Grown Up in the Mountains

This post won’t tell you what to do when you vacation in the mountains, although there are plenty of options. It won’t really even tell you what is in the mountains.

 It will tell you what the mountains mean, at least to this one person who has grown up in the mountains.

Hill Country

Why do you live where you live? 

I live in the mountains because I was born here. And I like it here. I love this place. But it’s not just the specific place I love. These Vermont hills will always be special to me, but any mountains, no matter where, would draw me, I think. It’s the kind of terrain that feels like home.

In hill country, the land meets me. I feel there are cozy boundaries and landmarks rather than the wandering vastness of a single plane, a constant searching for the horizon. The climbing and dipping down again; the ear-popping during even a short car ride – this is all I’ve ever truly known. And my heart is comforted when the land does not lie still, when it lifts and dips and turns beneath its coverlet of trees and fields. 

There are woods and fields and water everywhere, meeting and mingling. Trees clothe the hills and edge the fields. Fields roll to meet the woods, soft and brimming with possibilities of grazing animals, telling of former days of farming. Little streams and ponds and marshes and lakes and rivers flow through the crevices and form in the pockets of the hills. In every valley, running water winds under the darkness of the trees with a smell of wet rocks and fish slime that always reminds me of mud boots and mosquitos. 

Seasons

In the time of sugaring, we clamber over the ledges and drill holes in the maple trees that cling to the rock by their toes. I listen to the “ting, ting, ta-ting” of sap dripping into buckets that have just been emptied. I inhale the sweet, warm smell of sap steam as it boils, and set my cup of hot liquid gold to cool in a snowbank. 

After the quiet of snow-hushed winter, the cacophony of birds in spring cheers my heart. Every bud and every little growing thing that pokes out of the dirt makes me eager for the coming days. And the green – oh, the blessed green of summer! It spills from the fronded woods out into the open spaces of field and lawn and sprouts up from garden beds of foxgloves and irises, or tomatoes and climbing rows of peas. It arches over the roads and lines the edges of the gravel or pavement. It ripples in the wind, showing silver beneath green leaves, and it glows in the lurid light that lingers beneath heavy thunder clouds. 

When the lightening bugs are finished with their summer show, I seek another kind of glowing. On a day of clouds, when the sunlight is diffused, a sugar maple turned orange seems to make its own radiance. The brilliant glory of red maple leaves against a blazingly blue autumn sky — it farewells summer stunningly. And I relive a childhood memory every time I work up a sweat on one of those early frosty days, when my skin is cold, but I am hot.

The snow of winter speaks of purity. After the snow comes, the air smells clean with a tasteless freshness, and the brown, tangled grasses, dark splotches of bare earth, and gnarly branches are softened and covered. Last-year’s bird nests have a dust-sheet of snow thrown over them — waiting. A watercolor stroke of blue hides in the crevices of a white snowbank, and dazzling diamond dust glitters in the sunshine. Those first footprints in a fresh fall of snow make me smile. 

Marveling

I marvel at the massive, glittering expanse of ocean and feel the pull of its longing. I enjoy the excitement – like a pulsing heart-beat – of a wilderness of pavements and houses and houses and plazas and cars and houses. But I’m glad to return to mountains and rivulets of melting winter, to liveliest green from moss to pine; dirt to measure, dig, and sow; neighbors to swap produce with; and life to live – grown up in the mountains.