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April 19, 2005
Amidst whose vastness I first yearnedÉ
If you have read this blog long, you will know that I often post material, specifically poems, that may go back many years, some almost all the way back to the time in high school when we Òhad toÓ write a sonnet, and I found I liked it.
Some of my older writings use words such as Òache,Ó Òlong,Ó Òyearn.Ó They seem so poetically cheesy. And, indeed, there may well be a whiff of Òle fromageÓ in my use of them. Yet, I think there is more than that. I think I use them appropriately, if rather too readily, to describe some of my memories. Today, going to my high schoolÕs web site, I found this image.
The images on the right are brilliant, of course, and show the heavy snowfall amounts I would always wish for as we made our way back to school after a three month break in the winter. I would eagerly watch, bend after bend, as we ascended up the mountain ranges, looking for signs of snow on the hillside whizzing past our windows, on higher mountains across the valley, even on cars coming down the mountain.
If there were no promising signs further down, I had one dramatic bend remaining upon which I would pin my hopes. Going around it took one from the sunny side of a mountain to the shady side. Sometimes, dismally, there would be nothing even there, save the cold and dark of a winter night and slush and mud, adding weight to a heart already carrying the ache of missing parents.
But sometimes, it would be like going with Lucy through the wardrobe. Even the sound of the roaring bus engine seemed to be absorbed in the dark, stillness of the mountain. Heavy spackles of snow covered the gaps between stands of pine trees. Beneath the trees themselves, the snow was less deep. In especially dense groves, one might find the brownness of pine needles and dry earth.
And then, ÒCold? What cold?Ó Of course it was there, and along with the dark would bide its time. There would be time to sadden hearts. But now, ÒSnow! ThereÕs snow!Ó That was all that mattered.
No, what really excited me when I saw this montage was the picture on the left. This is the view the Jr. and Sr. High boys would look at every day when we walked the mile or so to and from school, when we had the good sense to look, that is. In my era, it was rare to see this much snow, but the tops of these mountains often had snow. Even snowless, though, they were lovely. And to the right of these mountains, across an even more breathtaking expanse of space, were the beginnings of the true Himalayas, which themselves were mere babies to the legends even further North.
It is these enormous gaps of spaceÉpine needlesÉsticky sapÉrich dark earthÉsnowÉthat shaped my sensibilities, my ideas of beauty. For many years, driving in flat Illinois, the occasional cloud formation that seemed, at first glance, to be a towering mountain, would quite literally make my heart skip. The mountains of Eastern Colorado provided a bit of a fix, but not the same expansive, gasping glory.
This is some of what I was getting at in the following lines from a poem I wrote for a poetry class about a return journey to Murree, which I hope to post after I have revised it.
these years
that have gathered thick like a winter's snows
melt from me
these years
stream down and bless the hills
that gave me love of beauty
amidst whose vastness i first yearned
for unknown things
for windswept hills
and distant lonely valleys
More laterÉ.
Pure Northerness | By jackdas | 5:07 PM
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