An Open Letter to Daryl Lang (Which You Can Read Too) "I'm just writing to point out that the destination you describe in your "Gone Hikin'" entry sounds an awful lot like New *Hampshire*, not New York. But have a great trip, wherever the road takes you!" - Daryl Lang, regarding my most recent blog entry *Japhynote: Daryl Lang can be read every day at his stupendous journal @ www.daryllang.com Dear Daryl, How are you? I'm well. You're absolutely right. I was referring to New Hampshire, not New York. Truth of the matter, I was standing in the middle of a library web kiosk at Brooklyn College while writing that blog. Looks like I must have been a bit distracted by all the...books, since I clearly mistook one 'New' for another. You can't really blame me though, since I've lived in every 'New' state save New Jersey (gak!) so it's easy to get confused. I'm not surprised that you were the only one to notice though. New Yorkers probably believed that Mount Washington might as well be in New York for all they care- it's all upstate to them. As I was driving past Concord, I thought of you and your days at the Concord Monitor. While New Hampshire might be home to a thousand human interest stories (exactly one-thousand, in fact), I can't imagine the frustration you encountered in your search for real news in the Granite State. New Hampshire defies the concept of The Now. I had not been there in five years and the only qualitative differences about the state I could discern were that Plymouth State College is now a university and The Old Man in the Mountain (a.k.a. The Great Stone Face- which is more majestic sounding if you ask me) is now a pile of dust at the bottom of Mount Cannon. In any event, I'm rambling. What I wanted to tell you about, Daryl, was my trip up the mountain. Mount Washington, home of the worst recorded weather on Earth.....reachable by road, cog railway and by foot. My Dad had been bugging my brother Mo and I to go on a father-son summer trip for years. Inevitably, whenever the three of us camped together, it rains. My childhood father-son bonding memories are a permanent water-logged alblum of playing checkers on a mushy cardboard surface, pock-marked by rain dripping down the sides of the tent....or nights of falling asleep to the sound of rain hitting the windshield of our Aerovan while Dad slept next to me in the driver's seat, fully reclined, minimally comfortable. The rain never really concerned us all that much, to be honest. Rain on Father-Son Weekend had become like Snow on Christmas....only, more inevitable. Which is why we stayed at a condo. And there wasn't a drop of rain. Someday, what we will do is make reservations for a hotel, pay for it, check in and then make a mad dash for our tents and camp, hopefully fooling the great storm spirit, Ammonoosuc, into thinking we're at Holiday Inn and giving our camp trip the impossible dream of a dry, dry camp. Seriously, we're doing it. This is what I want to write to you about Daryl. I want to tell you about Ammonoosuc, who makes his home on Mount Washington, who is a creation of the Abenaki people, and who I met at about 9:30 a.m. on the 21st of August. So, Dad, Mo and I hit the trail at around seven o'clock. Ungodly, I know, but the air up there defies sleep, too thin to ever lull you into a sense of relaxation. Down at sea level, the air is soup, perhaps a chowder, really. Up in New Hampshire, the air is more like an abstract concept that you might run into time to time while traveling through empty space. So we start walking- Mo in front, my Dad behind me, carrying his walking stick with feathers he had found on trails past tied into the leather lanyard at the top. I'm in the middle and for the first hour or so, true to form, I don't shut up. Every thirty seconds or so, there is an arrangement of rock walls interspersed with peg-like trees and lit by the morning sun in such a way that surpasses any Hudson school painter. My mind races with the idea that once the world was all like this and what it would mean to come upon such grandeur for the first time. Which I was, but I mean, to be discover this. Which I did! But to be the first. Which I am in my own heart. I am the frontiersman and the guy who died before ever hitting the mountain and who have endured snow storm and death and bears only this time, this umpteenth first time, it is beautiful and I am reminded of paintings that everyone call 'impressionistic' because nobody gets out enough anymore. Nowadays we call the fantastic unbelievable and call a painting surrealist if it's colors are to vivid, it's contrasts too contrasty, it's reality too stupendous. (Aside: Great joke I heard this week- "Dadaists are just keeping it surreal") This is what I'm thinking about. I'm also thinking about how to write a nature poem in a way that doesn't reference the man-made. No "rivers like ribbons" or "vast canopy's of green", but rather to find ways of talking about the natural without turning it into a dressmaker's shopping list or an architect's glossary. I'm thinking about this and crossing the Ammonoosuc, which when not being a mountain or a great storm spirit, is also a river. This is a mad river, really more water falling off the side of a giant rock than actual river, with banks and shores and things. It goes barreling down the mountain like dragon's flames, only wet and white. We reach this perfectly amazing waterfall that looks like it took thirty zen monks fifty years to arrange in perfect harmony each tree, boulder and pool into a balance that expresses the One True Nature of All and then we go up. This is a staircase. My knees are up to my chest in each step, bah-dah, shuffle, bah-dah, shuffle. If it was steeper, I'd need climbing equipment. This goes on in short intervals for about twenty- thirty minutes and then something happens. The trail gets harder. I'm dying here and the trail gets harder and all the sudden I'm flying. Crossing the ever shrinking Ammonoosuc back and forth, splashing it's fucking way-too-early-in-the-morning water in my face and I'm laughing at the boulders and the way they have absolutely nothing to do with a trail at all other than that I'm making my way up and over them. I'm falling up the damn mountain! Fuck the cliche, I am the cliche and I'm dangerously close to becoming the guy I'm named after, but I don't care, really because this is the most incredible thing I have ever felt, as if my heart has become this giant metal thing slicing out of my body and reaching out to the valleys below, the ravines and gorges, to the water and moss and lichen beneath my feet and I'm giddy. I stop every few minutes and scream out into the valley below and my voice is just absorbed into the mountains and the forests. My hollars and whoops are just sucked in and Ammonoosuc is saying, "Yeah, baby, let it all out, you aint' gonna' get me riled up. You scream and you hollar and I'm just gonna take it allllllll in, you hear?" Rhapsody of stubby pines shrinking down from vertical towers into nothing, into moss and shrub and nothing. Into nothing and nothing and nothing. Man on rock. Man up rock. No man. No air. No rock. Just the demarcations, the line of where footprint hit stone. When traced: A lightning bolt in empty space. Thanks for listening Daryl. (Everybody else, too) -Japhy

posted by Japhy at 9/02/2003 11:39:00 AM || #