Mt St Helens
30 April 2018
The clouds rolled in this sweet spring morn. And they never did burn off which was just fine by me. Over the years I’ve come to accept the mountains as they are, just like the Nirvana song.
Come as you are
As you were
As I want you to be
As a friend…
As a trend…
I have no memory of….
Of course Kurdt Cobain’s lyrics were always so cryptic, and any time I watch him in interviews he’ll get all pissed off when people ask what the words mean. So I don’t like to read too much into them — besides, the melodies are so damn good. But I do like ‘Come As You Are’: he recognizes that people change over time, and seems to be wrestling with the fact that we want to see them as in our best memories…’as you were, as I want you to be’…But of course that’s not possible. People change, good things go away, and that’s OK. Soon we move on, freely, and all that is left are swirling memories colored by long gone emotions…
memory of…
memory of…….
coincidentally those precious couple lyrical lines speak to big themes: losing friends, grappling with their memory, only to have it all fade away.
Regardless I had come to accept the passage of time and even in seeing my old friends Cris and Cody, things had changed a lot and it was painful to see them for such a short time. But still very much worth it. They are both quite a bit more settled than me and sometimes I wonder if all my mountain wanderings are worth it. Wandering about doesn’t leave much time for settling down.
But it’s easy to put all that aside and live presently, to experience joy, riding down a mountain so clearly powerful as Mt St Helens. The evidence was all around — the crater, the windblown cornice, the blown out worm runnels torn asunder by land slides past. I was wonderfully happy to be here, and gliding through the trees back to the car, nothing else mattered.
