In A Hollow Where The Air Tastes Like Snow

Liam O'Connor-Genereaux

 

This is a story about two different places and two different times.

 

*   *   *

 

It’s a little white room. The walls are bare. My roommate and I tried to get posters to stay up, but the greasy paint wouldn’t let anything stick. I lie in a narrow bed, gazing out an even narrower window at a concrete wall. Like the ones in my room, it is blank. I roll over, shoving my head under a pillow—trying to escape the lifeless walls, looking in vain for a reason not to start crying. This is Emerson College.

And I am miserable.

There is no way to live here. Even when I go outdoors, I am still surrounded by doors. There is no way to move here; each turn is blocked by sheer cliffs of brick, silently mocking me. There is no way to see here; the horizon has been imprisoned by the rising cluster of boxes. There is no way to listen here; the screams of wheels and engines have swallowed up the silence. There is no way to sleep here; the stars have fallen from the sky and lie flickering atop lampposts. There is no way to breathe here; the air has stretched through too many mouths, it has washed away too much smoke. There is no way to think here; the hideous buildings have crept inside my very head—every thought has to fumble up and down arbitrary alleyways.

Worst of all, there is no way to hope here. The backbreaking lines of the city crush me down. A cancerous skin of steel and asphalt has mummified and strangled everything that grows. There is no way to live here.

Laying there in bed, tears coming to my eyes, I try to remember that it was not always this way. Once, I was free.

 

*  *  *

 

A different place, a different time.

 

The sun was bright—that special summer brightness that turns all the colors up as high as they go so that you have to squint even when you’re just looking at the ground. It had taken me a while to find a water bottle, but that was to be expected. My family treats water bottles the same way we treat cars—get them as cheap as possible and wait until they start to leak. I didn’t need shoes—it was too warm for shoes. Barefoot, bottle in pocket and eyes puckered up against the special sun, I headed uphill.

I was nearly fifteen-and-a-half. I had not yet moved away from the little green state of Vermont. I still lived up in the woods and hills, where even the distant state capital (Montpelier, population five thousand) was an unnervingly large metropolis. Here, the scale of my world was measured in miles and hours—three miles to the post office. Fifty miles to the train station. A half-hour drive to either movie theater. A bit less than two hours to Canada. Three-and-a-half hours to Boston, the nearest city by a long shot. A mere two crow-flown miles from my bedroom—an hour or so’s bushwhack in special sun weather—lay the majestic Blue Mountain.

Blue Mountain rises two thousand feet above the collected villages of East Ryegate, South Ryegate and Ryegate Corner and rests its granite bones on farms and pastures as it watches a world that hasn’t changed a whole lot since the first settlers arrived direct from Scotland back in 1774. There have been stone quarries—big pits hacked deep into the side of the mountain, out of which hard granite was pulled for foundations and farms—on Blue Mountain for over two hundred years now. Now there’s only one quarry left, which mostly supplies gravel to the aforementioned surrounding villages. In the Summer you can hear the granite grinders thumping along like ancient trains.

Blue Mountain looms over my farm’s fields in such a way that it is always in the background of whatever is happening. It is a presence—it has weight. You can feel Blue Mountain there above you as you play hide and seek or bale hay—you don’t have to look to know it is there. Unlike the numb squares that sit sullenly on top of Boston, Blue Mountain is a living, breathing entity—a creature that feeds streams with snowmelt, gives it’s stone for roads and offers shelter for deer and pheasant. All my life I’d lived in its comforting embrace, knowing it was there looking after me. But one day late in the Summer, after my fifteenth birthday, I decided that instead of being watched by the mountain, I wanted to see what the mountain saw.

I set out to climb Blue Mountain.

 

*  *  *

 

Three years later and I’m doing much the same thing. I sling my massive trunk onto Boylston street. Bubbly nineteen-year-olds in matching T-shirts cheer manically and rush by with overflowing luggage carts. It’s orientation day at Emerson. The August sun is bright, but somehow the colors aren’t that vibrant—I suppose there is only so far you can push grey sidewalks and brown bricks. This is college. I’ve come here to study film, make connections and have experiences that will stick with me for a lifetime. Someone takes my bags and loads them into a cart. We head off towards my dorm room.

I glance across the street to the Boston Common. There’s an old graveyard there, surrounded by a few carefully placed trees, their branches pruned and twisted. I can’t tell, as I follow my bags into the dorm, which I find sadder: the dead people or the trapped trees.

 

*  *  *

 

What you must understand is that Blue Mountain is wild. It’s all private property that hasn’t been logged since the old quarries died, back during The Depression. The only paths are those made by deer and moose, plus the occasional road-turned-streambed. The only evidence of modern civilization are the zigzags of birches with faded orange paint splotches that denote the property boundaries.

I started out counter-clockwise, making my way around the Eastern flank—it’s a more gradual ascent that way. Quickly I found myself in different world. I stumbled upon ancient mining equipment wrapped in wreaths of roots and toadstools, huge pits half-filled with mystical waters, primeval steel cables rusted to the same color as the dirt and piles of granite shards so massive that I wondered if they had been set there by giants.

And I found a hollow tucked deep in an elbow of the mountain where, against all seasonal expectation, the air tasted like snow. I realized then that I was in a magical, shapeless place with no rules or firm edges—the halfway place you get when human industry has long been subsumed by moss. I still felt safe there, safer than I have anywhere else. On Blue Mountain I didn’t feel lost, even though I had long since mislaid my home and wasn’t entirely sure if I was even still going uphill.

Blue Mountain is alive.

 

*  *  *

 

Boston is no more alive than a vampire is.

It dresses up in life, hiding its true nature in a relentless bustle of people and noise. But take away the rush and the faces and all that remains are cold streets and dead windows. As I begin my morning jogs here, I cut across the Boston Common—a sandbox of grass and lonely, washed-up trees. I slip down perfectly straight paths slathered over with a sheen of asphalt and ice. I have to stop my progress at Charles Street, waiting for the soulless lights to break the never-ending Möbius strip of cars and trucks. I pound along the bank of the Charles, unable to relish the moment of space that the snowy river offers. I am used to running to recharge, to find balance—but here I come back to my dorm exhausted. The path I run on is hard-edged, confined, and overused. Even though I know exactly how to navigate my jagged loop, I never feel safe on it.

Here, there is no magic.

 

*  *  *

 

As I neared (or so I thought) the top of Blue Mountain I had to step around three great heaps of moose droppings, each nugget as big as a grape. This is rare: moose are gorgeous yet secretive creatures—I don’t think I’ve seen more than a handful in my whole life (in contrast, I can’t get in car without having to dodge a mess of deer). To come upon such evidence of moose existence is a special, almost sacred, experience. I savored it. Looking up, it was then that I discovered the nebulous nature of Blue Mountain’s summit.

At two thousand feet, while significantly taller than the surrounding landscape, Blue Mountain stops far below the treeline. It’s summit, therefore, is completely obscured by spruce and birch. There is also no sharp apex; the slope slowly becomes an irregularly mounded ridgeline. Up there it all looks vaguely peakish—the trees prevent you from judging the true height of the next rise. Sometimes you think you’ve been going up for ages and then find yourself back at the bottom having totally missed the summit. I must have wandered from one end of the ridge to the other without finding a verifiable “top.” Discouraged, I paused to take stock.

Without finding the top there was no way I could truly see what the mountain saw. The special sun was edging toward the Western horizon; the colors were fading towards their natural state. I would have to get off there soon. Not wanting to admit defeat just yet, I picked my way through the exposed roots and piles of pine needles, not along the ridge, this time, but over it. If I couldn’t find the top I would at least see what the backside of the mountain looked like. I clambered over Blue Mountain’s backbone—and had to grab a sapling to keep from falling.

The slope I had just climbed up was steep. This slope—the mysterious one on the back side of Blue Mountain—was a cliff. The tenacious trees coming out of its surface had to bend at a right angle to reach the sun. The potential bottom was hidden from view by the assembled trunks. I looked back the way I had come, toward home. I could turn and head back down the relatively navigable Southern face, where dinner and my bed lay, or I could plunge into the precipitous, unknown forests of the Northern slope, where it might be days before I found civilization. My feet were pricking on the fallen pine needles and a quick shake told me that my bottle had surrendered it’s last drop. I had no choice.

I climbed a tree to get my bearings.

 

*  *  *

 

Christmas break has come. I can see again. I’ve escaped the cubist confines of Boston and am back in the northern woods I love. I go skiing and build snow caves. For the first time in four months I feel free. I go outside and I can really look without clumps of buildings stepping in front of me. At last I have a mountain again.

I’m happy.

And now the Spring semester looms, skulking up upon me, waiting for me to decide. Do I stay here at home—bag the whole college thing and remain where I am happy and safe—or do I go back to Boston, the place I have learned to hate, in the hopes that I can somehow see the life in the city?

I have no choice.

 

*  *  *

 

The view that met my eyes when I clambered up the tree was awe-inspiring. Unlike the Southern end, which trickles gently into swathes of open farmland, the North face of Blue Mountain drops into a vast, primeval forest with few roads or houses. There is greenery as far as I could see, with one or two glints of late afternoon sunlight twinkling off sheet metal roofs. The blanket of trees looked like a challenge inviting me in. I went for it.

After an hour-and-a-half I was a modicum less inspired. What had seemed like a smooth quilt of trees was in fact a pockmarked valley, filled with muddy stream beds and brambly hillocks. Scratched, sweating, and thirsty, I meandered up and down lumps of land, very lost.

 

*  *  *

 

Now it’s almost too hard to write. What’s the point? Writing makes me happier, but I’m so far from happy right now that even when I’m “happier” I feel sad. Even as I write about the glory of Blue Mountain I have to struggle to remember what it feels like to be content. Here—in my little white room, in this corpse of a city, in the first year of a $200,000 sleep-away camp—I have nowhere left to turn.

I’m sad, discouraged and in my hopelessness I’ve pushed away my friends. Now I am also very lonely.

 

*  *  *

 

I stopped there, deep in the valley, the sun nearly obscured by the tall maples surrounding me, and thought. I was alone. I’d gotten myself in an adventure and now I had to get myself out. I wasn’t about to hike back over the mountain to escape. I wasn’t even sure I could find it anymore. No help was coming my way. This was before I got a cell phone, and even if I’d had one it wouldn’t have done me any good since my piece of Vermont remains uncannily reception-free.

The only way out was forward. So forward I went, growing more and more tired; a kind of weary doggedness driving me.

 

*  *  *

 

My roommate is out. I’m doing my best to sleep but I can’t stop the tears. I look out my slit of a window at the hideous, faceless wall and suddenly it’s all clear.

I’m trapped if I stay here. I’m just like those twisted trees on The Common. I have no way out, no way to feel alive, as long as I force myself to exist in this broken maze of grey walls and closed doors. I may as well be lying in that graveyard. I try to convince myself of reasons to stay but my mind is made up. I tell myself all the things that Emerson and Boston have to offer but I can’t make it stick. For every reason I come up with to stay I have a counter-argument.

College education? I can get that anywhere, even online. Film education? I learn better by doing. Industry connections? I’ll find a way.

Throughout the whole debate, there loomed the brutal fact: there is no way to live here.

 

*  *  *

 

I stumbled out of the woods, onto a road. It was a dirt road, a logging trail—barely a horse track by Boston standards—but it was pure civilization after the unending forests of Blue Mountain. I followed it to another road and that one to another and that one led me home.

 

*  *  *

 

A different place. A different time.

 

I’m running along the Charles River. It’s April and the Winter is gone. My bare feet squelch over mud and brown grass. I stop at the edge of the Lagoon, a sort of pond that’s been cordoned off from the rest of the river. There’s a tree there—an old, old specimen. It’s back has been broken many times. It’s trunk folds over almost all the way around so that it’s branches trail in the water. One branch in particular draws my eye. It has something on it: four small shapes. At first I assume they’re sculptures, but then one plops into the water and I see they’re real. Painted turtles, the orange stripes on their necks shockingly bright in the Spring air. The three on the branch are frozen, staring at me while the fourth stays low, refusing to come back out of the water. The clouds move, allowing a patch of sunlight to fall on the branch. It isn’t really special sunlight, but if I squint I can imagine that the turtles look a bit more vibrant. If I completely close my eyes I can almost say that the air tastes like snow. The turtles watch me as I run off.

 

There is no way to live here. But some things do.