The Mountains

One of the things I've discovered about myself in our travels is that I really get a deep satisfaction viewing mountains.  This never tires, bores, or I take for granted.  Each morning, my first impulse is to look out the picture windows in this house and appreciate these elderly, rounded, soft green Appalachian Mountains.  Green is such an inadequate word.  We're at the peak of summer here; however, the green of these mountains is already looking a little tired, dark hearted and wishful of rest.   The most notable difference between the Cascades or the Sierra Nevada, or any other chain of the Rocky Mountains is not only the height, but also the composition.  The Rockies are in your face, unrelenting, daunting. 

I told Drake today that these Appalachians seem like elderly people nodding off for their afternoon nap.  They seem to slump in gently rounded shapes.  There's nothing pointed or jagged even where the glaciers have scraped them to pale stone.  They aren't dramatic and imposing shouting look at me, look at my stone marvels like the northern Cascades or the Sierra Nevada.  Those ranges are proud, erect, towering and intimidating.  Of course, many of them are at least double or triple the height of these New Hampshire mountains.  The osteoporosis of millions of years has overtaken the Appalachians.
 
These gently rolling mountains sleepily smile and prepare to flash their secret to the world.  The vegetation of the Cascades and the Nevada is just as erect, towering and bristling as the mountains it stands on.  The western mountains coverage is always a steady, unchanging verdant landscape  of evergreens.  Juniper, spruce, pine, and fir both dot and crowd the landscape interspersed with jagged multi-colored sharp stone.

Not so in the Appalachians.  Rampant logging has left behind a few evergreens in a deciduous forest that makes the summer green of these mountains undulate in shades of forest, emerald, jade, pine, viridian, moss, hunter, and olive.  As the weather cools, all those shades of green will transform into vermilion, crimson, maroon, rust, terra cotta, butter, mustard, gold and amber.  That's the hidden secret shared with the world each fall.  It's why we're here.  Today I saw a sumac; a tiny little tree, which already had one blood red  leafed limb standing out among twenty cool green waving limbs.  This was a little tease of the show to come. 

I think as they slowly transform with each day unfolding into a more beautiful show, these White Mountains, these Appalachians, will find a cherished niche in my heart and in my mind's eye, just as the majestic Cascades slowly putting on their white finery did last year.

One of the things that frames these New Hampshire mountains are the clouds floating across, over and around the mountains and scudding along the baby blue sky.  If you like to play the cloud game of finding shapes, this is your land.  The sky and clouds here are as soft as the rounded mountains.  It's such a contrast to the hard, sharp deep sky blue of the desert,  and if a cloud appears, it looks like a sparse comet tail pushing across the hard blue.  In the White Mountains, the clouds are always surrounded by friends, that push together, pull apart, reform, and even argue changing to a dull gray and frowning down the mountains as they sprinkle their rain. 

Sometimes, these white, white clouds tiptoe stealthily down the mountainsides.  Other times, they boil over and rush in a white thick comforter across the mountains smothering and obscuring them. 

Each morning I look out to check the clouds, to see what games they will be playing.  Is it any wonder that this place soothes me?  These mountains lull and comfort rather than challenge.  I impatiently await their finery.