New Zealand part 7 – Like everything else at all

The rock beneath my fingers is smooth to the touch, worn away in places by myriad feet and hands as they have climbed their way to the top of Conical Hill. To say I can feel the rock would be like saying you can watch a sunset, true enough, though anyone who has done either knows there’s more to it. Up here, on the rock, in the mud, in the air I can feel the rock as I can breathe. Capturing something external and making it part of myself, holding it within my chest before pushing it away and on to the next thing. The next foothold. The next gritty patch of earth to which I can cling and by extension move myself closer to the same summit so many feet have stood upon before me. Not that it makes it any less personal, the ground down presence of others. Right now this is my bit of rock, my balancing ledge. These are my tussocks swaying intoxicatingly in the wind, their jutting grasses dyed golden by the summer; this is my conical hill, not just the Conical Hill.

Below my feet the earth pitches away down to an alpine lake, deep and cold and mysterious. Around the bend and the trail seems to bound off a cliff to the valley floor some thousand feet below us. But looking down is far from the best part of going up and soon, in the way that time contracts when one is consumed by their actions, I reach the top of this, my conical hill and around me an eon of mountains erupt into being from outside my narrowed view. Quickly my brain attempts to categorize and classify, to fit what I am seeing into what I have seen before. That range looks like the Sierras, but with shoulders like the Rockies. Over there, the Alps or maybe the Pyrenees. But of course, as anyone who has looked at a mountain can tell you, there’s more to it than that. The view stirs memories of vistas seen before and yet is unlike anything else at all. Far away and yet holding me in their presence a giddiness subsumes me. Under the cheerful blue sky I stare across the horizon, out to the very ocean itself and across the face of every mountain I hope I will see again. I look out in the same way we love, cherishing yet knowing there could never be enough time stood right there.