Driving up to Dunsmuir again, leaving the lower down for the higher up.

Here be mountains.

We had them in Altadena, just at the end of the street. The San Gabriels. They go up as high as a mile. Mount Wilson. They called it Mile High and built the observatory there because it was closer to the stars. And higher than the smog.

We didn’t go up into those home grown mountains very often, so we didn’t think of ourselves as mountain people, only mountain adjacent, mountain sometimes.

I’m somewhat familiar with the ups and downs of the earth. We used to go over Kellogg Hill into the valley on the other side, to and from Riverside. There the mountains are to the side, and just a few scattered intrusions to remind us, Mount Rubidoux when you’re entering Riverside, and the little token clump on the other side of town, the Box Springs Mountains which barely qualify, and over beyond which, the desert, stretching out into flat infinity where mountains are only a memory of a mirage.

But here, on the road up to Dunsmuir, we’re climbing, going up, trees on both sides, river below, and the lake.

Ahead, as always when you’re here, Mount Shasta, showing itself to be a real mountain with its own snow nearly all the time capping.

And so I’m thinking those thoughts you think when you’re thinking mountains.

How mountains are all one big family, scattered around the earth the way children do when they leave home, go off to start their own lives and have their own local children.

And the trees. Forests, both sides of the road, crowding close, and I realize I could be anywhere. They may change names and brands and flavors, but a forest is a forest, just as a road is a road. And if the forests beard the slopes, the highest peaks are shaved down to timberline.

And then those mountains that really are, ranges, like Alps and Pyrenees and Andes and Himalayas, above the trees to show what mountains can be, where the air is thin and only those few can rise above the flatlands and survive.

The earth is a teaching Mother. She gives us a textured surface so we know she is not flat. If we go far enough over her to the end, we won’t reach the edge because there isn’t one.

And now I’ve worn myself out, thinking and writing about mountains and trees. But I’ll come back to the subject again and again, because, as they say, mountains are always there.

Even if in the long view that may not quite be true, I choose to believe in truth, the persistence of mountains, and of nature itself.