To those who are enthralled by mountains their wander is beyond all despite. To those are not their allure is a madness.” The Call of the Void: High Place Phenomenon and being in love with oblivion. N. Razzo July 2019

Gambling with our given weather, we plan an early morning hike about 45 minutes from the lake. One I’ve never done. Sophie finds it on a hiking app and Mamie quickly locates it in a hiking book, which–no surprise–gives us a dearth of geological information no one wants to hear at the dinner table. “The mountain is composed predominantly of pale quartzite, rising abruptly above the Housatonic wetlands and river valley. From the 1,642-foot summit of Squaw Peak…” Already they are done. What? You think we are hiking for learning and input? Hell no. As with our other adventures, we are mining for Instagram worthy pics. Putting up with mom’s wilderness agenda in the hopes we’ll have something to post–poorly framed half-snaps of our face or fish-pouts. Output, baby, output. Pretty funny, since in the background will be a spectacular marvel and geological wonder, unmissable miracle of the Creator God himself. And what we got going on in the foreground? Fish-pouts.

Monument Mountain, running north to south along a ridge of the Berkshires. It promises to be a steep hike, but a relatively short one so won’t take up a whole day.  I am elated to find a free, low-risk, do-able activity in quarantine and focus my energy on dodging the rain and crummy weather forecasts, which are daily. “The 1.51-mile Indian Monument Trail brings hikers past more than 300 years of history – the remains of ancient Native American trails, stone walls of former sheep pastures, woods roads, cart paths that brought hemlock bark to tanneries, hearths of charcoal makers, horse-and-carriage pleasure roads, recreational foot paths, and roads traveled by Ford Model T’s.” A beautiful nature hike with a history??! I am in my metaphysical glory. Covid, take me away.

Apparently, regarding this mountain, the native Americans have a legend that an Indian maiden, consumed with an illicit love for her cousin(!), climbed the ridge and threw her heartbroken self off the peak. Where her body lay, dressed in the wedding gown-now-funeral garment with a wreath of flowers in her hair, the villagers brought stones to heap her grave, stone upon stone, creating a monument to the tragedy. According to my trusty guide, “Monument Mountain has been the subject of art and literature since as early as 1815 when the poet William Cullen Bryant penned “Monument Mountain,” an account of the story of a Mohican woman who allegedly leapt from what is now called Squaw Peak. Other, more celebrated greats have passed this way, too, and decided to keep their wits and their persons intact on the mountain: In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville picnicked on the mountain; a thunderstorm forced them to seek cover in a boulder cave where they engaged in a lengthy discussion which inspired some of Melville’s ideas for his novel Moby Dick. I think we passed that boulder cave! I think the kids crawled all over and in it while I slowly continued on up the trail, hoping to maintain a pace that would keep me with them instead of miles behind. Maybe if they stay there long enough they will absorb some classic lit or come away with a novel of their own. After all, so much of this trip, and therefore this day, is about legacy.

The drive there is classic New England–rambling roads, rolling hills, rows of rock–half wall, half pile–that make you wonder what they ever kept in or kept out. Neighbors maybe, but not sheep. It makes you feel as ageless as a stone wall, too. The memories flood, unleashed by a simple signpost, a turn in the road, an old barn you remember from a million years ago….my memory taking over at the wheel. More than the “already seen” of deja vu, more like an already-been and breathed here, so long ago. I’ll give you monuments. I won’t have to climb a mountain to see them, either. The monuments of our youth stand forever. For me, it’s more than the nostalgia. It’s that my traveling companions are now the age I was then, so they–without knowing–are like the monuments to the passage of time and without pushing nudge me into a new phase of life — the passing on, the handing down. Since this phase is one of storytelling, it will suit me fine.

I am increasingly aware of the transition. I may have driven them here, but it is they who lead the hike. I, the navigator and know-er that got us to the base of this mountain, will not be the one to get us up it. Hiking behind the pack of them, middle age having taken the mountain goat out of me, I am aware of being outstripped. I don’t stop, gasp for breath, but my heart is racing and I move at a much slower pace. It’s a 720-foot elevation gain in under two miles. The place ten feet in front of you is practically over your head, not your average neighborhood walk. I size up the pack of them, laughing and climbing effortlessly in a tight knot up ahead on the trail. I gauge their strength, their agility, try to estimate their calm under pressure and collective ability to handle an emergency. Once a mom, always a what if… Could these people get us off the mountain in a crisis? They are not exactly flip-flopped, but they have disregarded their rain jackets in the van and the three girls are even water bottle-less. Come on, people. It’s a three-hour hike and every App you looked at is calling for rain. How ‘m I going to hand things down if you won’t carry them? Posterity is heavy. I am carrying two water bottles (mine and an extra), a first aid kit, bug spray, sun block, a Swiss Army knife (with screwdriver and eating utensils), a towel and a splint/tourniquet. If Bill were here we’d have a roll of TP as well. If we end up in Drama in Real Life I want them to see I tried. Only Aaron carries a water bottle and a rain jacket. Silently I nominate him to fight the bear, wrestle the snake, and help me get boy scout boy off the mountain when he breaks something.

Musing as I climb, I am aware how much I have handed over already. I am aware that my intelligence is far outstripped by these “top colleges” types. Not only was I never where they are, but they can run circles around me now–or, as the case may be, straight up. My math skills alone make me their junior, never mind my stunted curiosity (what is NOT going through my brain: hmmm, I wonder what’s in that cave….look at this cool rock precipice…dang, how big a drop IS that…?) and my non-existent risk-taking impulse. My book-learning has decidedly waned and my wanderlust went underground with the appearance of children. One thing only do I hold onto, and that is a depth of experience these folks may never know. Sadly, wisdom has become utterly counterculture. In one generation! Is this arrogance? Does the generation before me, looking forward, think the same? My apologies if so. But it does seem that the social media set is missing more than a little about life’s meaning and its purpose. Oh, I know they seek it. That has not died. The counselors and the therapists and today’s rate of anxiety, depression and suicide will all tell to about a void no technology can fill, about the desperate search for meaning in existence. But wisdom knows where to find it.

As we hike, these magnets away from intelligent life pull me back to it by the conversation they make. Go figure. A reasonably fit little band, they have extra breath on this vertical climb. All the way up they do what I thought they might have done–and didn’t, my screen suckers–strapped into the Honda iMobile: they talk. Though I’ve spent almost nine hours in a car with them and the last three days in a 900-square-foot cabin, it is on this sweaty straight-up march they surprise me with a new skill–conversation. Not only that, they sound more well-read, more conversant and more well, educated than I recall. Guess I’ll have to stop bashing the SOL.

When we reach “Devil’s pulpit” there is a yawning chasm and a gorgeous view. We sit, stand, gingerly move out and back from the rock precipice. Will wants to throw a stone over the edge and we all evaluate the wisdom and merits of such a move. The consensus is no, bad idea, but it brings up the next topic of conversation: the call of the void. Why have I never heard of this? The pack of cousins knows it, pulls together the random strands they’ve learned in separate classes, different states and different stations. My psych student explains it, and the rest chime in–like a meme or a YouTube sensation they all know, even though they live separate streaming lives. Freud called it “The Death Drive.” Others have referred to it as the “High Place Phenomenon” (HPP). Apparently there is a phenomenon about being in a particularly high or expansive place and having the irresistible urge to hurl more than a voice into it. “Sure mom,” says Soph, like it’s the most common occurrence, “Haven’t you ever crossed a bridge and wanted to throw your cell phone over it?” I think of a generation of texters and streamers who from the signs of it are urge-less, initiative-deprived, numbed and pacified by screens. Hmmm. I give it some genuine thought….actually…No. But I have been in many life places, high, low and everywhere in between and wanted to throw your cell phone over it.

The 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote about it in his book, The Concept of Anxiety: “He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss… Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” In French it is called “l’appel du vide”–the call of the empty. A group of psychologists at Florida State University discovered that “High Place Phenomenon” is actually not uncommon, even among the mundane and mom-like (i.e., moi). A professor of psychology at Miami University has noted that, ironically, “An urge to jump affirms the urge to live, an empirical examination of the high place phenomenon.” It has nothing to do with suicide or destruction. Rather than a sign of suicidal ideation, it may be the mind’s convoluted way of appreciating life. It can also take many forms. For example, call of the void can involve thoughts or urges to:

jerk the steering wheel and turn into oncoming traffic while driving
jump into very deep water from a boat or bridge
stand on train or subway tracks or jump in front of a train
cut yourself when holding a knife or other sharp object
put a metal object into an electrical outlet
stick your hand into a fire or garbage disposal

Huh. How ’bout that? I have the raw data for a PhD in weird urges from living with a 13-year old boy. His “call” is more like an inescapable scream of disaster, sucking us all into the vortex of “dumb stunts I saw on YouTube.” Come to think of it, I’ll go with Edgar Allen Poe’s term: “The imp of the perverse.”

When we get to the top, the trees are now hip height along the granite head of the mountain, scraggly and clinging against wind. But there is no wind today, only blue skies and a view that explodes for miles in every direction. From the summit you can see four states: south to Connecticut and across the New York border into the blue Catskill Mountains. Farther north, to the edge of Vermont the of Mt Greylock. Slowly, separately, our eyes take in the panorama. Wilderness seems to have been on special that day. The Housatonic River valley almost two thousand feet below us, with its winding ribbon of water through lower lying hills, is dotted with villages, steeples, pastures, specks of life. Over the neighboring ranges thick clouds are lowing, dark and slowly filling for a storm that will come later, long after we are gone. Predicted to be cloudy and overcast much of the day, our mountain top is clear and bright as we spend what is surely the only two-hour span of sunshine all day. Hiking back the clouds will follow us slowly down and tuck us into the van for a rainy ride home.

For now, we climb along the bouldered “Squaw Peak” looking for footing, then for seating. Who would throw themselves off this lovely crest? It’s not a cliff, it’s a cradle, a giant nest of boulders. A pale quartzite perch. Stretching out along the huge stones with our faces to the sky and sun, we let the inside wow wash over us and settle. Someone muses…Too bad we didn’t bring the picnic, which in a cooler back at the van. The moving shadow of Will speaks as he jumps from rock to rock, casting shadows on our sunbathing faces, “I’ll go get it! He pauses, thinking… Yeah, I could prolly do that. I’ll be right back.” (Smiling teary-eyed emoji face here). We have just hiked for more than an hour, straight up. You wanme go get it?  Finally, after the round of selfies and the daring inspection of every outcropping, he, too, settles on the sun-warmed rocks and we spend the rest of our time up there doing what you’re supposed to when you’re at the top of the world: Looking. Just looking. Look kids, it’s not a screen it’s not an app, a game, a vine or a feed, but that there is as “live” as the stream gets. It is, in all its crashing wonder and mesmerizing beauty: Life. It is two places you kids don’t travel to enough: the crossroads of here and now.

On the way down I’ve got them all looking for the perfect rock. Rock collecting has replaced my “Waters of the World” collection, still housed in a shoebox under the bathroom sink. More on that later. For now, my own personal “Monument Mountain” is a strip garden in the side yard, slowly filling with this lifetime’s souvenirs: a rock from each of our past travels. Mt. Washington. Mont St. Michel. (Yes, French customs, and yeessss, baggage surcharge). A few white patio stones from the garden at Viroflay where I sat and enjoyed two evening meals 35 years apart. Yes, I know it’s not the most legal thing to do in a state park, never mind a foreign country. Next time I’ll bring one in trade. What? Yes, of course I’m going to lug that down the mountain. Well, you can if you want to. Usually, I like my specimens to come from the top, but for obvious reasons they are best collected on the way down. Hannah digs up a quartzite spike, hard to pass up, and Sophie and Aaron nominate a triangular palm-sized peak made of the same translucent pink quartz. It will travel home with me and symbolize this day, this moment, and from a much lower plane I will remember the hike up Monument Mountain. I do not draw any parallel with the poor Indian maid whose bone-breaking violence has made for quite a poem, but I do ponder… Maybe I am collecting my final monument, one stone at a time. I have the Kancamagus River rocks, worn smooth and bald as a baby’s head. I have Shrine Mont, a jagged pointed piece of that looks just like Shrine Mont. I have sand from the base of Mt. Sinai, where I once slept under an inky bowl of stars. I have beach stones, Cape May “diamonds,” a handful of pea gravel from our first house in Kilmarnock when we were just starting out, and a few like-sized pebbles from my childhood driveway that are stained with blood from the night my father accidentally hit and killed our cat as we were coming home.  Not all of the mountains we climb are vertical.

Driving home we are greeted with the rain that has held off, which will go behind and wash our footprints from the trail. Though one of my passengers is eager to navigate  (Apple maps), my instinct knows the way. I am on autopilot, letting my mind wander these meadows and fields as we pass by. I do know a call. It is not the call of a void, so much as a beckoning from these rambling hills to ramble, too. To come away with them. In this way it hears more like an invitation to disappear. What will I call it, since it’s my term to coin? I Google synonyms to define it and come away amused, if stumped. Here are some terms I almost mean, but not quite: To “get away,” “escape,”  “break free”… To “decamp,” “skedaddle,” “bust out,” or “fly the coop.” How about the more colorful “take French leave” (!) or “show a clean pair of heels (Who says THAT??!), and this one, the most fitting: to head for the hills… That’s it. To head for the hills. It is staring out from a lifetime of car rides, bus trips, planes, and trains in a time before screens, letting your eye go to the furthest distance. It is driving to the grocery store and wanting to keep going. Getting on a local road and eyeing the express lane. Passing through an airport on my way to somewhere domestic and hearing that whispered “what if…?” contemplating going rogue and trying to board, as in an adventure film, a plane for Paris. Ending up on back roads right around here–there still are some–and thinking, I could just disappear… Each time I am called back from my precipice. It is not emptiness that calls to me in this hike of my life but fullness, not oblivion but connection, not engulfment but engagement: ties and groundedness. So you see why it had to be rocks instead of water.

Years and years and years ago, I spent a month in the Alps with a French family on a student exchange. More mountains. A singer at the resort there, Marc Blanc, who coincidentally shared the same name as the peak we were on (“White”), sang about an empty that filled my 15-year-old French-learning self. Captured all the life yearning you have at that age into a lyric still around on YouTube–the singer now stooped and shaggy haired like he’s been in quarantine a lot longer than March: “Quand la bouteille est vide… Je craque une allumette… Et la bouteille vide… se remplit de lumière … (stirring crescendo chorus) se remplit de lumière.”  The lyrics and the song, in their native tongue, are beautiful and philosophically stirring. In English, not so much: “When the bottle is empty, I strike a match … and the empty bottle … is filled with light… (overplayed pedestrian refrain) … is filled with light.” Huh. How ’bout that. The thing about French is its reflexive verbs. We don’t have those, anymore than we have melted Brie on a fresh baguette in a just-opening bakery on a freshly washed street in Paris. A reflexive verb modifies its subject and thus seems to share something personal in the action itself. An indivisible predicate. Thus, when I text pictures of the James River to Camille and ask “Tu te souviens?” what that translates to literally is “Do you remember yourself?” The bouteille vide, “bottle empty,” fills itself with light. And I, traveling along these wooded paths and soaring peaks, remember myself.

FIN.