The Old Man of the Mountain

As J walked through the plane’s connecting gate into the airport terminal, a blast of freezing air hit him as squarely as if he had stumbled into a brick wall. He hadn’t been back to the East Coast in over two decades and wouldn’t have planned his prodigal return for February if he’d had any say. But the executor of Fran’s will wanted to get the house on the market as soon as possible, and that meant an estate clean-out company’s dumpster was positioned in the yard and had been for some time. The lawyer who had called him again last week said that if J wanted anything from the house, he had until Monday to take it. After all, Fran’s been gone almost two months now, the man had added, almost accusingly.

To be fair, J hadn’t spoken to Fran since he left for California at eighteen, and in the intervening years, he’d done his best not to even think about her aside from the fleeting, unauthorized synapse fire. The fact that she’d mentioned him in the will came as a surprise until J realized that she hadn’t exactly left him anything at all- nothing specific, anyway, nothing intended for him other than an invitation to come back and wade through all of her shit. In his darker moments, he imagined Fran smiling on her deathbed, smug in the belief that if given the chance to make a grab for all the “antiques” she’d always claimed had value, J would come running straight back into the pit he’d escaped.

If she died satisfied in that assumption, it was at least some comfort that she’d been mostly wrong. The last Fran had heard about J must have been from his second cousin, Brett, whose couch he’d slept on for a couple of months when he first got to San Diego. Brett had been dead now for something like fifteen years, and J had lost touch with him even before that, but Fran had always been given to ungenerous speculation. In this case, a) that J was still hooked on the same shit that had killed Brett, and b) that to support those habits, he’d gladly mine her decaying house for treasure.

J navigated the Manchester airport easily with just his Patagonia duffle hanging nearly weightless from his shoulder. In line at the Avis counter, he took out his phone, then decided to leave it on airplane mode. It was his ex’s week with the girls, and the workshop wouldn’t be open for another three hours with the time difference. Checking his email or voicemail would only alert him to problems he couldn’t solve from 3,000 miles away, supply chain issues or the endless, impractical demands from his clientele: people rich enough to buy one-of-a-kind furniture that was designed and hand-made from sustainable materials were usually also rich enough to be very out of practice with the concept of waiting. This day was going to be long enough without adding extra headaches.

Standing still in a line with four people ahead of him, J felt the creeping dread and overwhelm that a day of air travel, with its neat, sequential hoops to jump through, had helped keep at bay. His mind began to wander at an almost frenetic clip: he was walking up the creaky staircase and into the room he’d slept in at Fran’s house. He was holding his breath against the smell of cat piss, the soles of his shoes collecting mouse shit and god knows what else. He was opening the flimsy accordion doors to the closet and looking for the yellow hearts that his mother had once painted inside. Even in his imagination, they weren’t there anymore. He really was a moron, coming all this way just to see a couple of old smudges that Fran had almost certainly painted over.

He tried to do as his therapist always advised and break the rest of the day up into small, manageable chunks. All he had to do was get the rental car and drive two hours north. No, that was two chunks; he couldn’t even do the chunking thing right. He tried again: all he had to do was get to the car and close himself up inside. J trained his eyes on the plastic snapback of the cap worn by the man in front of him and repeated those words until they felt almost like the truth.

Complicating things was the jagged profile. J saw it first on the license plates of every car in the garage, then on every highway road sign he passed. He had all but forgotten about how prominently the Old Man of the Mountain was featured on everything here. It had come down back in the early aughts, but unsurprisingly, New Hampshire had not been fast to change its branding. J remembered seeing an article in the Times when a memorial plaza was built to honor the fallen landmark. One man had been bleakly quoted: “To me, it feels like an open grave.”

Only twenty-five minutes from his destination, J found himself taking a detour at the Aerial Tramway exit, parking near the visitor center, then walking the quarter mile through Franconia Notch Park to Profile Lake. He braced against the wind chill, uselessly shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his fleece vest (the warmest piece of outerwear he owned). The flat grayness of a New Hampshire winter had stayed clear in J’s memory, but the brittleness of the cold, its knife-edged bite, had been dulled by all his years in southern California, pampered like a housecat lying in a sunspot. It was rare now that he felt embarrassed by his own vulnerability, but the instinct was still there, just under the surface. It had taken little more than an hour, the clacking of bare branches in the freezing woods, and the sight of his stupid checkered Vans losing traction on the frosted ground: J was back in New Hampshire, and New Hampshire was back in J.

He’d been to the Old Man only once before despite the landmark’s proximity to the town where he’d spent the first eighteen years of his life. His mother had taken him there on an impromptu field trip, memorable because of its rarity. He was probably four, maybe five; it was after she had returned from her first disappearance but before she went off and died with a needle in her arm, leaving J to survive the same deranged upbringing that Fran had once inflicted upon her.

He’d been asking about his father a lot around that time. A little kid with an unpredictable mother who had already split once… well, the road to becoming a civilized, non-piece-of-shit human had included enough therapy for J to be able to connect those dots. He could remember the sometimes physical ache that he’d felt around his daughters when they had been kindergarten age: the urge to look away from their smallness and fragility before he could dwell too long on the fact that he’d been exactly that small and that fragile when he’d learned a parent could leave. His mother’s first absence had lasted for only a few months, but it was enough time to impress upon J the desperation of the hand he’d been dealt. He’d never cared much about having a father before, but by then the facts were clear. Kids were supposed to have two parents so at least there’d be a backup.

J’s memory didn’t extend to the circumstances around his mother driving him to Franconia Notch and leading him out to the lake. In the cynicism of adulthood, he’d always assumed it had been a meeting spot for an illicit exchange, or maybe on the way to one. He just remembered his summer-tanned hand in her paper-white one, the way he swung their arms like a pendulum back and forth, back and forth as they made their through the forest.

“There,” she’d said when they arrived at the viewing point. “Look up. Past the lake. High on that cliff. Do you see him?”

He hadn’t had to search; the profile revealed itself to him right away. The sloping forehead, the jutting chin. A man’s face, plain as anything, as though chiseled from the stone.

“How?” J had asked.

“You mean who,” his mother said. “That’s him. That’s your father. He was a really important guy, see? So there you go.” The subtext was obvious, even at five. Now you can quit asking about him.

J did quit asking. For years, he’d thought back on this moment and seen it as an act of cruelty. A child asking for someone safe to grab hold of, a half-disappeared woman giving him a slab of cold and crumbling rock. But having children of his own had been like twisting the kaleidoscope through which he saw his life: every shape and color that he’d thought was fixed became something different. Because it turned out that kids, besides being small and fragile, contained a wellspring of pure belief. And even if there were limits to that magical thinking, wasn’t that a bet you’d take for someone you loved?

The walk from the parking area was shorter than he remembered. He followed the signs for the Old Man until he came upon a granite plaza that hadn’t been there before. On raised stone ledges, a line of seven steel profiler rods stretched skyward. J stopped before he reached them and sat down punishingly on one of the granite benches. It was like pressing his ass to a block of ice.

There was only one other person on the plaza, and to J’s dismay, he began making his way over to him.

“Hey there,” the man said, an older guy, maybe late 60s. “Welcome to Profiler Plaza. If you have any questions, I can answer them for you?” he said as a question.

“Oh, I’m okay.” When the man didn’t change his inquiring expression or shift his stance in any way, J added, “Thanks, though.”

This apparently also wasn’t enough to send the guy on his way.

“The Profile, or Old Man of the Mountain, was one of the best-known natural rock formations in the country. The outline of the Old Man's profile could be viewed by travelers on the road through the notch or from the shore of Profile Lake. The addition of the seven profilers offers a silhouette-type view of what used to be,” he recited.

“Do you work here or something?”

“Me? No, no. There used to be park employees stationed here, back when the plaza was new, but not anymore. I just come out during my lunch break sometimes, and if I see a tourist, I try to do my bit for the Old Man, you know?”

“I’m not a tourist,” J said.

The man looked him up and down. “Your coat without sleeves tells a different story.”

“Yeah, well. Been a while.”

“This place meant something to you, then,” the man said. “Meant something to a lot of us.”

J wouldn’t have claimed the Old Man in the Mountain as a place that held any real significance for him. In fact, he suddenly wasn’t entirely sure how he’d ended up there. The rental car had seemed to pull itself in this direction, highway exit taken before J had really thought to bear onto it, and the walk through the woods had become a bit hazy. He blamed the cold.

“Not really. Just wanted to stretch my legs, I guess. Thought I’d come by and see for myself what was left. When did they put those things up?” J asked, gesturing toward the profilers.

“Have to be fifteen years ago now,” the man said. “2010. No, 2011. My father died in 2010 and I gotta say, I’m sure glad my old man went before the Old Man. He would’ve hated this bullshit.”

“You don’t like what they’ve done?” J asked. He wasn’t much for sentimentality, but it seemed nice enough to him, a tribute of sorts. All the granite- must have cost a small fortune to build.

“Me? Naw, I wish they’d have left it alone.”

J stood, his entire bottom half now numb.

“You going to try the profilers out?”

He shook his head no. He’d had no intention of doing so.

The stranger nodded approvingly. “Good man. They put ‘em up thinking they could give people a glimpse of what used to be, but if you ask me, it just gets folks stuck in what they’ve lost instead of letting ‘em remember what it was they had.”

J looked up toward the cliff once more. Maybe if he squinted, he could see… but no. There was nothing. An open grave may have been a melodramatic way to put it, but standing there, J couldn’t say it was entirely inaccurate. He knew suddenly and with deep certainty that his self-appointed tour guide was right. A gimmicky look through the profilers wouldn’t give J one last view of the made-up father his mother had tried to give him, wouldn’t provide the child still inside him with a better knowledge of her desperate, generous, damaged, tired heart. Such a view would only make the absence more pronounced. It would sharpen the edges where cliff met sky, where yellow paint pushed faintly out from underneath a layer of white.

“Anyway,” the man was saying, “I’m sorry to ramble on. You better get back to your car before you get frostbite. Probably shoulda made your pitstop at the outlets instead.”

“Probably,” J said.

After his mother died, J convinced himself that he remembered the day she painted the hearts in the closet. The made-up memory was deep and layered. The smell of paint and mildew. Her plaid flannel pajama pants catching drops of yellow. The coldness of the room and the dull thumping of a broken space heater. He played this scene over in his mind so often that it became fact, until he ran into an old friend of his mother’s at a local bar. Over beers that she bought for him despite knowing exactly how underage he was, she told a story about the day his mother had found out she was pregnant with J, how the two of them had stamped yellow hearts onto the wall using cut-up sponges. They’d chosen the closet because it was the best chance of getting that little bit of cheer past Fran. “Nasty hag. She still around?” the friend had asked.

J still thought of this friend fondly, hoped that despite her hard-living ways, she was still around. She had taken away a story that he’d invented to keep his mother close, but given him something so much better in its place: the proof that she’d been happy, once, and not about just anything, but about the very idea of J existing in the world.

After that, he used to squeeze his teenage body into the closet regularly. He would sit in there when Fran was drunk and looking for someone to absorb the rage she chose over grief, or during the rare moments when he felt moved to do his homework, or the significantly less rare moments when he had a joint to smoke.

Back in the rental car, J followed the green road markers for I-93. This time, instead of the Old Man’s profile on the signs acting as a siren’s song, J steered the car onto the southbound ramp with strong acuity. Less than a hundred miles and he’d be back at the airport, where he would return the car and buy a seat on the next flight out. He might have to wait a while, but that was okay. He’d turn his phone back on and respond to whatever needed responding to, text his ex-wife to let her know that he would be back in time to have the girls for his weekend. He’d call the estate lawyer and tell him that he wouldn’t be coming by to get the keys to Fran’s house, after all. There was nothing there that he needed.