travelogue
Remembering the White Mountains
08/26 - I miss Her more than anything else in this life.
Nature, that is.
I used to go hiking regularly. While I lived in New Hampshire, during a 7-month stint as a seasonal employee in the White Mountains, I spent every free hour I could climbing up and down the peaks embracing the lodge on all sides. Mtns Tom, Field, Willey, Willard, Avalon, and of course the Presidentials.
The Presidential Range of this national forest are some of the oldest hiking trails in the country, and it shows in their steep stone steps and refusal to handhold. Trail-building techniques like switchbacks are hardly ever found here, and you can forget about pavement or gravel. Many places in this range you'll find yourself climbing a 10-foot wooden ladder last repaired god-knows-when, one side against a boulder and the other side feet away from a 70-degree slope down a cliff face, wind screaming at your face until you begin to tear up little sleet pellets and question your choices.
Simultaneously though, these are foothills compared to what we'd eventually discover in the West and the Great North. This makes them perfect for a particularly persistent and dangerously fearless greenhorn like I was, and so I was instantly enthralled by their attainable peaks alongside the grit of the unpredictable. Additionally, the White Mountains are one of the only places in America that you can find a 'high mountain lodge system' reminiscent of those seen throughout popular European mountaineering destinations. This brings to the entire ecosystem of this place a feeling of being transported back in time, but to a degree further than you'd find in most National Parks, overdeveloped and overcrowded as they are. When I was here, I felt like I was on another plane of existence, that the pressures of modernity had been flushed away and yet the abundance I needed for success was magically available to me. The truth, of course: anyone would be chipper living at a vacation resort. My coworkers certainly were, despite their seeming disinterest in peak-bagging. But my choice to push myself to field the mountains daily, even in the coldest and snowiest conditions, is what made this experience absolutely transformative.
New England is known for this intoxicating aura which dirty kids like me get addicted to. Just writing this so far I've had to take a couple breaks to have minor silent screams at how much "I want her back!!!" Aside from the White Mountains, I've experienced these sorrowful pauses only for people and never for a place. I don't identify with where I was born, or where I grew up. But this is where I became me. And when I think back about it, I simply can't pretend anywhere else is home. But I can't go home. You can't look at the girl who broke your heart with naive eyes again, and you can't live in a vacation forever, even if you're working for it. I know because I've since returned, very briefly, and its cold embrace was not the one she met me with the first time. My home is gone because I'd built a shanty-shack just for me, and its since been blown over in my leave.
Living rurally is a family game. If you don't have one, it doesn't work. And while I had (internally) chastised my coworkers for their choices to stay inside most days, it left me blind to the kind of meaningful connections people made with each other while living together in close quarters. One of the things about seasonal jobs is you get to see a variety of people from across the country find ways to relate to each other and inevitably get along. But I had my happy, and they had theirs, I thought. I didn't realize what they had was also very transformative, and probably a lot closer to what I need right now. The end of my stay in New Hampshire was the culmination of this compulsive need to ALWAYS be out there. One day I woke up with some seemingly impossible new weakness that threatened my ability to keep up that pace, and it spiraled into a psychotic episode which almost certainly would have been defused by a reality check by a theoretical friend.