The Mountain
Sometimes, it takes being above it all to put it in perspective. I was never sure on the way up that we would even get through the overgrown trail, which didn't so much switchback as go pretty much straight up the ridge. Some parts had washed out and there this plant -- well, I guess it wasn't poison oak, because none has turned up.I had looked at this mountain my whole childhood. It had loomed above, constant and comforting. Once, it burned, coming alive in the night, the smoke filling the house. It hadn't been so much frightening as wrong, horribly wrong looking. A harbinger of all the wrongs to come.
As we rose up, I stopped and looked back across the basin. The buildings downtown were clear and the Wilshire corridor rose behind Hollywood, I can barely make out the corner of the Fox building in Century City over the hills. At my feet, Lake Hollywood interrupts the brown and olive the sage dry hills with a shocking blue green. It's more of an exclamation than a color, banked by the white, antique folds of one of Mulholland's surviving dams.
I turn back to the dirt in front of me. The rhythm of my feet and my lungs. The shape of the mountain against the sky occurred to me again. The slant look of it as it rose the Saturday morning my mother stood talking to the police man about the body of a young naked woman they had found near the resevoir. There was a lot of open land around and it invited the imaginations of those touched by darkness. We never found what happened to her, but, I was as sure now as I had been then, the mountain knew.
to be continued...
posted by kuaptic. @ 6:25 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home