and I, as well as twelve other students and three instructors from all over the world, stand in a circle to introduce ourselves. I don’t pay much attention to you, only registering in my diary later that you are “from Amsterdam, 24 years old.” I don’t write that you’re tall and have big blue eyes that seem to harbor quiet thoughts. That you’re good-looking but frown a bit too often. Or that you speak English with a mix of British and Dutch accents and say Thank you in a rising tone like dank je.

That night — the night before our adventure in the wilderness — I walk from our temporary sleeping ground to the bathroom at 10:20 p.m. and see a rainbow — no, two. They reign over the cyan sky with their peaceful grandness and austere vibrancy. My Chinese name, 丽雯 Lì Wén, means “the beauty after rain.” I have always wondered what kind of beauty it is. That night I believe I see the answer right in front of my eyes.

On May 20, the fourteen of us, still nearly strangers to each other, leave behind our phones and suitcases and city life and loved ones and go together into nature, a romanticized concept, to search for things — such a romanticized act. We are, however, faithful pilgrims towards these black mountains.

What was the beginning? Was it a few days after we kayaked away from Applegate Island in the Prince William Sound? I was dejected like hell because I was really struggling. Remember? I shared a kayak with Nick on the first day and we were constantly a hundred feet behind everyone else — because of me. It was partly because I didn’t have enough strength to propel us forward. But more importantly, I wasn’t doing it right by relying solely on my arms. Adam had to attach a string on our boat to drag us and it was just humiliating. All the other students — eight guys and two other girls — were so much more physically capable than me, or so I believed. I wanted to scream — which I did out of the blue during one break on a small island and everyone stared at me as if I was mad. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I walked away during our first bonfire and cried in front of the empty tents, staring at the purple sky and purple sea and wondering how much it would take to call a helicopter back to the city. I was missing my boyfriend so much. I considered myself a loser and wanted to quit.

It was around then that we had the chocolate exchange activity next to the shushing waves. You happened to get a pack of Hershey’s chocolate with my name written on it and had to say a few words of appreciation before giving it to me. That was the rule of the game. You said you appreciated that I was determined and brave and hugged me tightly. Tides snuck up the coast and dampened our feet.

Why do I still think of you in November of 2020? Sometimes I can’t tell whether you are just part of my experience of Alaska, or that experience is part of us.

I like to think about you when I have been staring, here in Guangzhou, at my laptop all day long with a dozen deadlines burning my ass. I like to think about you during cigarette breaks or while listening to James Blunt’s songs during a shower. I like to think about you when I compare myself to others and become anxious about my future. I hope to prolong my time, to liberate it from the ticking clocks and calendars, to daydream against all odds while resisting external pressures and the computer screens with their fifty open tabs. The process of longing slows things down and creates what Svetlana Boym, a scholar of Soviet literature and art, calls nostalgic time.

Nostalgia, for Boym, is “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed,” or a romance that exists in our own fantasy. This modern condition is at once tempting and dangerous. It may lead us to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one, to devote ourselves to reconstructing a phantom homeland.

Y-O-U. You.

If that chocolate exchange was the start of the story between you and me — a beginning like the moment when Celine and Jesse, in Before Sunrise, first meet their eyes on the train, but less romantic and self-aware — the middle part is made of fragments and traces. Here are some of them, from among many:

• We become teammates in a four-person group and hide under the same tarp during that “apocalypse” night. The non-stop raging storm darkens everything around us, and we are drenched from coat to underwear. My teeth are chattering when I tell you about my study abroad experience in Amsterdam. With its sly “coffee shops,” chaotic clubs, Bosch’s fantastical and strangely futuristic triptych in museums, the spirits of old buildings summoned by the toll of church bells, and the flickering fluorescent lights of the red-light district, the city embodies the myth of Europe in my mind.
• We both like to go to bed early and, before falling asleep, often read books side by side inside the tent. You are reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and I am reading Kafka on the Shore.
• I hear you talking about going to a James Blunt concert. I love his songs! (And before we part, I will play “You’re Beautiful” in front of you with my portable speaker. We will be sitting on the grass back on the Palmer campsite. I will pass the speaker to the person on your left and accidentally touch your knee. You will gaze at the remnant of my touch, so intensely.)
• We hike together with Adam and two other guys on the second day of the backpacking session. After more than five hours of hiking up 1,600 feet while carrying backpacks weighing over fifty pounds each, we reach our campsite in the alpine tundra terrain at about 5,000 feet above sea level. The only living creatures around us are dwarf shrubs, moss and lichen. Soon enough, the bone-wrenching cold seeped through my thick jacket and neck gaiter. We look up at one moment and see the sky suddenly torn between heaven and hell. Behind us are splendid, golden rays of sunlight emanating from the blue sky; facing us is a landscape of inky, ominous clouds. We start scouting for water but have barely moved fifty feet when a streak of lightning flashes across the sky, illuminating our pale faces and the ashen mountains. You throw away your hiking pole immediately. No sooner have we all dispersed and crouched in the lightning position, each in our own space, than a hailstorm starts lashing down on our bodies. The jagged streaks of lightning that flicker and vanish right above our heads have a fleeting power to halt time and collapse space. The five of us look at each other with the purest expression on our faces, without all the masks we put on for social performances. We share this moment of life and death.
• All fourteen of us have to cut across the steep slope of a mountain in order to descend to our campsite in the valley. The rocks under our feet are often loose. You are behind me and, for some reason, knowing that makes me feel safe.
• It is a sunny day. Our student-led group gets to the campsite even before instructors. I lie on the ground, embrace the long-due warmth of sunlight, and then suddenly smell something rotten. You are holding your pair of soaked wool socks — socks you’ve worn off-and-on for two weeks, with neither shower nor laundry — above my face and teasing me as usual. After you leave, a girl whispers in my ear that she thinks you like me. I pretend that I don’t know and ask, “really?” I then glance at you and you tell me to stop staring at your biceps.
• We are descending from Mt. Chitna and, again, cutting across a muddy slope with big sharp rocks jutted into any path we cut. You are, again, behind me. When I step forward, a patch of mud in front of me slides down for two feet, and my body starts slowly slipping downward as well. In my mind I start seeing myself tumbling down the slope. While I am panicking, you find a shortcut above me, creating a new path that leads me onto a safer route. I like to think that you might have saved my life.
• You look sad when people ask me about my boyfriend and our upcoming trip to Disneyland. You suddenly say you just want to go home.
• Your last name means, according to you, “birdsong” in Dutch. I have never checked but I believe you. Because it’s a beautiful last name and you look very serious when telling me this.

Boym writes, “Nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes nostalgia is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space.” Somehow, a year after our time in Alaska, I became nostalgic for a relationship that never existed. You are part of my present, but beyond the here and now. You don’t seem to age, forever 25 (oh god, but you might be married now, or even have kids). You expand my bedroom so that it sits in the vast ocean or the land of mountains. You’re the name and profile picture that show up under the views of my Instagram stories. Isn’t it strange how social media brings together people who are probably never going to meet again in real life? As if even though we are two diverging lines in life, we are still on the same plane. Are we supposed to always view ourselves from a higher dimensional perspective?

Boym writes, “The sentiment itself [nostalgia], the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition…Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: alter egos.” Our trajectory is unrepeatable and irreversible. We live on a linear narrative of time that threatens to throw us off with its dazzling speed, but never does for real. We have been tethered to the train ever since we were born. I think of you to defy the movement of time — which, during the pandemic, has mainly been filled, for me, with anxious acts of typing or of watching a flickering computer screen. But I’m jealous of you as well. The last time I snuck a look at your LinkedIn page, you had completed a master’s degree in finance from a renowned university in London. You’re working in one of the biggest investment banking companies. Meanwhile, I am struggling with finding my path as an artist — a vocation that has much less of a clear track to it. I sometimes feel unshapeable as sand in an hourglass, slipping back and forth through the narrow neck of a small container. Do you think of me? Do you think of me to slow down your time?

Your eyes. Big, blue, bathed in your yet indecipherable desires. When I woke up that morning and took off my eye mask, I realized that yours was resting not on your eyes but rather on your forehead. Your eyes were closed, yet it felt like you were still looking at me. Our bodies faced each other, so close yet isolated in our tight individual sleeping bags. Our desires chained and constrained. Only my knotted black hair was loose and trespassed on your side. That was the last morning.

It was 10:45 p.m. on June 17, still the same day. Five of us met up in Anchorage before our flights the next day. We drank and chatted in a bar called Humpy’s even though another boy and I were underage. You came late and people asked why you looked so sad and troubled. My eyes red from smoking weed, I kept giggling and you stared at me with a gloomy look. We tried to find things to do, like smoking more on an empty parking lot at 2 a.m., making every effort to prolong that night — at least I was. But someone forgot to buy rolling papers. Another person was being pushy about ending the night. Plus, we had returned to the pace of life in cities again. Back to the “homogeneous, empty time” dictated by the big and small numbers on our phone screens and our flight schedules and deadlines. Everything suddenly became so incongruous, so illogical. Once we were out of the wilderness and back to the urban space, we just couldn’t understand or tolerate each other anymore; we became aware somehow of our difference, of the five different countries we came from and the completely different lives we lived. Is this why we don’t stay in touch?

You were the first one to call an Uber and leave. You hugged me and said thank you, Raina. Thank you. You get into the car and it swiftly disappears.

The next day, I got to the airport at 10:30 a.m. and bought gifts for my boyfriend. Before boarding, I stood in front of the big window and stared at the emerging mountain ranges behind the highways and city buildings and cried while listening to “Hey Jude,” a song we all used to sing together in the wilderness.

Sitting on the plane right before it took off, I received a Snapchat from you. It was a screenshot of a song — “Can’t Do Without You” by Caribou. I’d never heard of the song or the artist, and I panicked after opening the message. Did you send the song to everyone? Did you mean it? But how can it be only after one month? How can we be? Caribou suddenly reminded me of the Caribou River, and the time my small daily hiking group — a group that perhaps would have been better with you in it — had lost our direction near the river. So I replied “Caribou LOL.” And then, out of panic again, I asked “Have you flied back yet?”

You opened the Snap but never responded. That was it.

I met my boyfriend back at the baggage claim in SFO at around 9 p.m. on June 18. He brought me Little Gem waffles, our favorite dessert in Berkeley. He told me he had been just staying home and not doing much. I felt tired and disappointed and didn’t know what to say to him. As per usual, he didn’t seem very curious about my experience. We were, and still are, different people. He doesn’t feel the force that propels me — or you—towards the mountains and other sacred places.

I couldn’t get over one tiny thing that really bothered me then: he seemed to be speaking English with some weird inflections, and now he sounded to me like a boy in puberty. But how could it be? He was a native speaker and a 19-year-old adult. Meanwhile his voice was just one aspect of him that felt so strange and incongruous after my time in Alaska. Still, I started getting used to everything, and that annoyance faded. After a while, even his voice sounded normal to me again.

The very next day my boyfriend and I flew (fly, flew, flown — I promise I will never get it wrong again) to Orlando for a shared vacation. He said I looked very far away. He kept saying “I love you” and asked me why I wasn’t saying it back to him. “What is I? What is love? What is you?” I asked him. I still don’t know. It seems to me impossible to pin down their meanings because language, as well as feelings, flow like water. I always make the childish attempt, during showers, to hold onto water with cupped hands. But it simply flows around my body and down into the drain.

By writing about nostalgia, Boym was also writing about herself. She was born in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union in 1959. In 2015, after a year-long struggle with cancer, she passed away in Boston, where she had spent most of her adult life as a professor at Harvard University.

Cristina Vatulescu, an old student of Boym’s, wrote a homage to her after she passed away. The piece starts with a walk that she took with Boym, one day in the mid-1990s, by the banks of the Charles River. They looked up and compared their relative distance to the sky here and back where they had come from.

Boym, Cristina writes, “talked at length about the closeness and beauty of the Petersburg sky. Still she would not call it home, she said…’’ Later in the walk, they also talked about Boym’s book in the making then, The Future of Nostalgia.

At the end of the book, Boym distinguishes between two types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. While restorative nostalgia dangerously attempts to reconstruct the lost past at all serious costs, reflective nostalgia embraces the ambivalences of longing with humor and irony and fears the return to the imagined homeland. The latter, she suggests, gives us more control and freedom. It allows us to take responsibility for others as well as foster a creative self.

“Sometimes it’s preferable (at least in the view of this nostalgic) to leave dreams alone, let them be no more and no less than dreams, not guidelines for the future,” she writes.

I seek to at once harbor dreams of unrealized possibilities and break free from their chains.

My favorite short story in high school was James Joyce’s “Araby,” from Dubliners. The narrator, an unnamed boy, fantasizes about new love and exotic places while simultaneously living within a familiar realm of everyday drudgery. What makes me fantasize about you? Most likely, you’re not a single person but rather a composite — a tangle of people and places and things superimposed on one another. You’re the soaked socks and cold feet after river crossing, the purple light veiling the whole sky, the liberated farts after eating mostly carbs for thirty days straight, the hands that pull me out of knee-high muds, the sight of mountain goats faraway and moose nearby, the rainbows that have one foot in orange mountains and another in the blue ones. All the things that feel so distant but beautiful as long as I’m facing four walls and desperate for air.

The ending of “Araby”: the narrator becomes terribly disillusioned as he finally arrives at the fantasized location and encounters a cavernous warehouse instead of an enchanted bazaar. Nostalgia, a form of fantasy, breathes on distance. It is both nostos (place) and algos (pain). It embodies an awareness of the impossibility of returning to the same place and time.

You are you. But what is you?

Hey, fun facts: The Dutch are considered the most direct people in the world. The Chinese are known to be the opposite. Did you know?

A search on Quora: “Have you ever met someone who you liked and you will never see again?” There are so many stories like ours. Sometimes I think that you and I are the products of a fragmented world, where continuity can only be achieved through editing — like in movies, like with Celine and Jesse.

A question: I set out for the Alaska wilderness to find answers for my future, but what did I find besides a dream towards the past? (An answer: traveling always manifests in two directions — there’s the forward movement of the train and the backward movement of the landscape. Reflective nostalgia is mindful of both directions; it challenges us to march forward into the future with strength gathered from moving backward through dreams. My dreams about Alaska, about the mountains, and about you are such forces that expand my conception about the future beyond the urban mode of time. They give me the strength to pursue a path of life that takes on irregular shapes.)

A classification: The appeal of German mountain films (bergfilm), according to film historian Eric Rentschler, “lay in primal nature explored with advanced technology, in pre-modern longings mediated by modern machines.” Mountains, from Chinese landscape paintings to Christian narratives, have historically been linked to spirituality. They have always been sacred places, imbued with both geographical and spiritual significance. The mountains we share are neither Mount Ararat nor Mount Sinai nor Tai Shan — ours are nameless mountains that have become religious in our own mind.

A poem:

不识庐山真面目，只缘身在此山中。

苏轼《题西林壁》

We do not know the true face of Mount Lu,
Because we are all ourselves inside.

— Su Shi, “Written on the Wall of the Temple of West Woods”

Are we still inside the mountains of our own makings? Or are we now finally seeing the true face of mountains from the outside?

A confession: I may be actually enjoying living our relationship in possibilities, unbounded by space and time. Unbounded by who you are and who I am. It’s a relief, really. It’s a perfect relationship that doesn’t shatter, fade away, or rupture like any other.

A realization: You’re not to be reconstructed, not to be retraced through the single path back to the past. You’re to be engaged with through ruins, traces and fragments that live in my mind as I travel my own path.

What is the end? There is no end as long as the train keeps racing forward, because for me you’re the moving landscape surrounding it. I think I love you, whatever that means.