June mornings at the foot of our mountain, when the peak’s shadow stretches dark and cold across the valley, before the high sun beats the earth. In this coolness a jacket is needed, despite the fact that the children will be swimming in the streams by midday.

 

Hike into the breast of the mountain and breathe this cool air, beneath the oaks, beneath the tangle of cedars and keep going, up to up, under the invisible eyes of the cougar.

 

Alone I was, and at wits end. On one journey of my youth, the end of the march from womb to field and now to father. My novelty shall go to him, my son, my daughter, whatever they may be.

 

But into the canyon I climb, into the mountain's dark green breast. A dog at my side in case I encounter a bear.

 

Upon the ridge I look back at the sweep of the valley and the lake that shimmers with the budding light of day. I can hear my brothers calling to one another, I can smell their wood smoke stoves curling even this high, where I stand on the ridge, and I know that lake and river are being touched and routed so precious crops may be given life.

 

But up I go, and I am not thinking about my own dry crops, for soon I will have a child to help me with the irrigation. Up I go, and I feel I can hear the cows screaming in the barn, their udders full to bursting. But up I go, and why? Is it because the morning is so old and new and slow. Is it because the bleak dawn woke me and called. This, I think, is why.

 

In June, there are pines on the ridges that are shielded from the south facing sun. Now there are aspens higher up; I have not reached them yet. There is a tune on my lips and a hum in my throat, a song called ‘Kingsfold’ that my church in the valley has placed as a poem. About ascending to a higher plane, where God lives on his throne of light.

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And so up I go, and the sun alights the peak of the mountain, a jagged silhouette of the very highest ridges. It seems like that far off place is my song, it seems like that distant world is where God began to ‘be’.

 

The steeple is this, I think to myself, and the rising point of any house of worship is what all churches wish to become, they are like fireflies mimicking the scattered embers of a once great fire, little lights shining in the valley hoping to one day take light, to sweep across the earth and become like this mountain.

 

But nothing becomes like the mountain, nothing but the mountain itself, anything that is an imitation is always short, but is it looked down upon? Could the mountain possibly care?

 

Up to the aspen line now with their white bark that leaves a powder on my palm, with their many black eyes from missing branches, and their skin that remembers everything in grave scars. Here the stream tumbles off a rockslide and forms a pool at the foot of a granite step. A cold mist is pearling the air, gracing my cheek with even more coolness, and the heat of the valley’s June is a distant thing, a welcome thought, actually, for my nose and ears are red with cold.

 

This next part of the mountain bears a coldness in its soul. There are wildflowers in bloom, green grass in swell, far higher I see fields of ice in melt. I can hear the buzzing, the trickling, the whispering of the aspens whose quaking voice lives despite the lack of breeze. And at once I know this place is sacred, and yet at the same time the hymn falls from my lips.  In the valley our chapel song dispels the yelling of farmers and crank of the irrigation panel. But hymns are for the valley, I see, not where the buzzing of these bees through the wildflowers is so subtle and pervasive, where the aspens’ words are barely discernible, where the waterfalls' infinite percussion carries.

 

But in the next moment I feel a hallowed silence, that of a graveyard. Or something even more primal than a grave. In the brush I expect to see mounds of bodies, but the bloodshed is too far away. A single season can erase an entire elk corpse, and so this place takes everything that is needed for the hard winters that cover this place in ice. But in my heart, I feel it, like the speaking of the Spirit, and I know it is sacred and should be tread upon lightly. My dog knows too, his tongue ceases to lag and his eyes become soft. We are moving up still, through this hallowed glen and meadow.

 

Too high for the aspens now, even too high for the pines. The last of those twisting evergreens, stunted from the altitude and rocky soil, we go well beyond. The moss is on the boulders now, the streams slip beneath the rocks. Earth here is not soil, it is stones crushing stones and every one of my steps triggers a tiny rockslide down the ridge. I watch, and wonder, and look over the valley that is silent now. I can see the slight white haze settling over the fields and the lake, the smoke from the fires of so many breakfasting men.

 

My dog goes ahead, and in the mountain’s waning shadow he looks like a creature of this shaded dawn world. But he, like me, was brought here. We’re like cattle that have escaped the panel, roaming the lands with big black eyes. Up we go, and my boots are filled with snow melt, soft ice from last winter turned to froth by the hot June sun.

 

Up and up, the wind from the heights is incredibly cold. Does this place ever know summer? When the snows melt, does the next come just as soon.

 

There at the top I see a man and a part of me is discouraged. All this time I imagined I was the first set of eyes to lay upon this place, these peaks, this highest part of my valley and my world. But courage will not let me turn back because of disappointment. The dog has seen the man, he’s making for the top.

 

So up that trail, barely discernible through the slate and granite. Barely traversable because my legs are tired, and my breathing is hard. My thirst is pointed, and my hunger is raw. But up I go, up and up to the palace of the peak, to the place that keeps the sun locked behind the horizon.

 

It is a woman, not a man, up here on the peak. Her skin is leathered and cracked at the heels, she has a mouth that exists within folds of time. Her braid is white and studded in beads and her gray eyes are looking out east toward the light of the rising sun. I open my mouth to speak, and the words will not find me. Wind fills my mouth. At my feet is the other side of the valley, the hills and lesser peaks already bathed in daylight. But this mountain, here, I imagine is my shadow stretching out across the lake and the fields, across my cabin and my wife, across the haze of smoke that builds up on those hot days in June.

 

I thought I was the first. That is what I speak. To the woman who has not even glanced at me. My dog is lying on a swatch of moss beside the boulder upon which she is seated.

The wind comes sweeping up the ridges and I smell the wildflowers and I smell the honeycombs. Longer still I smell the water and the grass. And even though the wind comes from the valley and even though the smoke’s haze sits thick, I cannot smell any burning.

 

Sunlight has turned her gray irises to granite white. Her pupils are black and clear as spring water. And in this moment, I feel that hallowed sorrow, that ending that has continued to end for so long, which has yet to be resorbed by the mountain.

 

She motions to her side. I take my seat and my weary legs are given their first respite. And my eyes watch as dawn reaches far across the world, the crisp, clean, ripe earth that it is. And I realize that she can smell the smoke, because her clothes smell like water and wet mud, and mine must smell like sweat and pine smoke. But she watches, and beside me I feel like I join that hallowed silence, that terrible sorrow that the mountain holds, and remembers, and feeds through the streams into the valley and into the rivers, into the irrigation and into the plants that will one day feed my child. Beside this woman, whose aged face has the eyes of innocence, whose braid moves in the wind and whose beads shift and make a sound much like the small rockslides, that were part of my journey to this peak. Here the wind hits us and moves through us, and I wish I was naked so that I could feel it true and unimpeded upon my skin.

 

She was not the first here either, I realize. She is not the first of anything. Nor I. Nor anything else.

 

And the dog’s eyes squint as the sun touches and warms his red fur. And the woman smiles as the shadows bend down and the warmth of June embraces the mountain.