There are places here so beautiful and hard to reach — I think that goes together — that they don’t seem of this earth. Or rather, what we’ve become used to thinking of as home is just the palest imitation of the real thing.
To me, the mountain meadows are the most sublime. There are forest roads to take you by a few of these, but anywhere there are trucks is not the same. You’ll find campfire circles and the occasional beer can, and the grass is matted down. You may visit one of these spots and have a lovely picnic, but that’s not where I’m coming from. And so far, the only way to get to what I’m alluding to requires attempted suicide by hiking. It sure feels good when you get there, though.
The image below shows an unnamed meadow on a ridge across from Forest Road 439. The only way a person without a helicopter could ever visit that place would be by taking a compass reading and heading off into the bush. Needless to say, your cell phone won’t work, and every few dozen steps is a potential compound fracture. Just gazing at that spot is like peeking through a window at the living room of God, though. Nature made that meadow. It’s gorgeous, full of grass and flowers and elk poop. If you were there, you might never want to leave.
But the mountain meadows that really move me are the ones up high, just below the timberline. You can find one at the top of almost every trail that follows a creek up to its source. Here’s what I once wrote about just such a place:
Half an hour later, with no warning save a growing lightness in the space between the treetops up ahead, I unexpectedly emerged from the womb of the deep, dark woods and popped out into open space! Before me was a huge tilted bowl of a mountain meadow, extending up the sides of the valley slopes and into the sloping distance as far as I could see. The effect was simply stunning, after so long in the trees: blue sky and sunshine, enough room for a small city, and no one else around. I took care to scan the treeline for elk or bear, but the only animals in view were me and a chipmunk running across the path. This was pure nature, a cathedral of the gods. No one I know would believe that such a place existed, I thought to myself, much less that one could walk to it and never see another soul.
The source for that is here, although regretfully, there’s no photo of that meadow. It would have been impossible, anyway. I saw room for half a dozen aircraft carriers at least. And nobody was there! In other words, this is what the Earth is really like, not in our image but something else entirely. This is the essence of all non-human life, which is to say, MOST of everything. These meadows connect to something vast and stupefyingly powerful that we can’t even conceive of and shouldn’t try to name. Most of them have a spring somewhere, Think of that! A hole in the earth where pure water flows out!
What if you’re thirsty?
What do you do, go to church or WalMart and buy a case of Spirit?!?
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