The Mountains Will Still Be There
by Cara Stolen
It’s 10 degrees and foggy, which means the fog is freezing to the hood of my car, the pavement in front of us, and the fences and power lines along the road. My forehead throbs with a cold that started two weeks ago in my sinuses before spreading to my chest, where it has become a dry, unproductive cough that makes my whole body ache. I can’t breathe through my nose, so I try to take a deep breath through my mouth, which triggers a coughing fit that makes me gag and prompts my husband, Levi, to ask if I am going to be able to keep the car on the road.
“I feel terrible,” I respond.
“You know, maybe if you stopped telling yourself how bad you feel, you would start feeling better,” he says.
His eyes and tone tell me he’s joking, but it stings just the same, and I roll my eyes so hard it hurts. I grab a cough drop from my coat pocket and put it in my mouth. In this moment, I hate him.
Last night, I canceled the trip to Hawaii we were supposed to be taking at the end of this month to celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary. Instead, because of the early winter and the rising cost of everything, we will stay home to feed the cows we thought would still be turned out on grass. To feed the cows that are, still, after all these years, barely making our financial ends meet. I peer through my windshield, at the fog and ice and snow, and hate everything.
With considerable effort, I swallow my instinct to pick a fight with Levi—to try to make him feel as miserable as I do—alongside the cool menthol honey of the cough drop in my mouth.
There was a time when ignoring the urge to pick a fight with Levi was a tool I didn’t possess in my tool kit. In fact, a few hours after we made vows to love and care for one another forever, we stood in the master bedroom of our newly purchased home, still wearing our wedding best, and hissed at each other (to avoid waking up a houseful of wedding guests). I don’t remember what the fight was about, but what I do remember is that those types of explosive fights—the slammed doors, searing insults, and subsequent hurt feelings—were common in the early years of our marriage. We were young, stubborn, and terrible at both communication and compromise.
In those early years, I sometimes joked that the only way Levi and I stayed together was by taking a week-long trip to the mountains every year. Away from our jobs, our phones, and our to-do lists, our quick tempers and selfishness somehow ebbed in the fresh air. Above 5,000 feet, we were literally dependent on each other to survive. We became teammates in a simplistic kind of way we often found difficult in our day-to-day lives.
We went as often as we could throughout the year. But every fall, after a summer filled with long hours at work and not enough time together, we requested time off and went to the mountains. We horse packed (or, a few memorable times, goat packed) or backpacked or truck camped. We explored new trails and returned to old favorites. We camped beside alpine lakes and on rocky, sketchy ridgelines. We bathed in frigid creeks and napped in the afternoon sun after we’d set up camp for the night. We carried heavy packs and filtered water side-by-side and ate meals in the dirt beside our tent.
And we huddled together in our 4’x7’ “home” and waited out storms.
Levi went to the mountains without me for the first time when our oldest son, Royce, was three months old. He’d drawn a once-in-a-lifetime elk hunting tag that year, and even though I’d told him to go, I hated him for leaving. I stood on the porch of our rental home and watched him drive away, then sat down on the step to cry tears of rage and resentment. Later, as I rocked Royce in our bedroom, alone with him for the first night ever, I stared out at the stars twinkling in the night sky and wondered if I could ever forgive Levi. I wondered if the jealousy and resentment I felt toward him and his seemingly unchanged life would ever fade.
I wondered (albeit, a bit dramatically) if our marriage could survive without the mountains.
There’s a sandy little puddle of a pond I think about sometimes. If I had to guess, I would say less than 20 people have ever been there. It sits behind a jagged peak and above a lake 10 miles into the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in Washington State and is only accessible via the trail to the lake below it. Accessible is a bit of a stretch, since getting to it requires leaving the trail, scrambling across some rock slides, and gaining the ridge for a mile or so. I’ve only been there once, and yet, when life feels dumb and hard and I just want to throw my hands in the air and walk away from it all, it’s this tiny little spring-fed pond I stood on the edge of with Levi on our honeymoon that I think about.
I thought about it that night, rocking Royce in the rocking chair as Levi slept in our backpacking tent in the mountains without me, and I find myself thinking about it now, as I grip the steering wheel and lean forward as if proximity to the windshield will help me see through the fog better. It occurs to me that it isn’t even really about the pond. While I would like to go back someday, it’s more the feeling of the pond, and of that day, I want back.
It was mid-morning when we stumbled upon it. We’d pitched our two-man backpacking tent in the meadow below the pond the night before, unaware of the sandy shore and fresh water source above us. That morning, after instant coffee and oatmeal packets, we hiked up the ridge above it, still oblivious to its existence. But as we came down the ridge, its surface glittered in the warm September sun. We stood side-by-side at its edge in silence for a few minutes, taking it all in.
I don’t remember who said it first, I just remember that we seemed to have the same thought at the same time. It felt like we were completely in sync—our desires totally linked—as we wondered aloud what would happen if we sold everything, packed ourselves into the wilderness, built a cabin, and lived off the land.
It was an impractical dream, of course. The pond sits at an elevation that would make living there nearly impossible due to snowfall alone, and, well, there’s the tiny matter of how difficult it would be to actually live off the land indefinitely. But we didn’t think about any of that (or the fact that building any kind of structure on wilderness land is illegal). Even now, all these years later, if I close my eyes and imagine that pond, I can conjure the feeling I felt that morning. Of complete trust in our partnership and the belief that all we needed was each other.
Trips to the mountains are different now with three kids in tow. Our seventy-mile, multi-day backpacking trips have been replaced by day hikes or truck camping that require a much different kind of teamwork and partnership. More often, we take turns going to the mountains by ourselves. But we keep going back. And as we lay side-by-side in a much bigger, fuller, tent, we hold hands and whisper that we can’t wait to come back again someday, just us.
We’re better at loving each other now. We don’t need the mountains the way we used to. Time and maturity have dulled our rough edges, and while we still won’t win any awards for communication, we’ve found a way that (mostly) works for us.
I stifle another cough, then reach across the center console for Levi’s hand. Without looking at him I ask, “What if we plan a pack trip this summer? Just us?”
He squeezes my hand and nods in response, then asks me if I want him to take the kids this afternoon so I can rest.
Someday it will be just the two of us again. And while that little alpine puddle may look different when we get back, the mountains will still be there.
 | A guest post by
|
Cara you took me right back to the mountains with this one. I’m thinking about what our “pond” is in my marriage. The honesty of your words is always encouraging for me.
I love this. 💛