The mountain you never climb

Last hour of light, and the ridge has gone the colour of the inside of a shell. Bo is a hundred yards down the trail with his nose in something.

There is a bald knob on the far ridge, three hollows over. From my kitchen window it is the highest thing on the horizon, and I have wanted to stand on it since the spring.

That is the honest sentence. I wanted to stand on it. I did not say I wanted to walk there, and I have never once said it out loud to anybody, including myself.

It has been sitting in my mouth for four months. Today I finally went and did something about it, and it did not go well.

So here is the plan I made, and I’m telling you the plan because the plan is the interesting part. I gave it a project, three Saturdays, each one a quarter mile longer than the Saturday before. By the third, the knob would be inside a walk I could finish before lunch.

I wrote the three Saturdays on the back of an envelope. The envelope is in my coat, which tells you how the morning went.

So this is the first of the three. I got out at the gate with the coffee and the envelope, and I took the timber road.

Here’s my reasoning, because it is the reasoning everybody uses. The timber road goes up out of the hollow, and from the top of it you can see the whole far ridge. So a quarter mile on that road and you would be lined up, with the view before you even started.

The timber road is not a quarter mile. It isn’t even half a mile. It goes down, around, and up on the far side of a hollow I did not know was there.

So I came up out of that hollow two hollows west of where I meant to be, and the afternoon was already half gone.

And I want to be fair about this. The knob was behind a stand of white oak I have walked past for years. From where I stood I couldn’t see it at all. Not a slope of it. Nothing.

The plan did not work, and I would like that straight.

I burned the afternoon, my socks are wet, and I have a blister on the boot I care about least.

Here is what happened in the middle of it. Bo found a seep in the oak hollow that I have walked past a hundred times. He put his front feet in and stood there up to his chest, absolutely delighted, for a minute and a half.

He did not look at the knob once. He did not know the knob was in the country.

Here is the strange part. Walking back, past the second fence, I did not miss it. Not the way you miss a thing you nearly had, and I would have felt that, because I have felt that.

I felt nothing about it. I was wet, I was watching the light come down off the ridge, and I was thinking about the blister.

So here’s the question for today.

Why do I want the top of a hill I have already walked around?

I am not asking about mountains. I haven’t been on a real mountain in my life, and I’m not going to open a walk by pretending otherwise.

I am asking about a bald knob, three hollows over. I can see it out of my own kitchen window every morning while the coffee is going.

And I want to stop one thing before I go looking for the clever part. The hill is not hard. There is no weather on it and no crowd. It’s a bald knob with a fence at the bottom of it, and that is the entire obstacle.

Here is what I know so far. I know the wanting has been there since the spring. I know the walk has gotten better while the wanting got louder. I can’t get rid of one by doing more of the other.

I’m not going to tell you I’ve got this figured out. I’ve read one thing about it, from a long time ago, and it wasn’t written to be about hills.

So I’m going to go and get that thing. Then I’m going to tell you the exact place where it stops being any use to me at all.

Here is where I am borrowing from. I am standing outside that whole old way of thinking, and I’m taking one thing out of it. That’s the polite way of saying I’m borrowing.

The name is Montaigne. French, fifteen thirty three to fifteen ninety two.

He gave up the public part of his life when he was in his forties. Then he went and lived in a tower on his own land, with his books in it. And up in that tower he wrote a book. The book is called the Essays.

Here’s the shape of it, because the shape is the whole thing. Almost every book of his kind has a shape. It sets out a thing, and then it argues for the thing, and by the end you’re supposed to be somewhere better off. You can tell what it is from the last page.

This one does not do that. There is no plan in it and it does not arrive anywhere.

It’s a man turning his own mind over in front of you, and he lets you hear the turning, including the parts where the thinking doesn’t come out right.

You can open that book in the middle of a page and find him already in the middle of something. It doesn’t matter that you started in the middle, because he was in the middle anyway.

He kept at it for years. The book has him in it at several ages, and the version on a shelf now is a later one than the version a reader in his own lifetime would have had.

And the tone is what catches you before the idea does. He writes about himself as though he were somebody you might have to sit next to. Not a famous man, an ordinary one, with a bad back and a temper and a mind that wouldn’t sit still.

That is the whole trick of the book, and it isn’t an easy one to pull off.

I am not a man in a tower. I have a bench outside and a dog who needs walking at six. I’ve never once sat still long enough to find out what I think.

Now, the part I want is small, and it’s in the title. The word essays does not mean opinions. It means tries. An essay is an attempt. It’s the thing you write when you don’t know how it comes out and you want to find out by writing it.

An attempt is not a lesser thing than an answer, it is the thing you do before the answer. Most of us only ever do that in our heads, quietly, and never on paper.

I’m not going to say his line. I’m going to say mine.

A try has no finished version. And if a person is not a project, then there is no last draft of a person either.

Here is what I take from it. The looking is not the preparation for the arriving. The looking is the whole of it, you’re allowed to stop with it unfinished, and nobody has to sign the bottom of it.

Now the price of holding on to it, before I go any further. If nothing ever gets finished, then nothing can ever be counted. There is no telling a thing that is going somewhere from a thing that is going nowhere. Both of them are allowed to be a try.

That is a very expensive way to be comfortable, and I’m not going to pretend I haven’t noticed it. I’ve been carrying that around for a week and I’m not going to pretend it fits.

Here is my hill, seen from this ridge. What I have actually wanted all spring is to be a man who went up a thing, and that is all the wanting was carrying. Not the knob. The man.

If the man is what you are after, then he is up there, and he is not coming down here to meet me.

So the borrowing does not solve my hill. It tells me a man can spend twenty years in a tower without ever once being finished.

That’s either a great comfort or an excuse for never going outside, and I don’t yet know which. That’s the honest place, and I’m standing in it rather than stepping over it.

And it’s worth saying out loud that this is what the ridge does for me. Halfway up an idea I like, the walk hands me something. Not a lesson, a fact about a bench and a blister and a dog in a seep.

Now the middle of it, which is the part where I try to knock my own idea over.

Not wanting a thing can be an excuse, and it’s a good one. You get to be a person who is not greedy. You get to keep the whole afternoon. Nothing is ever taken off you, because you never reached out for it.

And I’ve watched myself do it. It’s not a theory with me, it’s the timber road. And it works, because nobody can check it. There is no afternoon in this county with a scoreboard on the end of it.

So, who is it bad for? It’s bad for anybody who needs the summit to be real in order to get out of the door in the morning. I am not joking.

I didn’t walk today because I felt like it. I walked today because there was a thing I was supposed to finish, and the walk was the price of it. Take the price away and there are a lot of afternoons that simply don’t happen.

That is the whole trouble with a hill you have wanted for four months. It never gets cold enough to be worth arguing with, it just keeps being there, being reasonable, being a bald knob.

There’s also a popular version of this idea that I want to walk past. It has been printed on an enormous number of things, and it does one job very well. The version is that there was never any mountain to get to. It is all in you, it says. You already are the thing you are looking for.

It is not a bad sentence. I have had it on a wall. What it does for you is that nobody can ever tell you that you cannot.

That’s the one thing I want from a mountain. On a bad day, from a hill, I want somebody to tell me that I cannot. I want the mountain to be real enough to say no to me.

And it’s bad for the young, and I don’t say that lightly. Hand a nineteen year old the idea that the point is to keep your own trying and never arrive anywhere, and then you haven’t handed him anything.

He is the only one of you who still has somewhere to arrive.

I don’t think a man gets to retire from wanting on the strength of a good sentence, however plainly he’s written it. He had a life before the tower, and nobody gets to skip that part.

Now the third cost, and this one is mine.

I’ve been enjoying this idea all week, and that’s exactly how I know to be careful of it. It flatters me. I get to be the man on the ridge who has made his peace with wanting. That is a good place to stand, and a cold evening makes a man generous.

Here is the part I do not like about myself. There’s a list on the wall by the stove, and it has nine things on it that I haven’t done. I couldn’t tell you this evening which of the nine are unfinished and which are finished with.

That is what happens when nothing is ever a waste. The list stops telling me anything, and I stop reading it.

And there’s no mountain I can put on the end of it that would make it start telling me something again. I have looked.

So, back on the ridge, and it’s nearly off the light now. The light comes off the top of the far ridge first. Then it slides down the trees. Then it gets to the ground and stops, like somebody pulling a sheet up.

There’s a bench up here. I built it in the spring out of two pieces of a pallet, and it is level at one end and it rocks at the other.

I sat down on it in the wet and the coffee went over the side of it, down the slope, into the sycamores. That is the whole of the news from this week, and I want you to have it.

A bench I built myself is on that list by the stove. It is the only one of the nine I have finished since spring, and I never noticed it on the list.

That is what I learned today, and it is small, and it is all I have.

The other one on the list is a room at the back of my place. A workbench, a light, and a place to put the things I have not decided about yet.

I’ve been adding minutes to that room all spring, the same way I add minutes to this walk. There is a difference, and it took a bad afternoon on a wrong road for me to see it.

On the walk, every minute I add is minutes I spend. I’m out here, my boots are wet and I’m going back the way I came.

In that room, I’m not spending anything. I’m standing outside it looking at the door, and I get the satisfaction of the work without ever opening the door.

Which is exactly what I was doing with the timber road. I wanted to earn the top by looking good at the bottom.

So here’s the shape of it, and I’ve been wrong about shapes before.

Most of what a mountain does happens underneath it.

A summit isn’t sitting out there with something in it that you are one good walk away from. What a summit does is give a person something to be shaped by while they are still down here.

And here is the honest case for not wanting it, which is not the case I expected to be making. The wanting never stops. That is not a fault in you and it is not a sign that you have not done enough, it is what wanting is. It has no bottom and it was not built to have one.

And the only thing I’ve found that moves it isn’t a summit. It’s a walk you would have taken anyway, in the dark, with wet socks, that takes you back to your own gate.

I’ve been looking for that walk for four months. It’s been going past the gate twice a week the whole time, with the dog, and I didn’t see it. I was looking at a bald knob.

So somewhere out there is a summit on your list, and I am not going to guess what it is. It might be an instrument. It might be a stretch of water with your name on it. It might be a language you’ve been carrying in a coat pocket for two years like a stone.

I’m not telling you to go and get it, and I’m also not going to tell you the wanting is nonsense. Both of those are cheap, and both of them feel good for about a day.

Here’s what I have actually got. Most people can tell which thing on their list is the walk and which one is only the story, and it takes about four seconds. Then they carry it a while longer anyway.

That is not a failure of character. That is just what it feels like from inside a wanting.

Here is the thing to try, and it takes one walk out of a door.

At the start of the next walk, before you set off, say out loud one thing you have been wanting for a long time. Not out loud. I mean out loud, and whoever is in the room can hear it. The somebody is allowed to be a dog.

That is step one, and it’s one sentence. Do not write it down and do not go looking for it. Just say it, let the room have it, and go.

Now walk, and don’t do anything about the sentence. That is the half everybody skips, and it is the half that does the work.

At the end of the walk, before you go in the door, leave one small thing you don’t need. Pick it before you start, because if you wait until you’re standing on the step, you’ll cheat, and you’ll leave something you have to walk back for.

Not on the trail. This isn’t a thing to leave on a county road, so put it on your own step, or your own gate post, or the stump by your own door. One small thing, small enough that you’re not sure it counts.

And then, standing right there, say the thing’s name one more time, same words you used at the start of the walk.

That is the whole assignment. One walk, one thing named at the beginning, one thing named at the end, one small thing left behind.

And one more thing about the order, because the order is the exercise. Name it first, leave it last, because the other way round is just doing the wanting twice. Do you have to decide anything about the name while you’re doing it? No, and that is not a rule, that is just what I did.

Here is why the leaving is in it. The small thing at the end of the walk is proof that you can put something down on purpose. That is all it is, and you do not have to want it forever to be able to set it down.

If you walk to the mailbox for this, do all three steps anyway. They take about a minute, and the third one works perfectly well on a gate post.

And here is the part that does the work, so please do not walk straight past it. Decide nothing.

Do not cancel the wanting, do not sign up for the wanting, and leave it exactly as live as it was when you started. Notice that you didn’t have to do anything about it for the whole hour.

That is the whole instruction and it is the hardest one I’ve got. I know because I’ve tried to obey it on a walk, and I couldn’t manage it much past the first mile.

If you have a long walk, keep going after the leaving, and notice what the wanting does over the next mile. In my experience it gets louder, and then it gets boring, and boring is the good news.

That is what mine did, once. I’m not going to tell you it happens every time.

And if the thing you named turns out to be the walk, then you have just given yourself an hour. An hour you were taking anyway, and that is the best outcome there is.

If you skip it, you got twenty four minutes of a man talking about a bald knob, and the dog didn’t care about the bald knob at all. That is a walk too, and I’ve taken a great many of them.

The envelope with the three Saturdays on it is still in my coat, in case you were wondering.

Two Saturdays to go, and I’m not going to tell you what I’m going to do about them. I would only be telling you the story of what I’m going to do.

Two Saturdays. A wet sock. A dog asleep on my boots.