to Other Mountains

You named Rainier your nemesis.

The American Everest, your mortal enemy and forbidden love. Thrice you attempted to summit its peak and thrice you were foiled. Once by hubris, once by equipment failure, and once because of that storm that never showed, but still cancelled your flight. Each time your hate-filled fascination for the mountain drove you to raving. I remember days where you’d visit me at university and with much pacing and waving of hands you told me of your next plot to, at last, conquer the mountain. You always spoke with grim tone and grimace, but I could see shining in your eyes. The same you’d always had when relaying your exploits, past, present and future, to me. The same you always got when you took me on ‘adventures’ up to the waterfall when we were kids. The kinds older brothers take younger ones on, till they’re too red-eyed and runny-nosed to continue. You never faulted me, but I did wonder what the world looked like through your eyes. Through that shining. Too bright to see straight, I guessed.

You hated Rainier so much, you carved its name into your lucky tin flask. I saw you do it, conviction on your face, gripping the ivory handle of the Leatherman you got for your birthday when you were twelve. You told me you’d summit that mountain “if it’s the last thing I do.” Rainier followed you everywhere you went after that, tapping out metallic taunts against your belt with every step. You were never without it; told me you drank courage from it. Maybe you were onto something, cause you never backed down from a challenge, not even when challenge became all there was.

The last thing you would do, that’s what you said. In the end the real last thing you did was look very, very tired on a hospital bed. Some mountains are too tall to climb, I guess.

I said goodbye then. It didn’t stick.

Afterward I held onto the flask, and you came with it. You never left me alone. Freezing my muscles as I tried to scroll past an internet ad for REI. Pointing out the type of tree I was looking at, like you always used to. You aren’t a vengeful ghost, but burn me if you aren’t an obnoxious one. It was you, it had to be you, who stopped me from hiding that flask away with the rest of your worldly detritus.

“RAINIER” it said, from where it sat on my shelf.

“Not me,” I replied. “You don’t want me. You want the other one.”

“And where is the other one?” It didn’t say, which was good, because I wouldn’t have responded.

It took me a year of staring down that flask, tracing that word with my eyes, before I called Scotty and booked a flight to Seattle. I stayed with him and his wife for weeks; they have a new baby on the way, actually (no, it’s not named after you). We went on runs every day, if you’ll believe that. I woke up at 6am for daily 5ks in the freezing Seattle springtime. Never fast ones, mind you, but still enough to have me questioning if letting my brother’s restless spirit stick around was such a bad thing.

Scotty and I trained and researched and planned so hard that I began drinking from the flask myself. Turns out courage tastes a lot like anxiety and Redbull. Anyway, we found a day, gear, and a guide who I doubt was much less than 40% beard. The weather was right, and damn it if I wasn’t a little bit excited. I’d somehow stepped into your world, a secret world, always in plain sight but never visible to me.

I didn’t nearly die three times, like you always seemed to. There were no free solo climbs, no cougar encounters. I did see a few snakes, though. One I found hidden in a box of decaying orchids. Left on the side of the trail like some lasting footprint of someone maybe a little like me, driven up this slope by their own brotherly/motherly/loverly tormentor.

By the time we hit the glaciers I was tired enough to wonder if I’d hear your voice, encouraging me as I climbed. I didn’t, unless your voice is the sound of rock falling and wind whistling. It might be, for how often you spent laughing, sweating, instilling your spirit in it. In all this.

This is the part where you would describe the triumphant final ascent. That moment of standing and looking around at a hazy, breachless blue horizon, head humming with blood and phantoms. In that moment the flask had nothing to say, and… neither did you. You weren’t there. Not in the wind, nor the stone. You weren’t there, but my eyes shined anyway. I think I see what you saw, and ironically only through a view you never would.

I didn’t leave the flask here, if you’re looking for it. That had been the plan: one final tribute to you. A tiny tin cherry on America's biggest frosted cake to shut you up for good. Instead I tore a page from our logbook and wrote a note. This note, which I’m leaving instead. You would have left the flask because it’s more romantic, because of the symbolism, the simple, tasteful, and above all mysterious wordlessness of it. Well I’m not you. I’m not the other one. If I am to greet your ghost when it comes here —and it will— I want it to be my words which greet it.

And so I leave you, on to other mountains. Some might be made of stone, but at the risk of sounding poetic, I imagine most will merely be good old fashioned soul and sorrow. Thanks for teaching me to climb them all the same. And while I don’t think the old flask will ever be mine exactly, I hope you understand that I have to hold onto it for a while. There’s a whole lot more courage left for me to drink.