A World Apart

The sun was falling into the west, and after it left, it would become unbearably cold. The Bridgers were peaked with snow though it had not reached down into the valley yet. Paul just stood, leaned against his Ford Explorer, watching the world move on around him, pretending that he was not caught up in time with everything else. Perhaps, this was his final attempt to hang onto the warmer months before the Montana winter would sweep in and cover everything in a layer of snow and ice.

He could not see the highway, though he could hear the "hum" and "swoosh" of the occasional car that would fly by in the unknown. He lived not far away, on the edge of a town called Bozeman, which somehow managed to be both a small town and city at the same time. He knew it was a short distance between his home and where he now stood, perhaps, not more than five miles difference, maybe seven, but that short drive made all the difference. Here, in this other world, he often drove to fish the Gallatin, or to just sit and listen, or, maybe, if it felt right, to talk.

He felt foolish the first time he had done it: just started talking to no one. It was only a word or two, perhaps some exclamation that caught him unawares. The sound of his voice spooked him as if he were an animal, and he retreated back into silence. Weeks later, though, after he returned one evening just to watch the river pass by, he opened his mouth and a few words quietly escaped. It was hardly more than a mumble but it forced him to turn around and make sure no one was watching or listening. After that, things kind of took off. He would spend hours talking; he would talk until his throat was sore or until he simply ran out of words to say. His mundane life created little more than mundane problems, but these he saved up during the days or weeks leading up to his next visit and, once there, he would tell his stories and problems to the river that ran below him, whose edge he would sometimes cross, fly-rod in hand, to participate in the holy act of fly-fishing; he would rant to the foothills that skirted the mountains and on which, just before the sun would set, he could watch the animals come out to feed: deer and elk, a small orange fox, or a grey flash on the tree-line which he thought was a wolf, but was more likely a coyote; lastly, he talked to the mountains. He never knew why, but always had to work his way up to addressing these lithic beasts, coated in pine and bespeckled by rock slides and cliffs where the earth's integrity itself was tested. For these mountains, monuments to a god unknown, for these alone, he saved his deepest concerns and his most philosophical thoughts that every human is bound to stumble upon in his life. Many an evening, he sat on the bank of the river, eyes fixed on a single tree, miles and miles away, or roving from peak to peak, and asked the mountains why they exist, why he exists. He would face them with the problems of a mortal life: of love and why he hated spending nights alone; of death and why he must sit by and watch his friends and family part from him into the abyss. He would ask the mountains how it felt to watch civilizations rise and fall and about the countless lives that have been lost at their very feet and on their very faces. The mountains were Paul's confidants and knew his deepest secrets.

On one of these evenings, sitting on the bank of the river, Paul had extolled his frustrations with his job and with women and with the world, upon the river and the foothills when he finally looked towards the mountains.

"Well?" he said with a sigh as he looked for something more to say, as if to humor them.

Paul's eyes became fixed on a point of the mountainside nearest him. His mind went blank, and he stared as if he was drawn to the point by some divine power. The point was simple, a single tree in the sea of pine, little more than a drop of water in the ocean. Slowly, as he allowed himself to surrender to the mountain and the moment, to allow his mind to remain blank, did he begin to understand. The mountains were speaking to him. All this time, not only had Paul been talking, but the mountains had been listening, and now, it was their turn to speak. Paul remained motionless, eyes fixed on the single tree, which seemed as ordinary as every other tree around it, but was, somehow, more. At this time, this single tree was portal that could link Paul's mind with something greater, something unimaginably profound, and something unquestionably pure.

Now, it was Paul's turn to listen, to look up at these pillars raised to the sky and to hear their words. Paul sat for hours before he realized that the mountains' words were not words at all. By a transference of divine feeling, from them, unto him, he felt the presence of the mountains. Perhaps these symbols, these ideas, were simply realizations-a grand unification of signifier and signified. Perhaps it was something greater: perhaps these were the words of God. This transference of ideas, of concepts, of answers, continued well past the setting of the sun to when Paul could no longer see the point at which he stared, but felt were it was by the unmistakable hold it had on his gaze.

As mysteriously as it had begun, it ended. His attention was drawn to the"hum" and "swoosh" of a car speeding into the headlit dark. It was the first one he had heard all night. He simply sat in the grass, where he had been for hours and tried to make sense of what had happened. The mountains' voice, if it can even be called that, still sounded in his mind. It echoed in the recesses of his brain; its vastness was astounding and consumed him. His limbs had grown cold and stiff as if the earth had imbibed him and, now, offered him up once more to the world of man, only more stone than flesh and bone. Slowly, he shook himself free from the stupor, feeling the dust of crumbling stone fall from his joints to rejoin the earth, and moved back towards his Ford Explorer.

He returned one week later. He had spent the past seven days trying to understand what had happened, but to no avail. He felt himself fundamentally changed; though, in all ways he could inspect, he was very much the same. As he approached the river's edge and scanned its water and the foothills and the mountains, they too seemed, somehow, changed, though he could not quite identify what was different. He examined the river. It flowed as steady as ever over the free stones. He examined the foothills. The fields of grass remained; some contained cattle, others, a few deer that had ventured out; nothing seemed out of place. He examined the mountains. The layer of pines was as green as ever, the cliffs and rockslides were very much as he had left them. He stepped back and viewed all three at once and still, he could not help but to feel that the scene, that he, that the world was changed. He closed his eyes and removed himself from the scene entirely, back to the last week when his eyes had been fixed on the point of the mountainside. Immediately, he opened his eyes and tried to find the point that had captivated him the week before, but, try as he might, he could not find it. He even walked to where he had sat, in the grass on the river's bank, but even from there, he could not find the single tree that seemed to stand out so singularly the week before. He stared at the wooded hillside when a spark was lit inside his head. "It is simply a mountain," he thought to himself. "What do mountains care the troubles of the world? for my troubles? for other mountains?" This is what the mountain had taught him: mountains will be mountains, neither more nor less. The mountains had listened to his words and his problems and they gave him a glimpse into a moment of being a mountain; the lives of mountains are slow, incomprehensibly slow. Ice ages come and go under their watches; Man has fallen from Grace under their gaze and fallen even further than could have been imagined and, still, the mountains carry on. The rivers and the foothills are nothing more than products of the mountains: their children, their progeny, their legacy. This man, this mortal of mortals, and his problems, spouted at the world and heard by the mountains, was given an insight into the nature of the mountains, and the world, and life and he realized that all his problems were not problems, but were barely even trifles. In the past week, what had changed was that he had not developed a list of complaints for the river and foothills and the mountains, and, without those problems dragged into this world apart, he could simply sit and contemplate his life, or the mountains'.

When the sun finally disappeared into the West, Paul was still leaned against the Explorer. His eyes were fixed on the mountainside and he had something of a half-smile on his face as the cold began to nip at his nose and fingertips. Several years had come and gone since his revelation, and still, he comes to this spot nearly every week, though, now, few words need be spoken. He sits quietly for hours, listening to the stories of the mountains and, only on the rarest of occasions, sharing his own. His stories are not new to the mountains, but are tales that they have heard more times that Paul could ever know. The mountains know that the world is only recycled, and stories are no different. Perhaps the mountains once told the original story: the story of the world. But now, under the light of a simple yellow sun, all stories are only retold, and the mountains listen and care not, for they know the only story that matters.