Текст книги "The Call of the Mountain"

Автор книги: Sam Neumann

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The Call of the Mountain

Sam Neumann

Contents

Copyright

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Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

About the Author

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Copyright © 2015 by Sam Neumann

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

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Nonfiction

Memoirs of a Gas Station

Quitting Cold Stone (And Other Struggles)

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”

– John Muir, 1873

1

It was a Friday morning in the summer when I left her. I was tired, she was hysterical, and that was the way things went.

“I’m sorry,” I told her through my open car window. Her black hair was frizzy in the New York humidity, makeup running down her face, just wanting to know why. Give her one good reason. I didn’t, because I couldn’t, but even if I could’ve, it wouldn’t have helped. She clutched the car door and screamed in my face.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I love you.”

She tried to punch me through the window. I put the car in gear. It was the way things went.

I didn’t like it. It wasn’t something I’d planned on doing. I was a failed husband, maybe a failed man. These were serious charges, I knew, but at the time they were only uncomfortable. I meant it when I said I loved her, and on some level I knew I was an idiot. This surely wasn’t fair to her; it was downright improper, and borderline cruel, and this was the fact that made it hardest for me to leave. This was the thing that almost made me stay, in spite of everything else.

But in the end it didn’t matter. There was still love, but the love had changed. The love was different. The love didn’t matter as much anymore. At one point the love would have kept me, but not now. The love wasn’t love; it had turned to something else. Where love had been was something different, something we and the rest of the world still called love, but wasn’t.

So I left. Because I was trapped. And because being trapped with something vaguely resembling love wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for me, and someday she would learn it wasn’t enough for her, either.

Megan kicked the side of the door as I drove away, then threw her latte into the rear windshield. The cup exploded and splashed caramel-colored liquid over the glass. I made a mental note to clean it when I got out of town.

The sun beat down on the streets of Upper Manhattan, and soon I was sweating through my oxford. But I didn’t turn on the air conditioning; I opened the windows, and took in the sounds and smells of that godforsaken city one last time. The jackhammers and car horns and the smells of hot garbage and car exhaust. I rolled the windows down farther, all the way to the bottom, and let it all in. Let all of that shit in, to permeate the dashboard and the leather seats and my sweaty blue shirt. To sink into my skin, and stay there for a while, to remind me of what I left.

Soon I was driving that Mercedes-Benz across the Hudson, then through Jersey and across I-78. Before long I would be riding the freeway across Pennsylvania, with the windows down and my sleeves rolled up. I was headed west, and if I had any say in the matter, I would not be coming back.

2

I was an analyst for Wilson Keen Financial Group, and I did the things Wall Street financial analysts do. Worked in the city in one of those big buildings, wore the suit and tie, regularly put in fourteen hour days plus commute, drank enough coffee to kill a horse. I was twenty-two when I got the call with the first job offer; I remember it clearly. Sitting at the kitchen table in my little apartment in Hanover, putting the finishing touches on my senior year of college, I kept myself together as they told me I’d been accepted, that I’d gotten the job, then thanked them politely and hung up. I kicked my chair back and screamed like an idiot. I yelled loud enough for all of New Hampshire to hear. I won, again. All the academic bullshit was worth it. I was a Wall Street financial analyst. It sounded good, like it was meant to be. I was ready to make money.

And make money I did. All the big Wall Street firms paid well, even for entry-level employees with no experience. I had a degree from Dartmouth and good test scores, which was enough. My starting salary was ninety-five thousand plus benefits and potential for advancement. In exchange, I gave them my soul.

Immediately the days were long, the pace grueling, the work mind-numbing. Admittedly, I went into the financial sector to get wealthy; any other details had hardly entered my mind. And within my first month at the company, reality began to set in. My job was to stare at numbers all day every day. The good news was I was good at numbers; numbers were easy, cut and dry, always following a formulaic progression. There was an answer for everything. The bad news was that I didn’t particularly like numbers. Quite the contrary, the long nights in college staring at financial textbooks had made me kind of despise them. This was unfortunate, given my profession. But I figured that most people didn’t like their jobs—you weren’t supposed to like your job; that’s why it was called “work.” I slogged through and forged ahead.

It didn’t get more enjoyable, but it did get more lucrative. I was promoted for the second time on my twenty-eighth birthday, my salary increased to well over six figures, and I was patted on the back by those of my ilk. By age thirty I was a senior financial analyst, labeled a fast-riser and a future star, destined for an executive title and corner office, and completely miserable.

Megan wasn’t, though. She loved it, all of it, and was for the most part oblivious to my complete lack of contentment. I suppose I knew that was what she always wanted—financial security, a husband with a reputable job, elite social status—but I thought she’d at least consider my happiness. I tried to tell her on a few occasions. I gave pointed hints after particularly long days at the office. She ignored me and looked back at her magazines. She was busy making plans.

Megan and I married after graduation. She had been as excited as I had been to move to New York City. She took the lead in apartment hunting, making sure it was the perfect space in the perfect area of town, and generally dismissed the idea that something might be a little more expensive than we could afford. Credit cards. I kept making more money and we kept spending it, on a redecoration or fancy dinners out. She bought us both new Mercedes’ even though we hardly drove.

I did love her still, but something had changed. She no longer had the goals or dreams or that bright look behind her eyes that she had in college. Meg was an English major. She was going to be a novelist. And it seemed like a good plan initially; I’d work and she would write. She could chase her dream while I brought in money. But more than five years in, she had just one partially finished manuscript somewhere on her laptop hard drive. Far fewer words on a page, far more new pairs of shoes and sunglasses and iced coffees. She was still pleasant to be around, but I never expected her to be affected so much by the money. I found it hard to respect her.

One day she was done with New York. It was time to get out of the congestion of the city, she said, and find a quieter place. I didn’t love living in Manhattan either, but the thought of a long commute every day on top of everything else made me want to slit my throat. Connecticut, she said. Find a nice little white house with dark window shutters and decorate again. Join a country club and enter social circles and generally dick around while I rode the train for two hours every day and pored over numbers for another twelve.

Her mother visited from time to time, and the two of them would look at properties online and giggle and disregard price tags. They would plan how they’d arrange each room, and call real estate agents for more information on the properties. Numerous times I mentioned that maybe it would be a good idea to wait a year or two. That it was okay to just look, but we might want to hold off until we had a better idea of where my job was going. Neither heard me. They weren’t just looking.

In each potential house, in every master plan between Megan and her mother, there was one room dedicated to being a nursery. They giggled every time they said it.

“The city isn’t a suitable place to raise children,” her mother would say, with Megan nodding in agreement.

Neither ever asked if I wanted kids.

One day I woke up and admitted to myself things were out of control. I’d lost any grip I’d ever had on my own life, and the only thing that was going well was my job, which was the one thing I couldn’t stand. It was a predicament. I tried throwing myself into work even more, putting in extra hours above the usual twelve or thirteen, hoping to find some sort of purpose there. I told Megan we were slammed. Work was the one thing I knew I was good at, so I thought by spending more time there I’d develop a fulfillment from my skills, or something. Of course, I didn’t. I just hated it more.

I was exhausted, and the exhaustion is what triggered it. Too many days of waking up at five and getting home at midnight, and I could hardly open my eyes when the alarm went off. I was a zombie at the office, staggering around with an empty face and downing pots of coffee that did nothing. Megan was asleep when I left in the morning and when I got home at night. I told myself I just had to push through. Just keep going, a few more days or a week, and something good would happen. A breakthrough, or something. It’s what I made myself believe.

And something did happen.

The alarm went off at 5:03 a.m. as usual. The radio kicked on with the familiar click of a switch flipping, the volume loud because I needed it loud. I stayed unmoved from my fetal position and tried to will the noise to go away, the clock to roll back a few hours. This was how things went. Usually I lay there for a minute or two, trying to rouse my muscles from their hibernation, until Megan rolled over from her side of our king bed and hit me. But today, I didn’t.

Once my brain woke enough to transform the noises coming from the radio from blunt, unintelligible sounds into actual voices and music, I realized this morning was different. On the radio was not the voices of over-caffeinated morning show hosts squawking about celebrity gossip, or a commercial for auto parts, or an overplayed Top 40 track, but something I’d seldom heard. It was a song; a real, actual song, but more than that. A skillful acoustic guitar came from that small speaker, with a steady rhythm that flowed like a river. There were deep, heavy drums, and a gravelly voice that forced my eyes open. And as he sang, I sat up in bed.

Can I come home for the summer?

I could slow down for a little while

Get back to loving each other

Leave all those long and lonesome miles behind

It hit me. I don’t know why, but it hit me. It was some blend of bluegrass and Americana, but neither of those things, really. There was faithful sincerity in that song, too much sincerity for the radio.

“Meg,” I said, sitting up in bed with open eyes.

She grunted, her back turned to me.

“Meg, who sings this song?”

She grunted again.

I reached over and turned the radio up.

I am tired

I am tired

Can I come home for the summer?

I could slow down for a little while

I fell in love with it, all of it, as I sat there in bed and listened. It was the opposite of the usual shit I listened to. All the synthesizers and overdubs and digital vocal corrections, stuff I didn’t really like but listened to anyway because it was there. This was raw, unadulterated beauty. And I had to have it.

I didn’t even know what it was, but I had to have it. I didn’t know what the words meant, but they sounded so good. They sounded right, like the secret answer to a secret question. They were the way out.

The song ended, and after a second of dead air the radio went straight into a station promo. No explanation, or indication of who that might’ve been, or why they decided to play that particular song instead of the usual garbage. Just like that, time moved on, like it never happened. The promo played loudly with its sound effects and fast-talking voiceover, and Megan mumbled something and rolled over. I turned off the radio and got up.

I walked toward the shower and my feet were light. My hands tingled. My brain was alive, and a voice filled my head. It was strong, and it was clear, and it repeated one thing.

Go, it said.

Go. Go.

I stopped where I was, and looked down at my bare feet on the hardwood floor. I glanced around the room, at the TV on the far wall, at the matching nightstands, at the minimalist, black, angular decor.

Go, it said.

I looked at my briefcase sitting on the floor, papers spilling out. I thought of the other stacks of papers that would be waiting on my desk when I got to work.

Go.

I could almost smell the sweat on the subway, feel the humidity as bodies packed together and pushed against mine. I heard babies crying, cabs honking, and office phones ringing.

Go.

I closed my eyes tight, and I saw mountains. I saw jagged, snowy peaks that cut straight through a blue sky. I saw rolling foothills before them, blanketed in lush pines and divided by a river running through them. I saw winding two-lane roads and little standalone shops. I heard birds and the howl of a coyote, and silence. I heard silence. I smelled the outdoors, things not from the human world but the natural one. I saw, heard, and smelled all these things, even though I never had.

Go, it said. Go.

So I did.

I walked to the closet and pulled out a duffel bag, and I began packing.

I did my best to explain myself, but this was a weak effort. I knew nothing other than I had to go. After she awoke, there was a lot of crying, some yelling, a little pouting, then more crying.

“Will this just be for a little while?” she asked at one point, eyes puffy and voice hoarse, trying to salvage something.

“I can’t say that,” I said.

“Fuck you, Jules.”

Briefly I considered bringing her along, or proposing the idea, at least. I could tell her we’d get out of the city. I’d leave my job, and we’d find a quieter place to live. There wouldn't be any country clubs or social status like she craved in Connecticut, and money would be tight for a while, but we’d figure it out. I could spin it as a new adventure, the two of us together, finding our rightful place in the world, exploring something outside the same thirty congested city blocks. I could really sell it.

The problem was, she would say yes. It would take some convincing, but in the end she would come with me. And she would be miserable. She would come along and try to make it work, mostly due to blind marital allegiance and a crippling fear of being alone. And she would hate the new life we found, and would resent me for asking her to go, and I would resent her for going. It was a failed proposition from the start.

Megan and I no longer shared a path in life, and denying that would be a disservice to us both. She was better off without me. I repeated this thought in my head and it brought me a small amount of comfort.

3

I drove for three days. The first was the longest, through a sliver of New York, then Jersey, then a long trek across the expansive fields of Pennsylvania. The landscape changed quickly, evening out from walls of skyscrapers to lines of trees and rolling hills, then stayed that way. It seemed unending. I stopped for a burger outside Pittsburgh.

In the afternoon I crossed into Ohio and began the uncharted territory. The driving was easy, the heat manageable. As I crossed that open land, the miles of highway and dirt and grass and trees and signs and occasional towns, I rolled up my sleeves and scanned the radio, looking for some bluegrass or Americana. I stopped at a truck stop outside Columbus and admired my country, the sights and smells of it all that I’d missed most of my life. I washed my face and moved along.

The final leg of the day crossed me into Indiana, and the industrial city of Indianapolis, where I stayed for the night. I checked in at a cheap motel that advertised its rates on a sign, and ate a chicken sandwich at a diner across the parking lot.

In the morning I slept. I slept soundly, quietly, wonderfully, in that cheap queen bed, until the scandalous hour of 8:30 a.m., when I was gently roused by the lingering scent of stale cigarettes. There was an alarm clock in the room but I didn’t use it. I sat up on the bed, rubbed my eyes, and saw a missed call from Megan. No voicemail.

I refilled my duffel bag with the few belongings I’d removed, put on a t-shirt and shorts, and hit the road, pointed west again. The duffel bag sat in the back seat, holding my only belongings, a small reminder of the many things I’d left and the few things I’d brought. Before long I was in Missouri.

It was almost amazing to me that there was this great expanse of country that I had been aware of but scarcely considered. All of this land, hundreds and hundreds of miles, in my own country, that I’d all but ignored my entire life. It wasn’t the northeast. It wasn’t New York or Boston or Philly or some Ivy League town. So it didn’t matter. Indeed, the drive was monotonous at times, but there was a beautiful simplicity to it. Even the farm country, with the endless fields of corn and soybeans, the scattered windmills and occasional red-sided barns, had a wholesome glow, a serene sense of purpose. This was America. This was the America I’d missed while holing myself up in the only area of America that was supposed to matter.

This day on the road was shorter than the last, and by five o’clock I was in Kansas City. I paid for a room at the Marriott downtown and ate the finest rack of ribs of my life. I called Megan back from the hotel but she did not answer.

My last day of driving took me across Kansas, past hundreds of miles of wheat, through the city of Topeka and by a different Manhattan, over a state that once again seemed impossibly large, to Colorado. I reached the border and pulled to the side of the road.

Welcome to Colorful Colorado

It’s what the sign read. Confusing, to me, because I didn’t see much of anything colorful, and I was fairly certain I wasn’t even seeing Colorado. Behind me was brown grassland and thorny shrubs, as far as I could see, and in front of me, the same.

When I was ten years old, I had flipped through a magazine at my parents’ home in Boston. It was one of my dad’s car monthlies, Motor Trend or Car & Driver or something similar, which I’d often pick up and peruse while waiting for dinner. Mostly I didn’t bother with the words, but enjoyed looking at the images of fast cars and ads for razors and cologne. As I turned the pages on this particular evening, I stopped on a page of blue and white. It was a different kind of ad, not one promoting Ford or Chevy or Gillette, but a simple image. Blue and white. Deep blue sky and snow covered mountains, shimmering in the midday sun in some other universe. Find Your Freedom, was printed in block letters at the bottom, followed by short information for Colorado ski vacations.

I bugged my mother for a year. Can we go? Can we please go? Even at ten years old, I felt the pull of adventure, the call of uncharted land and the mystery that was Colorado. Colorado. The very word sounded like a western fairytale. Having never been west of Pittsburgh, the thought conjured images of foreign utopia, a place nearly inaccessible, in a way that can only happen in the mind of a ten-year-old. Colorado. It dominated my mind. I doodled mountains on my notebook paper in school, and visualized the open countryside while lying in bed at night. I knew nothing more of the place than a single picture in a magazine, but my imagination created the rest. Colorado. The thought alone was magical.

We didn’t go. Even as a family of three, there was scarcely enough money to spend on recreation, much less a cross-country jaunt based on the whims of a ten-year-old. My mother asked me why. Why Colorado? Why all of a sudden? And I had no real answer. I knew there was a why, just didn’t know how to put it into words, even in my head. Explaining the why wasn’t as important as the why’s mere existence.

The thought faded eventually, falling into a bin with all the other temporary impulses of adolescence. A distant memory, not totally forgotten, but no longer salient. It was replaced with words from textbooks and after school activities and summer jobs. It was pushed out of my consciousness, through the subconscious all the way to the unconscious, and it rested there for decades, until one morning I heard a song I’d never heard before.

Perhaps it was naïve to expect the Rockies to majestically jut from the earth into the sky, just like they did in that picture, as soon as I crossed the border into Colorado, but nonetheless I felt a tinge of disappointment. Here I was, finally in that foreign land, and there were no mountains. It was just more Kansas. I squinted into the distance, but even on the far horizon there was only flat land meeting a hazy sky.

It was confusing. I got back in my car and kept driving.

Two more hours across bland farmland and mostly flat countryside, the elevation slowly and imperceptibly creeping upward, and finally I was able to make out the Rocky Mountains on the horizon. Through the clear summer sky the image came into view, starting as a wisp, an illusion of sight, and soon coming into focus in grand, far off splendor. I slapped the roof of my car and yelled, and honked the horn three times. Three days of driving across America’s heartland, a lifetime of harboring an unconscious dream of mountain peaks and blue sky and open range, and it was real. Finally, it was. A decade of slaving away in a pewter gray box, a sweatshop in the sky, secretly dreaming of freedom, and it was real. I found it.

The highway led me gently to the edge of civilization. The road became more populated with cars, the highway signs more plentiful. The mountains came into focus, and I could make out specific features; certain peaks separated from one another, small blotches of snow at the highest altitudes.

I saw Denver. Driving through the eastern suburbs, past industrial centers and railroad tracks, I had a good view of downtown. It was small, no more than a dozen skyscrapers, flanked by twice as many smaller buildings, and this made it welcoming. That was the city center, but Denver sprawled for miles.

The highway took me north of downtown and closer to the mountains. The elevation again rose steadily, then dropped, quickly and sharply, and I made the descent into my final destination. Boulder. A town I knew nothing about, other than the little Anthony had told me. But as my car crested the hill and made that drop into the valley below, I slowed down to take in the beauty that lay before me. Lush trees and shrubbery broken up by small, scattered buildings. A town nestled at the base of the foothills, with green mounds rising from the earth just beyond the city, blanketed in pine trees. To the immediate west were gigantic blades of sandstone rock, carved out of the hills and marking the city. The Flatirons. The sun began to set and cast a golden glow through the valley, falling gracefully and directly on the town itself. An oasis.

My car glided down Highway 36 and through town, past the Tuscan architecture of the University of Colorado. I turned on Broadway and followed it north across Pearl Street, then took a left on Mapleton and climbed another hill. I parallel parked the car under an oak tree on a divided street, looked at the address I’d written on a piece of paper, and found the house. It was a small, ranch-style home with Victorian styling and overgrown shrubbery in the front. It was beautiful, but everything was.