An Ocean and a Mountain
By Jonathan Haeber

You know those times when you’re walking down a road and you don’t care where you end up? Most of the time you end up somewhere that you’re familiar with—a favorite contemplation corner or a refuge of reflection. You sit down and you imagine how life would have been if you would have done this or that. Cars speed by, but you don’t notice. You don’t hear the average. You hear your own longing for change, or longing for stability, maybe just a longing for an end to all your worries.

I was once walking down such byway in the back-roads of Oregon. This time, instead of cars, there were logging trucks passing by with their pilfered pine trunks. Once in a while a farmer on a John Deer or Ford would putt on, knowing his destination, while I-- walking even slower-- didn’t know where I would stop.

There was a shooting range on the side of the road. My dad sighted in his deer rifle every year there. It used to be a quarry, literally a graveyard of shotgun shells and spent 220 cartridges, old retro-refrigerators with targets spray-painted on them, and the occasional deer carcass left behind by the neighborhood poachers.

That was my destination, but I didn’t know until I got there.

The dilapidated quarry wasn’t much of a destination. I wanted to go further. There was a mountain to the south of the quarry. Locals called it Rattlesnake Rock, a 3000-foot peak of sedimentary rock conglomerated with seashells millions of years old. It was a peak that was once under hundreds of feet of salt water, and at that time, towered above me like an ice-cream sundae.

On the top of that sundae ironically, was a lone cherry tree gnarl struggling to live under the harsh and windy conditions and constantly nibbled at by passing mountain goats. I had a hankerin’ for cherries, so I climbed, despite the rattlesnake-ridden caves that dotted the Mesa Verde-like cliffs.

The mountain goats used to thrive on the rock. It was a microcosmic version of the Canadian Rockies, and until settlers arrived, their enclave. There was a winery on the south foothills of rattlesnake rock. Travelers came from all over the county to taste the wine. My 7th grade Social Studies teacher was once the owner. It was a dream of my dad’s to buy that winery some day and make a living off of it.

The grapevines looked differently from my vantage point. It looked like a mountain lion claimed the foothills with a gigantic claw by scraping the alluvial soil in neat concentric rows. The mountain lions claimed a lot of land—160 acres in all, as part of the Homestead Act. And it was beautiful land. Tenmile Creek meandered through the valley, feeding the grapes, wild elk, deer; supporting the fish, livestock, and farmers. The creek was like a blood vessel, giving life to Reston—the historic stagecoach stop that became a permanent home for a few brave farmers.

As I straddled the cemented conglomerate I had just had enough breathing space to escape 100-foot drops into rattlesnake pits and thickets of brambles or poison oak. It wasn’t the first time that I climbed the peak, but it was the first time I appreciated what it had to give.

Two years earlier my brother and I-- with adolescent wet dreams of finding mining tunnels filled with raw gold-- trekked to the top. We never noticed the view and how golden it was. We never noticed the splendour of the sea of fog that blanketed the valley in the morning. And the smell from there. The smell was every smell from every point in a twenty-mile vicinity. It was a combination of pine pitch, burning madrone, wet leaves at fall, and hickory smoke from my father’s salmon smoker on the porch. All of it culminated together as winds from various locations diverged at the top of the ridge.

It was quiet up there; almost too quiet. But the sweet sound of unencumbered silence was a symphony to my ears. I was hearing so much those days-- college applications coming out of my ears, coaches telling me their stats for the newspaper I worked for, my senior year sweetheart asking me why I couldn’t see her more, and there was so much more. More than I could hear at once. But on the rock, all I could hear was my rhythmic breathing with each step up. It was my stairway to heaven and escape pod to the moon. Rattlesnake rock would be to me the same it was to the Umpqua Indians who did the quest a century earlier when they became men. It was my vision quest.

Visions came to me in droves. With the help of my pair of portable binoculars I saw the locations of memories from atop. You know how some people say that when they have a near-death episode, it’s like they’re floating above everything? Others say that their life flashes by them and nostalgia gives the body its last taste of mortal life. With the help of rattlesnake rock, I did both of those, without dying. I saw the place where I delivered a calf. I saw where I caught my first salmon. I could make out the roof of the tree house my brother and I spent our last middle school summer constructing.

The family ranch was a checkerboard of green clover and domesticated cattle, 19th century bucolic barns, and various gravel roads leading to secret fishing holes and hunting spots. They were places that defined my life, although only six years of my life were spent there. The landscape below me was everything, from summer jobs plowing fields to kissing under the ancient Oak trees, from jumping barbed wire on horseback to the doorless outhouse that helped free the bowels with a beautiful vista of the pine-covered hills.

When I made it to the top of Rattlesnake Rock, I realized that the trifles of life really mean the most. I could spend the whole week up there if I planned it, but I didn’t, and that’s what made it so surreal yet so real. The reality was: I was going to leave 4060 Reston Rd. for the urban University of California. A few days earlier the happiest and saddest thing happened to me. I opened the mailbox to find a letter of acceptance. I was being deported to California. I was leaving Rattlesnake Rock and everything that it helped me realize.

Near the cherry tree on the top of the peak is a boulder. How it got there is a question of geology, but it was there as a reminder of the perplexing power of nature. Among the cryptic graffiti that littered its seashell-covered sandstone surface are the initials of my brother and I. The makeshift flag that we left years earlier was sitting on the boulder, lying on its side. It was a symbol of our conquest and not of discovery. On it was the epigraph: “Jon and Erik H. reached the top of this mountain in May of 1998.” I wrote below it: “Jon H. discovered this mountain for the first time in June of 2000.”

Now, whenever I look up at the mountain, be it summer or winter, if the clouds are not hindering the view, I see that flag from the gravel quarry at the bottom. It reminds me of good times in the past and the mysteries in the meaning of life, all solved on a simple rock that was once at the bottom of the ocean and now sits at the top of my teenage world.