This is about my October hike that took place in November.

Life, and death, conspired to keep me away during Mount Monadnock’s most popular month, as tens of thousands of devotees ascended its well-worn shoulders to witness the colorful glory of peak foliage in New England. The idea was to cap this twelve-month cycle of hikes with a fun romp in mid-October with my wife Elahna and our friends Andy, Leah and Julia, but we postponed due to work demands. Then the rescheduled hike for Saturday, October 24th was shelved when Elahna’s mother, Hadassah, collapsed and was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital. Diagnosed with colon cancer, her condition deteriorated and she died on October 28th at 12:17 a.m. with Elahna and me at her bedside. We picked out a burial plot that same day, stumbled through the funeral and sat shivah for seven, long days.

All this year, I’d been worried about my mother dying. Not once did I consider that Elahna’s mom, age 80 and beset by chronic health issues but mobile and feisty as ever, could vanish in a blink. It just wasn’t on our radar. No one knew she was this sick. And so we torture ourselves with laments. What, I wonder, might Hadassah say to all this? Der mentsh trakht un got lakht, she’d probably say. That’s Yiddish for “Man plans and G-d laughs.” She’d pronounce the words – how she loved words! – in that thick Israeli accent she harbored since her arrival in the USA in 1961, and then she’d ruefully chuckle. The photo above shows toddler Elahna with her proud mommy. In it, everything seems possible.
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I embark for Monadnock on the sixth day of shivah, which is the week-long ritual period of mourning in Judaism. Technically, you’re not supposed to pursue activities beyond receiving guests, reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish and remembering the deceased, but I needed a break from the gloom and didn’t want to risk another tragedy or fluke injury or earthquake pushing this hike into December or 2016. As I approach the mountain, the blaze of orange, red and yellow leaves in the surrounding woods has faded to embers. Peak foliage, the ranger at the gate tells me, passed a week or two ago. But “there are patches,” he asserts hopefully, outlier trees still trumpeting peak beauty. This cheers me, but turns out to be untrue. 

I park my Prius Zipcar – the plan was to take Hadassah’s 1993 Toyota Corolla, but its alternator expired after the funeral – and I head up the most traveled avenue, the White Dot Trail. A sign I’ve never noticed before labels Monadnock as a “carry-in, carry-out” park regarding trash, and it’s a measure of my somber temperament that I comment, maybe to myself and maybe out loud: yes, they carry you in, they carry you out. From the birthing bed, we’re carried. To the grave, we’re carried again. And I flash onto the fresh image of my wife digging shovelfuls of dirt and dropping them onto her mother’s pine-box coffin, its only flourish a carved Magen David, the star-shaped shield of King David.

It’s a warm day, in the 60s. The wind picks up and rusty oak leaves shudder overhead. I take some shots of a beautifully tangled birch grove and imagine sending them to Hadassah’s email. Just in case you’re still checking your messages, I’d write, here are a few nice pics from my latest hike. Of course, it’s a long shot because she always had trouble opening attachments. Yesterday Elahna concocted an even stranger fantasy, that she’d take photos of herself in the snazzy autumn coat that her mother had ordered but never got a chance to wear and then she’d slide the prints into her gravesite using a garden edger. See, mommy, see how it looks. I was wary, as you can imagine, about leaving her today, and at the door she urged me to “be extra careful” and “keep two hands on the wheel.” She said “I love you” over and over because, of course, the world is unpredictable and unfair and you can’t always count on another chance to do the right thing, to say what’s in your heart. As Elahna keeps repeating, “There was supposed to be more time.”

Young folk in shorts and t-shirts pass me, going up and down. We exchange quick hellos, nothing more. I plop on a rock at the turnoff to the Cascade Link, at the very spot where I once witnessed a young lady yell at her snow-sliding male companion, “I’m not going down on my ass, Larry!”  With difficulty, I peel off my long-sleeve shirt and switch the torn black ribbon to the t-shirt beneath. The ribbon symbolizes the act of kriah, the rending and tearing of clothes in grief and anger. Jacob rends and tears like a madman in the Book of Genesis when his lying sons tell him that Joseph is dead. Job does the same for his tribulations, as does King David when his best friend, Yonatan, is killed in battle. Now the wind causes the torn ribbon to flap over my heart.
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Okay, that's enough. Time to cheer up. This is supposed to be a blog, not a dirge. 

 I resume climbing and it’s an effort. I’m tired from lack of sleep and tight from inactivity, but soon the muscles limber and my thoughts lighten. I cross to the Red Dot Trail and take a break on a jumble of granite slabs with a southern view. It’s all muted greens and darkening reds to bluish hills beyond. A cushion of cirrus clouds sits between the hills and the light-blue sky. Way, way up, a plane emits a gushy contrail. Maybe it’s going to Israel – last year Elahna took Hadassah there for what the old lady presciently called “her last time.” In fact, after receiving her cancer diagnosis in the hospital two weeks ago, she commented that she’d be dead in a few days. No way, we declared, stop it, don’t be ridiculous. Lots of people live with cancer. Besides, you can’t know such a thing, that you’ll be dead within days. Ridiculous. Here, have a drink of water.

Hike, hike, hike – just below tree line I rest on a granite mound riven by long cracks that seem carved by chisel. I sit near a cairn – old friend! – recognized from a winter trek. Then it was spattered with ice and snow; so was I. From here Monadnock’s rocky peak is visible, framed by the tips of pine trees. A couple of stick figures, surely human, move about up there. I munch Trader Joe’s Rainbow’s End trail mix and drink from my leaky City Sports water bottle. On the ride up, the super-peppy woman inside the car radio explained that City Sports had declared bankruptcy. Their strategy to expand from urban locations to suburban malls was a colossal, cash-hemorrhaging flop and now the whole thing had gone under, demonstrating, I guess, that you never know when you’re at your peak, when you should pull back and stop trying to do more, better. When you should simply accept.   
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For me Hadassah’s death was a tremendous shock, as if I blinked and Monadnock’s great, granite summit was suddenly gone. I take comfort in knowing that such an event is highly unlikely in my lifetime – barring asteroid strike, errant nuclear attack or celestial intervention via a Monty Python-esque flicking finger. But still, you never know for sure. 

Around two o’clock I arrive up top, joining 18 other people, give or take, come and go. It’s mostly young couples, with a few older, solo acts. One of the young’uns stands over my favorite geodesic marker – yes, I have a favorite one – and I ask him to move his foot so I can tap the round, bronze object imbedded in stone with the tip of my hiking pole. Tradition! He laughs and garbles something unintelligible, or am I just not hearing today? I laugh back and almost start a conversation, but don’t. Then I hunker against a boulder and eat ginger cookies and watch ink-black hawks play and scrap on the north side of the mountain where a rock spur points to Dublin Lake. The view of forest and mountains farther to the north is painterly, bathed in a purplish hue that seems not quite real

Before going down, I walk to the eastern edge of the peak and face Jerusalem where Hadassah was born during the British Mandate, before the state of Israel was born. Where she grew up in the neighborhood of Beit Ungarin abutting an enclave of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Where she cherished and fought with her four sisters and was known as daddy’s favorite and survived the Siege of Jerusalem during Israel’s War of Independence. Where she served in the army, graduated Hebrew University, had a Russian boyfriend with a Vespa and practiced English by reading Perry Mason pulp paperbacks. Where she earned a Fulbright Scholarship that enabled her, she emphatically declared, to “escape” – and so she came to the Land of Opportunity where justice prevails. Soon she found herself with an American husband, an exuberant child and a real job teaching college students.

On a high, granite knoll I face Jerusalem, pull out my iPod and tap the iKaddish app. Lines of Hebrew appear and I say the Mourner’s Kaddish in violation of the rule requiring a minyan of ten fellow Jews for recitation. I figure sitting mountaintop shivah is an extenuating circumstance.  

Yit-gadal vi-yit-kadash sm’meih raba
(May his great name grow exalted and sanctified)
B’al’ma di v’ra chir-u-teih
(in the world that he created as he willed)
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And so on for twenty more lines, not mentioning mourning or death once; rather, it exalts G-d’s glory again and again. There’s a mountain of books written about the Kaddish, which I haven’t read, but the other day I picked out The Mysteries of the Kaddish from Hadassah’s library (now ours) and gleaned this pearl: the mourner’s prayer praises G-d in order to keep the griever from surrendering to anger at a divine power with the chutzpah to claim a precious, loved one. It keeps us humble, grateful for the gift of life.     

I head down the White Cross Trail and the sun is lowering in the west, casting slanted shadows on the granite slabs. Hopping over puddles, I’m careful not to slip on slick leaves shrouding rocks. Soon I meet a golden chipmunk gnawing an acorn and closely encounter a downy woodpecker, all black and white with a ruby red kippah on top. Hanging on a tree trunk, he gives me the gimlet eye. Then, bam, I’m in a birch grove – hundreds of shy, spindly tree folk, entirely bare of their yellow, isosceles triangle-shaped leaves. I lean over, pick one up. Its brown veins outline a tree inside the leaf – but not a gangly birch, no, the tree inside is a mighty, spreading oak or elm or baobab. The little birch leaf dreams of something greater. Have I noticed this before? Maybe, but it feels like the first time. The leaf’s edges zigzag like a haphazard staircase or a graph line going up, up, up to a peak, to its point-absolute, and then meandering down, down, down the other side.

The day before this climb, a young couple on our street came to the house during shivah hours. They brought their newborn baby, Sadie May, swaddled in a white blanket streaked with rainbows. She was asleep, her little pink face faintly scrunched, and I held her in my arms for a while. The couple hadn’t met Hadassah, so we mostly shared neighborhood gossip. I found myself whispering a lullaby to Sadie May, one my mother sang. The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain to see what he could see…and what, you might ask, did the brave bear see? The other side of the mountain, the other side of the mountain, the other side of the mountain was all that he could see…an outcome, frankly, that disappointed little boy Hal.

What, no fantastical land? No sparkling city on a hill? No answers to my questions, no solutions to my problems, no clues to the dark, unpredictable future?
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That’s right, none of that. Just the other side of the mountain. But now, in the middle of my life, I’m okay with that reality because I know that the mountain, not the next captivating vista, is the thing. Every side of the mountain is fascinating and endlessly revealing in its own right. Every side of the mountain is an adventure, a new test for the curious climber. Every side of the mountain leads to the peak and, when you’re ready, takes you back down.       

Today, which is the first day of autumn, feels like the last day of summer. Just a few, scrappy clouds pester the sky and the temperature has risen to the mid-60s by mid-morning. The forest around Mount Monadnock is deep green, not yet acquiring the browns and golds of yearly ruin. Today is also Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and maybe I should be shuttered in shul or home fasting, maybe I should be sitting on my porch contemplating inscrutable sparrows and reviewing my sins, which, by the way, is hard to do while fasting but that’s probably intended. Instead I’ve had my coffee and donut and driven to my monthly temple, Mount Monadnock, where I make teshuvah, repentance, by turning away from civilization and going up the trail.

Psalm 121, also called a Song for Ascents, begins with an apt question: I lift up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from? Put it another way: if standing at the foot of a mountain doesn’t impart some humility, doesn’t cause you to take a deep breath, regret your stubbornness and pledge to be more open to change, then what the heck does? 

But first, in the parking lot, I watch a fit young woman with her toddler boy. (You can tell they’re mommy-son by the relaxed way he grabs for her hand.) Nearby sits an elaborate child carrier with padded aluminum frame – the Osprey Poco model, $200. With diapers, wipes, water, snacks, sippy cups, stuffed friends, first aid kit, toddler and child carrier, she’ll probably have 35 squirming pounds on her back. This mom must really be tired of dragging junior to the playground. She must really miss going up.

I head due west for a half mile on the Parker Trail – who’s this Parker fellow? The next day I do a little Googling and regret it. Turns out the Parker Trail was cut in 1911 by a Harvard zoologist, George Howard Parker, renowned for “discoveries about the sensory reactions of fishes and the lower invertebrates” – so says The Harvard Crimson. But it’s not his work with earthworms that bugs me; it’s his belief in the coldhearted discipline of eugenics, demonstrated in his article “The Eugenics Movement as a Public Service” in the journal Science (1915). Soberly, Dr. Parker warns against the “defective classes” whose “very growth threatens our civilization with future submergence, if not annihilation.” The solution? Sterilize handicapped people, including the blind and the deaf, in order to improve human “breeding stock.”

Two falls ago, right here, I watched deaf students happily unload from a bus and take this trail named for the man who wanted them neutered. 

​The definition of “defective classes,” of course, is easily expandable. The Nazis realized this and built their ideology of human destruction in part from the ideals of eugenics. Worth noting on this High Holiday. G. H. Parker lived until 1955 and I wonder if he repented his views after the grisly abominations of the Holocaust, if just in his heart. Probably not – he was an esteemed Harvard professor, after all. Not the humble type. Perhaps we should do penance for him – and for ourselves, for continuing to devalue outsider, suffering groups – by at least renaming this trail. The Freedom Trail is taken. Anyone have a good idea?

An old stone wall appears and I head north on the Lost Farm Trail. The hardwoods – beech, oak, scraggly-barked maple – have grown tall, so that farm must have been lost a long time ago. I feel strong today and set a fast pace, climbing over mid-sized boulders, implanted stone steps and roots protruding like a teenager’s knees. As the trail gets steeper, the wall fritters itself away, and at the junction to the Cliff Walk I stop to hydrate and munch trail mix. My perch is a rounded loaf of granite with a clear view to the south. The deep-green expanse goes for miles and miles and miles, broken only by blue, watery splotches and large buildings in clearings.

​I pick out the Bible Conference facility, built as a farmhouse in 1801 and christened The Ark for its huge size. Later it became an inn frequented by vacationing Monadnock lovers, including a certain Harvard professor. The July 11, 1952 issue of the Jaffrey Recorder and Monadnock Breeze contains an article about the guest register for The Ark in the summer of 1897. “Dr. and Madame George Howard Parker,” we learn, stayed for two and a half weeks and ran up a bill of $30.51, including room and board, use of hats ($1), a ride to Monadnock (76 cents) and a gallon of maple syrup ($1).  

Three questions. One, they couldn't bring their own hats? Two, they couldn’t walk to the mountain? Three, a buck for a gallon of maple syrup? A dollar in 1897 was worth 27 smackers today, so that’s still an excellent deal. In 2015 a gallon of grade B maple syrup goes for $55 on amazon.com. Maybe Parker got a special deal from The Ark’s sugar house for being such a muckety-muck. As for hoofing it to Monadnock, in subsequent summers the professor and the owner of the Ark, Joel Poole, together blazed a trail from the inn to what is now the current headquarters of Monadnock State Park, where the great majority of hikers decamp for trips up the White Cross and White Dot trails. In 1921 Poole built an auto road across his land to those trailheads and gave it to the state in memory of his son, Arthur, who died of pneumonia. 
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That road donation greatly improved access, opening up the mountain to the uncouth, unperfumed masses. Yes, the “defective classes” wanted their share of hiking fun and within decades Monadnock ceased to be a playground for wealthy and privileged Bostonians faux-roughing it at rustic hotels. The Halfway House, a prime destination for elites on the western flank of the mountain, burned down in 1954. The Ark stayed open until 1965, presumably still renting hats.    

A hawk caws. I watch it float, high on a thermal. Its wings barely move. A second hawk appears and they circle about each other, as if tethered. A fluttery wind plays across my granite seat and traffic murmurs far away. As I rest my bones, I notice faint touches of autumn amid the green. Maybe two percent of the tree cover has turned shades of red, yellow and brown. No, make that five percent. Actually, the longer I sit and look out, the more fall emerges, as if it’s progressing before my eyes…make that seven percent.

Oy, better get going before winter comes. I head up the Cliff Walk, which I traversed last month, and it’s drier this time and seems easier going. Are my spirits higher today? Is my old body having a random good day? I pause on Thoreau’s Seat and at Bald Rock and then cross onto the Smith Connecting Trail. The peak of Monadnock, suddenly, rears into view in all its beckoning solitude. Smith’s trail dips through a strip of thick woods and soon I’m climbing above tree line across slabs of granite with veins of white quartz like coagulated stone. On the White Cross Trail I meet my first fellow hikers of the day, a middle-aged woman guiding six spindly, string-bean boys, maybe nine or ten years old. She totes a pack bursting with lunches; the bean-boys bustle and bumble about her like squirrels. Squirrelly bean boys.
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One actually says, “Are we there yet?” Two babble nonsense about “marry-ja-wanna” and heroin. Another: “It feels like I’m in an airplane” Still another climbs up the side of a big cairn, constructed over years from hundreds of stones, and he’s got a rock in one hand and clearly intends to cherry-plant it. “No, no,” chides the woman, “that’s not safe.” He backs off and I jump in: “It’s bad karma to touch a cairn,” I instruct, “very bad luck.” Bean-boy behind me: “Really?” “Absolutely,” I continue, “very bad juju,” and now I’m the eight-foot-tall juju dude they’ll laugh about in the cafeteria tomorrow. “I don’t care because I don’t believe in that stuff,” states the thwarted climber. “I do,” asserts his companion because he really does or really wants to or can’t stop himself from saying night if the kid with the rock says day. Meanwhile, the poor woman-in-charge stares at me, hands on hips. I head up the trail.

About 36 people lounge about the peak; everyone’s having a good time, laughing and sharing cookies and looking out across the magnificent sky, across woods and rivers and hills and five New England states. It’s a rare day of ultimate visibility. There’s Mount Washington! (I think.) That quivery, sparkly line to the south – the Hancock Tower! To the east, the whitecaps of the Atlantic Ocean! To the west, the peaks of the Adirondacks and cornfields and prairies and the Rocky Mountains arising! To the north, ice shelves calving off Arctic glaciers… okay, I exaggerate a bit, but you can see a long, long way. 

I settle in for lunch and there’s mom with her toddler, changing his diaper. How’d they beat me up here? Must have taken a straight line, but still, impressive. Now the kiddo stumbles to a puddle and pats his palm on the surface; mom keeps a hand on him, gently, not constraining. There’s no wedding ring on her finger. Nearby, a couple of teenagers are eating Subway sandwiches and speaking in Japanese. I ask them if they’ve ever climbed Mt. Fuji in Japan. Yes, says the older one, brightening up, but he didn’t make it up top. We chat about Mt. Fuji’s trails and the tea houses and resting spots along the way, and I mention that it’s the second-most-climbed mountain in the world with Monadnock right behind. This they hadn't known. “Fuji is really crowded,” says the younger boy; on TV, he’s seen lines of people going up and down.
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“I’ve heard that,” I say, “but I still want to go there.”
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A man with a twangy voice (Texas?) calls the boys over. They gather on a boulder with several other teens, some Asian, some not. “Get closer together,” says the man, and he snaps photos with his phone. “Good work, lads,” he enthuses, and I notice a few smiles because it’s fun, I guess, to be called a lad. When they leave the peak, my new friends wave goodbye and the younger one, I’m not sure why, thanks me. I depart soon after, traveling downhill on the Pumpelly Trail, then Red Spot, then Cascade Link, then White Dot. On steep areas I hold my hiking poles in one hand, using the other to grab tree trunks and cracks in rock faces.

Halfway, I stop to tie my bootlaces and finish the water bottle – it's better to stay hydrated than save a bit. A small plane chutters by a couple thousand feet above. This causes me to wonder how much carbon I emitted during my trip to London two weeks ago. What’s my responsibility for climate change? And how did that flight compare to my eleven, and soon twelve, car trips back and forth from Somerville to Mount Monadnock during the past year?

The results are surprising. I would have thought that the CO2 exhalations from 2,000 miles of driving alone in a 1993 Toyota Camry would exceed one person's allotment from a 6,550-mile ride in a crowded plane. Not so, and not even close if you account for water vapor emissions (which trap heat) as well as the amplified effects of CO2 released at altitude, also known as radiative forcing. Therefore, a dozen trips to climb my great granite friend: .84 tons of carbon. One hop across the ocean and back: 3.27 tons. Cost of carbon offsets (carbonfund.org) for all these journeys: $42.17. Just pop in those 16 VISA numbers, plus expiration date. Renewable energy programs financed in India. Conscience cleared. 

There’s a problem, though. Carbon offsets, as the Brits say, are a bit dodgy. Yes, if properly executed, they make up for environmental misdeeds, adding good to the future in trade for bad in the past. But offsets cannot undo what’s been done. They should be considered, perhaps, a form of virtual repentance, of digital teshuvah. Sooner, and not later, we must stop offsetting our screw-ups and start doing better the first time around. 

​I’m still feeling strong and finish the hike at a brisk clip. Wouldn’t you know it, there’s mom and toddler again in the parking lot. Did they fly up and down? Chilling on a bench, the mountain-conquering child slurps at his sippy cup, legs kicking, while his mother fusses over the child carrier. Slurp, slurp, kick, kick, fuss, fuss. Life goes on.     

Conditions are dry and hot, about 90 degrees – in stark contrast to last month’s wet weather that had me slipping and sliding up and down the mountain. (Allow me to boast that I didn’t fall once today.) Turning off Route 124 into the parking area for the Old Toll Road, I notice a No Pipeline sign. This refers to a proposed natural gas pipeline that would transit rural communities from, according to nhpipelineawareness.org, “the fracking fields of PA to the gas hub in eastern MA.” The website paints a pretty dire picture – eminent domain takings, corporate hubris, exposure to accidents, lack of sustainability – but doesn’t once mention climate change, as in, hey, let’s leave the fossil fuels in the ground before we cook the world but good. Newsflash, as I write this: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announces that July, 2015 is the hottest month since the advent of record keeping in 1880.

And that’s no fluke – but I won’t bore you with stats. Numbers numb, say the communication honchos. Stories sell. Make ‘em cry, not think.  

The curly-haired ranger who takes my fiver and gives me a map of Monadnock has a tiny nose stud and a friendly manner. “Any dogs?” she asks, peering into the backseat. I shake my head. Do people really smuggle them in? She directs me to park next to a Subaru with a Trees Not Towers, No Northern Pass bumper sticker. Everyone’s against something, I guess: mothers-in-law, light beer, income inequality, transmission lines on steel towers bringing hydroelectricity from Quebec. I can’t get behind this one much: if we environmentalists want to smack climate change in the mouth, we can’t object to every form of producing and transmitting renewable energy that offends our eyes or, in the e-lingo, “compromises pristine viewsheds.”  

On the other hand, if those dread towers try to climb Monadnock…

And so, up the Old Toll Road. It’s mostly shaded, but my t-shirt gets soaked through in ten minutes. This sweaty male of the species takes a right onto the Parker Trail running east across the mountain, and the bugs make a coordinated attack. Liberal application of lotion works well except for the dive bombers buzzing my ears. I take an uphill left onto the Cliff Walk, marked by white C’s painted on rocks and plastic blazes nailed to tree trunks. The trail’s matted with aged oak leaves. After clambering up a log ladder, newly-hewn, I examine lacy moss, ivy, fungi and paint-box lichen. As if saying, hello mountain. Then I slap away, slap away, and finally kill a greenhead going for the vein on the back of my hand, and I feel bad about it. What a softie.

Today we ascend Monadnock from the north on the long, gradual Pumpelly Trail, three dauntless hikers hoofing nine miles up and back in a seamless shroud of cloud, and hold on there, you ask, what the heck is a Pumpelly?

In this case, it’s a Raphael Pumpelly (1837-1923), geology professor, archeologist, explorer (China, Turkmenistan) and beard grower extraordinaire. He “summered,” as the heedless rich say, in Dublin on the northern shore of the mountain, bestirring himself in 1884 to cut his namesake trail. In his autobiography, Pumpelly comments on Dublin’s pampered children – “When not on their ponies they spend their days exploring the mysteries of Monadnock” – and advises his Harvard-bound son to write a freshman theme about the “wild and rugged mass of Monadnock” by camping sunset to sunrise at its peak. There, counsels the old goat, “Watch the unfolding of the eternal drama that inspired religions of the ancient world,” faithfully record what you see and feel, and “don’t use similes.”

In honor of Raphael Pumpelly and his righteous beard, I pledge in this blog entry to work like a trio of Turkmen tinkerers to avoid similes. Alliteration – I make no promises.

My hiking companions are Russell, an old friend, and his girlfriend Bar. We meet at Timoleon’s “Family” Restaurant in Keene, west of Monadnock. I’d last eaten here maybe 20 years ago and the place seems frozen in time. I order two eggs over easy, home fries, toast and coffee, plus a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie for Russell. The damage – $6.10. My old favorite chicken croquettes with apple and “special” sauces is still on the menu – $5.50. On the back wall hangs an oil painting, Monadnock in Autumn by Helena N. Putnam, featuring a maple tree ablaze and Monadnock’s rocky nib in the distance.

Russell points to an autographed photo of Telly Savalas next to the pie cabinet. It’s young Telly, pre-Kojak, with no lollipop planted in his kisser, no scrawled “Who loves ya, baby?” Nearby sits a framed headshot of a guy with a fat, 1980s tie. “Who’s that?” I ask the man behind the counter who happens to be the 88-year-old owner of the restaurant, Timoleon Chakolos. “That’s Bob Clark,” he says. As in, who else would it be and were you born under a log? It seems Bob was a friend from the insurance agency down the street who came in all the time. A big eater? I ask. Long pause. “He did all right,” drawls Mr. Chakolos.     

It takes a while for me to find the trailhead. Bar seems distracted, perhaps skeptical of my competence, but we get started by mid-morning and it’s just us clomping along between tall trees, mossed-over rocks and promiscuous outbreaks of fern. The sky is white-on-white, the cloud bank low. Russell, a fit 60, is a former marathoner; Bar, an even fitter 62, once hiked the Appalachian Trail stem to stern, Georgia to Maine, and she’s contemplating another go, says Russell, “before the window closes.” Within minutes, she perks up. “It’s like a walk in the woods,” she says, and I wonder if she expected a paved trail clogged with tourists.

I’m impressed by their knowledge of flowers and birds – Bar, especially, who hears a ruffed grouse in the underbrush, ruffing and grousing about, and identifies a woodpecker as the fabled yellow-bellied sapsucker. I must admit to hearing no sucking of sap, nor do I spy a yellow belly on this industrious, red-masked fellow as he attacks bugs on a tree trunk, bunka, bunka, bunka, bunka. The Chirp! USA app on my iPod, however, soon confirms Bar as bird queen. About an hour in, Russell points out sheep laurel with its pendent clusters of red flowers and encapsulated fruit. Sheep laurel is especially toxic to, well, sheep, but it can also take down a human. Symptoms include headaches, diarrhea, sweating, excessive salivation, tingling skin, impaired coordination, green froth around the mouth, depression and recumbency (an inability to stand). Actually, I experience many of those conditions on a regular basis. Maybe someone is slipping sheep laurel into my salad.

On the first steep area, we encounter a trail crew of a dozen dirty, sweaty guys in their 20s and 30s, volunteering for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. With shovels and crowbars, they’re moving huge rocks to create a staircase and a water bar to ease erosion. Fixing the Pumpelly Trail, says one, should take about 15 years. Other than two hikers coming down and a gaggle of young folk scarfing Oreos just below the peak, these are the only people we meet on the way up.   

Blueberries! Blueberries! The tiny fruit – some dusky blue, others green and pinkish – congregate on low bushes. The taste of blueberry is faint with even the ripest ones, so I shovel several into my mouth to get a good blueberry boil going. And onward we tromp into the loitering mist – not a scrap of sun or blue sky – as Russell and I reminisce about our year (1989?) working together at Campus Crossroads, a company hired by small colleges to get them big publicity. It’s fun to respin the tale of my epic efforts to gain media coverage for the Rat Olympics at Kalamazoo College, and I mean actual rats trained by actual psychology students to run steeplechase and dive from platforms. Then Russell, a skillful writer, tells me about his new book project on gardening in the time of climate change, and I can’t help but worry when I hear that he’s bravely turned down a book contract because the publisher wanted him to exclude personal experiences tending his garden. 

Are you sure? Yes, he says. The personal, that’s the whole point of it. And he’s right – how we make our way through this changing world as we ourselves are changing, absolutely, that is the point. But many people don’t agree. And onward we tromp.     

Above tree line, visibility recedes to 15 yards in every direction (except down, where it’s less). It’s okay, though, because Raphael Pumpelly’s trail is now marked by huge, unmistakable cairns, rock pyramids as big as…sorry, no similes today…they were really big, these piles of rocks, and then, whoosh, whomp, my first fall of the day. Down on my butt, nothing fancy. The granite slabs underfoot are slick and glistening with cloud vapor, so on this final stretch across Monadnock’s bald top I strive to securely plant my boots’ thick soles. (I’ve been breaking in a new pair, the Vasque Breeze 2.0 GTX – comfortable, no blisters yet.) After passing the aforementioned kids mainlining Oreos, we make our slipping scramble to the peak where, remarkably, a crowd has gathered. 

“It’s like spending a week in the Provincetown dunes,” says Russell, “and then going into town.” Fortunately, no one’s clutching plastic shopping bags or licking ice cream cones, praise be to the mountain gods, but it is a bit of a jostle moving through 30 or so happy souls swept up here from tributary trails. I show my hiking buddies where to tap their poles on the geodesic plaques as per LaCroix tradition. They oblige. We stare out. The view from the summit is absolutely…nothing but white. White, everywhere. No fields, mountains, glints of city and sea. We’re socked-in and cloud surrounded, north, west, south, east and up.  

White as…  

What would young Pumpelly have written for his freshman theme if he’d spent the night in this cottony soup? What melancholy screed might have poured from his fountain pen? For myself, I like the change-of-pace sensation, the way the mist leaves expectations utterly unfulfilled. Perspective is obscured in this place and, if not for the memory of three-plus hours of climbing, I might believe that we’ve wandered onto a sea-level jetty or inside a Hollywood sound stage with fog and wind machines churning and extras fake-celebrating. It could be one of those am-I-dreaming-or-in-heaven scenes and here comes the executive angel or G-d himself, looking very much like Morgan Freeman.

Without visual cues, there’s no way to know that we’re 3,165 feet above sea level on a lone mountain in New England. I suppose a smart phone with GPS could provide confirmation, if I had one, or maybe Bar could identify the call of a bird that only lives at altitude. If I were Mark Twain, as related in his travel tale Ascending the Riffelberg, I’d direct my porters to start a fire, lay on a cauldron of water and boil thermometers. As we’ve all learned and forgotten, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, but the boiling point is reduced by about one degree for each 500-feet increase in elevation. So here atop my great granite friend, a boiled thermometer should read about 196 degrees.

Or I can just take it on faith.

Lunchtime. Russell gobbles a peanut butter-and-raisin sandwich so overstuffed it resembles a burrito, Bar picks at leftover chicken and roasted veggies, and I scarf an apple, trail mix, crackers and two PB&Js. Then we head down. And I start falling. First my feet slip on a slick, steep slab and I roll ridiculously into a narrow gorge. No problem, I meant to do that. Then, minutes later, I slide off another wet rock and land ludicrously in a patch of heather, flat on my back, arms spread, poles akimbo. Russell can’t help chuckling and praises my choice of destination. Bar looks perturbed – what’s wrong with this guy? – or perhaps it’s because we’re on the wrong trail by mistake and need to go back up. On the brief re-ascent, I can’t remember feeling so shaky, so klutzy on Monadnock. I did brush my hand across that sheep laurel – enough to catch a bout of recumbency? Is green froth around the mouth next?

Before long we find the Pumpelly Trail and make good time on the descent, when not falling. Now Russell has taken up this time-honored tribute to gravity. Booink, whoosh, splat! Don’t worry, I say, you’re still three falls behind me. He resumes more cautiously, and all’s well until he slips down an embankment. Blood streams from Russell’s elbows, which he employed as dirt-breaks. Bar, blessed with balance and shortness, apparently never falls. Or hops up so quickly we don’t notice. “Oh, you boys,” she says, and whips a first aid kit from her pack. Out come ointment, rolls of white medical tape and great gobs of gauze, and in a jiffy Russell’s wounds are wound up. It’s kind of sweet, watching her attend to her man. Then she scurries far ahead on the trail because, after all, how much of this nonsense can a veteran AT thru-hiker take?

Now and then, however, we come upon her relaxing on a rock. She gives us the gimlet eye, searching for fresh, running blood or protuberant bones. At one juncture, she points out the trilling call of the Rufous-sided towhee. “Drink your tea,” it insists, “drink your tea.” About halfway down the mountain, we three witness the day’s only break in the cloud pack. A wind shearing across Monadnock’s northern shoulder rips a ragged hole in the haze and – look, there it is! – we glimpse the world below: green fields, slate-blue lakes and forests running to forever. Here and there, a black river of road or hillside mansion. This unveiling lasts at best a few minutes – celestial reward for our perseverance, I fantasize – and then the wind fades and the show closes. Cloud re-engulfs our side of the mountain.

Soon Pumpelly levels off and the conversation turns to the challenges of being fathers to adult children – especially, as in our cases, when divorce and its never-ending ramifications complicate matters. To say the least. “It’s a process,” Russell says, and I agree, and isn’t that the way whether you’ve got a bird’s eye view for a hundred miles with all the comforting clarity that comes with that, a view as reassuring as a well-hewn simile, or if you’re hiking into cloudy whiteness and witnessing trees, cairns, hikers and birds appear and disappear from thin air, as if conjured. It’s an unpredictable process, a fumbling forward, whether you’re climbing on dry trail or slip-sliding away.    

For the last quarter-hour, Russell and I carry two big rocks that he wants to bring home for his climate-changed garden. “I can look at them,” he says, “and know where they came from.” Bar’s waiting at the bottom, smiling; when we part for the day, she surprises me with a big hug. Their car turns around on the gravel road, disappears, and I change into sandals and commence itching an awful scrape on my left calf, a divot of dirt and blood.

Tomorrow I will ache. But today, it’s another great day on the mountain.      

It’s in the 70s, a light wind. The sun peeks out now and then, but keeps going back for cloud naps, and the trail is wide and rocky. In this former sheep pasture gone to woods, Elahna assumes the lead, her long legs gobbling up ground. Birdsong above: all gossipy trills and warbling news reports. Our conversation babbles along, too, resting upon her days as a resident, many moons ago, when she applied for a fellowship with a Harvard hospital. Some muckety-muck called her up and asked if she would say yes if they offered her the position. “That’s when I knew what I was getting into,” she says. Yes, she responded, I would. Then the offer was made. And then she accepted.

We sit on a rock and munch Trader Joe’s trail mix. A couple dozen women in their 20s come up the trail, speaking in foreign accents and wearing sneakers in green, yellow and orange fluorescent colors. I ask one of them, a tall blonde, if they’re a group. Yes, she informs us, they are au pairs. “A day off from the noisy kids,” I call out to the nannies as they trip by, and there’s much nodding and laughter. “And from the demanding mothers,” says Elahna – more laughter and zippy comments. “And from the grabby dads,” I almost chime in, but think better of it.

You know, I say to my wife, these candy-covered chocolate discs in the trail mix have thicker shells than M&Ms. Probably to forestall crushing and melting in the great outdoors. She tries one; well, maybe. Definitely, I counter, and vow to take two baggies of trail mix on my next hike in July, one with real M&Ms and one with Trader Joe’s variety. Elahna advises me to augment my field test with a laboratory experiment. Put a handful of M&Ms in the microwave, nuke for 20 seconds, then check for mushiness and cracks in the shells. Repeat with the TJ generics, 20 seconds, compare…

Spring has sprung but good up here. Spruce branches are growing fat, yellowy tips – “Evergreen expansion pods,” states Elahna – and we come across smatterings of white flowers, like miniature daisies, and red flowers in clusters on shrubs. Hard green berries grow on a vine, promises, promises. On a sloping rock shelf I photograph a single white flower – reminiscent of magnolia, but not – set in a bed of leaves. And then I look up – wow, just look at that! The hills and valleys to the west are a rhapsody in green, sunlit, shadowed, rolling to a hazy turquoise horizon.   

Near the turnoff to the Marian Trail, we visit the Rock House; it’s basically two granite slabs tilted into the mountain to create a rough enclosure. Here, every autumn, students of Dublin’s Mountain Shadow School perform an opera recounting Monadnock’s history, and there's parts for Emerson, Thoreau and the wolves driven away by the great fire of 1820 that rendered the peak bald as an eagle. As we loiter, a couple of noisy kids go bumping downhill, liquid limbs gangling, the boy manic, the girl licking some plastiky treat, and they’re followed by two haggard, clearly peeved adults. Presumably, the parents. I want to stop them and say, hey, relax, have fun. Cherish these moments. Blink and your children are grown up and living in Pittsburgh. And besides, no one made you drag the little devils up here, right?

Guilt, says Elahna, guilt made them do it.

She gives me three kisses and resumes. The trail is steeper now, and rockier, and we traverse first a granite extrusion that looks like a dinosaur spine and then a rock projectile that resembles an enormous water droplet/pointy breast/spilled ice cream cone (you choose). Mosquitoes release from their lairs and swarm about our ankles. Elahna’s getting cranky as she searches for hand and foot holds – “I don’t know how the short people do it,” she mumbles” – and then, “Owww!” What’s wrong? It seems my wife has twisted her ankle – a “forward twist,” she testifies – and she takes off her boot and puts on an ankle sleeve from her day pack. Once we resume, she banishes the twinges with a song about a rogue meatball, to the tune of “On Top of Old Smoky.”

On top of spaghetti, all covered in cheese

I lost my poor meatball, when somebody sneezed

It rolled off the table and onto the floor

And then my poor meatball rolled out the door…  
 
Eventually the meatball goes mush under a bush. Things, alas, fall apart. A couple of years ago, Elahna and I hiked for a few days on the Appalachian Trail and when her knees started aching she sang the entire score from The Sound of Music.

Soon we’re above Monadnock’s tree line, scrambling across swathes of bare rock. My wife reports ankle pain reduction and we diverge onto the Dublin Trail and from there spy the peak, where dozens of hikers congregate. Their voices tumble down. “Sounds like a cocktail party,” says Elahna, and, yes, I’m only reporting her snappy comments, not the boring or indecipherable ones. Not her soliloquies on coffee prices and Pluto's unjust demotion.   

We reach the top – a journey of almost three hours – and tap, tap our hiking poles on a geodetic plaque. Then we smooch and I congratulate her. It’s windy here, and brisk, and after gazing out at this glorious wraparound view of the world, at the endlessly interacting expanse of land and sky, and then down at the loyal mountain supporting our feet, we find a cozy spot facing north for lunch. PB&J sandwiches, apples. Then, unbidden, a woman with a Garmin smartwatch/fitness tracker strapped to her wrist asks to take our picture.  

But why, I respond, as I hand over my iPod. “Because you guys,” she says, “look like you actually like each other.” The photo, wouldn’t you know, comes out dark and grainy. Elahna tells her that today we’ve observed parents who don’t appear to enjoy their kids. “I like mine,” she responds, pointing to a smiling young lady, maybe nineteen, standing nearby. “But she’s grown through it,” says Elahna. “She’s a human being.”

A few minutes later, my wife asks if I’ve made dinner reservations to celebrate our fifth anniversary. Oh, I say, did I volunteer for that? Yes, she says, in fact you did. Well, I haven’t gotten to it yet, I admit, but it shouldn’t be a problem on a Monday night. Where would you like to eat? Anywhere, she replies, it’s up to you. More minutes pass and she turns to me: “Why does the guy want the sheep to begin with? What the hell is he going to do with the sheep?” An excellent question, indeed. What the hell is that mathematical biologist going to do with the sheep? Keep it in his condo? Sign it up for SAT prep classes? Dip it and shear it and knit a sweater? Maybe, if not for the cagey shepherd, he’d have it divided into mutton chops for the annual mathematical biology department barbecue.

A while later I chat up a young man and his girlfriend. He’s got a small solar panel hanging from his day pack. It’s the Goal Zero Nomad 7, 13.5 ounces, foldable, and he uses it to charge his phone in the wild. Can it heat a stove? I ask. He laughs, says it works for anything with a USB. How ‘bout a blender, chimes in Elahna, for daiquiris. Now the girlfriend laughs; she’d like to be drinking a daiquiri right now, I suspect, in a Mexican restaurant. In Cancun.

When they move on, I inform Elahna that I want one of those super-nifty solar panels for hiking Israel. Her eyes widen. “I’ve only been telling you that for six months,” she retorts. Has she? Hmm, maybe she has.      

After Elahna takes a snooze – she can nap anywhere, a trick picked up in residency – we head down the mountain. The wind has picked up, the sky is darkening. “Honey, I’ve got a thorn that’s gone right through my jeans,” Elahna announces, a bit whiny, and then on a steep section, oy vey, she twists the other ankle. So she stops, switches the wrap from one tender ankle to the other, and keeps going. My baby, she does what she’s gotta do. It’s not long before she goes off trail to use her GoGirl, an ingenious device that allows a woman to pee standing up like a man. “Did you write your name on a rock?” I ask. She smirks, no answer.

Our final encounter is with a middle-aged couple going up. He wears an Employee of the Month t-shirt (“I’m self-employed,” he jokes) and a cap advertising the National Rifle Association, perhaps the most uncompromising, uncooperative single-issue group on the planet. It seems a violation to wear those hard letters on this unspoiled commons, this place of mutual striving and enjoyment. Behind him trails a woman (wife? sister? hostage?) crowned with an “I’ve Got Issues” cap. “I get the whiners award,” she yells, and claims to climb Monadnock every year. “You should try it every month,” I tease, and she growls, “Not from Manhattan.” Then she demands to know if we carry those energy gel packs. No, but we’ll share our trail mix. She waves us off, not good enough.    

Near the bottom, the trail levels off and our pace quickens. I stop only to examine a fungal colony on a boulder, each fungus shaped like a tiny bat wing, black on one side, brown on the other. They’re bunched close, not touching, and I run my fingers gently across them; they feel stiff, but bend with a little pressure. They survive that way. We make the car before the sky, now darkly overcast, breaks open. I drive through rain. My wife sleeps most of the way back to Boston.

And really, you have to wonder. What the hell was he going to do with that sheep?  

It's been 36 days since my last climb, a generous dose of time for winter to have unlocked on Monadnock, for sleepy spring to have swung its legs off the bed, and I set my compass to the Dublin Trail on the northwest side of the mountain and set off.  

At the Alewife Traffic Tangle in Cambridge, however, I return home because I’ve forgotten the elastic wraps for my surgically repaired knee and Achilles’ tendon; alas, my street is blocked off. I park a quarter-mile away and walk past five Eversource Energy workers watching one worker dig inside a square hole in the middle of the street, and if I were a free-market loving, cult-of-productivity curmudgeon I’d say, see, that’s what you get with union workers, but instead I choose to believe that it’s break time for everyone around the world except for this probationary digger, or maybe nothing can proceed until some thingamabob is unearthed and, besides, how many round men can fit in a square hole? And didn’t the company waste a bundle rebranding itself from NStar to beneficent Eversource?  

At the house I call my mom. Mims fell a couple days ago and now struggles to get out of chairs and circumvent her apartment, no less steer her walker to the mailboxes or dining room at her “independent living” facility. I’ve arranged for aides to bring her lunch and dinner until she regains strength, but she insists they didn’t come yesterday and doesn’t want lunch anyway, so I call Janice, the nice lady in Home Support, who reports that the aides did, in fact, show up. Complicating matters, the fall may have resulted from weakness brought on by a bladder infection to be confirmed by urinalysis. Infections can render the elderly fuzzier and more forgetful than usual, which probably explains the differing stories, although Mims has never shied from telling “white lies” to effect desired outcomes.

I should do something, right? So I call her primary care doctor, the wonderful Jennifer Tam – several times I’ve assured my mother that Dr. Tam can afford a nanny to care for her children while she works – and leave a message. Then I take a deep breath and get back on the road.  

Halfway to New Hampshire, I notice a message from Dr. Tam on my cell; I guess I didn’t hear the ringing while Stevie Nicks crooned from the oldies station. The urinalysis is still out but she’s decided to “bite the bullet” and write a prescription for an antibiotic. So it occurs to me that I should turn the car around, drive two hours south, pick up the Cipro at the pharmacy, and deliver it to Mims today. Be the Good Son. Or I can hike Mount Monadnock and get the medicine tomorrow. Automatic Rationalization kicks in – what’s another day, she might not even have an infection, I’ve got to take care of myself sometimes, this is minor league baseball compared to her hip surgery, anemia, seizure from hydrocephalus, flu bout, collapsed lung and subcutaneous emphysema – but that only makes it worse.

I crank the radio, nuke the guilt. I keep going north.   

In Marlboro, New Hampshire, I’m lost. At a food truck, from a man cradling a hot dog camouflaged in sauerkraut, I get directions that take me to the Dublin Lake Club. In 1940, members of this exclusive private golf club – mostly summering New Yorkers and Bostonians; Cabots and Lodges and that lot – squashed a plan to run a paved road from the village of Dublin to the peak of Monadnock, an abomination that would have brought extra riffraff to their side of the mountain. Good for them, even if their motivations were more elitist than ecological. In the club’s parking lot, an old woman pulls a wheeled golf bag from the trunk of her car – oh my G-d, that could be my mom just ten years ago. She golfed at two country clubs into her eighties and then old age came fast and hard, bitch-slapped her. From here I take the unpaved Old Troy Road a couple miles through thick, shady woods and join six cars parked at the trailhead. Birds are madly tweeting, the self-serve pay station is out of envelopes, and I’m underway by 12:40 p.m.

It’s 75 degrees on the Dublin Trail. The canopy of spruce and maple trees nearly shuts out the sky crowded with puffy clouds. Bugs buzz, the first of the year, and ants patrol a boulder. At first the trail is flat and rolling, all rocks and roots, and, weirdly, it isn’t marked by paint blazes but by rectangles of metal the size of electrical plates loosely nailed to tree trunks. I don’t like this, no sir, don’t like anything man-made or unMonadnockian in my way. I stop at a klatch of five gossiping birches in the middle of the trail and call Mims, telling her that I’ll arrive with antibiotics tomorrow morning, first thing, and our conversation is a staccato mess as she inveighs against the lunch delivery and we go back and forth and all around about what’s happening when, why and by whom. 

“Hey, guess what?” I say. “I’m standing in a grove of birch trees on Mount Monadnock. It’s beautiful.”      

A long pause.

“That’s good,” she says, “you enjoy yourself.” Her voice has perked up, emerged from the disputatious fog and everyday humiliations of advanced age, and she’s my mother again caring for my happiness, reminding me to live. “You enjoy yourself today.”

Soon the way grows steeper and sweat soaks my t-shirt as I indulge, against maternal orders, in thoughts of Mims’ next chapter: a parade of aides with names she can’t pronounce or remember, long days in beds and chairs, chronic pain, confusion, constant TV and a new facility with smaller rooms and privacy served as thin luxury. Or will she die next month?

A couple of teens, probably tenth graders, come down the trail. The girl has jet-black hair cut in a jazzy bob and chirps a birdy “Hi.” Her companion is well over six feet tall and hikes in size-12, bare feet that slop gracefully from granite stone to stone. “He’s a hobbit,” I comment, and the girl loves this. “Yes,” she says, “you’re Bilbo!” The boy will have none of it. “I’m Frodo,” he says. “You shall call me Frodo.” And they disappear downhill. He’s Frodo before the Ring, I think to myself. Frodo Untroubled. Frodo of the Shire.   

The trail, I notice now, is lined with patches of moss, baby ferns and striving saplings, and as I go higher the mountain seems to get mossier, fernier and more striving. The forest canopy is sun-shimmered, glowing a brilliant green. At the tree line the view westward is a fantastic, undulating meadow of green rolling to Vermont and beyond, and just a little higher I come across the year's first Monadnock flowers blazing purple on low bushes. Quick stepping, I encounter rock cairns and a crumpled Budweiser can next to a pile of orange peels, as well as pinkish-white flowers in rock divots. The summit's made by 2:40, a two-hour ascension. Of course, I tap my hiking pole on one of the geodetic plaques – tradition! Eight or nine other human beings have joined me on this exclusive spot – five bucks and working legs are the only entrance fees – including a young couple who ask this stranger to take their photo and then rush to their day packs. “C’mon, let’s crush those sandwiches,” he says to her. Excellent idea – I find a crevice facing north and commence crushing mine. 

On the way down, a black-bearded man appears on the trail. He, too, is hiking in bare feet, but his boots are tied to his back. “Excuse me,” I say, “when did you take off your boots?” He explains in a soft, Russian accent that he goes barefoot all the way up, then wears boots on the descent. I must look perplexed, because he jams his hands together in explanation. “So I don’t…” he says, and seems at a loss. “Stub your toe?” I offer, and he nods slightly. “It feels good,” he tells me about the crazy practice of climbing a mountain without shoes or socks. “You should try it.” I wave goodbye, and we part. But should I, really? Must bare feet touch rock, flesh grip granite, to know it? Must I scrape and bleed and wince to speak to the mountain? Maybe so – after all, that bird on the peak wasn’t wearing Merrell Moab Ventilator boots. Those moths tumbled naked. So all this gear I’ve amassed to brave my climbs – useless now? Junk to be stripped away, let go…   

A half-hour later, I come upon an ascending couple in their twenties; he’s beefy in white t-shirt with slicked-back hair, she’s sturdy and buxom in purple sleeveless top and tight shorts. I stand atop a knob of granite, thirty feet above the pair, and hear her exclaim, “Your girlfriend, she must be some kind of fitness freak.” He: ‘Yeah, she goes to the gym like six times a week.” She, derisively: “She’s tiny.” He: “Yeah, a buck twenty.” They stop and look up at me. Between us slopes an expanse of boulders, trees and shrubs.

“Which way should we go?” she hollers. Not nicely. Hand on hips, demanding. I retort, “It’s all good. Just pick one.” No, it’s not all good for Ms. Congeniality. She maintains her pose, stares, and I try again: “Go to your right for about ten yards, then cut back to the middle.” This she does, exactly so, and he follows at her smoking heels; no one says thank you, oh wise mountain man. Recklessly, I slide down a steep boulder to avoid them.

An hour later, at the base of Monadnock where 19th century sheep reigned on rocky pasture, I notice old stone walls that weren’t there before. Ghost stones? More likely, there’s no limit to what a preoccupied mind can miss – and, whoosh, a chipmunk scoots across the trail with an acorn in his mouth. A nut as big as his head, lucky guy! He’s got white racing stripes on his fur, and, double-whoosh, he’s gone. At the trailhead parking area, I change into sandals and drive away down the Old Troy Road to the Dublin Lake Club where the wealthy cavort to the Old Marlboro Road to Charcoal Road to the highway.  

Yes, I’ve enjoyed myself. Tomorrow morning I’ll bring a bottle of pills to my mom.    

I’m ten minutes from Mount Monadnock in my mother-in-law’s 1994 Toyota Corolla and one of those mobile signage contraptions with the black letters – in New Hampshire they tend to spell out Meat Raffle or Praise the Lord – has been rolled in front of the United Church of Jaffrey. Today we learn: Life Is A Gift. Indeed, yes. I believe this. Life’s not a curse, not a things-to-do list and not simply better than the alternative. It’s a gift. My wife, Elahna, often gives me a kiss as she rises in the morning and whispers, “Every day is a gift.”

But some gifts are ugly ties and slice-o-matics, and some climbs up Monadnock aren’t worth blogging home about. April’s hike had its moments, sure, and I was glad to explore trails on the mountain’s eastern flank, but the day was mostly this: chilly, cloudy and muddy. My hat and gloves got soaked with sweat. My right knee ached, I wasted 45 minutes wandering around Gilson Pond looking for the trailhead and I saw but five sentient creatures – four humans and a shy chipmunk. Most distressingly, I didn’t feel empowered by the looming prospect and, then, the magnificent sight of the mountain peak; joy avoided my heart as I made the chilly-cloudy-muddy ascent; alas, it was a meh climb, but I got it done.  

So, bear with me, this won’t take too long. And there’s some merit in field-testing the gift hypothesis, right?

I park next to a snow bank in the Gilson Pond parking lot and it starts to hail. Teeny-tiny white balls bounce off the Corolla’s hood. Winter’s cleaning out her junk drawer. I set out and stupidly march past the turnoff to the Birchtoft Trail – marked only by a huge sign – because I’m musing on the hot dog sandwiches I chowed down as a boy. You see, several split logs lay across a muddy area and, bizarrely, they remind me of the boiled dogs that I long ago sliced open, drenched in A&P catsup and shoved between white bread. Disgusting, but I liked it.

A nice moment: I watch a ruffling of white-water move across the pond’s surface – a tide of some sort, a squad of fish? No, it’s the visible manifestation of a gust of wind, and I stand and wait as the ruffling come closer, and there it is, cool upon my cheeks, and then gone.

Up Birchtoft I go – birches, actually, are a minority tree in this oak and pine forest, huddled in groups of two or three, a few solo acts in corners – and the mud-creased trails get me thinking about my mother’s invocation back in the day. “Keep this up,” she’d say to her unruly children, “and your name will be mud.” Our names, it’s crucial to note, never actually became mud; her words served as a perennial threat to counter anti-social behavior. I took it to mean that a dire stain could somehow, magically, by parental or divine fiat, be visited upon my measly self, but I didn’t consider the name part much. So I do now: why ground wet dirt into my very name, as if to cover or even erase it?   

LaCroix means “the cross” in French. It’s an odd name for a Jew, certainly, even for this converted one; at a conference of Jewish learning, a fellow with a knitted kippa squinted at my name tag and remarked that LaCroix was a “hell of a statement.” Of course my name is not a statement of any kind, not about my spiritual life or the Crucifixion or the constellation in the northern sky or the crossroads at the heart of every hometown, but it is a record of family behavior and movement. In fact, LaCroix was frequently acquired as a dit, or alias, by Europeans on the lam from the law or various persecutions. So my real name on my father’s side may have become mud out of necessity or desperation. LaCroix could be a cover story. There’s something very Jewish about that, I think.  

About a mile up, the trees begin to bloom snow. The trunks and branches are snow dusted only on their sides facing east, away from the summit. Wind patterns, the sun’s track? I sit and drink water and chat on the phone with my daughter Kelsey in Pittsburgh. We’d had an argument a week ago – a rare occurrence; I strive to keep conversations with my out-of-state daughter productive, upbeat – and it’s good now to talk casually, to reassure each other that all is okay. Then the sun, hello, peeks out and within minutes clumps of snow begin to fall from the high boughs. Bam, boom, smash! Melty mush crashes to earth. Delicate snowflakes that descended in February now coalesce and take an April suicide dive. Bam, boom, smash! The forest sheds the last shreds of winter.

Soon I’m walking again, and beside me a stone wall undulates into a ravine and back up the other side. A stone snake, very cool. It’s thickly built, collapsing – is there a subterranean wall, a mirror image, sunk into the earth? It probably stood three or four feet high in sheep-farming days. The forest is sparsely wooded here, branches as bare as trunks, the ground tree-to-tree carpeted with crunchy, light-brown leaves that emit a nutty aroma as I churn through. Abruptly the wall ends, as if the farmer got tired lugging rocks and went home, and the way devolves into a muddy stream. I pick along the sides of the trail but can’t prevent my left foot from getting soaked to the sock, skin and bone.  

I stop, look up: no vista, nothing but woods ascending. Not once on this dank day have I seen Monadnock’s spire. Indeed this is a furtive approach to my old friend, without fanfare or visible incentive. I’m the annoying neighbor dropping in by the side yard.   

Crossing the Cascade Link Trail, which runs north-south, I continue to the summit on the Red Spot Trail – marked, you guessed it, by white-encircled red spots on boulders. Thirty yards up a cliff wall, a small waterfall churns, shush, shush, and just a few feet to the right clings a huge burl of ice existing outside, I suppose, the arc of the sun. Poetess Amy Lowell understood this kind of juxtaposition: Thou standest, bright with April's buoyancy, she wrote in “Monadnock in Early Spring” (1912).  Yet holding Winter in some shaded wall /Of stern, steep rock…

Nothing blooms yet. Curled-up oak leaves, paper-thin, stubbornly cling to branches. I scan for the Doric Temple, a rock formation that’s said to resemble a Greek temple – nope, not here, not today. Maybe it’s a figment of a professor’s imagination, a hiker’s trick. There is, however, a cavern between boulders that looks just right for a bear den. The opening is triangular, like a rock tepee, and half shrouded by tree limbs. Should I creep closer? Maybe take a peak, toss in a pine cone? Nope, not today, not feeling adventurous.

My head brushes a pine bough and a pint of slushy snow ripples down my neck, between coat and t-shirt. Instantly, I remember my older brother Chris harassing me at the bus stop at the top of Wendy Lane, 45 years ago. He lured me beneath a snow-burdened bough, stepped aside and shook the branch. I yelped; he cackled. Hilarious. If my mother had witnessed the scene, she might have intoned: keep that up, mister, and your name is mud. And Chris would have smirked.

Above the tree line, I cross onto the Pumpelly Trail and, finally, see the peak. Monadnock is a gray, unforgiving lady today: gray rocks on gray sky. Streaks of stubborn snow. I’ve climbed in hopes for spring on the mountain – just a flower or two, a baby robin here, a fiddlehead uncurling there – but my impatience has been exposed. Monadnock shrugs, doesn’t care. As Lowell wrote: Another year is quick with import. Such each year has been. Unmoved thou watchest all. Dutifully, I pick up the pace, high-stepping across boulders dabbed with lime-green lichen the size of thumbprints, and I make it to the top and tap my hiking pole on the Geodetic Survey plaque. A freezing-cold wind bites me back. Ah, well. And there I meet my first fellow travelers, huddled against the cold.

They sit, hip to hip, shivering. He’s fourteen, she’s a bit younger maybe. He wears a backwards ball cap and she sports white earmuffs from an attic trunk. Light coats, sneakers, no gloves. She sips from a straw in a plastic thingy, he shovels chips from a crinkly bag. I greet them and mention the absence of gloves. Their response: hey, it’s springtime. Who knew? They smile all silly-like. Surely this is one of those crazy couple stories they’ll curate as long as they’re together. (Fifth period, next Monday?)

I stand apart. A swatch of trees at the mountain’s base betrays a deep, crimson cast, as if blood has come to the surface. As if winter’s bruise has emerged. To the west, beyond dark pine groves, a funnel cloud dumps slushy, white stuff.  The cloud appears frayed, disintegrating, although some fractal architecture, some purposeful geometry undergirds it all – and more to the point it’s moving toward me, up the mountainside. On most days I’d smile and set my feet and arch my back and let the weather roll past, let it scrub my troubles free. I’d embrace every little adventure coming my way.   

But not today – today I spurn the offering. I turn and go back down.     

Near the tree line, I’m hailed by a middle-aged man with a German accent. He’s standing on a stack of granite about 25 yards away. “How do we get to the summit?” he calls. It’s kind of amusing, actually, since the peak is right there in full view, towering over us. Going from A to B, though, is rarely a straight-ahead business – in mountain climbing and life – and I point out a route around a gully jammed with dormant shrubbery. Then curl back from the north on the Pumpelly Trail, I say, and you’re there. “Thank you,” hollers the German, as if I’d done something wonderful, and now a younger man – his son? – appears. “How long?” he asks. No accent marks him. Hmm, should I lie? “Ten minutes,” I say. Then: “Well, maybe fifteen.”  

And I clamber down Monadnock, mucking through mud and slipping and catching myself on bendy saplings. The knee still aches. That chipmunk I mentioned pops up, dashes away. Maybe he doesn’t like my attitude; maybe he’s having a droopy day, too. The sun condescends to say hello again, catalyzing another round of winter shedding. Bam, boom, smash! Snowy bombs away! It’s Kurt Vonnegut’s season of unlocking in action. The author, whose books I gobbled like potato chips as a teen, believed that the four-season model was a poor fit for northern climes, leading to ritualistic disappointment and depression. For instance, spring as we understand it rarely arrives in March. In a commencement address at Fredonia State University of New York, he proposed a six-season superstructure: Winter (January-February), Unlocking (March-April), Spring (May-June), Summer (July-August), Autumn (September-October) and Locking (November-December).

Vonnegut’s six-season corrective, second in brilliance to his accidental annihilator Ice-nine in Cat’s Cradle, has little chance of being adopted by our gridlocked Congress. But it would encourage more realistic attitudes. For instance, if this was the season of Unlocking, I mightn’t have come to the mountain wishing for blue birds and pink blooms, and I mightn’t have fallen into funkdom upon finding only brown-ribbed fungus on a rotting log.     

I make it down. The car’s there, alone in the lot, and it starts up. The sky fails to dump more hail shavings as I change from soaked boots to sneaks. Hooray! These are all good things. Occasions, even, for gratitude. My desultory day on Monadnock, however, leaks into the next. I awake with a sore right hand, swollen from knuckles to wrist. It hurts to extend my fingers. And the thing is, I don’t remember smashing my hand – wouldn’t my brain have registered the pain? Perhaps I whacked it on a tree trunk or boulder during an inglorious, distracting wipeout. And now, ten days later, it’s not much better. I can barely type – poor, poor me. Has one of the 27 hand bones, let’s say the third metacarpal, broken? 

Or maybe I’m unlocking, just like the mountain, like the world, and in the slow, agonizing progress from winter to spring a few bits and pieces are bound to go gonzo at my age. It’ll heal, soon enough. I’ll be back up in real spring – blue birds and pink blooms prepare! Get ready to see who’s more alive and kicking.

Every day is a gift.     

 

This month I start from the quiet, southwest side of Mount Monadnock. The trailhead is served by a circular driveway crammed with about 20 cars, and the ranger’s booth sits empty. So I pocket my fiver: free climb today. Ducking under the one-armed gate to the Old Toll Road, I get underway full of vim, vigor and old-time moxie, the air bracing on my cheeks, the sky dark-blue as the “dungarees” I wore as a child. A coming-down-the-mountain codger hails “Nice day!” “Perfect!” I respond, and moments later I divert onto the Old Halfway House Trail and meander through wintry woods.

The trail is packed snow, with the occasional boot-shaped hole running a couple feet deep. To my left lay the remnants of a stone wall, the former boundary between meadows that existed here between forest eras. Branches have fallen across these tumbled, snow-crusted rocks, making handy bridges for mice and chipmunks. I snap a photo because, well, I’m not sure why. It’s pretty, but lots of things are pretty. What are the criteria for framing, shooting, downloading and blog-posting vs. just walking by? Can’t I remember on my own?

A mile along, the trail is closed due to erosion and I veer back onto the Old Toll Road. Four middle-aged women pass by, laughing like crazy. What’s so funny? I almost ask. Maybe it’s a girl thing, maybe I don’t want to know, and at the end of the road I sweep powdery snow from a rock and sit down to tighten my shoelaces. The wind whistles faintly, or is that faraway traffic? Air through birch and maple groves, through iron pipes and cardboard filters…

Behind me, at 2,050 feet, there’s a large, stone house with “Keep Out” and “No Hunting or Fishing” signs guarding the driveway. Another sign closer to the private residence reads “The Hermitage” – like the museum in St. Petersburg or the asteroid discovered by the Russian astronomer Lyudmila Ivanova Chernykh (Wikipedia rocks!) or the hotel in Nashville where suffragettes in 1920 successfully lobbied the Tennessee legislature to pass the 19th Amendment, granting women the vote. According to monadnockmountain.com, The Hermitage began as a cabin built by Augustus Chamberlaine, the first hiker to write about the “roar of the mountain,” a thundering noise – like a wind tsunami – that graces the ears of Monadnock’s most faithful hikers. The mountain, perhaps, clearing its dungeon throat? Alas, I haven’t heard it – yet.  

Decades ago, I wrote a comic screenplay about suffragettes at The Hermitage. The folks at HBO seemed to like it until one of their readers decided it was highly offensive, not to mention clichéd and sexist, that two characters employed their vaginas to change a pol’s vote.  

Over the next rise, I tromp across the flat, treeless site of the Halfway House, an inn which operated on the mountain from 1860 until World War II; in 1954 it burned to the ground and not a shred of the building remains visible in any season. Many of the inn’s visitors arrived by horse-drawn carriage or motor car on the toll road; others walked several miles in from the train station. It’s said that Ulysses S. Grant and the boxer John L. Sullivan stayed there, as well as hordes of Bostonians seeking the cure of mountain air and marvelous views. J.S. Winter’s entertaining novel Murder on Mount Monadnock peoples the Halfway House with turn-of-the-century celebrity murder suspects, including Red Sox pitcher Smoky Joe Wood, randy young Franklin Roosevelt, vaudevillian Lillie Langtry and a young German who later became the World War I flying ace known as the “The Red Baron.”

Here, halfway to the peak, I take to the White Arrow Trail. Quickly it gets steep and icy, but the MICROspikes on my boots meet the challenge. I stop and chat with a hiker about the Halfway House and he makes an annoyed comment about the Hermitage and the guy who “owns the property.” He spits these last three words, as if poison; who, after all, dares claim grubby ownership of even a pine needle, a scrub beetle, a fleck of stone or lichen smear on a mountain as majestic, as G-d given as Monadnock? That, at least, is what I think he meant.

Soon after I run into a descending pair. He’s silent, sunken into himself – exhausted? meditating? – and she moves with a clomping gait, her curly hair staging a crazed escape from its woolen-hat prison. She bumps her pack against a half-capsized tree trunk and almost knocks herself over. What’s it like up there? I ask. “We didn’t summit today,” she responds – not today, so I peg them as regulars. Monadnock worshipers. Instead of summiting they hiked around the peak, a feat which calls for a good deal of bushwhacking. And down they keep going.

I grip and push up an ice-cramped slope – in summertime of olden days, pale professors and hoop-skirted ladies conquered this route with picnic baskets and metal water jugs – and emerge above tree line. Now it’s just “the last hard climb,” as the Halfway Housers called it. But first I stop near a giant rock that looks, if you squint, like a Mayan temple, and let’s say the ice-cascade bisecting the rock’s scarred face is the steps up the Temple of the Jaguar Priest at Tikal. From here the brown-white vistas are broken by shards of evergreen. A white ribbon runs to the southwest – perhaps an electric transmission-line alley cut through forest? Then I resume the climb, determined to make the top without stopping again.

Extra determined, actually, but not a minute later I experience an intense compulsion to turn around. There’s something behind you, my self tells me, something to see. No, I retort, too much stopping. Make tracks, not excuses. Grip, push off, step up, grip, push off – the feeling persists, however, gets stronger and I can’t resist. On a steep incline I set my feet sideways to the trail, anchor myself against a rocky crag, and turn.

And there it is, a lone hawk gliding the thermals. A brown double eyelash against the blue, she glides far out and away and then loops closer and closer, tracing the mountainside from east to west and north to south and down to up. All the while, it seems, she moves not a wing. Indeed, this crisscrossing hawk is Supreme Commander of Wind in total control of her destiny – no, even better, she’s Mistress of Grateful Surrender to the Fates. Actually I’m not sure which designation is more apt or if there’s even a difference in the end. Ten minutes later I force myself to blink hard and get to the summit.

And what do I find there? A full-sized flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics flying from a hiking pole planted between boulders. I blink hard again. I stare at the yellow hammer and sickle on totalitarian red. What in the freaking world? Mind-flash: Krushchev pounding his shoe at the UN, duck-and-cover drills at Lloyd H. Bugbee Elementary School, the Miracle on Ice, Soviet tanks rumbling across Hungary, Sputnik, five-year plans, Ludmilla Tourisheva nails the landing, Soviet Life magazine dangling on its library stick at Sedgwick Junior High School, MAD, my social-studies report on the nuclear triad, McCarthy hearings, John le Carre thrillers, fluoridated water, pimply-backed East German lady swimmers grabbing steroid-gold, Brezhnev’s eyebrows, shortwave Radio Moscow informing little Hal that angry American Negroes are rioting everywhere, the Red Scare, Red Menace, Red Scourge, Red Dawn…

Jesus H. Christ, the Russians are Finally Coming! Or Putin, that KGB rascal, he’s rebuilt the old empire and the invasion starts right here, right now, on the freezing heights of Mount Monadnock where all creation can be surveyed…

Or it’s a bunch of kids messing around. After tapping my hiking pole on the summit’s U.S. Geological Survey benchmark plaque, as per tradition, I seek them out. Five knuckleheads huddle near the symbol of our once implacable enemy. They’re teens of some sort. 

“What’s with the flag?” I ask, trying not to sound judgmental. 

“Nothing,” one says. She wears a court jester’s hat made of black fleece.

“So, are you guys Russian?”

“No,” a few respond.

“Are you communists?”

“No, no,” is their chorus, mixed with rapid side comments that escape into the wind-whipped air. Do these young ones know about the Soviet Gulag? About Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? The Domino Theory, the Cuban Missile Crisis? What about Yuri Gagurin, refusniks, glasnost, perestroika, Gorbachev and Reagan at Reykjavik, the Berlin Wall? Do they have nightmares of nuclear apocalypse, as I did as a child? I’d sleepwalk to the living room and cover myself with the giant, purple cushions from our scimitar-shaped sectional sofa. In the morning my mother would find me beneath the slabs and she’d raise me from my sleep death and bundle me off to the kitchen for a glass of Tang and a poached egg on toast. Maybe canned hash, if I was lucky. While she cooked, I’d check the baseball box scores in The Hartford Courant.   

“Are you anarchists?”

A slight pause. Then: “Yes, yes!” They cry out, laughing, “Yes, we’re anarchists!”

I chat with one boy who explains that they’re also high school sophomores – born, some of them, in this very century! – from Brookline, Massachusetts.   

“Ah,” I say. “So the flag is ironic.”

“Semi-ironic,” another boy corrects me.

The girl with the jester hat explains that she found the flag in her grandfather’s basement and doesn’t know why it’s there or how it connects to the old man You should ask him, I almost say but don’t because this is the bald, rocky head of Monadnock in spring-going-on-winter and we’re all good up here, all fellow voyagers. The Brooklinites buzz about like child-bees and I wonder if gramps was a CCCP sympathizer. Or crazed cold warrior. Maybe he traded a Stars and Stripes for that flag at the Elbe River, spring of 1945, when Soviet and American armies converged. Maybe he’s a Jew who fought in the Red Army against Hitler. Maybe he’s a former social studies teacher. Or picked up the flag at a yard sale. Or all of the above.    

I say goodbye to these Generation Z kids – a New York Times article says they’re independent, globally oriented, diverse in heritage and shaped by the post-9/11 world – and climb down to tree line to eat lunch on an outcropping as the cold, afternoon sun slides along the southern sky. The hawk doesn’t return, but three older teens arrive and I hear them arguing. One insists that they shouldn’t continue to the summit, that they don’t have the right equipment and it’s too icy, too dangerous. Someone could get hurt. Another young man asserts that he drove all this way and hiked for hours and sure as hell doesn’t want to stop now. The third boy stays quiet. I eat my PB&J sandwich and tell myself to butt out. Not my business. Don’t.

“Hey,” I yell to the teens. “You gotta go up top! It’s awesome, the view is amazing. And it’s not far – ten minutes, easy.”

“You see?” says the gung-ho fella to his friends.

I swivel and swing out my boots, draped in MICROspikes. “Look, I have to admit that I’ve got the gear,” I say. “But you’re young, so we’re even.”  

They murmur, confer, and decide to go for it. But first, lunch, and the teens dive into their packs for soda and bags of chips. They eat standing up, staring at the peak. I gather myself and head down the trail, wishing them luck and hoping the cautious kid doesn’t shatter his femur because of my shaming pep talk. As I descend it gets warmer, almost balmy, and I unzip my coat. There’s a granular mushiness to the snow. Is the world finally beginning to melt? To forget the tricks of freezing? Yes, winter’s a bit long in the tooth on this late March day, a little too settled in its ways. Unaware, perhaps, of the green torrent to come.

Then a teenager stripped to his t-shirt appears, churning uphill with a banana held in his bare hand like an ice pick. It bears repeating: they’ve got youth, I’ve got the gear, we’re even. 

I cross the meadow where the Halfway House once glowed by the buttery light of kerosene lamps, where nature’s ardent lovers paused for a night’s sleep or furtive bouts of fornication before the morning ascent and a delightful luncheon at the peak. It must have been a grand scene in those days, but I’m glad the inn’s gone, and its ghosts, too. No one should own anything on the mountain and nothing built here should remain.

Pack out what you pack in.  

In the 40 days following my January hike, eight feet of snow fell on both my house in Somerville and the rocky shoulders of Mount Monadnock. As storm after storm rolled across New England, as I shoveled and reshoveled the driveway and sidewalk like a snow-mad man, a mountain of fallen and tossed-up snow grew in my little front yard, reminiscent, passersby concurred, of the Matterhorn. My attempts to top off the peak, alas, resulted in a strained right oblique, and then temperatures crashed below zero. How, I wondered, will I get in my February climb? So I waited, and waited, and on the month’s last day the sky turned platinum blue, the world warmed into the 20s and my side miraculously healed. Let’s go!

North, from Boston. After evading the 30-mph speed traps outside Jaffrey, I proceed west on Route 124 past a textile mill converted to apartments, the town’s red-brick library and a stone-relief sculpture of a WW I soldier carrying a wounded or dead comrade. One word carved below: Buddies. And then on a rise in the frost-heaving road, Monadnock leaps into view. Snow-streaked, beckoning. Soon I find 36 vehicles parked at its southern base. A crazy person convention? Have they not read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Monadnoc?

Many feet in summer seek,

Oft, my far-appearing peak;

In the dreaded winter-time,

None save dappling shadows climb. 

That’s the mountain talking, by the way. Emerson didn’t actually climb it until he was an old man, long after the poem appeared in 1846. That’s all right. Monadnock is the one landmark, natural or constructed, that’s visible from all six New England states, so it’s a good bet Ralph Waldo saw the peak from afar before writing his 2,440-word celebration. Ages, a hiker tells Monadnock in the poem, are thy days. I’m glad I’m not climbing you alone, I say.

At my wife’s insistence, I made a list of stuff to bring and even remembered to bring it:

Cell phone – charged
iPod, charged, in soft case
MICROspikes
Extra socks
Hat and balaclava
Two pair gloves
Compass 
Head lamp and batteries
Poles
Backpack w/food and water
Rain pants
Extra sweatshirt
Wallet
Inhaler
Notebook and pens

To my surprise, snowshoers have tramped down the snow covering the White Dot Trail, good enough that my boots penetrate only a few inches with each step. Swerve a few feet off the trail, though, and you’re floundering thigh deep. I move quickly over the snow pack, scanning the woods to admire tall, shivering birches, unburdened by ice, and the black brushstrokes of tree trunks and branches shadowed on the snow. In places the crisscrossing patterns evoke veiny muscles or brain neurons.

Then, whoosh, I meet Larry sliding downhill on his ample posterior.        

He lets out a whoop, coming to a stop about ten feet away. “Hey, Larry,” shout a couple of hikers who have arrived behind me, and Larry, a short, stout fellow lugging an overstuffed pack, bounces to his feet. He’s dappled in snow, from snow pants to knitted hat, and he smiles big-time and slaps his gloves together and suddenly I feel like I’m in an episode of Monadnock Cheers. Larry!! The hailing hikers keep going and Larry and I get to chatting about his recent trek up Mount Mansfield, the highest peak in Vermont. Windy up there, he says, damn cold. Then his girlfriend arrives, slowly picking her way downhill. She sports a powder blue snowsuit and yells, “I’m not going down on my ass, Larry!”

How might Emerson have captured this moment?

O’er icy crag and snowbound cleft I tarry

For I’m not going down on my ass, Larry…

It’s tough going from here to the tree line – I’m climbing a snow pyramid, after all. To the south I make out ski trails on Wachusett Mountain. To the east, the misty outlines of the Green Mountains. I stop to drink from a bottle of water I bought at Dunkin’ Donuts and fumble its white cap into the white snow. Oops. Aren’t they making these stupid things smaller than they used to? And then boasting about how much plastic is saved by their patented “eco-cap” that goes atop a bottle that’s all plastic anyway, that could choke a sea turtle if not recycled...fishing about, I somehow find it. Add to master list: bring water bottles without removable caps.  

Nonetheless, what a day! I unzip my coat, whip off my hat and gaze at the summit outlined against a sky that grows bluer and bluer as I crane my head heavenward and search for the point of ultimate blueness. On the mountain, last month’s rime-ice coating has been replaced by streaks of snow between enormous rhomboids of bare granite. These big rocks, I’m told, collect solar radiation and melt their ice sheaths even in temperatures below freezing. Now my iPod camera freezes up after a few shots of the vista, so I slide it beneath my coat and give it the old armpit rub. Thirty seconds, good to go.

There, at the tree line, I make friends with Dylan, Charlie and Tim. Somewhere between 17 and 25 years old, they’ve stripped down to sweatshirts and tote small, ultra-light foam sleds. Yes, they plan on sliding down the mountain. Without eye roll or smirk, the young men good naturedly accept cascades of kidding from hikers going up and down. “Better get Obamacare,” one wise apple yells. I line them up for a team photo on a wide boulder. Dylan, smiling under shades, cradles a Wham-O Snowboogie sled shaped like a manatee; Charlie with the hipster beard displays his Disney Frozen Sno Speedster, featuring beloved characters Elsa, Anna and Olaf; and Tim, tall and blond, laughs as he shows the world his Buddy Penguin model. It’s all in fun and maybe we’re okay if there are enough buoyant young men like these to go around. 

I can’t, however, fit sledders, sleds, mountain and impossibly blue sky into my camera’s frame. So I step backwards and just like that – Wham-O! – tumble off the rock and vanish to my waist in a snow drift. I list over like a turtling sailboat. I eat snow – but I don’t drop the camera! The guys rush forward and help me back onto the boulder. Are you okay? Yes, I’m fine. Are you sure, really? Yes, of course, and I order them to reassemble. “The show must go on,” I shout, channeling Ethel Merman. And I get the money shot.

Print it, boys, put it in the can!

This episode, oddly, energizes me. Up, up I go. Twenty minutes later, lungs heaving, I’m at the sun-spangled peak and once more I tap my hiking pole on the U.S. Geodetic Society plaque. About a dozen hikers congregate among the rocks. The wind is light, the view spectacular. A rosy filament, like cushioning gauze, floats between the sky’s blue dome and the faraway White Mountains to the north. It’s cold up here, sure, but not “stone-cleaving cold” as Emerson warned. I give him credit, though. He may not have surmounted Monadnock before writing his poem, but he knew what it felt like on top. He understood the power of realizing one’s insignificance in the face of overwhelming beauty; he grasped the freedom of looking beyond yourself and trying to recall what in G-d’s glorious earth is so important about the stuff you’ve been fussing about lately.  

Hither we bring
Our insect miseries to the rocks,
And the whole flight with pestering wing
Vanish and end their murmuring,
Vanish beside these dedicated blocks,
Which, who can tell what mason laid?

“Hey,” a woman yells, “you’re photobombing our picture!”

I spin about: behind me, two young women pose for a guy holding a smart phone. I scoot to one side, but not without making a lame retort about their photobombing my reality, and besides, I didn’t realize I was in the way. So begins, between myself and three other crazy people on the summit of Mount Monadnock on a clear, blue day in latest February, 2015, a spirited discussion of the phenomenology of photobombing. It is strongly asserted by my new friends that intentionality in photobombing is irrelevant; indeed, you must assume responsibility for the act even if you wander into the camera frame searching for a dropped water bottle cap. Is photobombing, I ask, an obnoxious offense? No, no, the millennials inform me, photobombing is a creative means to insert “flavor” into someone else’s constructed reality. What, perchance, is “flavor”? Personal style, says the youngest of the lot; she wears, for instance, flavorful fleece boots.

The upshot is that I’m clueless regarding photobombing. Not as clueless as my wife, I interject. She didn’t even know the term until she witnessed Benedict Cumberbatch photobombing Meryl Streep – or was it the other way around? – at the Golden Globes. The young folk shake their heads at my wife's ignorance, but when I add that she’s a doctor preoccupied with saving lives and stuff, they let her off the hook. The conversation migrates to other digital pursuits. I learn from fleece boots, as she shoulders her pack and departs the mountaintop, that “podcasting is the future.” 

Yes, that may be true. Podcasting, very futuristic. Lava lamps, however, were the future once. Pet rocks, eight-track cartridges, Richard Nixon, electric football and The Flip Wilson Show, too. And that takes me to junior high school. The future is a teasing, elusive bugger. But I’m pretty sure that Mount Monadnock, absent a direct meteor hit, will be around for this forever-becoming, forever-improving future. Snow-snug, harboring ancient heat, it’s got staying power. “Old as the sun,” wrote Emerson. “Old almost as the shade.” 

Ages are thy days.

As I start to head down, I almost step on a nine-year-old girl in a pink snowsuit. She’s hopping about, as my mother would say, like a flea. A snow flea. I ask her dad if she climbed all the way up by herself and he nods vigorously. Proud papa. On cue she rolls down a slope, lands in a snow-divot and pops up giggling, a ball of pink rubber. And a traumatic head injury waiting to happen, but I don’t say that.

Half way down the mountain, I divert to the Old Ski Path. (Fun fact: the path was cut in 1933 by Duke Dimitri of Leuchtenberg, a descendant of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia and cavalry officer in the White Army that got routed by the commies. Then the duke moved to Canada where he led the Penguin Ski Club at McGill University.) The semi-trundled trail quickly dissipates and I find myself wandering the woods, deep in powdery snow. It’s fun, tumbling down inclines and twisting about like aged taffy. I spy a woodpecker – small fella, blue and white – clockwise circling up a tree trunk. I listen: tik, tik, tik, tik. He’s really working it for bugs, but flaps away when I approach. Where in the hell is this? The map’s no help. I listen again – another bird? No, it’s the wild, whoo-hooing of sledding youth!

Wooo-hoo! Wooo-hoo!  

I chase the sound – knees churning high like a Budweiser Clydesdale – and make it back to the main trail where Dylan, Christian and Tim go rocketing by on their foam sleds. Whoa, baby, one goes airborne over a boulder, landing in a snarl of branches! Whing, another swerves down the trail like a runaway snow bunny! Woo-hoo, the third shudders past, legs held high and hollering. All three, joy in motion. All three, unleashed.

I’m wearing a pair of gray rain pants over my jeans, to keep them from getting soaked. They’re part of a Jack Nicklaus rain gear set I received from my first-marriage father-in-law. He wanted, I suspect, a son-in-law who never lets a little water ruin the annual golfing vacation to Myrtle Beach. The kind of guy who cleans his short irons with a Brillo Pad in the depths of February. Well, sorry for disappointing you, Frank, and I take several running steps down the White Dot Trail and leap onto my ass. Whoosh – instant sled! I hurtle down the mountain, Larry-style, picking up speed at an alarming, exhilarating rate. The green-and-white world whips and whirls by, my body buckles over the snow-slick ground from tailbone to toe tips to skull-top, and I’m photobombing images snapped by satellites spinning above. And suddenly I flash on the last time I went sledding, twelve years ago, an adventure that ended in the emergency room.

Oh, who the hell cares. Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!        

A couple hundred yards along, I brake with my boots to a stop. The world ceases and I stand up, drunk-dizzy, smiling. I gulp draughts of cold air. Nothing, apparently, is broken. And one of the three sled-dudes calls to me. “Wow, man” he says. “That’s a good sled.”

On the frigid peak enshrouded in racing, white cloud, the mountain zipped up in a coat of furry rime-ice, I meet a man wearing a Scottish kilt. It’s a green-and-gold tartan number, over blue jeans. Today is his 60th birthday and in celebration I give him a Nutter Butter cookie made, says the box, with real peanut butter. Oh thank you, he pipes, as if it’s the final piece in life’s confounding puzzle. We stamp our feet and munch our cookies down.

Let’s go back five hours. I’m leaving my house in Somerville, 12 feet above sea level, and I step off the front walk onto an ice-slick flagstone – whoosh, yikes, my limbs go spastic. Somehow, I recover before falling. At least I didn’t snap or tear anything. So I get in the car, not realizing that I’ve forgotten my camera, and my wife comes out to wave me away, as is our custom; whoever leaves first in the morning gets a big porch wave from the remaining spouse, regardless of the weather outside or inside the house. Today she wears her supportive, worried expression.

Halfway to New Hampshire, the oldies station gives me Stephen Stills warbling, “Stop, hey, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down,” and while I can’t remember the name of the song (For What It’s Worth) or the group (Buffalo Springfield), I do recall Stills’ solo concert at Boston College when I was a student there in 1981. He came on stage drunk or high and stumbled around playing incoherent guitar and mumbling lyrics. Alas, no Crosby, Nash, or Young provided harmony, no Wooden Ships sailed across the Roberts Center gym that’s since been demolished for a science building. He seemed old and broken-down at age 36.  (Now at age 60, he’s sober and still touring.)

Today my weather app calls for sun, but everything’s socked in. Mount Monadnock hides in grayish clouds with a yellow, sulfurous tinge from wood stoves cranking since dawn. Six cars dot the parking lot. By 10:40 I’m geared up and going up, too.

The ice on the trail is thicker than last month, a translucent seal. Underfoot, black boulders appear like surfacing turtles, like sea monsters frozen in mid-escape. When I stop to rest and hydrate at the Cascade Link turnoff, a young woman skitters by. She's stripped down to a sleeveless t-shirt; I’m wearing three layers plus coat, wool hat and fleece gloves over a new pair of runner’s gloves with metal-fiber fingertips for fine-motor activities like tapping cell phone buttons or unwrapping the short sleeve of Nutter Butters in my pack. I wave to her, unzip my coat a bit.

With a temperature of 33 degrees at the base, and no storms forecast, this won’t be a day for perishing on the mountain. Only one hiker has died of hypothermia here, according to Monadnock: More than a Mountain. That poor soul was Charles MacVeagh, Jr., a 23-year old Harvard College graduate whose family owned a house in nearby Dublin. MacVeagh had climbed Monadnock hundreds of times, and so there was nothing unusual on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, 1920, when he and friend Charlton Reynders took the Dublin Trail toward the peak. The sky was sunny and blue-jay blue, in the 50s, so they left behind their fur-lined coats and gloves. Just a February lark and back for supper! Then a freak blizzard arose and a tragic series of events followed. Poor Reynders saved himself by firing his revolver into the air, attracting the attention of Frederick Nettleton, the caretaker of the MacVeagh house, who had set out after dark to find them.     

On a flat shelf I stop to chat with three hikers. A black lab named Layla shutters about them, wearing an REI doggie backpack filled with water. (Dogs are barred from Monadnock year round.) Layla’s curved toenails are a couple inches long, perhaps explaining how she traversed the icy climb. Cammie tells me that Layla stays to the trail, and if a dastardly rabbit or chipmunk lures her away all it takes is a blow on the “panic whistle” and she’s back like a shot. A short woman in her forties, Cammie says nothing else during my brief visit; she does, however, roll her eyes a few times as her companions expound.  

Art and Pete, in their early 60s, are youngish codgers. “So how’s Somerville,” Art asks, “pretty posh?” Posh? Somerville, once dubbed Slumerville and Scumerville, is emerging from its rusty chain-link fence past and enjoys media hype for its high hipster quotient, but posh? No, my town ain’t posh. Arts claims that in the ‘70s he rented a house in Davis Square for 200 bucks a month, those were the days, and Pete kvetches that he led a hike for the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) recently and two kids in their 20s turned back “because they were tired.” He pauses, lets the outrage penetrate, repeats: “BECAUSE THEY WERE TIRED!” Kids today have it backwards, says Art, they work too hard and don't recreate enough, but Pete isn't seeing things that way, tells the tale of an intern at his company who skipped work because he felt like playing the piano – “FELT LIKE PLAYING THE PIANO!" –​ and then it’s time to bash the AMC because it’s gone all soft and cushy. 

“Run by lawyers,” says Art, or maybe Pete, run by lawyers despoiling all that is fine and good on G-d’s green planet, those kind of lawyers, and they both agree that the high-mountain huts for the Adirondock (not Appalachian) Mountain Club are superior with their lack of heat, food, hut crews or creature comforts. (Here Cammie’s eyes spin from her skull and attain a low-earth orbit.) I defend the AMC, where I worked in the 1990s, and Art allows that the AMC hut crews, mostly college students, do put on funny skits for hikers.

To this, we all agree. The stupid kids put on funny skits.  

Meanwhile, Layla laps water from her collapsible water dish and Pete pours me a cup of hot chocolate from a steel thermos. It’s steaming and delicious. “The real stuff,” Pete purrs. So where’s the sun? I ask. It’s supposed to be sunny. Well, says Pete, for weather done right you gotta call the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). All you need is a tail number. (Of course, a tail number). The FAA nailed it today, Pete continues, total cloud cover, wind whipping from the west. Sun should peek out by afternoon, adds Art, and we discuss, too, the song Layla. You know, Layla, you’ve got me on my knees, Layla, I’m begging darling, please, and by consensus the tune is performed by Eric Clapton with Derick and the Dominoes, not Eric Clapton with Cream. 

As I gather to leave, I ask: are you going to the top? No, says Art, not today. Above the tree line in winter, he explains, the “fun factor is diminished.” I try to disguise my shock. “ABOVE THE TREE LINE THE FUN FACTOR IS DIMINISHED!”  What I say aloud is thanks for the cocoa, good luck, and bye-bye, Layla.

On my way down, I let six slipping and sliding teenage boys pass on their way to the peak. One doesn’t wear a hat. None has poles or spikes. But they keep going, legs loose and forgiving, hearts cheerful. You’re almost there, I exhort them, and the blond, hatless boy smiles. Youth overcomes, although I’m sure Charles MacVeagh and Charlton Reynders thought they were invincible on that Valentine’s Day in 1920. At the tree line: the sun! A sun-sliver, to be more exact, appears all around as if a cloud bowl has been lifted a few inches off the mountain. The ring of sun shimmers with touches of pink and blue.   

Twenty minutes from the bottom, I stop at a tall, grizzled oak tree with a split running up its trunk, either from age or, I prefer, lightning strike. The trunk is hollow at the bottom and I duck inside. On the interior walls messages are scrawled with black ink, including “I Was Here – Chloe” and the cryptic “MQ14.” BP and SF live forevermore inside a ragged heart, and within another heart the initials joined to CM have been savagely crossed-out and replaced with ST. In pulling myself from the hollow, I bump my head on the tree’s gnarled, blackened burl. For a moment, I’m dizzy. I check with a finger – no blood, at least.

At the parking area, a sign commemorates the Civilian Conservation Corps. It reads: “Work crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps helped with the development of this park during the period 1933-1942.” That’s what kids need today, my inner codger cogitates, a new CCC, and I flash to my mother’s story about staying with her aunt in northern Vermont. She was a teenager and the highlight of the day was picking blueberries down by the state road and waving to the boys in the back of the CCC truck as it rumbled by. She’d comb her hair, put on a nice blouse for the occasion. Those boys, she recalls, standing up in the trunk. Some of them probably died in the war, you know.      

My phone’s dead, so there’s no calling Elahna to let her know I’m okay. I also discover that it’s hard to untie shoelaces when they’re ice-coated, frozen ropes. Oy, I’m pretty hopeless; maybe the young people should take over. Anyway, it’s happening whether we old folks grouse or cheer them along. How did that Stephen Stills song go again? Stop, hey, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down…

This time, I’ve prepared better. I climb with my asthma inhaler, bandages, digital camera instead of iPod and a short sleeve of classic black Oreos, not golden ones, not minty ones, and certainly not the Double Stuf variety that upends the universe’s stuf-cookie ratio. I also bring a fleece hood (balaclava), extra sweatshirt, two pairs of gloves and a shiny pair of spikes for my boots. (The Kahtoola MICROspikes Traction System, in fact.) They look like futuristic spats, with a rubbery red girdle around the ankle supporting a net of chain-metal teeth biting below.

This time, I also leave Somerville early and cross into New Hampshire before 10 a.m. At a country store there’s a Dunkin' Donuts secreted within and I fuel up with java and a slobbery breakfast sandwich thing. Four beefy hunters in cammo gear sprawl across plastic chairs. Done for the day or just starting, I’m not sure. I make the mountain by 10:30 and all of five cars sit in the lot. Yes, Mount Monadnock may be one of the most popular climbing destinations in the world, but not today. And now for a good slap at Mount Fuji.

Fuji, outside Tokyo, claims to be the world’s most-climbed mountain. It gets an estimated 200,000 visitors each year, compared to 100,000 for Monadnock. Okay, fine, but what does it mean to climb a mountain? At Fuji, the trails are marked not with paint swipes and dabs on rocks and trees, nor with the noble rock towers called cairns. No, Fuji’s trails are lined with iron chains between posts, designed to keep Fuji trudgers on track. Fuji has trailside huts with hot tea and rooms for napping. There’s a visitor center on top! Sure, it’s almost four times as high as Monadnock, but you can drive halfway up. The “anonymous monk” who bagged the peak in 663, he climbed a mountain. Last year’s Fuji-toppers, not so much.

Today the White Dot Trail is a rocky, icy snake and the woods are ground-covered with crusty snow, glowing in patches of sun.  The random, cross-cutting shadows of tree trunks draw black, irregular lines on the white. Five minutes up, a kid in his 20s long-strides past me. He wears running shoes with neon-yellow strips. “Wow, sneakers,” I say and he responds that he left his boots “in the trunk of my car and I might regret it.” (So go back, I don’t say, and get them.) “I might not make the top,” he adds, as if it doesn’t matter that much. He disappears up the trail.

Thirty minutes in, I rest on a flat, sun-streaked rock in the vicinity of Falcon Spring, just south of the turnoff to Cascade Link Trail. According to the book Monadnock: More than a Mountain, by Craig Brandon, the spring has been “a landmark for over two centuries” and was first called Bubbling Spring. Then it got renamed for William Falconer, “the original forest fire lookout watchman” on the mountain. I like the sound of that: forest fire lookout watchman. Snow’s melting here, a faint tickling, and the rustle of leaves in the wind is like a hand brushing lint from a shoulder. A guy goes by in his MICROspikes and I think, hell, why not, time to put mine on.

It’s an easy adjustment; the spikes grip the ice firmly and don’t get caught on the release. Just like that, I’m ripping along. At first I enact a reverse hiking protocol, avoiding rocks in favor of snow and ice, but soon I stop worrying about blunting the spikes and just climb over dirt, mud, granite and slush, up ice inclines, into snow cavities, across anything and everything. And I get to wondering about Interstellar, G-d knows why, imagining myself defending the movie to a former colleague at Boston University who raved about some pedantic, mediocre film in which a jerky college professor plays bongos in the subway…let it go, Hal, let it go…and it’s not just the amazing visuals, the echoes of 2001, the All-American pluck of Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway that I enjoyed so much. Interstellar expresses the anguished gulfs between people in conflict and especially between people in conflict who love each other.

Many years ago I was a movie reviewer for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. They paid me a pittance to type overwrought stuff like this: The gaps between characters in Interstellar are as galactic as the space-ocean McConaughey traverses. Love in Interstellar doesn’t so much redeem or transform, but sends out stealthy homing signals. It’s about seeking, striving, losing, enduring. Fear not, we’re entangled on the quantum level even as we speak to each other face to face without understanding.

And the robots. The fence-post robots are totally cool.

Around noon I sit on a stone mesa, and off come my sweat-soaked gloves and hat. Here’s the day’s first mitzpe – Hebrew for bird’s-eye view – a panorama of gray cloud, faraway hills and snow-clotted countryside. Closer by, several evergreens have turned a sickly pea-green, and the wind moves sideways on the mountain according to the wet index-finger test. Even though I’m not thirsty, I make myself drink. Two magnificent hawks soar above, swooping, brushing wings – playful or provocative, it’s hard to tell – and their parabolic cries fall smack-dab into my ears. Then they’re gone. Okay, up and at ‘em, and before long the trail becomes steeper, snowier, icier. Slow going and lots of fun.

Suddenly the fit, geared-up dude zips by – could he be older than me? Probably a corporate lawyer, a one-percenter with a personal trainer. “Nice day,” he says, with chirpy aplomb this time around. Of course, he’s leaving me in his ice-chips so he can afford to be a friendly fuck…let it go, Hal, let it go…look – a squirrel racing up a tree! It’s the only ground-animal sighting of the day. Leap, twist, dive, she’s gone. There’s a winter burrowing underway on the mountain.

Three o'clock, and the slope eases. The trail has been groomed with the occasional log step or water bar and I hear distant water rushing – or is it traffic? An ascending hiker appears in a college sweatshirt, holding a water bottle. Boots, yes, but no poles or backpack. There’s always one of those guys. Can he make the peak and back before dark? And then I see my old friend from last month, the portly guy coming up the trail with his stuffed Osprey backpack and a headlamp strapped across his forehead like a third eye. His pants are spandex, red-striped, awesome. And his shaggy beard – did he have a beard last time?

“How’s it going?” I ask, slowing down. “It’s going great!” he says, and I think, maybe, he recognizes me but he doesn’t stop because he’s a monster of momentum, he’s working those poles, and his MICROspikes are grabbing but good. Up, up and away…  

At the base I remove my spikes. Walking is sorta loosey-goosey for a minute. Hey, there’s my friend’s gray van; it sports no bumper or back-window stickers, nothing to give a clue. Next time, I should introduce myself. At my car – which also makes no statements except I’m red, I’m a sports car, and you’re not – I change socks. The big toenail on the right foot, a yellow crust of its former self, is starting to fold over – the last nail to go after my autumn hike in Israel. I check my shin boo-boo: bruised and scabbed, not bleeding. Doesn’t hurt much. My wife will fuss over it, though, and I must admit I’m looking forward to that.

It’s one o’clock on Election Day in the USA. I’ve done my civic duty at the Dante Club in Somerville, Mass., and now I’m hiking the White Dot Trail with a splitting headache – an angry something’s been axing its way out of my skull since I clonked my dome on a doorway this morning while searching for the wristwatch I’ve worn for 15 years, and things only got worse as I ran around town car-gassing, ATMing and package-mailing. It was like being stuck in tar, but eventually I shook loose and now I’m free and moving in the chill air, happy, very happy, to be ascending my mountain again.

I breathe in, out, climb.

Behind me, at the trailhead, my car is one of 25 vehicles in the unpaved lot. It’s an uncrowded day on the third-most-climbed mountain in the world, cloudy in the 50s. I paid five bucks for admission and a map, and the ranger advised that darkness drops at 4:38 p.m. So far I’ve passed only a man shambling downhill in old sneakers and a hoodie. He grips a small bottle of water and wears no daypack. Just wandered by, went up on a whim. There’s always one of those guys.

I’ve gone up Mount Monadnock a couple dozen times. During my inaugural clamber as a freshman at Boston College – fall of 1978, a dorm field trip – I wore low-top canvas sneakers purchased at Herb’s Sports Shop in my hometown of West Hartford, Connecticut, and I sprained my ankle on the descent but said nothing, didn’t want to be the wuss. I carried a heavy crush for a young lady from New Jersey who I’d danced with the night before. The song we shared, I recall, was Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones, and such is the deceit of memory; Start Me Up and its raunchy lyrics didn't come out until the fall of 1981, my senior year. At that freshman “mixer” we probably bobbed to the flirtatious stylings of Olivia Newton-John or The Bee Gees.   

Now I veer north on the Cascade Link Trail and hip-hop stone to stone across a mellow brook, my feet wrapped in waterproofed, air-cushioned Yakota Trail Merrill hiking boots, size 13. Color: walnut with yellow streaks. Made: in China, of course. Bought: at a chain-store shoe outlet, name forgotten. Loping along in my miracle boots, I notice the brook’s surface painted with autumn leaves floating on their backs, lazily spinning. Dark green rugs of moss encircle the bases of trees. I stop; it’s all quiet, or nearly so. I stand alone here just as the mountain stands alone in its environment. Monadnock means “lone mountain” or “island mountain” in the Abenaki Indian language, and indeed it exists without brothers, a rocky knuckle jutting from rolling forests. It looms in southern New Hampshire much like Mt. Kilimanjaro rises from the plains of Tanzania.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps not. For many New Englanders with but a spark of transcendental yearning, mighty Monadnock is our Kilimanjaro.   

And then, birches. Around the corner dozens of skinny birches scatter up the slope, some alone, some in clumps of three or four. The leaves have come off surrounding oak and maple trees, so these birches really pop, shine white. It’s their glamour moment. After all, what’s better than ghost-white birches, trunks flecked with black splotches and stripes, reaching their gangly selves to heaven? These early-November birches go up, up, up. They’re making time before enveloping ice bends them astray, thwarts their ambition.

I rest my 54-year-old bones on a rock at the turnoff to the Red Spot Trail. Sunrays wheedle through cirrus clouds. I guzzle water, but the headache persists. Do I have a concussion? Wouldn’t be the first – banging into this low-flying world is a drawback of my 6’6’’ height. (Another is people informing me that I am, indeed, tall.) Why, I consider, was it so important to find that watch this morning? (It appeared a week later next to a stuffed giraffe in the attic.)  A present from Kathleen, a former girlfriend, my watch is a sweep-hand model, retro and expensive, with a wristband of silver chain links. Kathleen picked it out at the now-defunct Filene’s Basement in Boston. She loved me and I loved her and, ultimately, I let her down. Sure, I had my reasons, but still. The watch is the only thing from that period – the years between the death of my first marriage and the day I met my beloved wife, Elahna – that I carry on my person. It keeps me, I hope, humble.  

On this sunny rock I peel off my blue windbreaker and fleece, exposing a long-sleeve t-shirt. Beneath that, a regular tee. I’m layered like this forest world, its ragged garments a chaos of oranges, browns and blacks. Stray bird calls break through, clipped like afterthoughts. Bird blurts is more like it. Henry David Thoreau – who confined his Monadnock trips to spring and summer, camping beneath the boughs of red spruce trees – made his last ascension in August, 1860, two years before his death. On that hike he identified a bird that made “a dry, hard occasional chirp, more in harmony with the rocks.” Have I now heard his rock-harmony bird? Wrong time of year, sure, but things have changed a lot since then.   

And I’m off. Here lie bigger boulders for bounding, and the occasional bursting-up tree root makes for a sturdy handhold. Soon I get the first good glimpse off the mountain: the reds and dusky oranges of trees in the valley. (Look at mountains, scolded Thoreau, not off them. “It is remarkable what haste the visitors make to get to the top” of Monadnock, he wrote, “…and then look away from it.”) I’m high enough to see two lakes, their silvery gray surfaces edged in black from the shadows of encircling trees. A little higher and I spy stray houses, the Bible Conference facility and a line of mountains to the east. My right knee twinges as I slide over a flat, angled rock; forgot my knee wrap – stupid! Mental note: always bring. Another twinge. Plus wrap for left ankle. 

I meet a descending dad and college-aged daughter. They just had their first snowball fight of the year, volunteers Dad. My cell phone rings and I answer. It’s the social worker from the rehab facility where my 92-year-old mother is recovering from a collapsed lung. I stare toward Maine as we discuss the old bird’s frailty, her difficulties “toileting” herself and Medicare regulations. Maine doesn’t move. We agree that she’ll need more aides when she returns home, and we agree that she won’t like it. I imagine the social worker in an office cubicle or striding down a fluorescent-lit hallway. Where does she imagine me?

Brrr, getting cold. I put my fleece back on. This is a cold spot, heavily wooded. Ice burrows in ground divots, in pockets between boulders, and thick icicles spilling off the lip of a boulder remind me of a church organ. I pick an icicle and suck – tasteless. Red berries cluster on shrubs. When I squeeze one, orange goo plops out – a sherbety, pumpkin orange. Up ahead I find snowball snow squirreling under bushes, so I pack a good one and hurl it at a cairn – a mound of rocks marking the trail. Sigh, not even close. Then two women pass me on the way down, followed by a couple of teenybopper girls (why not in school?) and two dogs barking lazily, out of obligation. A minute later I converge upon the last of the brood, a teenage boy negotiating a rock face. Earbuds worm from his knit cap. Expression: peeved. “Almost there,” he tells me.

And he’s right. I surmount the slope and emerge above the tree line into a world of large, lichen-encrusted boulders stretching to the summit. The sight of the bare summit delivers a jolt – there it is, I’m gonna make it! Actually, this isn’t a natural tree line. Mount Monadnock used to be forested to the top, 3,165 feet above sea level, until farmers set a fire in 1800 to clear the lower slopes for pasture. You guessed it, the fire spread up the mountain. In the following years, bands of wolves took residence in the burnt, blown-down timber littering the slopes and preyed on local livestock. You guessed it again, the farmers set more fires to purge the wolves and those fires raged for weeks, forever stripping bare the mountain above 2,000 feet. Here I must add that this story is in dispute, but I prefer it to the one about soil erosion and glaciation.   

I pick up the pace and it’s a fun jaunt to the peak across slabs and terraces scratched by glaciers and inscribed with the initials of 19th century visitors toting hammers and cold chisels. Now these scars are redeemed by lichen, colorful as swipes of crayon. My headache is mostly gone, just a tipsy dizziness. At the summit I tap a circular bronze benchmark – a couple inches wide, set in stone by the United States Coastal and Geodesic Survey – with the tip of my hiking pole. On this ultimate place I revolve about, my lighthouse gaze shining on every New England state. The clouds have a bluish, grayish tinge and a dark mass comes in from the west, but it doesn’t look like rain cloud. The wind is swift up here, as if in triumph. It’s 2:40 p.m. and I’m alone on the peak – a first for this Monadnocker. Since I’m a boy, of course, I use the opportunity to pee off the mountainside. To the north, with the wind: a beautiful parabola.

Lunch: peanut butter and marmalade sandwiches, apple, golden Oreos. I put on gloves and change my Yale baseball cap for a winter hat. Then one last look around: although it isn’t clear enough to see the Prudential or Hancock towers – Boston monuments that appear on rare, pre-industrial days of visibility – the view still extends for 75 miles across a browning world splotched with lakes and rooftops. There are, to this eye, no people below, no farmers wielding torches or consumers driving to the mall. Nature’s cloak hides person, pet and wild animal, and I entertain the idea that this is the same view which Thoreau, for all his mountain love, must have taken in like a draught of fresh, high- altitude air. Save, of course, for the wisp of jet contrail. And that cell phone tower. And the new church steeple. And the plenitude of trees. In Thoreau’s day farmland and sheep meadow dominated the plains below. In our day the tropics are being torched, defiled, but here the forest has returned.