I remember mountains. More
specifically, I remember the view of mountains from the kitchen window, the
front door of my apartment, and now, my stunted backyard. They've always been there. It's just funny how I’ve started
noticing them now.
When I was little, mountains were
always a little surreal to me. They were big and far away, much like giraffes
and elephants. The only people I knew who lived on mountains were from fairy
tales— Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks. The mountains themselves
just existed somewhere beyond the horizon, big and bright and beautiful, and I
was never really sure if they were real.
Something like this, I suppose, which I took from
Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, one of my favorite childhood
films. When the mountains were particularly majestic-looking, I imagined a Bob
Ross painting.
It sounds silly, but sometimes, I
imagined they were just a hologram, that if I drove toward them, they would
disappear around me like a mist. I wondered what was behind them. According to
my fifth grade geography teacher, the Mojave Desert. But was it really though?
I couldn't bring myself to believe that something as mysterious as mountains
hid plain old desert behind it.
When I started reading The Chronicles of Narnia
in third grade, I imagined something more along the lines of this, never mind
the fact that Southern California is unbearably dry, with no inland seas to
speak of.
Within the sphere of suburbia, they
were the guardians of my world, like the walls of a snow globe, holding back
whatever horrors lurked in The Real World. They were the edges of my earth, but
through the years, it seems as though this boundary is fading. Each time I look
at them, they inch a bit closer, until I can almost see them living across the
street, a five-minute walk away. Their once vibrant colors have dulled to
gritty blue-grey and on some mornings, they are translucent, a hazy smear on
the sky's canvas. From experience, I know this is impossible: Excluding sudden
geological events, mountains do not move, and even if they did, colors deepen
in value as distance decreases.
Maybe my windows are dirty. (They
probably are.) Maybe the air quality has decreased. (It probably has.) Maybe I
am remembering things differently. (I probably am.)
Even so, I can’t help but feel an
indefinable sense of loss, as though the mountains that I’ve only ever paid
attention to in passing reflect some fundamental change in myself. Moreover,
because this is supposed to be a personal narrative, I’m practically required
to extrapolate some deeper meaning from this, an inconclusive conclusion about
childhood innocence or the transient nature of beauty.
As much as I love Calvin and Hobbes, I’m with
Calvin’s dad on this one. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, and a story can
be relevant without shoehorning a lesson that isn’t there.
The most obvious and non-sentimental
answer would be my worsened eyesight. My friend and family never cease to give
me grief about my impending blindness whenever I fail to find something that is
sitting in front of me. Therefore, it should come as no surprise when I am now
unable to find the mountains that I once remembered. Perhaps I am blind to them
now because my severe myopia renders almost everything blurry if it is not
within twelve inches of my face.
Plausible as this explanation may
be, I nonetheless reject it on the grounds of being boring. I refuse to accept
that the objects of my casual curiosity could be reduced to a reason as stale
and unoriginal as myopia.
On the other side of the spectrum,
the most exciting possibility is that my childhood self was right: Mountains do exist solely in National Geographic covers and fairy tales, which would raise many
disturbing questions about the purpose of fake mountains— and in the San
Gabriel Valley, no less.
I mean, truly. Look at this picture and tell me that
it wasn’t staged or edited in some way. How can such breathtaking beauty exist
in real life? These mountains were made for gods and the greedy eyes of real estate
developers, not us.
As much as I am a proponent of
lateral thinking, I must discard this suggestion as well. Outlandish conspiracy
theories aside, it would be a disservice to suffocate my mountains under the
ilk of tinfoil men, not when the mountains themselves have a legacy of some
sixty-five million years. Although my younger self would criticize my lack of
imagination, I am willing to take the risk. Perhaps, this too is a sign of
growing up, that I can dismiss theories based on scientific integrity.
Rather than some change in me or the
mountains, maybe the answer lies in us both, as it is so often the case. I
concede that I am no longer the child that I once was. Maybe, in order to grow
up, I left behind more than I thought I did. Maybe, during the rush, I missed
the change in the mountains themselves. Or, maybe it is just the tendency for
nostalgia to tint the past with rose-colored lenses.
