My oiled leather clodhoppers half-bury themselves in broken rockflakes with each step, and then backslide, making almost no progress. Fragments clink and slide, too-loud wind-chimes in cathedral stillness, miles of silence between me and the facing mountain ramparts of rock and ice. Miles of silence between me and the edge of vacuum so close above. Twilight’s grey tide has swallowed the river and forest far below, and the universe shrinks to this bare slope and these sounds and my gasping breaths. A mountain on the Moon.
Mom and the girls nestle in the chalet, footsore, cocoa-craving, but Dad wants to wrestle another experience from the grip of this day. I go with. His boots shove avalanches of shale downward for me to wade through. We labor upward. We must climb 900 feet in half an hour, at altitude, and the deadline presses.
Sensory overload. The world was ground up, squeezed into rock, twisted tilted shoved towards the sky, broken and rebroken for an eon. The petrified sea screams its torture in slow, slow motion. I scrabble up a steep wave of that sea. Beneath me lie deep, stony mysteries. Ahead of me is another—my dad.
Chest heaving, I teeter at the knife-edge crest of the arête. A vista of fifty miles of Canadian Rockies on fire with sunset and alpenglow urges another step, and another, and the next step is a thousand-foot fall to a turquoise lake cupped by glacier.
I am nothing. Less than an atom. I am cosmic, stretched into vastness too big for my brain, time too deep, space too eternal. Too big. Too big, the man who nurtures and protects me. My mooring in all storms.
We try to harpoon a slice of it all. I snap a photo of his silhouette, anchored like a rock. He captures me lost in space and sitting at the edge of azure. Fading to black. I ache to matter to him. He would sacrifice himself before failing me. We yearn, tongueless as the breakers of rock reaching for infinity beach. Glacial fireworks of the first stars bloom above, returning the light leached from the world. Fear hems us on both sides, gut-wrenching, sucking abysses. The wind turns icy and its fingers probe me, thrust into my lungs, burning. The stars are fire. The stars are spears of ice that pierce to the bone.
Shivering, we fumble to find the trailhead, move to descend alive and in control and cradling our core of inner flame, but fierce gravity hauls us down, down, rock-surfing on broken glass, glissading faster and faster in terrible blindness, a barely-controlled fall over invisible blades of scree and unthinkable oblivion should we topple…but our shaking and weary legs hold.
My head has exploded. How can I hold all the vasty spaces? How can I live, and not relinquish the spears of starlight?
A buttery glow streams from the chalet and beckons with a hot chocolate promise that drives off all terrors.
Dad says nothing, following. But he thinks it was a very good day. I know he does.
Mom and the girls nestle in the chalet, footsore, cocoa-craving, but Dad wants to wrestle another experience from the grip of this day. I go with. His boots shove avalanches of shale downward for me to wade through. We labor upward. We must climb 900 feet in half an hour, at altitude, and the deadline presses.
Sensory overload. The world was ground up, squeezed into rock, twisted tilted shoved towards the sky, broken and rebroken for an eon. The petrified sea screams its torture in slow, slow motion. I scrabble up a steep wave of that sea. Beneath me lie deep, stony mysteries. Ahead of me is another—my dad.
Chest heaving, I teeter at the knife-edge crest of the arête. A vista of fifty miles of Canadian Rockies on fire with sunset and alpenglow urges another step, and another, and the next step is a thousand-foot fall to a turquoise lake cupped by glacier.
I am nothing. Less than an atom. I am cosmic, stretched into vastness too big for my brain, time too deep, space too eternal. Too big. Too big, the man who nurtures and protects me. My mooring in all storms.
We try to harpoon a slice of it all. I snap a photo of his silhouette, anchored like a rock. He captures me lost in space and sitting at the edge of azure. Fading to black. I ache to matter to him. He would sacrifice himself before failing me. We yearn, tongueless as the breakers of rock reaching for infinity beach. Glacial fireworks of the first stars bloom above, returning the light leached from the world. Fear hems us on both sides, gut-wrenching, sucking abysses. The wind turns icy and its fingers probe me, thrust into my lungs, burning. The stars are fire. The stars are spears of ice that pierce to the bone.
Shivering, we fumble to find the trailhead, move to descend alive and in control and cradling our core of inner flame, but fierce gravity hauls us down, down, rock-surfing on broken glass, glissading faster and faster in terrible blindness, a barely-controlled fall over invisible blades of scree and unthinkable oblivion should we topple…but our shaking and weary legs hold.
My head has exploded. How can I hold all the vasty spaces? How can I live, and not relinquish the spears of starlight?
A buttery glow streams from the chalet and beckons with a hot chocolate promise that drives off all terrors.
Dad says nothing, following. But he thinks it was a very good day. I know he does.
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