Recently, I went to a reading given by San Jose State University’s Center for Literary Arts of Early Days in the Range of Light: Encounters with Legendary Mountaineers
Early Days is luminous, as the title implies it should be, but also down-to-earth and solid. It tells the stories of the men and women who were the first to climb the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, that formidable, often impassible, 400-mile-long mountain range between California’s Central Valley and East Basin. But Dan doesn’t just tell you the history — though he does do that, vividly, with original research that is a testament to his scholarship; he also walks in their shoes. He reproduced their climbs without any modern equipment — what he calls in the introduction “a mess of carabiners, cams, and pitons” –a testament to his physical and mental strength. He recounts his experiences sleeping in the open air without a tent and scaling cliffs without rope so vividly that I recall fearing for his safety, even as he was sitting across the room from me in workshop.
John Muir called the Sierra Nevada “the Range of Light,” and one of the chapters of Dan’s book that made a lasting impression on me when I read it in workshop was the one about that great naturalist’s scaling of Cathedral Peak. Other chapters are more dramatic, but this one in particular shows the deep meditation that can take place on a great spire of rock:
The landscape here is profoundly still. This is high alpine terrain and movement is limited to a few squawky Clark’s nutcrackers and butterflies and gusts of wind. The gnarled dwarf pines that dot the meadows and find toeholds on the mountainside do not change from decade to decade. In this stasis, time ebbs and stops. All around, bare crags and stony peaks cut the air, the raw stuff of the earth frozen in place after breaching the top layer. Though I can’t locate God, I do feel an absurd closeness to the stars, a sensation that comes from pressed up against a thinning and blueing sky.
Squeezed between the mountain and the stars, it is the age of this place that calls me back. The difference in age and size between the mountains and me is nearly infinite, a quantity that is hard to locate in cities. Here, the scale of the universe is more visual, more visceral, the human creature at its least significant. It is both invigorating and humiliating to ride the back of something so huge, to look up in a whirlpool so deep. Muir’s God lives here somewhere, in the cycles of rock and snow and woody growth that far predate man’s self-consciousness and need nothing from him for their continuation.
It was a fine reading, and I hope Dan’s book gets the attention it deserves. It’s a unique and important work.
On a less reverent note, here is a Kate Beaton comic strip about John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt:
