Moonstruck

There are some experiences that are difficult to share with the uninitiated.  They are less about the event, and more about the sensory reaction to the event.

Eleven-thousand feet up in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range is a most magical place.

The air up there carries an icy edge even in the full sunshine of a summer afternoon.  It has thinned out to the point that you can sense that it is easier to breathe, but at the same time it is also harder to catch your breath.  It feels almost brittle as you draw deep draughts into your lungs.    

The lakes are startlingly colored.  With emerald greens and radiant blues reflecting shimmering patterns on the Granite cliffs.

Winter blankets often continue to grip the landscape throughout the year as small glacial sheets tucked into high ridge shadows slip slowly downward until they break off into miniature ice bergs floating into oblivion in lake or stream.

Many people would call it barren; the trees having mostly given way a thousand feet lower down the mountainside.   Here and there a small patch of grass hides in the shadow of a larger rock, seeking escape from the freezing winds, lashing rains, and blowing snows.  There struggling through countless generations the grass slowly piles up a modest shallow resource of nutrition in hopes that some passing wind swirl or flying bird will drop into its clutches a pine nut, or cedar seed.

Against all reasonable odds, hope is met.  Trees whose annual growth rate is typically measured in feet, sprout and struggle to gain an inch of height each year.  Most of the trees have been left far below yet here and there stand a bent and folded gnarled tree that is perhaps 5 feet tall at most, yet has endured nearly limitless numbers of years.  Spending 8 months out of the year buried under snow, weighted down and crippled, it never-the-less remains standing when the snows melt once more.

The sky is never pale blue but routinely a rich royal color that shades into deep purple and on towards black as night falls.  But before the black can truly take over the expanse, planets and stars shimmer forth, by ones, twos, tens, hundreds, and then thousands at a time until the sky is a background of so much white that individual stars are hard to separate from the masses.  Meteors strike from horizon to horizon, chased by slower satellites and flashing airplane trails.

The night sky is so brightened by the proliferation of stars and galaxies that there is seldom need for a flashlight, whether it is early night, midnight or just before dawn.

One of the most startling events at this altitude though is the moonrise.

Should you have chanced to bundle up and gone to sleep before the moon has risen high enough to crest above one of the surrounding ridgelines, you need to protect yourself against its rise.  Be forewarned, it does not sneak cautiously or timidly into view.  Rather the brilliant silver disk leaps upward, throwing light down on sleeping form with the intensity of a locomotive charging through a mountain tunnel.

So sudden, so bright is the moon, that it will literally scare you out of a deep sleep when its reflective blast falls full onto your closed eyelids.

Many a night I have thrashed awake as the primal life within my breast jerks defensively against the moon’s onslaught.

Many a night, after my heart beat had returned to normal, and the adrenaline had drained from my blood, I have lain awake refreshing my soul in the indescribable moonlit landscape’s gripping beauty.

Many a night, but not nearly enough.
 

© Copyright 2016 Marty Vandermolen