From Itself, Itself Becomes

“One never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it.”

Nan Shepherd

 

Distance emerges out of the air as the clouds pass by. As they go it seems that the mountains rise and sink out of and into the ground, as silvery drapes of rain let down their skirts, stroke the cheek of the hills and vanish. The forest reveals its layers, as if the trees form into ranks in the rain, then fall out again as it lifts. The soft horizon  – a flowing curving line – hardens as the clouds roll back. At the dark moor I sit beneath a pine, watching the weather and light wax and wane, looking up to the high places.

 

The outline of the hills, once strange but now so familiar, is just a two dimensional version of their three dimensional reality. When I view these mountains from their other side they look strange to me. The lines are all different. But there’s something about this view, my familiar view, that’s got under my skin. When I view them from here, they seem to slot into place.

 

My gaze travels distances in moments which take hours to travel in person. Starting from the ski centre, traversing the face of the northern coires of Cairngorm, steepening up the flank of the hill and traversing the plateau. The rise and fall of the coire rim, up to Cairn Lochan, back down, then the sudden upward flick at the summit of Lurcher’s Crag before the huge gulf of the Lairig Ghru. I’ve traced out that shape in person, drawing an invisible line across the hills with my body, spending bits of my life as the ink. I’ve gone back and forth over it, underlining important places. No promissory note ever paid back so much. 

 

The edifice of Lurcher’s Crag holds particular fondness for me, and constantly draws my eyes. As the cloud breaks around its blunted prow sunlight washes over the dark mountain. I can’t help a little smile and a slight shake of the head. It is one of helplessness, of wonder. I am sitting in quiet amazement of this thing that I love. Awe at its capacity to endlessly reinvent beauty. Always familiar, but always different.

 

Part of me wishes that I stood there on that summit just then to watch the clouds dance around the hill. But my smile is also one of knowing, and remembrance. This moment of beauty is seen from afar, but I have seen other such times up close.

 

In summer years ago the hill was in its greenest flush. The coires of Cairngorm were warm, quiet and still in the evening calm. My feet were carrying me past the mouth of the coires and taking the rising path that would lead me off to the summit of Ben Macdui if I let it, though I didn’t intend to go that far tonight. My long legs were eating up the ground, and I’ll admit to a certain smugness in how fit I felt, the result of many long days in the hills.

I stopped at the burn which tumbles from the mouth of Coire an-t Sneachda, where it steeps through boulders with a white knuckled brow. It was the first water I came to on the hill, so I knelt down to it, got my face in and drank long and deep from the pool. As I drank I noticed the faint scent of rock dust in the water; smokey and atomic, the scent of mountain stone. The draught was more refreshing than mere water. I was drinking of the mountain itself, and the taste was liquid vitality. I took a few minutes there to enjoy being in the presence of that ancient sound of running water, which is never silenced except in the coldest winters. Beside the running burn the short green spikes of deer grass wafted and bent in the soft breeze like little fans; I took in the way the light flashed across it in ripples; let my eyes see the sprigs of white flowered heather growing among the stalks; and much further off the shade of pink running into blue along the horizon.

After another hour of fast walking the heart-thudding dance of the uphill push eased off. My sweat began to cool, and I was on the last pull to the summit of Lurchers Crag – the ‘upward flick’ when seen from afar. It was a vast pile of boulders when approached from this direction. Legend has it that this peak got its name from a particularly long fox hunt several centuries ago, which roved all the way here from Ryvoan pass. The fox was pursued by man and hound over many miles of moor and mountain, and when it was finally at its last on the summit of the crag one of the dogs – a lurcher – went in for the kill, missed its mark. It tumbled off the edge of the hill and was gone, leaving nothing but its name. 

 

It is indeed a sudden edge. The Cairngorms are all soft curves and long views, but in some places the ground suddenly vanishes before your feet where the flank of some long lost glacier has carved deep into the mountain, leaving plummeting crags and huge gulfs of air.

I clambered up the last few feet onto the summit, and the sudden infinity of space turned the world inside out. The close details of stones, grasses and waving bog cotton fell away into some tiny singularity that shrank into the dark place behind my head. Where was all this space hiding? The Lairig Ghru spread out before my feet – deep wound of the glacier that had sliced the hills apart. A mile away on the other side rose the great flank of Sron na Lairig, dappled green and red. To the right and far below, where the mountains and forest become one, was the little cone of Carn Eilrig. The little Mt Fuji of Rothiemurchus, at which I looked upward so often from the dark moor. How strange to look down on it from above.

In the far distance the sun was approaching the horizon, and the western sky blazed with evening light. The west coast mountains of Knoydart, Kintail and Torridon were tiny pyramids of shadow like puppy teeth. Then I dared the edge of the crag to peer down into the Lairig Ghru, and heard the song of the Allt Druie being carried a thousand feet up to me on the soft breeze.

 

As I stood there looking down into the Lairig my eyes were suddenly startled by movement. My head dodged and my arm flew up with the instinctive warding gesture. My eyes latched on to something that whipped around my head just within arms reach. A white speck, fast moving and shining in the flame of sunlight. It streaked back and forth in the light, darted left and right – my eyes could barely follow – then sped away as suddenly as it appeared, vanishing in the grass. After a startled moment I realised it had been a white moth, but not before I wondered if I had just seen a physical piece of my soul come loose and blow away in the wind, to lie within the mountain forever. 

 

I know. It sounds like so much humbug. Yet that was truly my first thought, and the idea came to me as spontaneously and authentically as the sight of the creature itself; it was as present to me as the shadow draped mountains. The idea seemed like a gift. It took root, and began to flourish. I looked around, realising there must be little bits of my heart all over these hills. I could see them when I looked closely; the pieces twinkled in the rushing streams like flashing sunlight, lay in the sparkling snow like crystals, and rested in the secret hollows like a watchful hare. There was one, playing at being a lichen dappled boulder; another in the sound of water on the air; and one more waving at me from the grass, pretending to be a moth. Maybe little bits of all the things that live up here, of all living things that travel the high places, split off and get soaked up by the hills. There they take root and grow. The spirit of the mountain grows and grows, always becoming.

Something about it just made sense. It made me look around more keenly than before. You might say something had clicked into place. But nature is not a machine with parts, it’s not a click-into-place kind of thing. It grows, it changes. From itself it becomes itself. As Seneca said, every new beginning comes from another beginning’s end. 

 

From a beginning in these hills years ago, a new beginning was suddenly starting to grow inside me. Though nothing on the exterior of this moment had changed, I suddenly felt as if I were seeing the mountain in a whole new light. Seeing it not as a thing – an artifact on which the forces of the world acted. I suddenly realised why Nan Shepherd had called it the Living Mountain. Not as a term to summarise the fact that there was life upon it. The mountain as life itself.

Once, as I was rock climbing on a crag above the pine forest, I saw the pinecones of the trees beneath me burst open in a sudden explosive release of green pollen. It was the sound that caught my attention – tore it away from the dance of body and stone with a cascade of ripping pops that swept through the branches. Up there on the rock I was among the tops of the trees, and watched as green smoke engulfed the forest. Like mist, the pollen swirled in the breeze, struck through with beams of sunlight and shadow. It was nothing less than the moment of birth for the trees. Sudden fertility and fecundity sweeping through the forest.

I had thought myself awake until I saw that; had thought myself already immersed in the moment. How much more focused can you be, how more closely can you interact with the world than to climb a rock face? But it turns out even a dreamer can think they are awake, until they are slapped in the face. This was another such moment. So there on the summit of Lurcher’s Crag I stood, suddenly awakened by a moth. Awake to it all, in a way I only thought I had been until now. 

I turned away from the edge of the crag, to take in the opposite view, away from the gulf of air and the setting sun. My shadow stretched and pointed toward the plateau. Cairngorm itself was an iron grey swelling, just beyond the green and pink flanks of the ridges that swept down from the plateau in huge parallel lines. Those slopes glowed red in the sun, warm and dry, yet I could plainly see the work of ice in their forms. The huge scouring force of glacier and gravity that had planed these hills into matching lines and curves was long gone, but the shadow of its hand still lay over everything. A hundred centuries or so since the last permanent ice melted, but what’s that? The blink of an eye, a turn of the world. Four thousandths of a percent of a trip around the galaxy.

 

In all that time, how much life had made a home here? How many times had the light lain that same red stripe across the summits beneath a darkening sky as it did now? How often had the rain stroked the cheek of the hills with a glance of light? 

 

I didn’t want little answers, nor literal ones. I wanted so much more. I wanted to know the story of the mountain’s becoming, and its living. To know it as deeply as my body knows to breathe. In the same way that I beat my heart I wanted to reach out into the universe to rain the clouds, and to flow the water. I wanted to be the world itself, becoming a mountain.

 

There somehow seemed to be no conflict between the fact that the mountain was constantly changing, yet remained itself. After all, is that not the same for us? We are not the same as what we will become. 

 

I turned away from Cairngorm, back toward the setting sun beyond the Lairig Ghru and the peaks of the west. I imagined myself there on the mountain-top with the sun tied on a string. I dig in my heels, and with just a powerful tug and a twist of the shoulders I tug it back up over the horizon and spin it back around the other way. The sun rises up again into the sky. The light of afternoon and then morning returns. The days and nights roll back, the water flows up the streams of the mountain, and down the branching veins of the trees. The snow grows from the water; grows across both hill and forest. It pushes rocks and stones uphill and nestles them into vacant hollows. In the woods mouldy earth takes the form of trees and then they raise themselves like pillars, driving back the wind. Then the trees shrink into the earth, as the soil throws itself onto their branches in leaf shape. Eventually there I stand, on the soon to be Lurcher’s crag, upon a glacier. I let the sun go again, and it returns to its usual course and speed. 

 

Time starts to move in its ordained direction once again. I find myself somewhere new, or rather, old. The distant town of Aviemore is gone, the roads are gone, the tracks of people across mountain stone are gone. They have never yet been. No loch Morlich, no Lairig Ghru. I am on an island of stone above a sheet of ice that stretches all the way to the most distant north. But things still have familiar colours; familiar shapes; familiar textures. Sky is the same, water is the same, stone is the same. 

 

So now the question is this: if I were to keep going, to keep winding back the sun-clock, then how far do I go before it is not the same place at all? Until the glacier is gone again, and a taller mountain stands there? Or into ages earlier, when the mountain itself lay buried and in a different part of the world? 

 

There seems to be no answer. Because no matter how far ahead or behind I look, there will always be those timeless things that never change. For they are change incarnate. As long as they are here, it is This Place. The flow of water and wind are its breath. The flash of the sun and the change of the season are the beat of its heart.

From a deep reverie I returned, and found the last of the sunlight was running upward over the tops of the hills, shrinking and intensifying, clinging on to the last of the high places. The shadows that lurked all day between the stones and blades of grass were creeping wider and wider, stretching themselves out across the mountain, getting ready to leap into the sky and bring the stars to life. But summer sunsets are long, and there was still plenty of time for sitting, watching and dreaming. My legs dangled over the edge of a boulder at the cliff top where the shadows rose like a tide, and I leaned back against cool red stone in the last of the sunlight. By sitting with my head reclined back just so, my eyes slightly narrowed, my body perfectly still, I was able to lose all sense of my peripheral surroundings, and even my own body. The entire mountain was diminished to nothing more than the thing on which I lay, as forgettable as the pressure of a chair. I was left with nothing at all except the infinite view, as if I were adrift on the wind high above a wide mountain country.

 

I sensed the presence of Winter in this place, even though it was Summer then. The inhale of breath implies the exhale, and I could feel Winter’s touch even in its supposed absence, like a lived-in house when the people are away. Night, day, or the moment the sun splits them apart with a golden edge. Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring. Rain, Wind, Thunder, Snow, Sunrise, Sunset. This place is made of such things, and to touch one is to touch them all, and all they have known.

 

The shadows inevitably reached me, and I left the summit. My feet thunked on the granite stones that lead back downhill. I was deep in contented dreaming when a sudden flutter of scattering grey shapes and notes of urgency woke me from my wondering mind and brought me back to my wandering body. I’d not been paying attention to where I put my feet, and realised I had scattered a brood of Ptarmigan chicks with my clumsy blunderings. I stopped immediately, to seek the quickest way by which I could leave them be, when Mother came at me, wings spread and hissing. I’ve often marvelled at the hardiness of these beautiful birds, who spend all year living on the mountain. But this selfless act of bravery astonished me more than anything, for I am a hundred times as large as she. I turned tail and offered her my immediate absence, with humble apologies to the disturbed family. I had just crossed a line. Intruder. A reminder that no matter what I hoped the mountain had to show me, there are always places I should not tread.

 

Suitably chastened I picked my way more carefully until I reached the path again. The burn I had crossed on the way out was a noisy white splash in the deepening shadow when I stopped again for one last break to rest my legs, and after refreshing myself once more from the water I looked up into the coire of snows, where my journey into these first hills began years ago. The cliffs and gullies of the Fluted Buttress were a soft brown in the gloaming. Tonight the hill was quiet, welcoming, and more familiar than ever. The last light was now a fading orange glow beyond the tops of the hills, while behind it a great bruise of shadow and star was welling up out of the east. Destiny or freedom? River or tree? I don’t know, but I felt as if fate had just tipped me again toward something important with no more than the beat of a moth’s wing.