The Secret Life of the Living Mountain

Often one book finds the next one and so on, like a thread that ultimately exposes the reader's taste in literature.  The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd is integral to the weave that reveals my taste for treks into the wildness and the study of nature as a living organism.  

Long ago, I journeyed with Paul Theroux around the coastline of England with the A Kingdom by the Sea, and have read many of his journeys since, including my favorite, Dark Star Safari.  Bill Bryson was next up to bat and I remember reading In a Sunburned Country while nursing my youngest.  It was the only time I could read quietly and without interruption.  Soon I was laughing so loudly that I startled my daughter and who choked on the milk!   After that I read more sedate and sedentary volumes so that she could dine in peace.   

In the past few years, as the planet heats up and the rights of trees become preeminent, I have found more serious works whose themes discuss the ways in which nature and humans interact with, and impact each other, often in negative ways.  In Ancient Wanderings: Journeys into Pre-historic Britain, author James Canton discusses that interplay between landscape and the human hand to shape and reshape.  On his walks, Canton reads the landscape "like a gypsy would read the tea leaves." He instinctively knows that tension between human hands sculpturing the landscape to make it our own against the power and might of nature to claim it back."  

I was led to the Living Mountain by Canton and another author whom I read often, Robert MacFarlane.  He also writes about that human/nature struggle and some may say that he has become a champion for the old ways and the old language used to describe the landscape in all its degrees and variations.  Through him, I have learned that these very descriptors are falling out of the lexicon as humans become more and more urbanized, domesticated and mechanized, and language more utilitarian.  It begs the age old question that if the mighty oak loses its name (one of the supposedly obsolete words as deemed by the OED people), does it even exist?  There is no time for walks in the wild spaces and the discoveries such hikes can produce.  Both authors refer frequently to Nan Shepherd as an inspiration to reclaim the old ways.  She has emerged as the North Star of naturalist writers and it is time for me to find out about her.

Used with grateful thanks

Shepherd grew up and lived her life in Cairngorm Mountains in the Scottish Highlands.  They formed her backyard and loomed across the landscape like ancient elders from another time.  Writing during the early part of the war, she references night time walks to find a radio signal to hear the latest from the Front.  On such nights, the stars spread a blanket of jewels across the night sky.  It's been a long time since I have been able to see a sky full of stars and I envy Shepherd this quiet joy.

She spends days hiking and climbing the rock face.  She meanders its pathways and peeks into its crevices and caves, and while doing so, learns that the mountain has rhythms and a heartbeat all of its own that teams with life within and without.  It is indeed a living being with opens spaces and tightly held secrets that she pries into with the eyes of a lover craving the intimacy.  But the mountain is capricious, holding tightly to its secrets and Shepherd learns about the myths and cautionary tales of lives lost to the mountain because they failed to heed its warnings.   She talks of the ancient bonds between the mountain and its inhabitants - a host of flora and fauna, mosses, creatures and humans.  Even the shady dark places are teaming with life.  All have have found a safe place; safe only as long as they obey the Mountain's capricious whims.  

I'm a kindergarten teacher and part of my "mission" is to introduce young children to the outdoors world.  It's a place of freedom and infinite possibilities and a place where children can be children.  Shepherd finds these places in the mountain and talks about how the senses become an essential part of the mountain experience.  On a side note, she has an equal love of literature and so has the language and ability to describe what she is seeing and hearing and feeling with acute and glorious precision.  Her writing just sing of the wind and rain and snow.  It pulses and throbs with the heartbeat of a thousand creatures and carries the weight of life and loss and majesty in every line.  The irony is this work was shoved in a drawer for years after receiving a rejection slip from a publisher.  But maybe, just maybe, the world wasn't ready for this gorgeous elegy to the Mountains.  

For it is an elegy.  A loving record of a time and space that is gone forever.  Like the words that the makers of dictionaries now claim to be gone from our native language. Published finally in the late '70s, Shepherd's voice rings out clearly in a world divorced from the great outdoors.  The Old Ways are gone but for a cadre of men and women who, if we are willing to go, take us to those forgotten and wild places and gently remind us of its power to transform and transcend.  Just when we speak the "Worst flood of the millennium," or the harshest winter in decades, Shepherd reminds us that the Mountains have always been, have always weathered and have always survived,  While humans are busy doing, the Mountain is just being.  

(1) Photos taken from The Cairngorms National Park website, https://cairngorms.co.uk/discover-explore/landscapes-scenery/the-mountains/

(2) Defoe, Daniel (1724–1726). Rogers, Pat (ed.). A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Penguin. p. 736. ISBN 978-0140430660.