The Mountain
What is a mountain anyway?
First Published: 2025-02-05| Last Updated: 2024-06-09
Status: stub| Audience: Mountaineers of all stripes| Confidence: aficionado
The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble — to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.
The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.
I have always preferred the mountains to any other geography. I suppose I am what Americans call “hill people” when they are being polite and “hillbilly”Regardless of the origin of the word, it denotes the sort of person that inhabits mountains around the world: “clannish, inwardly focused, belligerent toward outsiders and tough.“ See T. X. Hammes Why Are People Who Live in Mountainous Regions Almost Impossible to Conquer? when they are not. The neutral expression of these traits describes me pretty well I guess. I am overly interested in personal independence, community self-reliance, skeptical of “modernization” for its own sake, and prone to overt displays of intense indignation at assumed slights or unfairness.
…a free and untrammeled citizen… who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.
Far from the jobless, hopeless, deplorables that out of touch flatlanders portray hill people as, throughout history we have been the guardians of linguistic diversity, closely observed agriculture, traditional multi-generational family units, and deep appreciation for local everything; from food to power generation to political structures.