Never flitting

'And the mountain, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting...'  Monadnock is such a comfortable heap. Summer and winter, people are swarming up your flanks, scrambling to your summit from every point of the compass, stamping on your topmost point, sprawling on your ledges and sheltered places as they eat and gaze out over the miles and miles towards Mt Washington, towards just visible Boston.

I've climbed you every year for years whenever I need reacquaintance with big air, eye-room  and massive rock, and no matter how familiar the routes, you always provide what I hanker for. There are even the pleasures of the day and circumstance: the conclave of twittering birds just below the treeline, the twill-like patterning of crystals embedded in your slabs, the stream trickling down braiding itself with upward trail, the crest of sleet on the lee sides of twigs and stalks left from a recent storm but now glistening in the westering sun.

Yes, you are simply there like a piece of grown-up furniture for us to clamber over--sofa, ottoman, pillow, chair, table--but I have to come to you intentionally. I don't suddenly wake up atop; I have to climb, in fact, drive and climb. It's not hard, but exertion is required as part of the homage. Thoreau preferred to admire you from below,  being surprised by you as he came over a hill, having you at his shoulder as he walked in Jaffrey or Dublin. He would have seen as as we see it today--none of the roads, towers, houses, bric-a-brac once contemplated for the summit has been build, thankfully. The only difference: continually, in the distance, tiny colorful groups of clustered people hugging each other on the top.

Three friends met you today, stepped up your stairs, trod your stepping stones, slid down your slick slopes, were wrapped in the scarf of wind that whips your summit, saw you distant when they looked up and again glancing back, thought 'Come summer, I want to know this mountain better.' It's a mountain for dreaming men, exuberant girls, women taking pride in their own energy. I feel I shared your pleasure watching the delight of this trio new come to knowing you.

You have new things to reveal. The Pumpelly trail is one I've never hiked, and people have said it's the best of the lot. Somewhere on the mountain in Pumpelly's cave in which, perhaps, a hermit might be persuaded to live--perhaps does already.

No Everest, no Potosi, no Croag Patrick or Kailish, no Lookout Mountain or Porkchop Hill, you Monadnock are so simply what you are that you've become generic, an eponym. Perhaps it's not a bad thing to be a monadnock person, provided one is so visited, so loved.