Seth Frame

Something Carried Back Down

That morning, before we left, she braided my hair for the climb. I watched the smoke from a stick of incense stream upward from its burning end, the scent quiet in my nose, while her hands worked and she explained it, the way she feels connected to this landscape, made of the same material as the mountains, her family having lived here for generations. The land was not something she had come to. It was something she had always been part of.

The trail begins in shadow, running alongside a narrow stream that moves clear and cold over stone. Ice rims the edges where the water slows. Last year's leaves lie pressed into the earth, dark and flattened, the forest holding onto winter even as the air begins to soften.

The cold finds my hands first. I pull on my gloves and keep moving, waiting for the body's engine to catch up. The path climbs gradually at first, then more insistently, winding through hemlock and rock. We are talking about our relationship, where it is going, what we each want, picking our words as carefully as we pick our way through the ice patches. You don't always know one is there until your foot finds it. At one point she slips on a hidden patch and goes down hard. I reach for her, heart lurching. She's fine. We keep going.

Higher up, I begin to take longer breaths. The air carries hemlock, cold and clean, and each exhale releases something I hadn't known I was holding. The body lightens with each breath.

We move quietly toward the summit. The kind of quiet that isn't agreed upon but arrives on its own.

The forest opens without warning into a wide paved lot, empty this time of year. Prospect Mountain, it turns out, is accessible by car. The trail dissolves into infrastructure: painted lines, a gradual slope, then a staircase rising straight toward the summit. It should feel like something has been lost there, some continuity broken, but it doesn't. Not today. Not with no one else around.

At the top, the land falls away in all directions. Lake George lies below, half-frozen, pewter-blue in the cold light. Beyond it, mountains fold into themselves, ridge after ridge receding into distance, each one fading slightly more toward blue. Vermont rests on the horizon. The air is clear enough to make everything feel closer than it is, as though you could step from one range to the next.

She points through the bare trees, naming peaks I don't yet know how to see. Whiteface stands out among them, ski slopes still white with manufactured snow, holding a season the mountain itself had already let go. Two seasons at once. The valleys turning toward spring, the heights refusing it.

"These are mine," she says.

There is no hesitation in it. Something already settled.

I try to follow where she is pointing, but the names don't hold. The ridgelines slide past each other. I realize I am looking at the same thing she is and seeing almost none of it.

I nod anyway.

I grew up in a place where the world did not rise. Driving south through the county toward the swamp, my father at the wheel of his old Jetta, the road ran between two cornfields that stretched to the horizon. In late summer, the stalks stood high and dense, the earth beneath them black and rich, the fading light catching the yellow tassels at their tops. The car smelled of him, something I have never been able to put words to. Looking west from the passenger seat while crossing the Kankakee River, the sky would open wide, just beginning to blush with sunset, the first stars already waiting behind it.

I felt like I could see forever then.

At night, out on country roads, the windows down, the air moved thick and warm through the car. Fireflies blurred into streaks of light in the fields. The sounds of frogs and insects filled the dark. Somewhere far off, thunder rolled low and continuous, not yet a storm but the promise of one.

The storms were how the land rose. Clouds would gather slowly at first, stacking on the horizon, their edges catching light as they built. They came in like ships, deliberate and immense. Some brought only rain. Others brought wind strong enough to bend trees, hail that struck the ground hard enough to leave marks, tornadoes that rearranged everything in their path.

When they came, I went out into them. Clothes soaked through, shoes filling with water, the rain running down my hair and along my back. The air cooling all at once, the world reduced to movement and sound and the force of it pressing against my body.

To be out in the storm was to be alive and in touch with the world.

It never occurred to me then that the storms did not know I was there.

Years later, I went looking for a different kind of mountain. Edward Abbey had written about climbing a peak in the La Sals, snow-capped above the red rock desert, cool and improbable against that sky. I had carried that image long enough that it began to feel like something I needed to see for myself. I had just finished graduate school. The years behind me had been spent sitting, reading, writing, working toward something that did not require much of my body.

I flew west to meet a friend in Colorado. We loaded his Corolla with supplies and drove south, the road turning eventually to dirt, then to something rougher. At one point we crossed a stream, the water running higher than it should have for a car like his. There was a moment of hesitation there, then the decision made itself.

Upward.

The hike was harder than I expected. The elevation, the loose rock, the simple fact of being out of shape. All of it made itself known. The last stretch rose steeply through scree, each step sliding back slightly, the body working harder for less ground gained.

There is a point, climbing like that, where the mountain asks you plainly what you have brought with you.

At the summit, everything fell away. I sat on the top of Mt. Tuk, the ground dropping off in all directions, the sky level with my eyes. Clouds moved below and beside me, their shadows passing across the land. In the distance, rain fell in long, visible lines, dissolving before it reached the ground.

I had followed Abbey up that mountain as closely as I could, carrying his words with me the entire way. But at the top, there was no sense of having arrived at something he had left behind. The mountain had not kept anything for him. It did not recognize the effort of retracing his steps.

It simply was.

We begin the descent without deciding to. The staircase gives way again to pavement, then to trail, the forest closing back in around us. The stream reappears, moving as it was before we arrived, unchanged by our passing.

She moves ahead. On the ice she has crampons and I don't, and she crosses it without thinking while I find each step separately, moving from boulder to boulder above the ice, walking delicately along the ice when there are no boulders.

Somewhere on the descent, the road comes back to me.

The first mountains came years before, rising faint against the horizon of eastern Wyoming. We had been driving for hours. He slept in the passenger seat, his head tilted back, one hand tucked against his chest. The road ran straight through heat and distance. Led Zeppelin III played low through the speakers.

At first I thought it was something in the light. Just a distortion at the edge of vision. Then the line held. Darkened. Took shape.

Something shifted in my chest before I understood what I was seeing. My throat tightened. Tears came without warning, without any sense of why. I wiped them away with the back of my hand and kept driving.

We pulled over near a gate. The gravel was a deep rust red underfoot. Across the road, the land rolled upward in a way I had never seen before, violently green in the spring light. Deer and elk moved through the grass without urgency. The air felt different. Thinner, maybe, or just new.

We switched drivers, and I climbed into the passenger seat as we began the ascent. The road bent into switchbacks, lifting us gradually into the range. Snow held on in the higher elevations, bright against the dark rock. The windows stayed down.

I had spent my whole life looking at distance. I just hadn't known it could stand up.

END

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Seth Frame's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blood+Honey, The Argyle, Sky Island Journal, Great Lakes Review, and Thomasonian. He is a writer in Schenectady, New York whose work explores place, memory, and connection, drawing on his background in archaeology and years in the American West. Instagram: @sframe938