Remembering Home

I have been fortunate enough to live in a place where grief, frustration, and sorrow remained ephemeral in the face of what always made sense…nature. The steady sacrifice of the river would sift softly upward while the surrounding backdrops of the Rocky Mountains or Lolo peak traded even your most quiet thoughts for automatic silence. There lived a subliminal system of values exchanged for values, where you would give to the river, granite, or wilderness your most enigmatic questions for the best advice it could give to you: quiet contemplation.

My friend Myers once wrote that “few to little words are said on a river,” and that got me to thinking about why. When things are abundantly clear or almost perfect in their own right, words fall short. My climbing partner Kevin and I rarely spoke after finishing an ascent. Those who I have fished with will claim that whatever needed to be said was already assumed. It seems we were all trying to listen for something, or perhaps finally forgetting everything, and really just being.

I don’t know if there is a façade that exists in those moments, or whether what should be enjoyed from life finally becomes palpable. It seems either way it never matters. There is always a façade we deal with in both realms of environment, natural and industrial. It is what we submit of ourselves in the sphere of that existence that dictates its significance to us.

I have surrendered my grievances more times than I can remember to the tranquility of a stream bed, sun lit climb, or crooked trail, and though I have never considered myself religious, I am somehow touched by a design that seems too perfect to condense into theory or sheer aesthetics. As the river is forever sacrificing itself in whispers, I think we all stop to try and hear what its final words might be before descending into the tides. We mutely admire the route finished perhaps for the first time or twentieth time, always knowing that nothing was conquered—only visited. And for a moment, we are no longer haunted by questions.

I keep going back to the rivers and mountains of Montana in my memories; their triumphs lionized in luscious ferns, reeds, and turbulent grasses that dance in the fitting melody of the wind. The drenched sun lit walls of Kootenai canyon and those perfect lines that keep me always coming back. The dried stream beds of summer where we finally see the story of all those rivers, who during spring, would dream of flood; a jammed oar; a salmon fly bequeathed to a trout’s greater endurance to remain.

In the wake of this recognition, through quiet contemplation of my own life, I see that nothing has to be said to figure out that we will recover from our woes or longings, whatever they may be. Regardless whether or not we can or can’t witness it, the rivers will keep running. Their banks will keep enduring, at least for now. The granite will be stained with the same evening ambiance, bouncing the sounds of the perfect creek between its vertical faces.

Life now has had me realize more than ever just how far away from that home I am. Not the home in California where I greet the competing oaks affront my driveway, or the numerous places I called home throughout my college career in Missoula. The home where all you need is everything toned down. Where East is marked by a rising warmth, the west marked by shades of pinks and purples, listening to the sounds of your own fears and ponderings descend into the hissings of coals over an open fire. But like the memory of a known ascent up "Sleeping Beauty" or "Pleasant Surprise", I find that everything has a purpose of return. And whenever I want to, if I’m quiet enough, I can hear the advice I would seek from the river, and feel the company of my climbs.