Our theme for the month of October is “states.”
My aunt lives in the mountains.
Looking out from her front porch, you can see all the way down the Rio Grande valley and back up its other side. It’s the desert, but it’s the kind of desert that makes you understand Manifest Destiny, how little selfishness it would take for someone to want to grab onto the landscape and hold for dear life.
My aunt told me once that when things get chaotic in life, when the world shifts and even the passing minutes become unsteady, she reminds herself about the mountains. That they were, and they are, and they will be. The mountain is the mountain is the mountain.
I love mountains, for all I only see them once every five years or so. Michigan was pressed flat by a glacier 14,000 years ago. We claim to have mountains in the UP and I suppose that we do, but our mountains are mountains in the way that a teacup pig is livestock (technically. Maybe. And with a variance in scale). And the Porcupines are 500 miles away from me anyway, so it’s not like I’m driving past one on the way to the grocery store.
In a moment of my own unsteadiness, I told my aunt this, after she had shared how the mountain grounds her. How I could feel the steadfastness of the mountain here, standing in the New Mexican sun, but I wasn’t entirely sure I could bring its solidity back to Michigan with me.
“But don’t forget,” she said, “you’ve got the lake.”
Which didn’t seem like much of a comparison at all, and I told her so. Lake Michigan is the opposite of steady. It’s mercurial and dark. Sometimes it freezes and sometimes it rages. It fills up with Asian carp and zebra mussels. It will kill you, if you’re not careful with it.
My aunt wasn’t buying it, and two days later I flew home, a trip that took me briefly over that very lake. That was over a year ago; I haven’t seen it since.
This is the other way in which the mountain differs from the lake. I live fifteen minutes from the shore of Lake Michigan, the fifth largest freshwater lake in the entire world, and I could live my entire life in this town without having seen it once. The mountain towers over you; you can ignore its presence but you’ll still be living in its shadow. The lake needs you to come say hi.
It needs you to remember it. Because it is always there. It’s been there forever (not as long as the mountain, maybe, but only if we stop counting by the timeline of humanity). It has a temper, but it’s always right where you left it.
The lake, it turns out, is as steady as the mountain is changeable. The mountain burns in the hot summers and explodes with aspen red in the fall. Its snows and storms render it unpredictable. It, too, is a danger to the unwary. And yet the mountain is the mountain is the mountain.
Which means, of course, that my aunt was right: The lake is the lake is the lake. You just have to seek it out.
Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Matthew.kowal (CC BY 4.0)
