July 9, 2008
The Distance Between
Mountains
I
crested the pass separating Utah's salt deserts from a flowering sagebrush
basin. The basin, in turn, separated this pass from the next, second in a
series of eleven between Utah and the Sierras. From the long, straight
high-speed descent down into the basin, the next mountain range looked close
enough to touch. In fact, it was about twenty-five miles away. At an altitude
of over five-thousand feet, without industry, humidity, automobiles or houses,
visibility is so uninterrupted that distances telescope and individual trees, a
mountain range away, are clearly defined.
But
here's the thing: twenty-five miles on a loaded touring bike, especially in the
early, less-fit portion of a tour, takes a solid two hours to cross. The
unbroken expanse of the basin, its unmitigated constancy, offset by the
visibility of its far side, pushes travelers to get across as quickly as
possible. A minivan passed me thirty minutes into my traverse. It accelerated
the entire way across the basin. At a hundred miles an hour, a minivan sounds
like a fighter jet. It pulled a suck in its wake that put a wobble on my bike.
But I understood. It was all I could do to control my own desire to get out of
the saddle and sprint for the far wall of mountains. And I knew that I was only
halfway to Lages, a quarter of the way to Ely. Discipline and pacing determine
whether one can pedal seventy pounds of bicycle and gear, plus ones own body
weight, a hundred-and-twenty miles in a day. I forced myself to slow down. To
ever slow down. Suddenly, I understood why people built villages in valleys: to
break them up. This was what Kant meant by the sublime. This was the
awe-inspiring beauty that terrified by overwhelming with its massiveness. Not
the mountains; you can conquer mountains. You can only force a basin into
submission by building subdivisions or skyscrapers, by turning it into Los
Angeles or Salt Lake City.
And
by proxy, I began to realize the true terror of terrorism as well: the threat
of terror. An actual explosion, like an actual mountain pass, is cathartic.
Once it comes, once there's blood in the street, or once you've shifted down
into your granny gear, you know what you're facing. You can relax in the
confidence that it has finally happened, the worst has arrived, the active test
is here. You can do whatever it is that you can do to survive. Waiting is
different. One lovely October Friday in 2002, that waiting overwhelmed me.
Flipping through a current issue of the New Yorker that my boss had lent me for
its article by Jonathan Franzen on difficult novels, I happened on a piece
about the government’s prosecution of Moussaoui, the apparent twentieth
hijacker. I started reading it as the A train left the 125th street
station. By the time we got to Columbus Circle my breathing had turned shallow
and my palms were coated with sweat. Nothing in the article implied any kind of
a threat. The piece focused on how the US attorney developed his case. But I
was reminded that it had been a full year since I'd walked down the World Trade
Center’s stairs, lost my bicycle. Now I felt that something must happen.
Immediately. Over the course of a week, I went from not exhibiting any signs of
PTSD to coming to work an hour late so as to avoid the subways at rush
hour. On the day that I was
supposed to fly to California for vacation, I was so visibly immobilized that
my boss sent me out for a long lunch. I walked in trembling baby steps to my
favorite deli, bought a meatball hero, returned to my desk and found it
impossible to eat. My boss finally sent me home early. I went to the airport
and waited. When the cabin door closed, it was all I could do not to scream
that we were doomed. I wanted us to turn off the runway. I wanted them to get
me out of there. I wanted them to tell me I was safe, and the only way I would
have believed them was if danger had just passed. I clutched the armrests for
the full five-hour flight. Obviously, the false peace of forcing myself to go
slow across the basin wasn't nearly so bad; but that lack of human adulteration
other than the road, the lack of variation in the terrain, conspired towards
that fearful freeze.
A
horse is slower than a bicycle, an ox pulling a wagon slower still. What, I
wondered, would it be like if this basin took three days instead of two hours?
What if I really didn't know what I'd find over the pass? Horrifying. I
wondered if proximity to this fear, more than any land-greed, allowed the
pioneers’ atrocities. I managed to stay slow, and when I began climbing that
next pass, relatively rested, I felt the same sense of accomplishment as if I'd
set a new speed record for myself.
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