The Other Side of My Mountain…, by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture | @MDWorld

May 30, 2012 Whitney Farmer 5 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an MBA, and doesn’t use pesticides in the garden.

She drew blood once, grabbing my lip in her beak when I tried to maneuver her into her cage so I could go to work. She wanted to instead continue nestling in my hair while chewing on the logo of my Ray-Bans.

I have been bird sitting Mia, the viscous one, as part of my wedding contribution. But it hasn’t been much of a chore. Instead of being frightened of her, I instead decided to think of her as ‘Frightful’, the peregrine falcon from the book “My Side of the Mountain” written by Jean Craighead George. It had been a favorite of mine as a child, making me imagine what it would be like to eat acorn pancakes while living in the hollowed out trunk of a tree that I would learn in later years should more accurately be called ‘Widow Maker’ instead of ‘Home’.

After the long weekend, I was drinking coffee with the tropically colored bird of prey and the Sunday L.A. Times and read that George had died. My sense of wanting to wander into the forest came from her, the thought that I might be able to spend a life alone with wild things that preferred my company to anonymous independence while munching dried berries that we had harvested together.

The first winter after high school, I stayed at an old hunting lodge on a lake in the Chilcotin. The closest town was Kleena Kleen, maybe about ten miles away with a population of maybe eight. It was the first time that I heard the sound of wild geese and touched a wolf pelt, killed after its pack had started attacking ‘cows’ (not cattle) on a ranch nearby in the valley. I picked mushrooms with friends that we pan fried with Dolly Vardens that we had caught fishing, and was ridiculed for wearing Chapstick and thus upsetting the natural order of my natural oils. In the morning after stoking the furnace for the last of the evening shifts and before everyone was awake, I would go down to the lake and ice skate while listening to Chopin cassettes on my Sony Walkman.  One day, I went out with some of my wet hair from my shower sticking out from beneath my stocking cap. It froze solid and one lock snapped off before I realized that Toto and I weren’t in California anymore, and that I needed to remember to respect Nature as George and my parents had taught me.

Wilderness times can be wilderness adventures. False layers of sound and light are left behind along with the fat that comes from having too much of things that aren’t important. Christ walked willingly into this place, and I’ve always envisioned that Elijah would come in from a vast unknown place with eyes that burned from what had been revealed to him there. I drove through a desert wilderness with friends as a grown woman to finally and for the first time see Mount Whitney, my namesake. This highest point in the continental United States is a next door neighbor to the lowest and most desolate, Death Valley. Looking out the window, wind-rounded rocks looked like gigantic loaves of bread. The temptations Jesus faced to take the easy way out when He had the power to do a quickie miracle became real for me there when I saw that.

At the base of the Mountain, in the Alabama Hills, we came across a benchmark, imbedded by government surveyors in the face of a rock to show you exactly where you are until the earth itself shifts below your feet. It’s important to know where you stand, and it is perhaps rarer than we know.

As I leave the club after long nights, usually dawn is close but still seems impossibly far away. It is as cold as it will ever get, and even the bad guys are asleep and dreaming. With snagged fishnet stockings and chipped nail polish, I am as close to creation as I will ever be that day. I am able to hold still and hear for a moment an echo of the wilderness even in this place. Still, I am tempted to turn towards the mountains and drive to where I can feel the earth breathe with me.

Once you have been in the wilderness, you are spoiled for the ordinary.

Quote of the Blog, from Paul in Romans 8:19…”Creation groans for the revelation of the sons of God…”

Photo courtesy of my cell phone: Mia helping me style my hair for the wedding.