Louis Roney: Mountain high

“Something there is that doesn’t love a mountain,” Robert Frost might have written (but didn’t). At sea level the human imagination, like the human body, is earthbound by invisible gravity. On a mountain top the pull on the imagination is upward, aiming ever higher, liberating. A mountain top is reached only be exertion—by muscle or engine. There’s the achievement!

After all, anyone can walk downhill—and too many of us do just that.

Sir George Mallory, speaking in the most mystical terms, said, “Because it’s there.” Someone had asked Mallory to identify the well-spring of his urge to climb Mt. Everest, the world’s highest mountain. Mallory disappeared into eternity in the clouds only a few yards from his goal.

Mallory is gone. Everest is still there, beckoning dreamers, inviting adventurers — perhaps the mad.

Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “I have been to the mountain” shortly before he was brought to earth by the lowest of cowards. King’s mountain was not Everest, but was just as risky. He joined Mallory in choosing the lonely and perilous path of the high-altitude climber. The legendary Greek gods lived on Olympus, a formidable Macedonian mount, but far more accessible than an Everest. Olympus was a mountain just lofty enough to separate its special residents from the hoi polloi living down below.

Mountain resorts in North Carolina, Colorado, New Hampshire and the European Alps provide much the same kind of “social caste stratification by altitude” in our time. The higher on the mountain you live, the swankier you appear from down below. Mountain high, you can look down on the rest of the human race physically, but, I would hope, not pridefully.

Adolf Hitler had his hideaway, “The Eagles Nest,” on the tiptop of an Alp near Berchtesgaden, in southern Bavaria. I have stood on Hitler’s porch and looked out across the precipitous landscape of Central Europe.

Mussolini stood in the same spot with Der Führer years before, as the insatiable dictators gazed from that aerie and dreamed of conquest.

Moses brought the law down from the mountain. Where else do you meet God on official business? Where are the tablets today? Did they ever exist? Are the “Ten Commandments” really God’s laws? Or are they simply pragmatic rules of behavior assembled by the wisest observers among the murdering and pillaging tribes, intelligentsia who understood that the human family must obey moral laws in order to survive? Who today could believe that we would be better off without, the Ten Commandments?

In the “Sermon on the Mount,” at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus said, “Think not that I come to destroy the law...I am come not to destroy, but to fulfill.” Christ’s moderated and humanized universalization of narrower, harder law brought him an unending stream of adorers as well as enemies. Did Christ himself invent the words attributed to him? Or condensed in this one identifiable human being, perhaps deemed “divine” because no one person could possibly be that wise; were those words the distillation of then state-of-the-art universal wisdom? The Sermon on the Mount tells us how to live together without destroying not only each other, but the beauty within the human race. Many may argue Christ’s divinity, even his existence. Few will argue the uplifting and practical value of the code of ethics delivered on that real or imaginary Mount, whence the wisdom of the ages was proclaimed by one human voice.

A mountain dispenses neither wisdom nor folly. A mountain’s eruption is immediate and catastrophic annihilation. When a mountain speaks for itself, it shouts, “Get out of the way!” Its sound and fury tells us, “That’s how mountains are.”

Although a mountain may be nature’s most awesome expression on the face of our planet, a mountain houses no gods other than those installed in it by the minds of human beings.

When I was a boy in Winter Park, the late, great, Kate Smith, a mountain of a woman in the best sense of the word, sang, “When the moon comes over the mountain...” to us out of our wooden Philco radio. In my mind’s eye I painted a picturesque mountain with a full moon coming up behind it. We had gorgeous, blood-red Florida moons rising over our shimmering freshwater lakes, but where was the lake Kate kept singing about?

Million of years ago the Rocky Mountains were under ancient oceans. In eons to come, erosion may bring Glacier Park’s great peaks down to sea-level once again. The timeless invisibility of a mountains’ changes imparts a sense of the eternal, in contrast to careening changes in our short human lives.

Mountains’ majesty and beauty are not evident to the mountains themselves, but only to those of us with eyes to behold them and hearts to love them. We instinctively look “mountain high” for the noblest and staunchest human truth.

There is another lofty source which we perhaps too seldom utilize. The human spirit can soar when we are ascending the eternal Olympus of our best instincts.