February 20, 2015
BLOG: Mountain Bones
Dear friends, part of my plan with this blog of my ‘Journey of the Lotus’ is to tune you into some parts of the travel adventure that might not commonly be noted.
Forget the cities built of piles of stones and cement, girders and flag poles, the icons and the cobbled squares in front of 400 year old massive churches proclaiming a legacy of a corrupt church, forget the madness of traffic in congested cities, the hideous piles of plastic basura that seem to be an inevitable feature of light fingered humans everywhere, forget the beaches and the resorts, just forget all that.
I’m much more related to – mountains.
I was born in northern British Columbia in the gold veined mountains near the eastern borders. Not so far north of that is the Yukon Territory and westward, Alaska, where the mountains of this vast cordillera stretching all the way south through North and South America might be said to begin.
My youth was spent on Vancouver Island, part of that boney spine made insular off the coast and also in the city of Vancouver where people of the world fly in to travel to Whistler and Blackcomb mountains to indulge in the only useful downhill sport: skiing.
I traveled across Canada by train at the beginning of the Raven’s Flight and remember lying awake most of the first night in my compartment bunk while the train with several working engines in the rear, pushing, and in the front, pulling, made the long painstaking climb from the coast to the crown of the great Rocky Mountain range between British Columbia and Alberta on the way to Calgary, home of the great stampede.
Several times I hitch hiked from British Columbia to California through Washington and Oregon States through the surf-like Cascade Mountains from the US border to Mt. Shasta and Mt. Lassen in northern California and further through the great dry forest of the Sierra Mountains.
This drive has taken me through at least 3000 miles of new territory and the mountain bones of Mexico, Guatemala and now El Salvador. These mountains are short guys compared to the great Rockies but they are all part of the spinal column of the two continents. They are stacked and arranged in threads and short ranges on the north-south back of the land, sometimes up to what I estimate to be 10,000 feet and at least an average of 4 – 6,000 feet purpling in the distance often greened in scrub trees or made tan-brown in the dry grasses now enduring dry season on this side of the equator.
There is something quite romantic about mountains rising in the hazy distances across a nearly empty land, or at least, countryside not peopled or graded into highways simply crowded with arching trees and the green leaved living fences that I have described. It feels a little like a land voyage across a fairy tale landscape only believable because I am here to see it all.
And, now my friends, you may see it in my writing and in pictures when I am able to transfer pictures from the chip in my camera to a data base able to send it to you, in the meantime, lift up your own eyes to the hills and be a little happier today.
Love and Blessings, Amraah.