My Side of the Impossible Mountain

I read Jean Craighead George’s novel about a boy escaping to the mountains at probably the same time everyone else did; to say, I read it at the right time. I was ten. It was summer. I was trapped. I found a kid in those pages who made a successful escape. Not only did he escape, but he grew in both strength and mind, the wilderness transitioning from an abstract enemy to a partner, then a friend, and at the end, into a home. It was the kind of story that accomplishes the impossible in a child’s life, by making things seem stunningly possible.

I can’t remember why the boy wanted to leave. It seems, if I recall correctly (fix my ignorance if it becomes glaring here), that his parents weren’t all that awful. He wasn’t running from the cops or from a bad debt owed to an obscure mafia trenchcoat. It was only that he was running. Now, sure, there were certainly novelistic conventions that pushed the child to his eventual exodus, but I remember feeling like those conventions were…regular. Inconveniences, situational requirements in every life that possibly sat harshly with a certain kind of imaginary middle grade character. It didn’t matter, obviously. The running was the point. People could run, and not just run away, but run away to somewhere.

It started with a compass. The kind with the black metal enclosure that flipped up so a person could calculate directions; I didn’t know how to use it, but it seemed like the right thing to get first. The boy used it and other compass techniques to get where he was headed. Somewhere. I needed a compass. It was my stepfather’s compass I stole from his desk drawer, though I think it was his father’s, inherited directions to not go anywhere, to stay, to enact the past deeply, to ensure the next one kept that compass in the drawer. After I stole it, I placed it in a fist-sized hole in the wall, careful it not fall, blanketed and secured by insulation and piercing fiberglass glitter. Over the next few weeks, I would pull it out when alone, watching for a resting indication that, yes. somewhere was due north, still.

I had never considered running away before I read My Side of the Mountain. The only escape I knew about, up to that age, was suicide. Shooting myself with the various assortment of guns in our basements. Rifles mostly. Their barrels tasting of smooth dust. But they never said where people escaped to in the movies, only that they were gone. The kid in George’s novel didn’t just get to be gone, he got to fucking live, gloriously. Goddamn was it glorious, do you remember? I hope so. I hope you got the chance to see that there could be a gone that came with expanding mountain sunshine.

I began self-harming at this time. Carefully, deliberately, one cut worked every few weeks. The holes I dug felt akin, in a way, to those Catskill Mountains (this was where the boy fled); the boy explored laterally, is all, and I explored vertically. I only bring this up because I always knew the knife could get me gone, but after the Catskill Mountains, I hid its sharpness even more. I went longer without it, value compounding with the narrative of foraging, root digging, and buckskin moccasins. To this day, a knife is without peer. Solver of so many of life’s dirty, sticky issues.

A flint stone I nicked from a local ranch house we bought hay from. A magnifying glass from school. Magnesium block for wet fires. An old ax found in a nearby abandoned house. All of these things I scurried away in various nooks in the house: the basement floor where plywood met dirt, behind untouched books on a shelf, inside the closets on a 2×4 ridge above an onlooker’s head. The boy goes on to achieve such symbiosis with the mountains that certain animals befriend him. They didn’t talk or anything like that, but it was still nonsense. I skimmed those sections hoping for more to add to my growing stock.

I can’t decide if it was my stepfather or the house that decided what happened to me. They so often were the same, at least in my memory. His intense breath smelled like the wood. His hands as firm as the concrete foundation. And he seemed to be able to see through the walls, or it was that the walls informed him of what went on outside his vision. It was an uncanny symbiosis. He built it, the house, so I suppose it is not that unexpected that it’s square footage was somehow linked to his DNA and consciousness, and our whereabouts with it. His father’s heart stopped in the house next door, so we were told, and apparently, the house’s did too, leaning and rotting, uninhabited by life since the man’s passing. His son forced to construct a new body. He could’ve lived there, but I know that the house didn’t want that. No one wants to share a grave, no matter how much time you allow someone to get used to the idea. I risked so much infecting that house with my growing abscesses and tumors of life. A larvae building a cocoon. Festering. Growing. Finally, hatching and flying somewhere, leaving behind a gaping burrow, one that would moan with the wind for its lost filling.

There was no messing up. It had to go off once and lay around the house, not as some question, but as a acknowledged finality. Unlike the boy who risked exposure by conversing with a local town librarian, an old man who gave survival advice (incredibly valuable advice), I could not risk anything like that. If caught, if dragged back, everything would be over. His anger would double in a world where already any increase in violent degrees currently felt like a renewed torture. Where anything that set you apart was a thing to be polished out, smoothed by his rough, calloused hands. Running would most assuredly set me apart. He would feel the negation like a brand on his skin. No one ignored him. Not even God, I eventually realized.

Fall came and my cache grew: cans of corn taken when they wouldn’t be missed, a can opener, rope and tape and black industrial trash bags. All of the items scattered around the house and animal barns and tack sheds. Growing. Growing my confidence that this would work. I began to allow myself to imagine it. I would hop the train and ride until Utah with my backpack filled like the boy’s, except mine filled with actual supplies and not just nouns and verbs. A few days, I guessed. Just far enough that the usual routes for those that cared would be clear of my journey as they searched. Once I hit Utah, I figured I could choose my destination—north, south, or west—pick your future and walk. Somewhere. But for now I would have to hang on until winter passed. Somewhere would have to wait out the coming snow.

I knew fairly quickly that my current strategy of hiding my gear in the house was bound to fail. There were too many opportunities for people to find them, and it was becoming difficult to keep my mind filled with all the tiny locations. I decided that I would risk a move, collecting and combining all my hope into one spot. I knew I had to do that eventually. It wasn’t like I could wake up in the middle of the night and expect nobody to notice as I went room to room, unearthing hatchets and rope as my family slept restlessly through the creaks and moans of a house intent on keeping us.

Before the ground grew too hard, I carefully collected my items and put them all inside a trash bag. Then, another. Another. Waterproof, insect-proof, nature-proof. I took a shovel with me, and I walked to the prairie, back behind the ridge, out of sight from the house’s gaze. The family still over at a neighbor’s place—his kin—eating dinner. I dug in the November wind. Its knots pulling and ripping at my clothes like a family member screaming to stop. I dug deep, deep as I could. It must have been three feet, possibly more, and as I prepped the back, gently pushing all the contents to lay flat, I pulled the book from my pocket and put it in, tying a bow. Once the hole was filled, I searched the area for a few large rocks. I aligned them in such a way that only I would recognize them—two close, one leaning on them, the other three pulling a person’s attention to the right; see, those like these, random and uninteresting. Move along. With my ears pulled and pink, cheeks wind bitten, I headed home. Walking like those uninteresting rocks infused my rhythm.

When the first snow came, I quit looking in the direction of my cache. The several inches would remain until spring. Until the sun signaled for my departure by pulling the snow like a white flag at the beginning of a race.

Winter passed as it always had, screaming and brutal, drunk on its own misery. Attacking blizzards. Bitter, sub-zero lectures. The compounding weight of every punishing snow storm, building and building and building, threatening one false move could take you into its suffocating depths, until all you did was breathe the consequences of that season.

Spring warmth takes too long to arrive. You know it will be late, and still, somehow, it always disappoints. But it did arrive. With each day’s high peaking over the 40s, I started peeking toward the cache. Then I looked every night before bed. Then I stared in the general direction, through the cinderblock walls of school, the bus seats, even as I closed my eyes, I looked into the darkness, knowing that the house could only guess what direction my dreams pointed, what rapid rhythm they beat to.

The buildup to the day was filled with anxiety. A prison escape. I can’t remember if the boy talked about how scary it was, about how you can look at the deepest insides of your own body, knowing the layers of epidermis better than a Nova documentary, and think that its black repercussions were not as scary as the repercussions of getting caught running. That somehow it felt more risky to attempt to make life better than it did to ensure it never got better. Did the boy talk about how he overcame that first step? That to take that first step said something, and it said it forever, and you couldn’t take it back once spent? And when you take that first step, the worst fate is that it leads back to where you were but that now you can’t stand how you were standing, and you can’t sleep in the same position, and none of your clothes ever fit right, and people’s voices are never as clear and you never understand anyone as you remember you once did? Right? I can’t remember exactly. I just know that the book didn’t cover everything you needed to run. In fact, as I look back, it hardly covered anything at all. The Catskills might as well have been Middle Earth for as many directions it gave me on how to proceed. I don’t know how I took that first step, so I can’t tell you either, all I know is that I did, miraculously. And as I took the next one, and the next, I didn’t hear the house moaning my leaving. I didn’t hear it’s hinges crying to return. I didn’t feel his eyes on my through the walls where he sat or the whispers alerting that a prisoner is on the run: “Attention, he leaves, he abandons the project, he refuses to do his part, he refuses to take part in the cycle. He is not allowed to refuse. Stop him. Stop.” I didn’t hear anything. Even the wind waited to see what happened as I walked the prairie, coat pockets full of as much food as I could sneak, shovel in hand. At first, the rocks were hard to find. The sagebrush tall from excess. Then, the rocks were closer to the fenceline. Then, further, but not that far. Then, the rocks were parallel to that fencepost, remember? Remember? You have to remember. Remember. Remember. Please, remember. Remember! Remember!

Then, day after day, week after week, the rocks were impossible to find. And even twenty-six years removed from that moment, I still remain. I am still here.

And once in awhile, when it’s a particularly warm evening and I am outside listening to the chattering laughter coming from the house—we are all still here—I walk the prairie looking for signs of those rocks. Unsure what I would do if I found them; uncertain that I even took that first step at all, or if I could now, or if I ever could to begin with.