Sunday, May 21, 2006

DR. OMED'S 24-7 SERMONETTE: VIEW OVER RUINS OF SUMMIT HOUSE,  MT. EVANS (14,264 FT.), 1982 THE DESCENT OF MT. VENTOUX On April 26, 1336, a man known to those who still bother to read history as Petrarch (and his brother plus two servants) became the first man, that is to say, the first self-consciously literate educated man since antiquity to climb a mountain just to see the view—just because "It was there"—and to write about it—to put it "there," pal, in a nice little essay, in the form of a letter to a friend. The mountain was Mt. Ventoux, an outlier of the Alps in southern France, and indeed a high mountain, the highest in the area.   I think this is something worth commemorating, and I'm glad that Petrarch took the trouble to write it up. A historian might peg the ascent of Mt. Ventoux as a symbolic act marking the beginning of the Renaissance. In terms of style, however, I'm afraid that Petrarch makes my ass want a pinch of snuff, he's so precious.   In one episode of Chris Carter's TV series Millenium, a recent college graduate missing in Alaska is discovered, by our hero Frank Black, to have been signing credit card receipts with the name "Alex Ventoux." Frank eventually figures out the reference, and, incidently, finds the young man, badly injured but not yet dead, out in the wild. They witness a spectacular display of the northern lights. Frank has a sort of epiphany. When Frank manages, against all odds, to bring the kid back alive to the rescue pick up point, he refuses to get on the seaplane—as if to be touched by civilization would destroy him, or destroy his new insight before he could integrate it—and spends another day in the wild, alone. But Frank does come back, back from the epiphany on top of Ol' Ventoux, so to speak. The series hadn't been cancelled yet.   That is what I want to talk about, the descent of Mt. Ventoux— coming back from the epiphany. I've climbed that mountain. I've been to Mt. Ventoux and seen the view. I came back, too. Not everyone comes back. When I lived in Denver, every so often I would take the bus from Denver, through Boulder, to Nederland, Colorado. I would hike from the bus stop to a trailhead up valley, and hike a trail to the Continental Divide, at a bit above 11,000 feet. I passed other hikers on the trail, but I always went alone looking for solitude rather than company, and no one I met got more than a smile, a nod, a few words. I truly don't know about you, but when I stand upon such a high place, alone, and look at the earth spread out below, I am in a state of contemplative exultation. OK, there was that one time when Spike and I stopped at the top of Loveland Pass, on the way back to Denver from one of our road trips. I totally lost restraint, stripped off all my clothes, and went sprinting up slope like a very short Yeti. An isolated incident. This "contemplative exultation" I speak of consists of the full body realization that I am an integral if insignificant part of the vastness of existence. At that moment, it would be easy to die "up there" on Mt. Ventoux, in the midst of that vastness with the full awareness of that vastness, to die, literally, at the peak. How much harder it is to carry that vastness with you and within you, down the mountain, back to your everyday life, to be your own Moses and face your golden calf, whatever it may be, with nothing but these useless slabs of stone cradled in your arms.   There are those who go up the mountain to that peak and do not come back down—Not because they were careless, luckless, or made a fatal mistake, but because they choose the vastness. The vastness uncompromised by continued human existence. To become one again by personal extinction alone in the vastness.   Don't fool yourself. We are all alone. We wouldn't need love if we weren't alone. We wouldn't look for it in all the wrong places, either.   TRAIL RIDGE RD., NEAR FALL RIVER PASS, ROCKY MT. NATIONAL PARK, 1982 2:38:01 PM    comment []