You Can't Fall Off a Mountain

Japhy had already poured himself over the last little lip and was up there, on the actual top, dancing in a tiny circle of wind, his hair wild, his arms out, his mouth open in some long, glad, cracked sound that the thin air carried down to me as a kind of laughing howl. He was yodeling. Yodeling for joy on the top of a mountain in the empty American West, and the sound of it went straight into my frozen hands and feet and undid something there. He looked down at me plastered to the rock like a piece of wet paper, and he shouted the words I have carried around inside me ever since, the small bright medicine that has cured a hundred small panics since. He shouted that you cannot fall off a mountain. You can only fall off a cliff. A mountain has ledges, cracks, shoulders, belays, a thousand places for a man to catch himself, and the only thing that drops you into the void is the picture in your own skull. The mountain itself is generous. I lay there with my forehead against the stone and the tears came, and I do not know whether they were from the wind or from the truth of what he had said, but by the time I had wiped them on the sleeve of my wool shirt, my fingers were working again and I was pulling myself up, hand over hand, and then I was on top too, and the wind was in my hair and the whole blue country was spread out under us like a second sky, and I was laughing, I was laughing like a fool, I was laughing because I was not dead and because my friend was alive and because the world was so big and so kind and so close.

Going down was a different religion. We did not pick our way. We ran. We ran down the loose scree in great leaping strides, the gravel singing and clattering away under our boots in long silvery sheets, and the rhythm of it got into us the way drums get into you, and we were whooping and hollering the whole way, the mountain a kind of moving sidewalk under us, the rocks rolling with us like a wave, the trees rushing up to meet us, the cold air whipping our faces, our thighs burning, our lungs barking, and every stone we hit at the wrong angle became a small joke we laughed at, every slip became a little story. The fear of the climb had not gone away — it had been cooked into something else, something warm and giggly, the way a child turns a nightmare into a game of tag. I could not stop smiling. Japhy was running ahead of me with that long-legged bird lope of his, and every few steps he would turn and grin back at me, and I would grin back at him, and we would not say a word, we would just keep flying down the mountain in the bright afternoon light, two strange pilgrims with scratched knees and dirty shirts, happier than kings.

That night by the fire, or the next morning, or maybe ten years later, I understood that what had happened to me up there was not really about rocks or ropes or the weather. It was about the body. The body, when it is treated right, is its own little dharma. It learns things the mouth cannot say. Somewhere up in that cold wind I had been a stone and a bird and a scared child all in the same breath, and Japhy's wild yodel and his three plain words had loosened the knot. I had gone up the mountain one creature and come down another. The mountain had not changed. I had. That is the small, ordinary, perfect miracle of the thing, and it is the only kind of enlightenment I will ever lay honest claim to — the kind that happens not in a temple but in the calves of your legs as you come leaping down a pile of broken rocks in the American sun, laughing, laughing, laughing, the whole empty blue country swinging wide under your feet.