Rubble from the Mountain
Since I know now blog posts about my former abode are being monitored, I shall refer to my special place as "the Mountain," at least while I collect my thoughts regarding my recent visit. Once I have some semblance of a plan on how to go about writing on "the Mountain," I will begin using its proper name once again. For now, my thoughts, feelings, and references about the place will remain generic.
Sadness is the dominant emotion of the moment. Sadness for the way such a unique place has been neglected; sadness for the memories that make what is an otherwise beautiful wonderland so painful for me to confront; sadness for being separated from the rest of the reunion party by my age; sadness for being sad.
On the plane out of San Jose, I knew I was on the wrong side of the aircraft to see the Mountain pass under the wings. However, I did see the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton go by, a place I knew was situated almost directly across the valley from the Mountain. It was a place I had been too terrified to visit as a child; my fear of heights induced a sense of vertigo whenever I thought about looking through a telescope at a magnified image of anything directly overhead, like the sun or the moon. Ironically, I later became fascinated with just such images and, at one point in my early college education, I aspired to become one of those people who live or work at remote astronomical posts like Mt. Hamilton.
As the observatory passed beneath me, I unconsciously touched the window of the plane, as if to bid those aspirations goodbye. They belonged to another person, another me, and I wondered if this other self could have obtained more from his life had he not been subjected to the peculiar family dynamics he encountered on the Mountain. A self-pitying moment, perhaps, but one engendered by two days of thinking about little else besides the Mountain, what had happened there, and its current state of decay. Once I became conscious of this again, my hand fell away from the window, dropping to find a distraction, some other physical sensation to divert my thoughts from wallowing in the might-have-beens of the past. Or the present.
Later, after landing in Las Vegas, I boarded a 15-passenger van for the ride back to my car, parked in St. George. The van was mainly filled with ugly Mormon women who, having fulfilled their primary function as child-bearers, had allowed themselves to dwindle into frumpy hausfraus with no hint of sexuality about them. They pointed and clucked at the desert landscape surrounding us, a landscape I have grown quite accustomed to over the years. It is a dead, moon-like environment, and there are still great pockets of the western desert that remain only sparsely decorated by life, by color, a sensation I could relate to only too well. But I do credit the Mormons for bringing life to it, or at least parts of it. Their efforts to populate the arid environs of Utah seem almost noble compared to the state of the Mountain I had left behind. And the gross irony of populating a remote, yet gorgeous, location and letting it fall to neglect and ruin, then restricting future visits only to "authorized" personnel, was not lost on me as I stared at the desert landscape rushing by the windows of the van, on a highway that was the closest thing to a river for miles. Whatever their other crimes, at least the Mormons have not yet abandoned their "home", their Zion, leaving their temples to the wind, their homes to the elements.
Though I do not necessarily consider the development on the Mountain to be quite the moral equivalent of paving paradise (for one thing, it was never quite possible for the population of the Mountain to rise too far above 120 or so at any given time), I do consider its abandonment a crime, as is the decision to let the toxic ingredients of the settlement seep into the surrounding hills. And there is a parallel here, too, of course, with a man, a father, who did much the same thing to his own family, abandoning them for what he seemed to think were greener pastures, however temporary, allowing the toxins of his personality and his drunkenness to leech into the home of his children.
All the time I was in San Jose this weekend, I was constantly aware of the presence of the Mountain, not least because of the box-like structure on the summit, which is visible for miles. Like the Watcher of the Fantastic Four, the box on the Mountain sees all, records all, without the faintest hint of any emotion, any human response. In my wanderings on the Mountain, I found the building that once contained the base chapel, a place I remembered as the location for the Christmas pageants and Sunday school classes of my youth. A few of the building's windows were still decorated with inspirational paintings, remarkably well preserved. My attention was immediately captured by one of these which featured a rendering of an Apollo capsule in orbit around the Earth. Above this illustration was written these words: Primus me Circumdiste ("You were the first to encircle me"), along with dates corresponding to the exploratory voyages of Magellan (1520) and Apollo 10, the dress-rehearsal mission for the moon landings.
If my familial experiences on the Mountain left me feeling abandoned, alone, and helpless, I think it must have been the Mountain itself--for all its unfeeling remoteness--that saved me, that offered me some escape from the wreck of a home I was living in, a home now literally wrecked by abandonment and the exercises of visiting SWAT teams, who now use the Mountain as a training post for "extraction" operations. The only extraction I was offered during my time on the Mountain was that of the imagination, and the Mountain's offerings in that regard were endless. It was the first to encircle me, and the only entity, human or otherwise, to attempt to engage me during that time.
One thing I realized, or remembered, about the Mountain during my visit this weekend was this: for as remote and lonely as it could sometimes be, it was by far the most loyal and the most cherished of my many childhood homes. How fitting then that now we are both abandoned wrecks, our main mode of expression that of endless and largely pointless regret about those who once attempted to live among us.
Sadness is the dominant emotion of the moment. Sadness for the way such a unique place has been neglected; sadness for the memories that make what is an otherwise beautiful wonderland so painful for me to confront; sadness for being separated from the rest of the reunion party by my age; sadness for being sad.
On the plane out of San Jose, I knew I was on the wrong side of the aircraft to see the Mountain pass under the wings. However, I did see the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton go by, a place I knew was situated almost directly across the valley from the Mountain. It was a place I had been too terrified to visit as a child; my fear of heights induced a sense of vertigo whenever I thought about looking through a telescope at a magnified image of anything directly overhead, like the sun or the moon. Ironically, I later became fascinated with just such images and, at one point in my early college education, I aspired to become one of those people who live or work at remote astronomical posts like Mt. Hamilton.
As the observatory passed beneath me, I unconsciously touched the window of the plane, as if to bid those aspirations goodbye. They belonged to another person, another me, and I wondered if this other self could have obtained more from his life had he not been subjected to the peculiar family dynamics he encountered on the Mountain. A self-pitying moment, perhaps, but one engendered by two days of thinking about little else besides the Mountain, what had happened there, and its current state of decay. Once I became conscious of this again, my hand fell away from the window, dropping to find a distraction, some other physical sensation to divert my thoughts from wallowing in the might-have-beens of the past. Or the present.
Later, after landing in Las Vegas, I boarded a 15-passenger van for the ride back to my car, parked in St. George. The van was mainly filled with ugly Mormon women who, having fulfilled their primary function as child-bearers, had allowed themselves to dwindle into frumpy hausfraus with no hint of sexuality about them. They pointed and clucked at the desert landscape surrounding us, a landscape I have grown quite accustomed to over the years. It is a dead, moon-like environment, and there are still great pockets of the western desert that remain only sparsely decorated by life, by color, a sensation I could relate to only too well. But I do credit the Mormons for bringing life to it, or at least parts of it. Their efforts to populate the arid environs of Utah seem almost noble compared to the state of the Mountain I had left behind. And the gross irony of populating a remote, yet gorgeous, location and letting it fall to neglect and ruin, then restricting future visits only to "authorized" personnel, was not lost on me as I stared at the desert landscape rushing by the windows of the van, on a highway that was the closest thing to a river for miles. Whatever their other crimes, at least the Mormons have not yet abandoned their "home", their Zion, leaving their temples to the wind, their homes to the elements.
Though I do not necessarily consider the development on the Mountain to be quite the moral equivalent of paving paradise (for one thing, it was never quite possible for the population of the Mountain to rise too far above 120 or so at any given time), I do consider its abandonment a crime, as is the decision to let the toxic ingredients of the settlement seep into the surrounding hills. And there is a parallel here, too, of course, with a man, a father, who did much the same thing to his own family, abandoning them for what he seemed to think were greener pastures, however temporary, allowing the toxins of his personality and his drunkenness to leech into the home of his children.
All the time I was in San Jose this weekend, I was constantly aware of the presence of the Mountain, not least because of the box-like structure on the summit, which is visible for miles. Like the Watcher of the Fantastic Four, the box on the Mountain sees all, records all, without the faintest hint of any emotion, any human response. In my wanderings on the Mountain, I found the building that once contained the base chapel, a place I remembered as the location for the Christmas pageants and Sunday school classes of my youth. A few of the building's windows were still decorated with inspirational paintings, remarkably well preserved. My attention was immediately captured by one of these which featured a rendering of an Apollo capsule in orbit around the Earth. Above this illustration was written these words: Primus me Circumdiste ("You were the first to encircle me"), along with dates corresponding to the exploratory voyages of Magellan (1520) and Apollo 10, the dress-rehearsal mission for the moon landings.
If my familial experiences on the Mountain left me feeling abandoned, alone, and helpless, I think it must have been the Mountain itself--for all its unfeeling remoteness--that saved me, that offered me some escape from the wreck of a home I was living in, a home now literally wrecked by abandonment and the exercises of visiting SWAT teams, who now use the Mountain as a training post for "extraction" operations. The only extraction I was offered during my time on the Mountain was that of the imagination, and the Mountain's offerings in that regard were endless. It was the first to encircle me, and the only entity, human or otherwise, to attempt to engage me during that time.
One thing I realized, or remembered, about the Mountain during my visit this weekend was this: for as remote and lonely as it could sometimes be, it was by far the most loyal and the most cherished of my many childhood homes. How fitting then that now we are both abandoned wrecks, our main mode of expression that of endless and largely pointless regret about those who once attempted to live among us.
posted by Chazzbot at 7:22 PM
1 Comments:
Okay, Chazz, it's high-time you start writing books of your own. Seriously, my friend. Honestly. You have legions of fans waiting...
b.schrand
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