Mount Eisenhower

Presidential ridge copyright Alexander Peppe Photography

I sat down this morning eager to begin revisions on my novel, my mind overflowing with sentences that had waited impatiently while I fed the dogs and cleaned up the breakfast dishes. But when I opened Word and pressed the control key, I hit “n” instead of “o.” “It’ll just take a second to write a few notes about hiking up Mount Pierce,” I told my German shepherd. “Then I’ll get to the real work.” Runja had hiked the 4312 foot mountain with Alex and me, and she always took interest in my decisions because at any moment I could say, “Get your ball,” Let’s go,” or “Want a bone?” It is exhilarating to have eager and attentive listeners. Any mother of teenagers will tell you that.

   

I titled my new document “Where Eisenhower Should Have Been,” having decided on my personal essay’s name when it was still just a seedling as I sat on Pierce’s summit. My intent was to just input raw notes such as the feel of the monorail of snow and ice beneath my feet the last half mile of elevation gain, the scratch of evergreen branches against my face and shoulders when I slipped into thigh deep snow, the intense quiet broken only by birds, chipmunks, and the crunch of my boots. In seconds, I became lost in remembering and bypassed the words at the ready for my revision, words that sat like a presence in my brain while I did anything that didn’t involve letting them out.

copyright Helen Peppe Photography

Alex stood to my right with Runja, pointing to a wall of silver fog. I sat on a rock that seemed made for sitting, a bowl of red seedless grapes balanced on my thigh. I watched my son move confidently over the shrubs and boulders, his fitness evident. I had expected he’d be in graduate school at twenty-one, MIT or Princeton, studying computer programming. I’d never considered that he’d one day be a Maine guide. “That’s where Eisenhower would be if we could see it,” Alex said. He was dressed in a gray synthetic shirt and shorts. It made me shiver just to look him. It couldn’t have been more than 40 degrees. “It’s impressive how close it is, but we can’t see even a hint of it.”

copyright Helen Peppe Photography

I placed my Tupperware container of grapes on my open backpack and picked up my Nikon to take a picture of the nothing that was something and took a picture of Alex and Runja instead. In the stillness of the alpine region, I could sense the rock’s presence, almost feel it behind the shimmering fog. “It’s a bit like all those gray jays you said I’d see when we climbed Jackson,” I said, throwing liver treats in Runja’s direction. She leaped and her teeth clacked together with a loud snap followed by a tiny echo. “Those were invisible to me, too.”

I teased him, but we both knew he’d mentioned the birds’ friendliness eight months before only as an incentive to get me on a mountain .

“Wildlife and views are always a gamble when climbing,” Alex said, his breath puffing softly in front of his face. The fog was so thick that water dripped through the air in a way that couldn’t be described as rain but felt like drizzle. Then he said something which stuck with me, which planted the seed that would become the essay that sidetracked me from my novel. “People shouldn’t hike mountains with expectations of views because if they don’t see what they expect, they miss what’s actually there.”

I knew he wasn’t slamming me. We’d hiked together enough that he was aware I no longer had any expectations beyond eventually reaching a summit and reveling in the absolute sense of isolation while I ate fruit and dark chocolate. That day the aloneness was even more intense because of the fog that wrapped itself around us on the flat ledge of the summit. What I hadn’t been aware of was how introspective he’d become, how erudite.  “We should start down,” he added. “We want to get out of the snow and ice before we lose what little light we have.”

copyright Helen Peppe Photography

I gathered up my pack, throwing more liver treats Runja’s way and handed Alex a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. As we adjusted our hiking poles and began the descent, I thought about what we can’t see when we’re intent on seeing what we expect. And then I thought of how many things I lose. I can’t even find my car keys or cell phone seconds after I set them down. It was as if sometimes all I could see was what I wasn’t looking for as if everything was hidden by a layer of fog. I remember my mother exasperated with my failure to retrieve what she wanted when I was a child. She’d often say, “If it were a snake, it would have bitten you.” Oddly, she was the one who also said, “It’s silly to be afraid. Snakes don’t bite.”  The Eisenhowers in my life, in anyone’s life, are numerous.

copyright Helen Peppe Photography

My notes did not take only a few seconds. Few things do. I think Runja knows this because she’d sighed when she settled at me feet. I wrote for several hours, exploring the idea of how something so large and obvious as a mountain or a son growing into a man can’t be seen regardless of proximity. I wrote, ferreting out the details and realized, even as my brain was taken over by the idea that Alex hadn’t actually changed his career goals, but had turned aside from the ones I’d made for him, that my novel revisions sat in my brain much like that of the towering  presidential beside Mount Pierce. When I stopped writing, Runja shifted impatiently against my leg causing me to wonder for an instant what she had seen at the top of Mount Pierce. What must it be like to have so few expectations?