The mountain

No longer broken but not yet quite whole, I accidentally climbed the mountain.

Sunday was a good day for a walk: the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the mountain was at her most fetching. A little tall, perhaps, but not ridiculously so.

The higher you climb, the smaller the trees. Here's a photo of Nathan being a Wood-elf King (we live in Underhill, for heaven's sake, and need to reference Tolkien and hobbits at least once a day...)

After a while, the trees gave up completely. On a camera better than mine, you'd see New York State and the Adirondacks spread out on the horizon beyond Lake Champlain. But look at the sweat on Nathan's t-shirt. See? We'd earned that view and it looks like we're at the top, doesn't it? Mountains are like that. Deceptive beasts, leading you on, pulling another challenge out of the bag just when you think you've won them over.

I learned a lot on Sunday. First, you know those thin pale gray lines on maps? The gradient ones? This photo shows what happens when they're really, really, really close together. And, second, when the Appalachian Mountain Club describe a walk as 'extremely challenging', they're not kidding. (It was around this point on the walk that I made the decision to believe every single word of every single thing I read from this moment on). Third, I learned how much my broken neck has affected my entire upper body strength. Three months ago, I could lift any of the boxes our removal men hoisted around; now, I'm significantly weaker and the nerve damage to my hands and arms means I don't always know where my hands are gripping unless I can see them. I managed to scramble up after Nathan (and follow him up a few other similar climbs besides), but it was not pretty and it was not elegant.

The trail was made in the 1910s by some free-thinking creative Vermonters. In the places where the gradient was too steep to scramble, they drilled tunnels. Perhaps they were as tired of climbing as I was by this point in the trail's design. Standing up there at silly-thousands of feet, I could hear their voices from over a hundred years before...
"Damn your eyes, Fitzgerald, there's another scramble here."
"Might I suggest a little dynamite, sir?"
Whatever. I like tunnels. I really like tunnels. Tunnels mean you don't have to scramble up near vertical rock faces or leap across 5ft ravines. Regardless of how many times Nathan banged his head (because even free-thinking Edwardian Vermonters didn't build tunnels for men who stand 6'7'' in their socks), I will not have a bad word said against them.

I'm not sure if I expected an easier walk because we started from our front door (there's always that strange psychological glitch which suggests something is only truly adventurous if you have had to make a journey to get there), or because my broken neck is stopping me from thinking straight. And I'm still not quite sure how I hadn't understood that our path was taking us to the top of the mountain. But we did it, and the fact I cried twice, bit through my lip on one of the ascents, and could barely move for a few days' afterwards is neither here nor there.

The true testament of the walk is in this photo. It's taken me nearly 2 years, but - look! - I finally wore out the dog.

And this is what I look like after climbing a mountain with a broken neck. You'd never know, would you.