MENDICANT MOUNTAIN & A “SENSE OF PLACE”
or
HOW I LOST MY TOWN

by George Sibley

[First published in Mountain Gazette 83, Nov.-Dec. 2001; reprinted in High Country News, March 18, 2002]


The land was ours before we were the land's....
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

–Robert Frost ("The Gift Outright")


I know I'm starting to lose it. My sense of place. It really hit home the day I neglected to stand up for Snow Days.

I had just finished making a presentation about our local economic development corporation to a local leadership-training group. I live in a mountain valley that, like most mountain valleys in the Rockies, has two principal towns, one upvalley and one downvalley. (Some have more towns, but they will all sort into "upvalley" and "downvalley.") I've lived in both towns, enough to know that both are a long way from being that "society to match its scenery" that Wallace Stegner talked about in "The Sound of Mountain Water." But we keep trying—and one of the most consistent efforts toward improvement on the part of each town is to try to help the other town improve itself through frequent criticism.

That is what the leadership meeting that day had devolved to: most of the people in the group were from the downvalley town, so they were providing a critique of the general business practices of the upvalley town, practices they believed were not sufficiently rigorous and disciplined. "You go up there," one person said, "and you never know if you're even going to find a business open." "Yes," chimed in another, "especially if it's snowing."

Well, that jogged a few memories of my own days as a businessman in the upvalley town - to the extent that a newspaper is a business. If it was snowing – especially the way it can only snow up in the high mountains, that straight-down drowning thick fall – there was no uncertainty at all about whether a business, including my newspaper office, would be open: it wouldn't. I kept the "Snow Day, back by 4:30" sign taped to the door jamb inside, ready to slap up quickly in a snow emergency. Other days, especially on a Thursday or Friday after the week's paper was out, I might tape up the "Out on a Story " sign and go up for a couple chairlift interviews in the late afternoon. But Snow Days—those were as sacred as Sundays used to be. That was a big piece of why we were there.

But at that leadership meeting that day—I didn't say anything. Save it for a better time, I thought to myself, a better forum. But this was the anointed future leadership of the valley; where would there be a better forum? Nevertheless - I said nothing, and let the criticism roll, and thus am probably becoming part of the problem that is my topic here: sense of place, and the subtle war, usually civil enough, we have between senses of place in a generic homogenizing global society.



For the past four decades, I've lived in a real estate development called "Colorado." Colorado has been a real estate development from the start back in the 1850s: four straight lines laid down on a map, a surveyor's wet dream, unnatural laser lines attached not to geography but to the abstract concept of property, subdivisible with liberty and licenses for all.

But within the abstract bounds of the real estate development known as Colorado, a lot of places have emerged since it was first advertised as a "territory" - as places had also emerged here before anything here was ever named "Colorado" and subdivided.

When Americans talk about "place" today, and "sense of place," it's often in the context of real estate because that's the way Americans think. But if you are going to really consider "place," the first thing you have to do is distinguish it from the concept of property. Both place and property are matters of possession, but it's who and what are possessed, and how, that's important. "Property" is a cultural convention whereby a person has the belief, confirmed by a properly filed piece of paper, that he or she possesses a piece of land by virtue of investing some money or labor in it. "Place," on the other hand, is something related to the land that comes to possess a person.

People in farm communities seem to understand this: in a long-time farm community, when Jones buys Smith's farm, it doesn't becomes "the Jones place"; it's still "the Smith place (where Jones lives now)." But if Jones works that property for a long time, long enough and well enough for everyone to forget Smith, then it becomes "the Jones place" — even after Jones dies or sells it to Garcia. Your property is not your place until there's a lot of you invested there.

Nonetheless, "place" is a concept every bit as anthropocentric as property. "No place is a place," said Stegner, until two things have happened: one, "things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments"; and two, "it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry." So the geography itself is not the place; geography only becomes place when some set of humans becomes all bound up with it in some way.




But one thing that begins to sink in after a while in a "place" is that the "sense of place" people have there doesn't necessarily have much to do with the natural environment in which the place is located. In fact, in the American West, most of the places to which people are attached have a kind of reductive relationship with the natural environment: a place exists to milk something out of the environment in the most major way possible; the place is a base from which to extract or otherwise exploit nature in order to trade along the back azimuth with the parent culture. The places we carve out of the natural environment usually have a lot more to do with the baggage we carry from our parent culture than with anything inhering in "the nature of the place" itself.

This is not just true now; it has been true from the time the American West was way back on the East Coast. We say that, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail; well, to a culture with the belief that Jefferson articulated – that "farmers are God's chosen people" – everything in nature looks like an incipient farm. So the people who thought of themselves as "New Englanders" struggled stubbornly for a couple of centuries to convert acidulous coniferous forest land with rocky undeveloped glacier-ground soils into the English farmscape they knew God really meant it to be. Thanks to their stubbornness, they made it work okay (climate notwithstanding) in some of the valleys and on slopes with southern exposure where the great Central Hardwood Forest had invaded and laid down a good leaf-based humus. But it didn't work very well at all where the old conifers held sway, and that has a lot to do with why the "sense of place" one picks up on from multigenerational inhabitants of a lot of New England places has more too do with stubbornness than pride, and a kind of sullen antagonism that comes of generations of not quite succeeding in a war against nature.

In the same way, when Brigham Young looked over the gray-green desert lands between the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake and said, "This is the place," he wasn't seeing what was there then; he was seeing what would be there as soon as the Mormons earned their "beehive" emblem by irrigating that desert and turning it into Deseret.

And then there are these mountain towns. They were all built in the most vigorous repudiation of local nature imaginable. The false front building – a two- or three-story front backed by a one- or one-and-a-half-story building, or maybe a tent – wasn't built to reflect the mountain environment at all, but to establish a convincing facade of the urbanity the "unsettlers" wanted to transplant there. The first public building (after a dozen bars or so) was not a simple church to celebrate God's beauty, but an elaborate hotel replete with wine, women and cigars where the avatars of back-east money could be made to feel at home, and the second public building was often enough an opera house built by a noveau riche who hated opera but knew what kind of a place money liked. The mercantiles offered "the latest Paris fashions" (and still do, in the really toney mountain towns). Most of these towns were founded by megalomanic dreamers envisioning cities, and copying cities, creating places grounded in what all cities are grounded in: the concentration of wealth. A concentration used by most cities to, as much as anything, complete its transformation of nature to something more civilized, more controlled, more useful to humans, even more beautiful to some eyes. New York's Central Park, the first preserved "wild park," probably continues to shape more people's sense of "the natural" than any other single place.



The fact that so many people are talking about their "sense of place" today doesn't mean this tendency to recreate geography in our own image is any less ubiquitous. To the contrary, "sense of place" gets manufactured and distributed today just like everything else that can play on desirable (and therefore potentially profitable) feelings and emotions and impressions.

Everyone arrives in the mountains with a pre-packaged "sense of place," thanks to our industrious media and an aggressive culture in general. Everyone arrives with a calendar-art sensibility about "place" grounded in years of exposure to the softcore airbrushed ecoporn of "place artists" ranging from Currier and Ives to Adams and Fielder; they've all read the Thoreauvian musings on mountain places cranked out by dozens of writers like Abbey, Bass, Ehrlich and the whole bibliography down to yours truly, and of course Thoreau himself; they all know from the calendar they got for their Save-the-Whatever donation almost exactly what to expect to see every month of the year in all the basic mountain settings from alpine tundra to high desert.

More to the point, they all arrive with a well-developed sense of what civilized people do once they get to the place they've chosen. This is the more true in direct proportion to the extent they have bought into and succeeded individually in the civilized world. That is to say, the more money they come with, the stronger their sense of place, and what a place should be, and their place in the place and what they need to be there. They have been inundated for decades with images of the right car to take into the scenery with which they have been inundated for decades; they've seen the kind of houses with which we crown our success in everything from the Sunday paper real-estate sections to the house-beautiful magazines devoted to starter castles and menopause manors. Television shows running the gamut from "Northern Exposure" at the low cool end to "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" at the high vulgar end are devoted to cultivating the sense-of-place part of our cultural education.

And since one major component of that education is the absence in our place of a whole lot of other people (especially people who are "other" from our kind of people), the first thing we do, once we're in place, is become a Friend For the Preservation of the Place, dedicated to making sure that the place continues to match our sense of what the place should be - namely, the way it was when I got here. Once we've built, we want the building to stop - certainly within our viewshed. We want the historic-looking little old town to continue looking as historic as it did the day we first saw it (although maybe with a little new paint in authentic Victorian colors), and so we donate to the creation of a historic district; we talk up covenants and architectural reviews; we cultivate the favor of the handful of remaining oldtimers, working as hard to get them to smile on us as we ever worked to win over a customer or employer back in the real world. And we accept, as natural enough, most of the changes that had been wrought on the place before we got there. You mean God didn't put that road there? Those ski runs weren't natural breaks in the mountain forest?

In short, we do what we can to make sure the place matches our sense of what such a place should be, and so do what we are able to do, as mere individuals, to change it for the rest of the cultural age to a more generic representation of what the culture stands for and nurtures. This is what civilization is all about.



There is, however, a more subtle "sense of place" that comes to those who inhabit a place long enough. This comes from a growing awareness of things there that just are what they are, and are not going to change to accommodate to our superior civilized sense of what the place ought to be. Thus the North Woods slopes and glacial gravels of New England, once 80 percent cleared for farming, are now about 80 percent forested again. And a lot of impudent "Capital City" type places in the mountains here have melted back into high meadows marked only by the occasional pile of rusty cans. Sometimes retreat, with or without dignity, is the only way. And even where the people stay, they sometimes change their civilized ways—stop building buildings with flat roofs in snow country, for example, or clear-cutting on mountain slopes, or running low-country cattle breeds in high altitude meadows, or a lot of the other things that are "the way we do things."

It stands to reason, common sense, that those who come to a place more or less empty-handed, maybe empty-minded, will more readily sense the innate and intrinsic qualities of a place than will those who come with the full baggage of civilization and a well-developed sense of what a place should be. Over in the Smith Fork valley, north of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River, there's a beautiful castellated ridge, above the town of Crawford, called Mendicant Ridge. I've never been able to track down the source of that name – and to be honest, haven't tried that hard, for fear that it probably traces back to something totally mundane, like a homestead at its base built by old Fred Mendicant.

Better to think that it is so named because someone came there with a truly mendicant spirit - not poor because of a failure to strike it rich, like those who named all the Poverty Gulches and Busted Flats of the West, but poor on purpose: someone who gave up all that wealth of baggage, that baggage of wealth that even the poorest of Americans carry around on their backs, someone who gave that up in order to better seek out some essential spirit and meaning in life. A true mendicant like St. Francis, coming deliberately uncluttered enough to see what might really be there.

I may just be saying this, however, because I had - not cleanly and deliberately, but through an escalating series of screwups - reduced myself to a kind of a mendicant state when I was possessed by a place in the real estate development called Colorado.

Call the place Mendicant Mountain for our purposes here; that's not its real name, but then we haven't been here long enough to know the place's real name, if it has one. Just say that below the mountain is a typical enough Colorado mountain valley: longer than it is wide, beautiful with the orthographic diversity that comes of relentless gains in altitude, and occupied by a few thousand people in a couple of towns that aren't yet "a society to match the scenery." The people, including me, are occupied in selling a growing variety of mountain experiences, including of course property.

I first came to this valley as an industrial worker in the mountain-experience industry that we call a ski area. At that time in my life, I wasn't expecting or desiring to be possessed by any place or anything. I'd been more or less bumming for the previous couple of years - ski-bumming in the winter, construction bumming in the summer. Prior to that I'd been caught up in the accumulating chaos and disorder of about half a decade of dropping out, without tuning in to anything significant and turning on primarily with excessive quantities of beer. That long quasi-deliberate slide of a fall had culminated in a close encounter of the worst kind with the United States Army over legitimate wars, a situation that had ended in a way that, according to everything I'd been taught about American society, meant that I probably had no future at all and could count on bumming all my life.

But I made the mistake no true bum ever makes; I went back to the same place twice. After ski patrolling for a winter in that mountain valley, I had bummed around Mexico for a month, then worked construction for a friend in Boston for the summer - then hitched back to the valley, because, well, they'd invited me to come back (bums always say sure, but don't do it), and one place seemed as good as another (bums know the new place where you've never been is always better).

The ski area took me on early, in September, to putter around the mountain on all the tasks that are part of turning a big slowly eroding hunk of rock into a bourgeoisie adventure not too obviously marred by the general untidiness and casual dangers of nature. Three of us, the ski patrol leader, the mountain manager, and private last class Sibley, wandering all over the mountain, in the ski area's beatup old pickup or afoot, cutting off stumps, blowing up rocks, changing wheels on the lift towers, fixing up the marmot-chewed patrol phone cables, et cetera.

I'd never been that close to a mountain, or anything else that big in the natural world - day after day, wandering over it like a gnat on a pumpkin, seeing something new every day, even in places where we'd been the day before.

It was also my first mountain autumn, and to the best of my knowledge, nature has come up with nothing in the way of sheer overwhelming mindless beauty that quite compares with a Rocky Mountain fall. A "Pacific High" tends to settle in over the Colorado Plateau after the Labor Day doldrums, and when it really settles in, it pushes incoming weather north or south of the Southern Rockies for as much as a month; a day of clouds or rain or snow might sneak up around from the southern edge of the plateau, or an early front might spend its way down from the Arctic for a day or so, but the High usually prevails, and it did that fall: day after day of pure blue sky, and the mountains going from late summer's heavy somnolent greens to the psychedelic intrusions of yellow among the green, then the yellow aspen regnant, turning the darker greens of spruce and fir almost black in contrast. Then the leaves all fall off and it gets in to the more somber brown beauty of November, with snow starting to creep down the mountains the way the morning sun does in mountains. The Pacific High is less enjoyable then, at a ski resort anyway; people start to get nervous, long for a cloudy dark day, waiting for the fat pregnant clouds to crawl over the jagged horizon—but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The seduction of the mendicant: I remember going back to work at the ski area one day after a two-beer lunch in town, and watching a whirlwind from out of nowhere run up through the aspens on the mountainside, spinning a column of gold maybe a hundred feet above the trees from which it was lifting the leaves.

Or sitting up on a lift tower one day checking telephone cable connections, and a bear walked down the service road, right under the tower.

Or sliding and stumbling down a slope, checking the cables for the patrol phones, and seeing a marmot sitting on a rock, and getting into an involved discussion with the patrol leader about whether it would be better to come back in the next life as a marmot, or as the rock a marmot sits on.

Or looking up one day into a sky so clear that we could still see the planet Venus at ten in the morning.

And always there—almost surrealistically present in both detail and completeness on the brilliant cloudless days, but somehow both more real and larger on the days when clouds gave only partial views—was the mountain, a jagged hook of a mountain - it hooked me: daily going into its shadow going to work; clambering over it all day; seeing it over my shoulder going home, and shadowed and ghostlit in moonlight when I came out of the bar late in the evening; I saw those things and can't forget them, and they all changed my life. The place got me.



But the mountain's town (the upvalley town, in the cultural geography of the valley) seduced me that fall as much as the mountain. Like all places out on the margins of civilization, that town was (and continues to be) marginal in many ways. Certainly this was the case economically. The town had one small struggling hardrock mine still operating, but its "mining heritage" was pretty clearly not a "mining future." The ski resort was also struggling; it had just been through a foreclosure and "financial reorganization" the year I got there - the reason it was so easy for any bum to get a job there.

But economic marginality is a relative thing that takes its standards from the mainstream economy - which is to say: it was only economically marginal if your "sense of place" and what places should be held that the local economy should offer about the same kind and level of economic activity and rewards as the mainstream offered.

But if you came there in retreat from civilization, then you didn't measure the economy in those civilized terms; the economy went back to its old bio-anthropological definition: whatever the living things in a place did in order to keep living there - the only base standard being better alive than dead.

Embraced and environed as it was by that brilliant autumn, the whole town felt revolutionary in ways unique to my limited experience. In the larger swirl of things, it was the end of the "Summer of Love," the beginning of the serious anti-war season (of which my inept lonely revolt from the Army had been a kind of a pale personal foreshadowing), on a deeper level the beginning of a serious, if short-lived, re-evaluation of American civilization. And all of that was present in my mountain place, there under Mendicant Mountain.

Rental houses in town were all full that fall, months ahead of the ski season, and the tenants were mostly the spitting image of those San Francisco hippies being portrayed in the national press. What was blowin' in the wind had blown some our way. Dope first hit the valley in a noticeable way that fall; that was when marijuana began to compete with alcohol as the Dionysian drug of choice in the mountain valleys—which of course horrified the old retired miners tanking beer in the bars all afternoon and evening.

But the hippies weren't the only characters stirring the pot, as it were, that fall in Crested Butte. The real ringleaders in fact were as unlikely a motley as you could imagine. A retired Marine officer become jeweler. A couple of professors from a nearby college, both living upvalley rather than downvalley with their families. A midwestern businessman with a latent imagination who found himself running a marginal ski resort. A former government secretary who'd given into an urge to carve wood. And a brilliant but difficult man who was both a licensed doctor and a licensed lawyer, and who had already set up a summer forensics "academy" in town.

This consortium of individuals, separately, together, and in shifting constellations, held all kinds of open meetings that fall to talk about the future of the place - and in all those meetings the sense that civilization had retreated, abandoned the valley, not only did not feel like a disaster; in some strange way it felt like a blessing.

The future, it seemed, could be whatever we decided it should be: a little skiing, a little mining, sure. But there was also a lot of support for a lot of education of a certain sort—the retired Marine-become-jeweler had, in an impromptu way that summer, found himself hosting a small jewelry-making class up from a university down in one of the cities of the plains, and they wanted to come back, and surely there were others like them, hundreds, maybe thousands of others like them, looking for a real place for learning: workshops and festivals celebrating art, music, dance, writing, politics, revolution, whatever, all in the shadow and reflected glow of Mendicant Mountain, and all of that art and music and dance and poetry and politics there to celebrate the mountain and the place it created.... We were the people of Mendicant Mountain, surely all possessed by the place, that beautiful brilliant fall, absolutely possessed.

Out of all those meetings came an organization that still exists in an ever- transmogrifying way, and the organization leased an old abandoned school building for a dollar a year, and one translucent Saturday morning everybody - old timers who had gone to school there and didn't want the building to fall down, us hippies who weren't much good for anything but laughs, a few people recruited because they actually knew what to do—everybody turned out to put a new roof on the old building, and that day may have been the high point of my life, roped up on the roof (because I already knew how to use a hammer), people milling around below kidding each other, some hippie chicks in granny dresses lugging a big pot of some kind of healthy goop down the street from the nearest rental house for lunch, and all of it surrounded by this glorious blaze of leaf death, watched over by the mountain - for the first time in my life, I consciously felt something I hadn't even recognized as missing from my life: a sense that there might be hope for the human species. Possessed: we were all possessed by the place.

That's so naïve I'm embarrassed to even be trying to describe it. But there it was, and I will have to say that life has never since been any better than that; truth to tell, it has mostly been a downhill trip into what passes for reality in America, an increasingly comfortable subsidence back into "civilization as we know it" for all of those who left civilization looking for something different.

Civilization of course came back. Not charging hard, banners waving, to overwhelm our impertinence: it came back sort of like the Spanish came slinking back into the Southwest after the Indians of the middle Rio Grande had revolted in 1680 and kicked their civilizing European asses all the way back to El Paso. The ski resort's financial breakdown had led us to think, naively I now see, that the world of money had abandoned us, that we were actually on our own to do whatever the place seemed to suggest. Now I can see, have seen, that civilization never abandons anything that has any remote possibility of profitability; it just occasionally has to withdraw and regroup for a new assault in the megaeffort to make every place part of its marketplaces, to impose its sense of what a place is supposed to be on every last place on earth where there is some saleable good or service.

So before we really knew what it meant, someone with money to invest owned the ski area. The hippies were replaced by (or just became) hipsters selling real estate – some of them a bit apologetically, "but you've gotta do what you've gotta do" – and the cost of renting, investing, living in general began a slow steady rise in a curve that looked like the geometric curve of the slope up to the hooked peak of the mountain (except that that slope ended in a peak and the cost of living in the valley just keeps climbing).

Without ever meaning to, or even realizing it was what I was doing, I contributed to that re-entry of civilization. I bought a newspaper – basically just a masthead, a list of 300 delinquent subscribers and a hand-powered Addressograph machine – for one dollar and a six-month printing contract, from a printer who had inherited the paper for unpaid bills in the ski resort's earlier meltdown.

Why a newspaper? Because the town didn't have one, and my residual sense of what a place ought to be said it should. The damage I could do to the fragile possessed soul of the place with a "media instrument" was limited by my total lack of any meaningful journalistic training, and anything you get into for a dollar, you can afford to play around with, give yourself on-the-job training for whatever you perceive the job to be. So in full violation of the journalistic standards I didn't know, I decided the job of a newspaper in that town was not so much to report the present as to help invent the future, along the lines we'd dreamed that fall, so I was probably guilty on occasion of what one American media historian called the problem of "representing things that had not yet gone through the formality of taking place." But by violating most of the stuffy precepts of civilized journalism, I succeeded in getting enough of my own persisting possession by the place down on paper to make the town and the valley seem really attractive to a lot of people—not all of them, unfortunately, as possessed by the place as we had been. People who came knowing what the place should be.

I not only lacked journalistic training in fundamentals like the alleged "objective reporting" on which civilized papers pride themselves, I lacked any modicum of business sense, and wasn't that interested in learning it. I loved writing the paper, but hated selling advertising, keeping the books and keeping regular office hours; so there weren't just Snow Days, there were hiking days, biking days, afternoons instigating old-timer stories down at Starika's, Walt Whitman loaf-and-invite-your-soul days. Still living under Mendicant Mountain. My relationship with the newspaper resolved itself in a kind of accommodation: if the newspaper would support itself financially, through people who wanted ads badly enough to hunt me down, then I would support myself through working construction or tending bar or whatever. I would write the paper so long as I didn't have to work too hard on building it as a business - with a one dollar investment, what did I have to lose?

But the town was changing around me. Businesses were changing hands right and left; instead of more mendicants, the place was attracting the "ground floor people" —the advance guard of civilization looking for good deals, the town-oriented equivalent of the pioneers who cut down all the trees on their homesteads, then sold the treeless places to real farmers who turned them into civilized farms. The ground floor people didn't look any different from the residual mendicants in the place, but they worked harder, and I began to get the feeling that they didn't understand the place in some essential way - weren't as open to it in the mendicant way. The word "quaint" began to be used more and more - and I realized that it wasn't just applied to the ramshackle architecture; it was being applied to the still barely-evolved way of life that included us mendicants and our business practices.

My own life was changing too; I got married and a family sort of happened. The upshot of both sets of changes was a decision to sell the newspaper rather than try to learn how to really run it the way a newspaper more or less demands to be run in a civilized environment. The newspaper had a lot more subscribers than it had when I bought it - mostly out of town subscribers who I suspected were more interested in the real estate ads than my editorials - but other than that, it had not really grown at all, I'm perversely proud to say: it was still basically just a masthead, no building, no printing press; the typewriter was personal property; the only piece of real property owned by the newspaper was still the little hand-powered Addressograph machine.

But instead of selling it forward for the dollar it was certainly still worth, I found I was able to sell it for several thousand dollars, and did. And so committed my first truly civilized act in that place—against the place, I would say. The guy I sold the newspaper to for thousands of dollars eventually resold it for tens of thousands of dollars, and it recently resold for a price somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands.

That same thing, happening with houses and businesses all over town, is the way civilization effectively dispossessed the possessed and repossessed the town and the valley, remaking it in the image of a more civilized "sense of place": an increasingly airbrushed postcard of a place that matches, more or less, the global imagery of what such a place is supposed to be. A "society to match its scenery" in the same way that the expensive color-coordinated furniture matches the expensive walls in the big Houses Beautiful in the valley.

And who can afford to close their doors for Snow Days with mortgages like that? I applaud those few who still do (and always call first if I've business upvalley on a snowy day). But basically the valley is now well into a whole different economy, a different world. In this economy, no mendicants need apply.



The thing is, it isn't really working. By the standards of American civilization, the standards by which we now measure things around here, Mendicant Mountain and its valley remain a marginal place - indeed it may be getting more marginal as both the skier base and the general economy contract - and now as petroleum prices start into their final death-fever. As success is measured in America, there are successful people here, but most of them brought their success with them; there are not, in fact, very many people succeeding here. The saying is, the way to make a small fortune in the mountains is to come with a big fortune.

The general response to this is to try to do things more and more by the forms and formulas of civilization; they don't work the same way here, if at all, but we don't seem to know what to do instead.

I keep getting involved in attempts to try out ideas here in the valley, most of them fragments of the old ideas that seemed so brilliant that first brilliant fall, but something is missing—probably the mendicant attitude. I'm afraid I've gotten pretty civilized myself. After holding out until I was almost fifty, I finally took on a fulltime, year-round job, with salary, benefits, mortgage - "the full catastrophe," as Zorba said. I've gotten involved in "economic development," hoping that some day we will all begin to distinguish between "development" and "growth" – trying something different rather than trying more of the same thing that's already not working that well – but that seems to be a little like Jules Verne's vision of taking a train to the moon: we just don't have the right vehicle.

I go back to the mountain every now and then - Mendicant Mountain, as I still think of it. Steal an hour from my important work—and occasionally get lost for a couple hours. It's hardly what one would call a wilderness, scarred all over as it is with roads and clearcut trails and blasted rocks and stumps, some of which scarring I had a hand in. But it's still a mountain, still bigger than any of the works scratched on it, and still my residual home of hope.

I was up there a couple months ago—on my way to a meeting in the upvalley town but with an hour or so to kill, so I went walking on the lower slopes. I wasn't there long, but long enough to stop just seeing the scenery and to again start picking up on subtle things—like an aspen grove up on a little rise that seemed to summon me. I went up to it, but presumptuously sat down in the middle of it and it shut right up—I should have just stayed on the edge of it.

But getting back down to the trail I'd been on required a detour to get past a soggy willow thicket below the grove, and that led me suddenly into the edge of one of those ageless old residual pockets of really big spruce down in a slightly less soggy hollow. And ringing that pocket of spruce bog, more different kinds of mushrooms than I'd ever seen in one place in my life. I stopped there for a bit (staying on the edge). Stopped looked and listened for a sense of that place I'd never seen before on the mountain, and will probably never find again.

But then I had to get on to town for something I was already late for. So on down off the mountain, back to civilization. My sense of this place is that it doesn't find me that possessable anymore. It's lost me; I'm losing it. If there's hope, it's hope that someday I'll again be driven by the growing poverty of our civilization into the mendicant posture, on my knees before the mountain and the universe praying that they will again open up to me.

Walk quietly, Coyote, The practical people are coming now. —Thomas Hornsby Ferril