Monadnock
Christopher Johnson
Mount Monadnock rose gradually from the rolling hills of southern New Hampshire. It wasn’t like Mount Washington or the rest of the White Mountains, Raymond Walsh thought to himself as he stood outside the open door of his blue Toyota Corolla and stared at the mountain, ten miles distant. Those mountains all crowded in on one another, but this mountain was all by itself.
To the east of the mountain, Raymond could see a lake, gleaming like burnished silver. Trees, so many trees, going up the sides of the mountain. Marching up, just like wooden soldiers. But then the trees stopped altogether, maybe three-fourths of the way up. The crown of the mountain was naked granite, which the winds of centuries had rounded into smooth contours. Well, Raymond thought, that’s the way God or nature or the forces of the earth did it, just throwing up this mountain by itself. It was the most-climbed mountain in America or maybe even the world. He’d read that somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. He hoped there weren’t too many people on the trails and especially that there was no one obnoxious. No jerks to ruin this beautiful Sunday when he was going to climb Monadnock with Nick. Please, no jerks.
He and Nick, who was ten years old, were going to climb Monadnock for the first time. It had been three years since Raymond and Janice and their two children, Nick and Tracy, had relocated from Chicago to Boston. Together, the family had explored all parts of New England, and today, the two were on their own, carving into yet another corner of New England. That radiant Sunday morning, Raymond and Nick had piled their backpacks and hiking boots into the ’84 blue Corolla and had driven northwest from their townhouse in Framingham and into southern New Hampshire. As they had approached Monadnock, Raymond decided to pull the car over to the side of the road and study the mountain from a distance. He wanted to gain a perspective on it as they approached the bulky mountain.
“It’s all alone,” he said to his son. “The mountain is all alone.”
“Yeah, it sure is,” Nick said. He picked up a rock and flung it as far as he could, which was pretty far, as he had a good arm.
As Raymond gazed upon the mountain shimmering in the distance, he felt . . . nothing. This mountain, this gift of nature . . . nothing. This magnificent view—it should have caused him more joy. The prospect of climbing it with his son—it should have filled him with anticipation. Instead, he felt colorless, distant. The only thing he felt was the aloneness of the mountain like something dead inside himself. He didn’t know why. He missed his hometown of Chicago. Maybe that was it—he missed the wholesome forgivingness and blithe casualness of the Midwest.
The feeling was an infection—he knew that much--and he didn’t want to pass it along to his son. They returned to the car and continued on their way, listening to the pregame analysis of the Red Sox game to be played later that day. The game would be broadcast throughout New England, for the Red Sox belonged to the entire region and fed New England’s sense of itself as a place of optimism and tragedy that the Fates doled out in equal doses.
Soon, father and son stood at the base of the White Dot Trail and looked up. The path was wide, and because it was the most traveled trail on Mount Monadnock, it was worn well with the sneakers and hiking boots of weekend adventurers like them. They began to climb. Raymond was relatively inexperienced with climbing, having grown up in the flat Midwest, but this seemed easy enough. Nick, bursting with energy, raced ahead, while Raymond followed along. Raymond stared at Nick as he raced ahead. The flesh of his flesh, the blood of his blood. Nick had skin the color of leather and eyes like black olives and long eyelashes. He’d had long hair when school ended in June, but then he’d gone by himself to the barbershop at the far end of their street in Framingham and asked the barber to shave almost all of it off. My son the skinhead, Raymond thought.
As they climbed the White Dot Trail, Raymond felt the earth through the soles of his hiking boots. He noticed the flowers lining the trail—mountain asters, which were royal purple; cinquefoil, which blazed with sun-bright yellow; mountain cranberries, with red globes hanging below the leaves of the plant.
Yet the beauty distracted him only momentarily from the feeling of heaviness that he carried with him. He felt as his feet had been cast into cement. He remembered going to family picnics when he was a child, and aunts and uncles who seemed older than this mountain remarked upon how tall he’d grown and asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He’d been unsure what to say, no words had come to his mouth. He’d felt surrounded by a barrier.
He stared at his son, now about 20 feet ahead of him, Nick with so many friends, friends from baseball, Nick like the sun with the planets revolving around him, Nick exerting a mysterious pull on other children. In spite of himself, Raymond felt a touch of jealousy toward his son, his one and only son. It was like a tiny needle injecting something black into his heart. The boy’s legs drove like pistons, and as he raced ahead of Raymond, he turned around and yelled, “Hey, Dad, get the lead out, let’s go!”
After 45 minutes of climbing, they stopped for a drink from their canteens and spied something about 100 feet off the trail. They left the White Dot Trail and wandered toward it. It was a hickory tree, crooked and misshapen. A vine had entwined itself around the trunk, and the tendrils of the vine resembled a child’s arms and hands reaching toward the sky. Raymond noted the tree, but it made no impact on him. The two wandered deeper into the forest. To their left stood a white pine, massive and straight and soaring toward heaven. They meandered yet farther into the forest and saw two trees merged together like conjoined twins. Were they one tree or two? Did they nourish each other? The breeze through the forest was gentle, and it touched their skin like a breath.
Raymond looked around and realized that they had lost sight of the trail. He looked at Nick. “We’re lost,” he said, his voice flat and colorless.
“Cool!” Nick said. “It can’t be that far back to the trail.”
“No,” Raymond responded. At the age of ten, Nick was more comfortable with wandering than Raymond was. The White Dot Trail might as well not exist. It was completely out of sight. Still Raymond felt set off from the forest. All that surrounded them should have prodded something in him, the transcendent feeling of joy that he had felt at times when he’d been a child in the woods.
They looked around once more. No sign of the White Dot Trail. The canopy of trees spread above them, blocking the sunlight. The forest felt primordial, mythic, even dangerous. Words mounted inside Raymond: How could he have allowed them to wander off the trail? The trees massed together, their trunks thick, their leaves black. The forest floor was carpeted with ferns and saplings—one generation of trees preparing to replace the previous generation. “We should have brought a compass,” Raymond said, frustration creeping into his voice.
“I think the trail is that way, Dad,” Nick said, pointing over his shoulder.
“Well, let’s try that way then.” The forest floor was clotted with fallen limbs of trees that would decay over eons and eventually return to the earth. Now father and son truly were wandering. They lifted their feet to step over branches that lay strewn on the forest floor, and it felt as though the vegetation grabbed at their feet. Raymond had no idea if they were moving in the right direction, but at least they were moving.
They came to an open space. Across the space stood a deer, tawny in the sun. It regarded them with almost-human curiosity and then skittered away. “It seems like we should have gotten to the trail by now,” Raymond said.
“I still think we’re going in the right direction,” Nick said.
Behind them lay a log, slowly returning its molecules to the earth. The two sat down on it and listened to the knock knock knocking of an invisible woodpecker ringing through the forest. Raymond put his arms around his knees and felt the lumpy bark against his bottom. “Hey, Dad,” Nick asked, “Did you used to go to the woods when you were a kid all those centuries ago?”
Despite his mood, Raymond chuckled. He didn’t really want to answer, to go through the effort of thinking back, but he knew he had to play the role. “Sometimes,” he answered. His voice felt gray to himself. Then a memory came involuntarily flooding in. “One time Grandpa took me fishing, or at least tried to take me fishing. He brought a pitchfork so we could dig for worms. He didn’t want to spend the money to buy worms, so we were going to dig for them. We were walking toward the lake, and he pointed down and said, ‘Let’s dig for worms here.’ I raised the pitchfork and brought it down—right into my right big toe.”
Nick laughed, his laughter echoing through the forest. Raymond shook his head. “Believe me, your grandfather had doubts about me sometimes.”
“Did you have to go to the hospital?” Nick asked.
“No, but I had to wear a big ugly bandage around my toe for about a week.” He paused. “We never did go fishing.” He wanted to continue, “He never tried to take me fishing again.” He wanted to say this to Nick, but he didn’t.
They rose to their feet. “I think the trail is that way,” Nick said, pointing over his father’s shoulder. They left the comfortable open space and once again entered the forest. The undergrowth grew thicker than ever, choked with ferns, bushes, fallen branches, uprooted trees with ten-foot-wide roots torn from the belly of the earth. The thick, pungent vegetation pulled at their boots, slowed them down. Raymond felt increasingly frustrated and jerked his boots up to disengage them from the undergrowth. Suddenly he was angry at the forest.
He glanced at his watch, and it was almost noon. He looked up. He knew that the sun was overhead, but the thick, clotted canopy of the trees hid it from their view. Ugly, he thought. The forest was dense and dark—ugly. The forest enveloped them, stood in the way, exerted a mysterious force of its own, a force separate from the lives of humans. He felt the forest against him somehow. He felt the forest pulling on him, and he resisted. He felt the unyielding force of the forest, the invisible life of countless insects and birds and mammals that thrived in the forest, and he held onto the darkness that had descended on him, and he could not let go of it.
Ahead, at long last, they saw a slip of blue. “The sky!” Nick yelled, triumphant. “I hear voices!” The voices of people—the voices of fellow human beings. Nick said, “We’re close to the trail! We made it! We survived!”
Despite himself, Raymond smiled. “So we did,” he said.
They spilled out onto the White Dot Trail. They saw people hiking, climbing, talking, laughing. The sun shot its rays down, and they crashed into the tightly packed soil of the trail. The light reflected back to Raymond and Nick and embraced them in its warmth.
“Let’s turn around, Nick,” Raymond said. “It’s noon. We got lost in those damned woods. We wasted a lot of time.”
Nick’s brown eyes curled up, and he looked at this father, looked at him full-on. “Really?”
Raymond looked at his son, and the boy’s disappointment traveled through the gap between them and enveloped him. He could not continue looking at Nick. He stood there on the trail, the sun shining on the two of them. He closed his eyes and tried not to feel his son staring at him. Suddenly he felt unutterably sad—stymied by sadness. He could feel his son’s aliveness. He was about to say, “No, it’s time to turn around.” But he couldn’t utter the words. “OK,” he said. “Let’s keep on.”
Nick smiled. He didn’t yell or say anything. Instead, he climbed ahead of Raymond like a mountain goat, leaping from one granite boulder to another. How do you do that? Raymond wanted to ask his son. How do you stay balanced?
They came to a steep wall of rocks that they were going to have to scramble up. The rocks were arranged like a puzzle, and it was not immediately obvious how to climb them. The wall stretched for about ten feet above them—rugged rocks placed willy-nilly against one another, like a crazy quilt with hard edges. Nick had complete confidence. He put his hands out and grabbed hold of a rock above his head and began to haul himself up. He pushed and scrambled with his legs, climbing like an engine.
Raymond stood and stared at the wall of jumbled granite. Old feelings of defeat crept behind his eyes. “You can do it, Dad,” Nick said, looking down with brows knitted from the ledge above.
“Oh, I know,” Raymond answered. “I’m just figuring out how best to attack this thing.”
“Look close,” Nick said. “There’s a foothold about a foot up, and then over here’s a handhold.” Raymond looked and saw a thin sliver of a foothold about half a foot wide and then a knob of stone that he could grasp with his left hand. His heart beat crazily, and he took a deep breath and placed his right foot carefully on the narrow ledge, grabbed the knob with his left hand, and began to pull himself up. He found another foothold, another handhold, and slowly rose, two feet, three feet. His left knee banged against the granite wall, and he winced. “Crap! he muttered to himself. He felt how ridiculous this was—that it was only a short wall—that it was such an easy climb—yet despite that, he felt this fear.
Now the top of the wall was only about a foot above him. With his left hand, he grasped the ledge at the top of the wall, found another foothold, and slowly pulled himself up with a loud grunt. Sweat salted his right eye. Nick leaned down and grabbed Raymond’s forearm. “”Push up, Dad! he said. “You’re almost home!” With Nick’s help, he managed to get both elbows onto the level surface and pull the rest of his body up. “Yay, Dad!” Nick said. “Not bad for an old man!”
Raymond was too out of breath to answer. He bent over, rested his hands on his knees, sucked for air. He breathed the air deeply, greedily. “Are you OK, Dad? Nick asked.
“Yeah, I’m OK,” he answered between breaths. It wasn’t just the exertion—it was the fear he’d felt. He felt ridiculous. The wall wasn’t that big a deal. But--this was the weird part--he couldn’t stop thinking about stabbing his toe with the pitchfork when he’d been a kid and how angry his father had been. He hadn’t told Nick that part—how angry his father had been. The air whooshed in and out of his lungs, and he felt slightly faint. Remembering his father, silent and mysterious in his easy chair, snapping at him if he’d forgotten to take out the trash. Suddenly Raymond felt like crying because he hadn’t been able to go fishing that day all those years ago. Tears! How ridiculous, he thought. How absurd!
Nick bent over with him, put his hand on his arm. “Really, Dad, are you OK?”
Raymond sucked in the breath, blew it out. He smiled at his son. “I’m fine,” he said. “Let’s keep going up this damned mountain!”
They came to a vista and sat down on a boulder. The trees had been cut away, and they could see New Hampshire and Massachusetts, all deep, deep green—as emerald as Ireland. “I feel like I can see practically the whole world from here,” Nick said.
Raymond turned to his son. “That’s a good way to put it, Nick. Very good.” They unloaded their canteens from their backpacks and drank, and Raymond savored the water slipping down his throat like liquid silk--cool and soothing. With the backpack off, Raymond felt that his T-shirt was sopping, his back was drenched. He liked the feeling--the wetness of the shirt. They finished their draught of water and hoisted their backpacks onto their backs.
They continued on. They veered left onto the White Cross Trail. Boulders filled the trail like huge rough marbles, and Raymond felt the physical part taking over the mental part. Father and son proceeded carefully, placing their feet on one boulder, balancing themselves, stepping onto the next boulder, pushing with their legs, straining, rising one boulder at a time, oh so slowly, never in any real danger but also aware that they did not want to slip and skin a knee or twist an ankle.
Finally, finally—the summit of Mount Monadnock. It was naked and rocky--a broad, rounded expanse of granite. It reminded Raymond of a bald-headed old man. The summit had once been covered with trees, but fires in the early 19th century burned the topsoil and turned the summit naked. Trees were gradually growing, moving up the sides of Monadnock, but their progress was painfully slow. The summit was open to the sun, the stars, the moon. Raymond and Nick tripped across the huge granite bulwarks that capped the mountain. They could see the shimmering skin of Boston’s John Hancock Tower, some sixty miles distant.
Father and son found a place to sit, unloaded their backpacks, took out their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and apples, and devoured them as if they had not eaten for many days. Raymond felt his senses sharp and alive, and he savored the bread, the incomparable peanut butter, the marvelous jelly. He bit into the apple, and its juice exploded in his mouth, and he closed his eyes and tasted the sweetness. He took another bite of the apple, so crisp that he could hear his teeth invade the fruit.
As Raymond and Nick sat, their elbows touched, and Raymond could feel something. . . something . . . the electric life inside his son. Another memory came flooding through him, overpowering him. He turned to his son, and he said, “I remember something.” He had this feeling . . . inchoate, a compulsion, that he had to pass this memory onto his son. “I remember the woods near where we lived outside Cleveland when I was a boy. On our block, there were four of us. Tommy was a real good boxer and wrestler. He was built like a fireplug. Jerry liked critters and especially snakes. Robert was a real nerdy kid with glasses and buck teeth. And me. I was kind of nerdy, too.”
Nick laughed. “I bet you were, Dad.”
“Gee, thanks.” He joined in with Nick’s laughter. “Well, anyway, every summer, we spent most of our time in those woods. We went every day. No adults around. We caught tadpoles. We put salt down on the ground to attract deer. Did you know that you can do that?”
“Yeah, I knew that, but I never did it.”
Raymond paused and reflected. “Those were the most precious times of my childhood. We were adventurers, we played cops and robbers, we played hide-and-go-seek. We went there every day in the summer. We found a baby bird that had been injured, and we nursed it back to health. We built a raft and floated on this stream that ran through the woods.” Nick listened to every word that his father was saying.
Raymond fell silent. “Those woods,” he finally said, “they’re gone now. They plowed them up and built a subdivision. The woods were only about an acre, but to me they felt like a huge wilderness. We felt so free when we were there! I’ll never forget when the earthmovers and the trucks came in and started to knock all the trees over and carry them away, and the workers gradually leveled the ground and laid concrete for streets and built houses.” Raymond paused. “When those earthmovers came in, do you know what I did?”
Nick shook his head.
“I cried.”
Nick continued to look at his father.
Raymond returned his son’s look. “I’m glad you came with me today,” he said. He rested his hand on his son’s forearm.
They drank from their canteens, packed up the wax paper in which they had wrapped their sandwiches, gathered up their apple cores, packed it all into their backpacks, and lifted their backpacks onto their shoulders. They began to descend Mount Monadnock. About three-quarters of the way down, the trail paralleled a stream that tumbled down over the harsh New Hampshire granite rock and shimmered in the late-afternoon sun. Raymond hadn’t even noticed the stream during their ascent, but now it captured his full attention. The stream murmured to Raymond. He heard the wind whisper through the trees, through the canopy of the trees. The mountain was alive—he could sense it—he could feel it.
Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He has been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published articles and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, and other magazines. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his first book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, which he co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.