Books, Mountains, and Wildflowers

When I struck the age of nineteen, a wholly irrational, albeit consuming, fear of death gripped me.  I could not cease thinking about death.  I obsessed over my own inevitable demise.

What, I wondered, had I done to deserve a death sentence?  What ransom might I pay to reverse this?  How soon the journey’s end?  What trigger will release the trap to eventually snatch me away?

Somewhere in my shuffling through all these morbid questions, I picked up books and began to read.   Soon, I began to shed my doldrums within the thoughtscapes of better thinkers.  I read the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Richard Hugo, and the lines of lesser-known poets littering each small press issue I found in bookstores.  I scratched into the Bible.  I read through Tolkien, Pearl S. Buck, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Dorothy Parker, and even attempted to wade into Russian literature.

I left Montana for Indiana and then almost as quickly turned around and came back home to where mountains kicked at the sky.  I began to take long drives on the mountain roads.

In the mountains, a new life came to me.  I paid attention as small birds stitched through the air alongside my car.  I walked out into earthy-scented meadows and climbed timbered slopes.  I was taken, especially, by the wildflowers tumbling down from the higher elevations.

I made it my quest to learn the names of every flower I found: lupine, paintbrush,  shootingstar, balsamroot, arnica, sticky geranium, yarrow, gaillardia, fleabane, queen’s cup, and mountain forget-me-not.

The names of the flowers became a kind of lovely music in my head.

And the mountains soon surrounded me—no longer allowing the sky to crush me.  The clouds began to roll over before me like pet dogs.

To hell, then, with death.

To hell with death so long as you have books to read and mountain roads to follow.

Life is not an invention.  It is a discovery.

—Mitchell Hegman