The Smallest Thing on the Mountain
I took up mountain hiking at the beginning of this year because fifty-eight is the age at which the horizon becomes visible, and somewhere beyond it, a cliff whose suddenness and steepness I’ve decided, firmly, not to consider.
Like a good consumer, I’ve acquired all the accoutrements; backpack, water bottle, hiking boots, moisture-wicking shirts, gloves, hat, polarized sunglasses, and a map and compass app that replaces a map and compass. It never once crossed my mind to bring a spray can. This is what separates me from Jason.
I’m assuming that’s the name of the person who tagged a granite boulder two miles out on the Pacific Crest Trail, which I came across on a Saturday morning when the only other living things that knew I existed were a Red-tailed Hawk riding thermals above the ridge and something small and rustling in the chaparral that had the good sense to stay hidden.
I’m no geologist, but that boulder had been sitting there for roughly forty million years. And Jason had decided that was long enough without his input, adding, in pumpkin orange, JASON 2026, in lettering that suggested Jason shouts in group texts.
I manufactured sympathy. Assembled it the way you assemble IKEA furniture—methodically, joylessly, with the instructions in one hand and a vague sense that this is not how things should work.
Difficult upbringing.
Limited opportunities.
Expression of powerlessness.
The full approved inventory. I have been well-indoctrinated in the reasons people do things, and the reasons are usually sad, and the sadness is usually real. But sympathy assembled from instructions is not sympathy. It’s performance. And the wilderness, to its great credit, has no interest in performance.
What I actually felt was: I am better than you, Jason.
Not richer. Not luckier. Not more educated. Certainly not more virtuous. But better. Specifically, at this. At being here. At understanding what here is for.
The mountain does not care that I’m there. The hawk has no opinion of my progress. The boulder—Jason’s boulder, forty million years old and deeply ambivalent—was never going to validate my effort or applaud my arrival. In the face of nature we don’t exist. We disappear. That’s the point.
Jason, it seems, did not get the point.
He arrived at the same boulder, in the same silence, under the same indifferent sky, and found it intolerable.
So he produced his can, a can carried out here, two miles, which means this was not an impulse but a plan, which is somehow worse, and signed his name.
I was here.
The subtext, scrawled in obnoxious pumpkin orange, on forty million years of geological patience: Please confirm that I exist.
What Jason is, in the end, is someone who cannot bear to be small.
The wilderness asked nothing except to be present. He found that insufficient. He needed a receipt.
Catch up on The Anecdote:
Nice.