Mountains of Composure, Mountains of Conflict

By Jane Holtz Kay

In the ancient tongue of Ireland, "Croagh" (mount) Patrick is the holy mountain that hovers over Clew Bay, gray as tarnished silver. Bearing the name of the saint who climbed its summit, fasted for 40 days at the peak, beat off the blackbirds and drove the snakes from Ireland, it is the island nation's Mt. Olympus. Drawn there by religion, by tradition, by mythology, pilgrims have made the cruel journey to these heights for a millennium and a half.

Today's armies of the devout have no easier time surmounting the tortured mortar of the saint's half-mile path from earth to summit. Absent those snakes and soul-testing "blackbirds" - no small thing - worshippers still traverse an unkind edge to salvation. On the designated day in late July called "garland Sunday," some 25,000 of them trace St. Patrick's sacred trek. Ten times that many make the climb throughout the year.

So there is the mountain before us along the Emerald Isle's west coast. Worn down, it seems, by the bloody feet of pilgrims clambering shoeless to do penance through the generations; or nowadays, perhaps, flattened by the mincing heels of women in wobbly pumps and sturdy wool coats mounting the holy peak as if dressed for church. There is the famous Croagh Patrick, the summer walker's holy grail to God.

It is spring now, though, and I see the mountain in a gentler guise. Introduced this chilly April by my daughter whose new kin inhabit the region, the shrouded peak limns a lyrical view as we take the drive from Dublin to County Mayo, the farm land of her husband's family and forebears. Croagh Patrick's ridges form a benign backdrop to the rolling fields and entwining inlets of Clew Bay. Its crest is a spiritual insignia along the horizon.

In the days that come, the half-mile high mountain commands our view; it peers down on us as we pause at the nearby beach, take our bearings and our photographs. It runs along the horizon as we motor through the fertile, rain-drenched countryside, visit the farm cottage that is my son-in-law's legacy and pause to have outings of tea and chats with his cousins.

Others take their mountains as conquest. We share neither the pilgrim's urge to climb nor the hiker's resolve to conquer the crest this trip. Like the stray sheep, those scenic poseurs who meander in the rock-strewn soil and seem to survey us, we cosmopolitan heathen coil through the landscape at Croagh Patrick's base with little sense of purpose. The mountain is steward not summons as we wander through the picturesque village of Westport, its narrow streets, its window-to-window stores packed with good wools, good books, good pubs.

Happily, it is off-season and there is no trace of the tourist trappings or religious icons meted out to religious climbers flocking awkwardly upward on appointed days. Nor do we - or, more accurately, I - have any urge to strike out for the spiritual summit. To me, Croagh Patrick like other mountains is not so much an object of quest as a determinant of place: not a journey but a view. And this fabled pyramid buttresses the sentiment. More view-seeker than ranger, more forager for place than pilgrim for the divine, I confess I prefer the cone-shaped mountain vista from the ground as I do the sea from the shore, the hill from the valley, the pilgrimage of mind more than matter.

Pilgrims come in two sorts, I read reassuringly not so long ago. Some are returnees, journeying to a shrine ... and back again - the yearly journey to their mecca. Others are place seekers, more inclined to settle down than pay tribute afoot. The "Pilgrims," (Puritans, really) who settled New England were not repeat travelers. No recidivists, sinning and then journeying to make peace. No tourists of repentance. They were stay-put-and-doers, practicing their daily worship in ongoing construction. Builders of church and state, crafters of commerce and soul, they planted their acts-of-reverence by mountain or sea, common or greensward.

Mountains have always been equally meaningful from afar, I think: artists, have taken their mountains as view, as scenic splendor and backdrop for their valleys, settlements, and cities for centuries. These soaring backdrops punctuate the gentler surroundings of the place they lived and painted. They were "prospects," in the language of the time, made permanent in paint. Even more mercantile image-makers have stamped a silhouette of these peaking symbols, appropriating their image as "paramount."

Now, almost a year after my journey and speculations, I read that we are entering what travel agents have dubbed the Year of the Mountain, and, once again, I wonder why that prominence so appeals? What do mountains, and indeed that legendary Irish mountain, mean? "Due to the mountain's perfectly triangular profile and its prominence and domination of the skyline in the region, Croagh Patrick would have formed a natural landmark long before the arrival here of man," one archeological commentator describes the gray eminence of "Reek," as the mountain is called locally. The thought, he writes, challenges the philosopher in us all: "Could a mountain be a landmark when there was no one around to see it?" Did the man (Saint Patrick) make the mountain a landmark ... or did the mountain make the saint?

In fact, I read, long before Saint Patrick made his stay in 44l, the spellbinding mountain had held - had bred? - artifacts of worship. Its pre-Christian remains dated some 1500 years before the saint's journey. Stones, sites of a hut, and monuments from the late Bronze Age tell how ancient gods worshipped here long before St. Patrick shattered the blackbirds' ear drums (and their ferocity) with that bell. The peak's old name, Crochan Aigh, "mount of the eagle," suggests the power of the mountain's topography to inspire.

Is it some genetically-coded impulse, then, some universal human awe for heights and views that inspires homage and lends mysticism to all mountains? After all, say, scientists, good looks account for the animals we choose to save - the cute koala, the endearing panda, the inimitable whale. Why not the attraction of views from the base and not simply the adventure that draws not only Sunday mountaineers but creators of poetry and prose, literature and art along with the more publicized adventurers? "Women enjoy the view. Men don't," says a male companion in E.M. Forster's Room with a View. Such speculations will no longer do, to be sure. Still, I suspect that my female genes are tilted towards mountains as a trip-of-eye and mind rather than foot. The shoe-leather exercise of the male climber with his bad-weather-take-the hindmost heroics is not mine.

On the other hand, if I feel no "bold yearning" to clamber, shod or not, to some mountain top, perhaps it is not my gender but my family genes as the grandchild of a German-born immigrant who tended store in Boston's long gone West End (while caring for her four children in its back rooms.) Perhaps, it is the DNA of pragmatism that makes me find more amusement in my son-in-law's tale of the easier route on the other side of Croagh Patrick than the intrepid climb. The story goes that his uncle, a shrewd merchant, and well acquainted with that sleight-of-hand path to the heights, lead his donkey up the docile slope to sell water to the weary. No "Into Thin Air" inspiration here, no chasing of The Snow Leopard through mountains that outstrip human grasp.

I admire his down-to-earth lack of spiritualism, his shrewd dismissal of the sentimental, at least as much as the piety of the pilgrim and hikers who clamber upwards to notch the peak's mileage on their spiritual or gymnastic belts (and in their bestselling books and snow-intoxicated movies of mountain derringdo). Of all the spiritual incantations from Plato to Chicken Soup for the Soul, "because it's there" leaves me most anxious to hang the motto out to dry on the line of such Hallmark Hall utterances as "climb every mountain."

But before I am dismissed as bereft of a sense of nature, boasting only the palest shade of green, let me say again how I compensate for this disinclination for steep inclines with my fondness for prospects from the middle plain, reposing mid-mountain, not atop Mt. Everest, a visual cousin, I like to think, to the artist working in situ. Sloughing off backpacks and bad food and creaky knees, I immerse myself in the surrounds. Nor, gentle or not-so-gentle reader, am I alone in this fondness. Thoreau who hobnobbed with the outdoors most famously, shared my passion for mountains from midpoint. As said surrounds. "I dream," the bard of Walden wrote, "of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountainside while my eyes revolve in an Egyptian slime of health." He longed, he put it, "to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass looks in the face of the sky." Short of the imperial summit, indeed.

Alas, even such summits are less imperial or inspiring these days. Painters who once took hand to brush to record their sweep and photographers who trod mountains to capture their sepia splendor have given way to more activist artists fearful of their future. Ansel Adams and his photographic heirs, alarmed at nature's fate at the hands of man, have struggled to perform rescue acts through capturing their beauty on film. Photo-journalists in our own distressed days have traveled not for the climb but to guard once remote slopes from coal mining and condominiums. "Bad moon rising," says the headline over a stunning mountain snowscape in this winter's High Country News, trying to preserve Montana's countryside. As the houselots slather the peaks and valleys ... as Yucca Mountain becomes the site of a Nuclear waste dump above Amargosa Valley's dairy country ... as West Virginia's mountain peaks are dumped into the valleys to mine them ... as mountains become conspicuously threatened, the journey has become secondary to the salvation.

No island is an island and no mountain is a mountain and, not long after I return from Westport, I find that even the pilgrimage at Croagh Patrick is embroiled in the travails of this world. On garland Sunday, crowds of Catholics groping up the mountain were intercepted by Protestants from the north, leafleting them with Bible tracts. Not only wrangling factions but bad weather tripped up the marchers who became the walking wounded, keeping the Order of Malta/Mountain Rescue operation busy. Indeed, even the weather conspired to obscure the pilgrims' view of Connemara and Clew Bay from the summit as the sky clouded over. Meanwhile, a bearded figure, "looking not unlike St. Patrick," declared the Irish Times, discoursed on the insanity of the world and, as if to confirm his admonitions, peddlers did a brisk business selling thermal socks, St. Patrick mugs and two-pound "I climbed Croagh Patrick" certificates.

So, can neither holiness nor good looks save today's earthly elevations in this Year of the Mountain, I think as I read the more worldly tracts of hardpressed travel agents. "It's where oooh and ahhh live," Holland America tells me, pumping for the cause. "Discover the wilds and wonders of Alaska, as only ... Watch as ten stories of ice thunder into Glacier Bay ... Catch your first glimpse of Mt. McKinley." It is easy to be critical of marketing or even visiting so-called wilds and wonders in a year that has seen more of the caves and catastrophe in Tora Bora than glory in the heights. "I want to read poetry. I want to be in a place where there are no god damn mountains," an NPR reporter snaps back from his site in Afghanistan's peaks.

Neither the parched black landscape of the reporter's world of violence nor the hardscrabble path to the Almighty of the pilgrim and hiker draw me upwards. But I would not be so stern about taking a retreat in their midst in a calmer world. Mountains stir my mind and eye: from a steamer, from an Adirondacks cabin, from front porch or, in extremis, peering down in mid-flight at half mile heights. A mountain portrait bound by the walls of a museum will do, as well, for I like to think I am a pilgrim in my own way - pausing mostly at midpoint; idling between peak and vista, contemplating the lingering beauties of our all-too-vanishing scenery as best I may.

This article appeared in Appalachia magazine, June 2002.

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