Hacking Through and Hacking Up in the Mountains

My lungs are on strike. Overwork them enough and they’ll decide that breathing is optional. My legs are starting to check out on me too, quivering and quaking like Jell-O in the breeze. If Google Maps were to snap a photo of me, it’d capture a little dot hacking up a lung somewhere in the Catskill Mountains of Woodstock, New York. But that's as specific as it comes; I don't know where I am or where this trail leads, and despite my legs wanting to kick my own ass for forcing them on this hike, I’m resolved. I am going to reach the peak even if I have to drag my body kicking and screaming behind me.

The effort doesn't go unrewarded. At this time of the summer, the maples, beeches, and birches explode into bloom sending their verdant shrapnel blitzing about the terrain. I brush aside limbs of wood—excuse me ma’am, pardon me sir—to reveal a blue sky so expansive that it seems to spread like the blob, overtaking everything in its path. The only thing that disturbs the Crayola-like harmony of blue to green is the occasional hawk that pirouettes overhead. Well, at least if they decide to peck out my eyeballs, they’ll do it gracefully.

Trekking further up the mountain leaves me gulping air. Even as my heart rate calms its skittering to a steady ow, ow, ow, I still find it difficult to breathe. The trail has opened up to a decaying stone building hiding in the green. A wall here, a few stairs there, it's a shadow of its former self. Perhaps the angry winters pelted and pounded the building into submission. Perhaps the rattlesnakes that reside on the mountain rattled their death song until the inhabitants fled. Only later did I learn that the structure was a luxury hotel—the Overlook Mountain House—constructed in the 1800s and charred to mesquite in the 1900s. But at the time I knew nothing, the stone skeleton that greets me is skeptical and silent. I slink over the front stairs and enter what would have been the lobby. But instead of the click, click, click of heels on tile, I hear nothing save the crunching of twigs underfoot. Embroidered drapes that sigh when the windows are open have become trees’ boughs. Inside and outside have collapsed into one, vegetation sprouting and spurting at every turn. I ascend the remains of a staircase only to reach a landing that leads to nowhere. I am hovering at the intersection of stone and wood-- both too bullheaded to yield to Time. I have a hunch they'll both make it. Keep pirouetting hawks, nothing to peck at here.