The Mountain Sleeps

Rainier, of an evening, soothed by sunset, sits benign on a landscape

Mt. Rainier from Larson Loss Road in Buckley, WA

Mt. Rainier doesn’t really fit into a landscape; it is the landscape most of the time.

But I look at this landscape and see something a little different. It’s taken very close to sunset - the sun was in fact already over the horizon from where I was standing, but you can still see its illumination on the Cascade Range and Mt. Rainier. At that moment, the sun’s light was traveling through a lot of atmosphere, and air and dust redden the sun’s light by filtering out the blues. Think of this as sunset, extra-red (roughly in the manner of an order at Starbucks).

But please move your attention to the foreground, and look at that little barn or home, the trees, the fence lines, the rawness of the land, and suddenly I can’t tell for sure what century this photograph was taken in.

One could look at this as the front lines of man versus mountain, time versus man. It’s a moment with a lot of historical and emotional significance. What would it be like to be living in that house, with the shoulder of the Cascades’ foothills behind you, with just a short walk to the other side of the farm to stand, as I stood that evening, and observe a creation that goes back (and will likely stretch forward) millions of years. Our lives seems long, or perhaps at least long enough, but they are smoke in the bigger picture of this planet.

What a shame that we cannot recognize our humble relationship to a planet, that we think ourselves entitled to its guts, its dirt, its life.

Live long and prosper, little planet, little mountain, and (one can hope) tiny human.