Reflections on a mountain

This morning, long before dawn, after putting on the coffee I turned out the lights to bath in the stillness. There was some wind outside and a slight spitting of snow, but it would be hours before carpenters came to split the morning with power saws and compressors and nail guns. My steel shack was solidly silent, warm.

It is becoming easier to navigate the house in the dark. There are a couple of potential pit falls -- literally. The stairs to my loft are nearly six feet wide -- the adjacent passage back to my bedroom and bath is only four feet. If I turn too soon there will be a tumble to the lower landing.

The cooking island stands right in the middle of the u-shaped embrace of the kitchen. And I don’t always know where the sink might be.

Back in my chair with a fresh cup of coffee and facing the mountains and quiet storm, I think of other homes I have navigated at dawn. It frightens me a little how fresh memories can be. First up is the rental house after the marriage came apart, with its tall white walls and glass fireplace, two sets of sliding glass doors. Two years ago there is a small pine branch blocking the track of one of those doors, and a shampoo bottle clatters to the floor of the shower.

After that the single level house, level only by accident where it was level at all, where I try to cobble together a blended family without any of the proper tools, four stools for four children along the peninsula behind which I cook eggs and sausage, doors that either swing open by themselves or closed, depending on which room you are in, which way the house is tilting.

Years before that I walk into the narrow pantry of the log house, with unfinished stairs leading onto the dirt floor of a low basement or tall crawl space, your call, tucked below the kitchen. I still see gaps in the plaster left as logs settle, heavy pine posts on the deck wobble as wood gives way to moisture.

We moved from there so long ago, lifetimes ago, and yet I can feel my feet slide across the wide-plank oak floor, the cool gray tile of that bathroom, the small splash of pink in tiny flowers outlined in gray, the window sill in the living room sags under the pressure of posts holding up the gable end and curved glass window.

There is the transition house, small twin girls and one bathroom, a tight one car garage for some reason full of camping gear, it is cold with its hollow core doors, rough wood siding of a room added by the previous owner, the smell of chlorine from an indoor hot tub. There is that mysterious cavity between the new and old rooms you can crawl into from where the firewood is stacked and then stand, you could hide in there for days or even weeks with preparation.

Reaching back 25 years, there is the apartment on Lovejoy, with the small white tiles in the kitchen, the narrow plank floors, the bathroom I rough plaster and paint blue, grass wallpaper, a window to the outside over the tub I rig into a shower with a hose, casement windows once painted shut I bang back into use with the heel of my hands in a fierce uppercut, tightly spring roll-up shades.

When I close my eyes in the easy chair facing the mountains it feels like I could open them into any one of these rooms of the past and present.

But when I do open my eyes I see lights where there should be no lights. The mountains are shrouded, I think, Black Butte only promising to become visible. The lights I see are halfway up where I know Mt. Jefferson to be. That is wilderness, that is high up the side of a snow-laden mountain.

From my chair in the dark I see rescue teams have marked with lights the location of a lost hunter or climber. They are waiting for dawn to bring in a helicopter for evacuation. It is too early to call the news desk, it would be too much an interference to call dispatch.

For a half hour the lights do not move on the mountain. There are two of them, one slightly brighter than the other. I wished I could see the mountain through the dark to tell how high the rescue teams might be, if they are above or below the tree line, the line-of-life in these and in most mountains.

It is not until dawn starts to gray the skies and I need another cup of coffee that I literally bark in laughter at myself, at these silly musings. There are no other lights. At all. There are no other rooms but this room.

In my predawn, the lights that I thought illuminated a mountain 20 miles away were simply the reflection of an illuminated button on the coffee pot behind me, bouncing back from the double paned window through which I am viewing the world. Memories are just that, too, poorly filtered reflections, fading somewhat slowly with the light of each new day.