The last time I climbed a mountain was years ago. It’s something of a religious experience for me every time.

I used to climb mountains all the time. I was not a “peak bagger”, but I climbed a lot in the Whites of New Hampshire and Maine, in the Berkshires and the Green Mountains of southern Vermont, and in the Central American Volcanic Arc in Guatemala. When life took mountains from me, I wrote a story about missing them, “Cloud Mountains”, which will appear in that collection I have coming out from The Fabulist in the fall. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written.

I climb Great Blue Hill south of Boston every year, I don’t count that, it’s 660 feet on a good day, though I love it and will keep climbing it because it’s what I get. Around Boston, there aren’t a lot of options. Once in awhile, I get to climb Mt. Pawtuckaway in Southern NH. It’s a good mountain; you can see my grandparents’ lake cottage from the fire tower. But it’s small, 1,100 feet.

Wachusett is 2,000 feet—big enough to feel more like a “real” mountain. Now I want something higher, which I suppose is the way of it. But I consider myself smiled upon by fate to have been given this opportunity after so many years, and I’m not going to make light of that.

Wachusett is in central Massachusetts. From the tower on the peak I could see half the mountains I’ve ever climbed. I have clapped eyes on Mount Washington. Theoretically, I could see Powissett Peak, near my mom’s house, because I’ve seen Wachusett from there, but damned if I could spy it in the other direction on a hazy day in July even well after the rain drove the smoke down. Massachusetts recedes from Wachusett towards where I grew up in softening, green-draped folds.

Powissett Peak is in there somewhere.

Wachusett and Mount Monadnock in Southern NH are both “monadnocks”, meaning a mountain that is alone, the last remaining high point of a range ground down by time. The Lonely Mountain is a monadnock. None of our readily available modern etymological sources dare suggest any other origin for this term than that the word is named for the mountain, but it seems obvious it’s the other way around, of Indigenous origin.

“The mountain held the town as in a shadow
I saw so much before I slept there once”

—Robert Frost, “The Mountain”

I first climbed Great Blue Hill with my sisters’ Girl Scouts, Monadnock with 7th grade, and Wachusett not for many years later, actually, because I felt judgy about it as a ski mountain. But ski mountains have back sides, and I have been hard up for mountains.

“He doesn’t touch grass enough, he needs to touch grass.”

—My eleven year-old cousin Siata of her 13 year-old brother El Haj, who’s consented to put down his console and sit on the stoop.

So they arrive at the mountain. They reach the parking area designed for other times, when not so many people needed to touch grass or knew they needed to, perhaps, and so they end up parallel-parking crammed in long lines along the roadside in both directions, 50 cars or more the day I was there, a blessedly ash-free but fairly droughted Saturday in July, 2026. And just like me, they take their assumptions, their expectations, their water bottles and phones, and they go. Steeply up over boulder and meadow, hearts rising in their throats. Does it take away their cares, their selves, the accumulations of minerals around their arteries? It does for me.

There were tons of different kinds of people on the mountain. I’m not used to that many people in the woods. I forgot what New England mountain climbing people sound like or the reasons they’re there. One sounded just like my uncle. At the top, there were gay biking ‘splainers, tech conversations, relationship conversations, townies, peak bragging, a ranger showing off animal pelts, a discussion of which mountains have the best concessions. Worcester and Southern NH accents sound alike. I saw families, couples, work colleagues, a group of girlfriends in their thirties with a guide, and only four other solo hikers, all men.

After twenty minutes on the summit I was tired of all of them. So I escaped, down an unmarked side-trail to a ledge overlooking the original wind power site in Massachusetts. I rested among stones. I ate and drank with all my senses. I exchanged two sentences with a guy who convinced me he was myself if I’d never left New England. I went on.

Coming down the far side, I ran into an influencer. He was wearing black cargo pants and no shirt; he was very cut, handsome, in a young Bahubali kind of way? I first saw him quite a ways below me jamming a metal pole into the trail, a phone mounted on the other end. As I descended, awkwardly, trying to think how not to get filmed, he hit record. Was he livestreaming?

“Go like THIS!” cried the influencer. He ran down the trail. He stumbled over a big rock. “Whoops, oh, man!” I couldn’t look. But I came around a switchback, and there he was, seemingly uninjured, back at the camera. “That’s how you DO it!”

Mortified, I attempted to get the hell out of that section of trail as fast as I could.

“I hope you get lots of sponsorships or whatever,” I said as I passed him, noticing as I did so another solo guy approaching from below.

“Yeah, thanks, man!”

This is the west side of Wachusett, the side away from the highway and the ski lodge, and the trail is “Indian Trail”, because of course the most-climbed mountain in Massachusetts has an “Indian Trail”, as steep as a 2,000 foot mountain can get, known to be treed with gnarled, remnant, four-hundred year-old original growth red maple and pine left alone by colonizers because the rocky mountainside was inhospitable to any other use. I’m descending steeply, at speed, using my handmade cane to avoid rolling an ankle, wearing a flowery purple little girl’s backpack I borrowed from my mom’s house, over a trail made of granite rocks the size of torsos. It’s glorious.

Dude below is like, “Whoa! This guy is who you should be filming! Look at him! Look at him go!” I shit you not.

I said something apologetic about practice, the cane making it easier than it looked.

Looking south from a ledge just off Mt. Wachusett’s summit on a clear July day, with two wind turbines framed against the blue distance.

What are mountains to other people? What’s grass?

I dragged that hike out as long as I could. I loved it. I stopped to hunt mushrooms. I wanted to kiss rocks. I was sorry when it was over.

I have some words to communicate what some of this felt like, I’ve used some, but the best, biggest feel inappropriate to share. I miss home, I also have nostalgia for some of the times this landscape represented in my life. I miss it dearly and when I get it, it’s like butterscotch on soft serve, It’s like ice on a burn.

I am defined for myself by the difference between the people on the Wachusett mountaintop, the ones down in the valley, and the ones out here by the lakes and on them. I am confounded by it.

Read that Frost poem again, if you haven’t in awhile. It’s not about the mountain, it’s about the people.

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