An American Map

Wild Poem: Mount Rainier, Washington

Wild Poem Mount Rainier, Washington I was raised in what’s called “low country,” country that is permeated by horizontals: wide meandering rivers, seeping wetlands, flatland fields, the perfect horizon of the Great Lakes. Even the bowls of our thousands of inland lakes are that, bowl-like, filled by gravity with freshwater sweetness that draws the eye across distances, but not up. Low country. It is a relative description, for we do have rolling hills and high dunes of sand that sport places of steepness, and the Upper Peninsula ’s great mineral fault line forced up a low range of fairly impressive mountains. But they are still that—low—compared to the Western Rockies. Mountains, especially big mountains with their righteous verticality, are news to me. Their steeply I heard a fly buzz—when I died— Emily Dickenson wild poem 17 diagonal slopes pull the eye up and up again to points that pierce clouds. A mountain’s slopes and soaring lofts seem to defy gravity, and that majestic rock-hard upward existence leaves me with a strange vertigo. This mountain idea is not so much too big as too tall. Even the sky bows and serves. This is how to make peace with such stature. This is how to find rest in elevation. What I learn is that hiking a big mountain is honor and privilege, but its other grace is finding a place within a place, a place interior and nearly horizontal to contrast with the mountain’s omnipresent height. But you cannot find these places without a guide. Post grad school. For several years, I slept little and studied hard, and now my head rings with an academic din of language that I cannot silence. I have handed in the bound document , undergone the final presentation, read aloud to a hundred people, said good-bye to my advisors and taken on a new job where I have self-promoted, self-marketed, and become totally self-absorbed. Now, insomnia, back spasms, headaches, bronchitis, moodiness. More insomnia. I can’t write, not poems or stories, not even a scrap of a play—which was the purpose of all this education. Even my beloved David, with his kind attention, cannot resolve this. He does what good men do; he lets me go to someone who can offer refuge. It is a long plan and a longer flight to the small town outside of Seattle, but I have come to Jackie, my friend who completed her degree the year before, who writes the trajectory of birds and things that swim, writes the story of creatures who live in places we cannot imagine unless some wise being can take us there. She can name a thousand plants—or an american map 18 so it seems to me, having heard her walk an ordinary street and rattle off every weed and grass and flower in view, as though she were speaking to them. Sitting in her sun-and-shadow kitchen, she lets me churn through the academic gossip that has been dammed inside me for months, how this writer did that thing to her manuscript, how this professor massacred that paper, which advisor said what to whom about whoever’s thesis and where it will get published. All of it is petty complaint and petulant brag, and it always comes back to me. I have become an egocentric automaton , a robotic creature out of sync with its natural mechanics, and even the words I love are not my own, but the vocabulary of the literary critics. I want to write new and wild poems, but writing feels like squeezing dried fruit, I tell her. I can’t hear even a line for the ruckus in my head. She pours tea and listens. When, like some worn-out wind up toy, I slump over the pretty tablecloth and take a long breath, preparing to launch again, she pulls out a hiking book and flips pages. “Mount Rainier . . .” she says softly. Still babbling, I help her load the backpacks. We park at a deep mountain lake so clear that we can see the cross-hatching of deadwood thirty feet below the surface. We start early, shouldering day packs, checking the Paradise Trail postings, orienting to weight and stride. At first, a wide curve of trail along a talus slope through young hemlock and cedar, but then we enter the interior—great hemlocks rising...