Mountains to Mole Hills

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity...”

                                                                                                              ― John Muir

My place is a place of mountains that still hold onto their skirts of green, their mantles of fir and pine – but only just so. But a very short distance away, in a nearby place, the mountains, with their tenacious stone and gripping tree roots, no longer withstand the larger strength of development.

 I stopped on the way to work this morning at a Starbucks in a village between my own small town and my work atop a mountain. When I came out, coffee steaming in hand, and juggling car keys, I looked up to the sound of a crow creaking softly and sorrowfully like an old farm gate sighing in the wind.

The light was still soft and hazy on the mountains on the other side of the sound, the tree line indistinct and velutinous. I lost my breath in a shocked gasp. Because not so very long ago, the green on the mountainsides was thick and impenetrable.  The mountains wrapped around this little village like a fortress. They seemed inviolable – holy.

Now I noted houses built in clear-cuts, right of ways cleared for power lines. Development is creeping up the sides of the mountains like flood water up the side of a levee. Creeping up to where the bears are, the elk and the deer. Taking from them the only homes they have.

Dr. Jacques Diouf, an environmentalist, calls mountains the ‘water towers of the world”. According to him, one of every two people on the planet, every day, quenches their thirst with water that originates from mountains.  Don’t even those people in those new, over-large, fancy houses need the water that the mountain creates? But as strong as we think mountains are, they are also fragile.  Geologically, mountains are dynamic, not static. Disruption like these houses I see up on the slope, change habitat. As humans move in, life is wrung out.

I took my over-civilized (and over-priced) cup of coffee to my over-civilized car and took one last look at the mountains emerging out of the early morning haze. What happens to the creatures who live there, I wondered, when there is no more ‘up’ to go to? When we have made of the mountain, a mole hill?