Thomas and Mountain Memories

The trail began in a yellow green wood.

“Don’t get your feet wet!” My mother admonished as I leaped across a trickle-stream not bothering with the log bridge.

Was I six? Seven? I’m pretty sure it was before Cub Scouts and that was eight. The leaves had just started to turn, so before my October birthday- September? Carolyn wasn’t there, but Connie was. My sisters are eleven and six years older than me. Caorlyn, later called Lynne was too grown up to be much of a part of my boyhood, except for the dog she bought me when I turned nine, without asking my parents. Connie regressed to be my first playmate, but that didn’t last when she became a teenager, so definitely not eight yet. Maybe five going on six? Probably six going on seven.

Mount Monadnock was less than an hour’s drive from our home. It is in Jaffrey in southern New Hampshire. We went on a family adventure driving in the old gray Willys. Connie and I counted pastured cows as we looked out half-rolled-down windows on our own side of the backseat. “Oh there’s a cemetery; you lost all your cows.” Connie gloated. “That’s NOT fair!” I pouted sticking out my lower lip, which made her laugh and improved my mood.

All the cemeteries were on my side of the car going, but her side coming home. “Why can’t we go a different way? She half-whined and Mama and Daddy laughed. “Fair’s fair”

I ran into the woods despite being warned to stay with the family. Connie caught me up. “Don’t make Daddy mad, kiddo. Besides, it’s a long walk- you need to take your time.”

“Alan, come over here and look at this. That’s a lady slipper. No, don’t pick it. You need to let it be so it’ll come up again next year. We have some of these in the woods behind the house.” I looked at the hanging gossamer pink lantern next to a dark green broad leaf and was six-year-old unimpressed, but humored the old man. “That’s neat, Daddy.”

I first noticed the warmth of the day as the trail started to rise. Those in our party, who hadn’t been running back and forth and up and down the trail, seemed less bothered by the heat and the incline than me, but I remember Mama saying, “Alan, that’s all the water we have,” as I gulped at the thermos she’d brought in a big straw bag.

“Let him drink, Nan. They’ll be a stream up a ways.”

The trail got steeper. I struggled. I may have started to whine, and whining was definitely not approved behavior in our household. That didn’t stop me, but Connie, ever-the-seismograph for my father’s volcanic impatience jumped in. “Alan Cay, remember Thomas?” Thomas, the Little Engine Who Could, was a favorite story in our house and a lesson used to get me to do many things from finishing my dinner to, now, climbing a mountain.

“I think I can. I think I can,” Connie softly chanted. Soon I picked up the chant. “I think I can. I think I can,” my little legs chugging up the mountain.”

“Thank you, Connie,” said Mama softly.

“I think I can. I think I can, whoo, whoo.”

“I know I can. I know I can,” I sang out as we broke out of the hardwood onto a first outcropping of rock. “Breaking out of the trees” is a hiking exhilaration that has never gotten old and this, my first experience of it, still thrills in my memory.

I was quickly disappointed as we could now see the top of the mountain. “It’s way over there?!”

“Come on, Thomas. I think I can. . . .”

So we started down into the conifers between our position and the peak. Soon there were fir needles cushioning our sneakers and smelling like Christmas. The cool dark green of the forest was broken here and there by vertical golden shafts of sunlight that kept me looking for fairies among the trees.

The downhill-into-the-elfin-glades euphoria didn’t last. Soon the trail wound uphill again. “I think I can. I think I can. . . . How much further?”

“Alan Cay, look here’s a toad, by the water. Look he’s wet and you can see colors on his back.” A cup dipped into the stream. Water never tasted so good before or since.

“I think I can. I think I can. . . . I know I can. I know I can.”

We broke out of the trees a second time, this time from dense fir and spruce onto the granite dome that is the summit of Monadnock, “the mountain that stands alone.”

Mount Monadnock is only 3100 feet tall. As summit views go, it is far from the most spectacular I have seen in my life, but in my brain pictures it remains more vivid than most.

I love the bumper sticker. “Get High on Mountains.”

Hiking is now a family legacy and Thomas has stayed with me all my life.   “I know I can. I know I can.”