A story about mountains and scrub and earth

Given that I had claimed I’d try to post once a week, I’ll conveniently post this very short story sort of thing that I started writing two years ago (curiously, also around late April, but in 2006, of course) and left unfinished until some days ago when I finally took it again and, well, finished it.

 

I lay down on the long not comfortable seat in the back of the vehicle, at the moment oblivious to the outside world. The air conditioner on, the increasingly arid light of the outside lighting the inside, my head on a pillow against the uncomfortable side of the van, three books lying somewhere on the seat as I try to fix the jumble of cables and make a final music pick. Most of the trip on the highway and into the Mexican mountains in the northeast of the country as the van drove south their range was spent reading fiction to the beat of music. I had the idea of overhearing the name of the place we were heading to, but I could not be sure what it was or if we were in fact going to the place planned. As we started to ascend through paths that circumvented hills as they climbed them and which showed new hills springing at the other side and all around, I started to notice my actual awareness of the surroundings despite the plugs in my ears and my eyes on the book in my hands.

I looked out to notice the dark dry green and brown shrubs standing among more of the same. Once inside the range, there probably were at any specific time some five hills or mountain peaks apart from the one we were climbing, but never did I consider during the trip the number being left behind or the number that kept springing up to visible existence. Otherwise, the view didn’t hold anything new. The same scrub and tree, soil and breeze that were present throughout the whole region and had predated the road and the diminishing civilization leading into the range. The transition was too gradual to notice, the pavement growing to less while the possibility of seldom solitary lives rummaging through stone, ground, and shrub bleakly permeated all around in increase. The thought of such lives did not render the idea of that quiet, rich life in nature in the woods, but simply a conceivable collection of lonely quiet existences that might entangle only by luck, hardly becoming a whole. The trees were thin but with extending branches as if trying to get some air in the heat and at the same time cover from the beating rays as most meager space as they could. Their leaves endured dry green or already dried with brown—at seldom times red; forming a foliage and not so willing to let see through but having little choice and having grown wearily content with that; waiting with each other as if all were one to the slipshod eye but each enduring a life of its own. The ground stood beneath changing from yellow where uncovered to light tones of brown dried out by famished roots which brittle remained permanently seeking through dusty stones; this ground lived thus just like the wall of the mountain, just like the mountain hills around, just like the valley below.

Suddenly the drive round stony and semi scrubby walls—the constant leap from hill to hill which before had seemed to be a single mountain—became a straight road in a relatively level space with a slight decline to the left that then turned up into other mountains; and a straight short plain to the right that seemed to crash with hills that must look like mountain peaks from the other side. So there—over a road high above what was at least regarded to be the level surface of the earth when altitude does not make sense to the naked mind busied in its own immediate dimension of life—was the van soaring above the world guarded by peaks at its sides. Although there were some hills as a background to the front and the back of our view, it still seemed as if we were in a procession through a hall walled by two files of mountains. The soil was still hard and yellow, more yellow and perhaps with more quiet desperation than the one before. The rocks stood released from the ground, enduring with the dust. The trees farther into these peaks were still short and thin, surrounded by long gone trees or those just holding forgotten sparks of life within. The spark was still dull, rather holding the memory of old splendor than eager to let it shine; seldom having this occurrence.

There was never a feel of death, nor was there one of life. Death or life kept itself in secret. Still the supposed breeze that barely touched the vehicle had a peace and rest of its own. The life inside the van only worked with the former to let thoughts race through my brain: thoughts of nature, thoughts of rhythm and noise, thoughts of scientific dissertations about nature and about culture, about the environment, and about the lives within it all forming a distinguishable one.

The trees closed in—it was all greener this time—holding a not very well kept secret: a spring of water which gushed vigorously. It was crowded by loneliness and sadness, by courage to breathe and a spark of wonder—sightseers fleeing their own austerity, knowing doggedly unconsciously that they are no different than these places, trying to take pride with a forlorn smile on what they convince themselves they are.