I have just had the great good fortune to view Jennifer Peedom’s documentary film, Mountain.
A product of her collaboration with Robert Macfarlane (script), Enan Ozturk (cinematography) and Richard Tongnetti leading the Australian Chamber Orchestra (music), Mountain is a feast for the eyes and ears. It is the most sensuously sumptuous film I have ever viewed. Not to be missed!!
Macfarlane drew the deeply insightful and poetic script from his bestselling book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. Although written very much from a mountaineer’s perspective, the book is also about the human experience of mountains more generally.
Unlike Macfarlane, I have not had the climber’s extreme engagement with mountains, but I have trekked
around them, across them and even into the glacial hearts of some. So I know first-hand the fascination about which he writes and can relate totally to his well-informed analysis of that fascination.
The label, “mountain”, is attached to all sorts of elevated landforms, some more hills than mountains.
Genuine mountains are characterised not just by height but also by the way ecosystems vary in layers across their
vertical expanse (vertical or altitudinal zonation). To ascend a mountain is to pass from relatively warm forests to cooler grasslands and heaths, to cold, vegetation-free rock and scree and then, in many instances, to regions of permanent ice and snow.
Even the “baby” mountains making up the Australian Alps display something of this zonation.
That said, it is important to accept that our experience of mountains has to do more with how we perceive them rather than the facts of their geology, climatic variation and ecology.
As Macfarlane writes, What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans – a mountain of the mind.
In his book, Macfarlane plots how the imagining of mountains has changed over time. In so doing, he draws our attention to the rich and unique impact that mountains have on the human mind and spirit.
These excerpts from Mountains of the Mind convey something of the extent and power of that impact.
- Ultimately and most importantly, mountains quicken our sense of wonder. The true blessing of mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels – whether it is the dark swirls that water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss that form on the lee side of boulders and trees.
Mountains return to us the priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives.
- By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.
At bottom, mountains like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans.
- Mountains also reshape our understandings of ourselves, of our interior landscapes. The remoteness of the mountain world – its harshness and its beauties – can provide us with a valuable perspective down on to the most familiar and best-charted regions of our lives. It can subtly reorient us and readjust the points from which we can take out bearings. In their vastness and in their intimacy, mountains stretch out the individual mind and compress it simultaneously: they make it aware of its own immeasurable acreage and reach out, at the same time, of its own smallness.
- Nowhere but in the mountains do you become aware of the incorrigible plurality of light, of its
ability to alter its texture rapidly and completely.
The sky and the air, too, were found to be magnificently different in the mountains. At altitude, on a clear day, the sky was no longer the flat ceiling of the lowlands, but an opulent cobalt ocean, so sensuously deep that some travellers felt themselves falling up into it.
- In the mountainous world things behave in odd and unexpected ways. Time, too, bends and alters. In the face of the geological time-scales on display, your mind releases its normal grip on time. Your interest and awareness of the world beyond the mountain falls away and is replaced with a much more immediate hierarchy of needs: warmth, food, direction, shelter, survival.
It is little wonder that people are still flocking to mountains in their millions, most to savour rather than climb them. As a friend of mine recently discovered, Yosemite Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California is crawling with sightseers during the summer season. A comparable influx of visitors occurs in iconic mountain locations and resorts in other countries including Nepal, India, Switzerland and Canada.
Is my friend’s experience telling us that people’s love of nature is well and strong and that the evidence pointing to a declining involvement with nature in many Western countries is, in fact, misleading?
Regrettably it doesn’t – in part, because the evidence is from a range of reliable studies including large-scale surveys, and also in part, because the evidence can be linked to (and partially explained by) broader changes in lifestyle and recreational preferences within Western societies.
And then there is the fact that the allure of mountains, especially the awesomeness of them, is like the Sirens’ call – very hard to resist even by those who are not otherwise drawn to nature. People will still be visiting mountains, even when other forms of nature experiences have little or no part in their lives.
Nevertheless, we can always hope that people will come away from their mountain visit with a new, restored or re-vitalised love of nature.
