By: Christopher Johnson

            Wachusett Mountain in central Massachusetts is one of the most climbed mountains of North America. The name “Wachusett” is derived from the language of local Native Americans and likely means “mountain-place.” This modest mountain is only two hours northwest of Boston, and according to the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the mountain draws more than three-quarters of a million visitors every year, including hikers, bird watchers, skiers, and snowboarders. During the autumn foliage season, the mountain can attract as many as 10,000 climbers a day.

As you approach the mountain, you pass through the charming town of Princeton, and from there, you can see the mountain rise gently from the rolling hills that dominate the landscape of central Massachusetts like the swells of an ocean. To approach any mountain, however modest, is to approach a mystery, a place of secrets, and the mountain reveals those secrets grudgingly and only to those who expend the effort to venture upward upon its paths. The mountain speaks, but it speaks a language that the climber must translate by listening, by observing, by awakening all of the senses. A mountain is a highway between earth and heaven, and if we remain aware, it guides us to more elevated spaces.

            Wachusett is, indeed, a modest mountain—only 2,006 feet high, but the view from the summit is breathtaking, affording a view west to the Berkshires and, to the north, the rugged and romantic peaks of the Green Mountains of Vermont and White Mountains of New Hampshire. The mountain is, on a fair day, accessible and inviting. She is like a great-aunt inviting you to Sunday dinner. On stormy days, though, the mountain can suddenly turn fierce, and you do not want to be caught on the summit in the midst of a lightning storm.

            Because the mountain is so accessible, I climbed it many times. It was only an hour and a half from our home in the historic town (now city) of Framingham. Sometimes I climbed it with my wife, Barbara, and sometimes with our children, Matthew and Emily. Often, however, I climbed it alone. Climbing it in the spring was good practice for more challenging climbs to come in the summer or the fall.

            I first climbed Wachusett Mountain in the spring of 1982. We had relocated from Chicago to Boston in the fall of 1981, when I was 34 years old. During that fall and winter, we had eagerly begun to explore the Boston area, visiting typical sites like Old Ironsides, Walden Pond, Emerson’s home in Concord, and the House of the Seven Gables in Salem. But when the spring of 1982 came, I found that I very much wanted to explore the natural beauty of Massachusetts. I felt this as a yearning, a calling. Even during the first time that we had circumnavigated Walden Pond, I had felt that calling, which had grown stronger through the ensuing winter.

            I purchased an excellent guidebook, Fifty Hikes in Massachusetts, by John Brady and Brian White. This was my bible to all parts of Massachusetts–clearly written with good maps and photos of destinations throughout the state. I still own that dogeared and weatherbeaten copy, replete with dates in the table of contents indicating when I first accomplished each hike.

            What particularly piqued my interest in climbing the modest heights of Wachusett was an essay about the mountain by Henry David Thoreau—“A Walk to Wachusett–in which he narrated an excursion he undertook with an unnamed companion in 1842. He and his friend walked from Concord to the mountain in central Massachusetts—a journey of some 35 miles. After hiking to the base of the mountain, they stayed at an inn and then, the next day, embarked on their climb. I found especially enticing Thoreau’s account of drawing nearer to the mountain:

At intervals we heard the murmuring of water, and the slumbering breathing of crickets, throughout the night; and left the inn the next morning in the gray twilight, after it has been hallowed by the night air, and when only the innocent cows were stirring, with a kind of regret. It was only four miles to the base of the mountain, and the scenery was already more picturesque. Our road lay along the course of the Stillwater [River], which was brawling at the bottom of a deep ravine, filled with pines and rocks, tumbling fresh from the mountains.[1]

            Thoreau inspired a feeling that drew me to the mountain. For that first ascent, I wanted to go by myself. In retrospect, I unconsciously wanted time to reflect. So, I was on my own that weekend day when I wended my way to the mountain, and I remember thinking, as I drove, whether I would have bothered with this excursion if, like Henry David, I had had to walk rather than drive. I was gainfully employed as an editor at a textbook publishing company in downtown Boston. Barbara and the children seemed to have accommodated well to the move from Chicago. We were close to being able to afford our first home. We were living the American Dream. The brass ring was within our grasp.

            But for me, something was lacking. A scratchy lacuna of spirit. An emotional missing link that was indefinable to me. Perhaps that was where the calling to Wachusett Mountain had come from—from this lacuna—and the calling had only grown louder when I had read Henry David’s essay.

            The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) owns most of the mountain, though a private company operates a ski area on a portion of Wachusett. The DCR produced clear and handsome hiking maps, and I picked one up at the park’s entrance and then consulted my Fifty Hikes. The authors recommended starting the climb on the old Stage Coach Trail, a capacious path with blue blazes that marked the way upward. The first portion of the climb was steep—a vertical rise of almost 300 feet in the first half mile on the path. I don’t mind confessing that I was huffing and puffing, and I had to stop every hundred feet or so to catch my breath. I really was not used to climbing. I was a native flatlander, born and bred in the Midwest.

            As I climbed, I noticed that to my left wove a stone wall—a remnant of the time when this land, as rocky as it was, supported farms. The trail was leading me through a woods of oaks and white pines–the tall, straight trees that were and are highly valued for their construction qualities. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the era of sailing ships, the white pine formed straight, strong masts.

            After several hundred feet, the trail leveled off and then gradually descended through a wood comprised of oak and beech. I could see the occasional yellow and green bloom of Indian cucumber. At that particular moment, a spirit residing in me moved me to wander off the trail and into the surrounding woods. I tramped ten, twenty, yards through underbrush, until I saw an unusual sight—a tree that at some point early in its history had divided into two, with one trunk growing in one direction and another trunk growing in another. It was two trees for the price of one, each with its own network of limbs and branches reaching toward the azure sky of that beautiful spring day.

            I sat down on the forest floor to observe more closely this corner of the woods. Dozens and dozens of trees spread before me in a multitude of shapes and sizes. The woods here were quite dense, and very little light penetrated the canopy of trees and reached the forest floor. Brown leaves from the previous autumn lay scattered like nature’s detritus across the forest floor, and I knew that time was slowly disintegrating those leaves and returning them to the soil, renewing the soil, enriching it.

            I looked upward and stared at the canopies of trees. The branches and limbs and twigs formed intricate patterns—a complex mélange of wood and leaf through which I could see patches of the blue sky. I wondered what secrets were hidden in those leaves and branches, what secrets the trees had observed as they had grown through the decades.

The trees formed a society that I had entered. I felt at home here, part of that society, experiencing the commonality of life, rejoining the organic community of nature. A sense of alienation that I had been carrying dropped away like a suit of armor that I had put on to protect myself from the trials and tribulations of life. The woods told a paradoxical story of randomness and order. The woods were not planned; they had evolved as an entity. The woods were a living, breathing thing, both a metaphor and a literal presence. In the interplay of leaves and branches, I was reading lessons—each part of the woods distinct and individualized yet forming an organic whole.

I was stirred by the similarity between the trees and me. Sap flowed through the trees through tubes called xylem and phloem. Blood flowed through my vessels to my extremities. If I cut into a tree, did it feel the injury? I felt certain that it did. We are too often divorced from the trees; it was good to reconnect with them.

            I closed my eyes, and the sounds of the forest sorted themselves out and trailed to me—the scrap of a squirrel scrabbling through the woods, the plaintive hoot of an owl, the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker, the soft and tender step of a deer. A breeze stirred the emerald leaves of the trees and brought them to life. I noticed what I was not hearing—planes, trains, automobiles. No chatter of people talking and arguing. No sounds of traffic or automobile horns. The woods were exactly as they had been in Thoreau’s time, aside from the well-marked hiking trails. The gap of time between Thoreau and me had been crossed and eliminated. I was living in Thoreau’s time, and he in ours. The ghost of Henry David was wandering through these same woods. This sense of permanence gave me a chill. I was riding a time machine, zooming back to the nineteenth century. All I could hear was the perpetual hum of the forest itself, creating a kind of symphony that crossed the lines of time.

            I sat cross-legged on the forest floor, and I could feel my rear end growing damp. But guess what? I didn’t care. In a strange way, my body was blending gradually into and becoming part of the soil upon which I was sitting. It was as if the earth had tentacles that were reaching up to enwrap me and attach me to the ground. It was a strange and magical sensation. The earth was willfully pulling me into it, and the whisper of the breeze as it tickled the leaves was a transformation of the soul.

            I could hear the infinitesimal sound of trees slowly growing. The call of a blackbird traced to me like a note of transcendence. I opened my eyes and saw a garter snake slide past me, almost but not quite touching my leg. The skin of the snake featured brown and black stripes, and the snake traveled with tongue slipping in and out of its mouth. The breeze picked up and swept through the grasses and leaves that lined the forest floor, whispering ancient words of wisdom and acceptance of me as part of the forest. I felt a sense of connection, of integration, with the natural world that I—and all of us—had been seeking.

            I arose and dusted off my hiking trousers and returned to the Stagecoach Trail and continued my upward climb. After another couple hundred yards, I arrived at a junction. I had arrived at the Harrington Trail, which would lead to the summit. I turned right. Yellow and blue blazes marked the path forward. I passed by a grove of hemlocks and crossed a bridge over a small stream. The trail resumed its inevitable way toward the summit, leading me over an asphalt road. After crossing the road, I began a rapid ascent, climbing over rocky ledges, balancing myself carefully on the granite boulders. The trail now was quite steep, with a 250-foot vertical rise in only 600 feet of trail. Here I was surrounded by a forest of beech, oak, and mountain ash. The trail emerged from the forest and led me over granite boulders the color of pale gray—granite with embedded crystals of feldspar and quartz.

            These enormous boulders dominated the summit of Wachusett Mountain. I picked my way across the boulders and walked to the center of this flat summit—so different from the jagged summits of the Rocky Mountains. As I traversed the summit of the mountain, I noticed that there were no trees at all. Through the centuries, wind and erosion had worn away all the soil, leaving nothing for trees to sink their roots into. This is a modest mountain, but even so, the views were spectacular. Mount Greylock was visible far to the west, in the Berkshires. Through the clear sky, I could see the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. To the east, the skin of the John Hancock Tower in the Back Bay of Boston shimmered far in the distance.

            I chose a friendly boulder and sat down and unloaded my backpack and unwrapped my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and ate it slowly, savoring every bite. I unscrewed the cap of my canteen and drank and felt the crystal water travel down my throat. Sated by the sandwich and the water, I closed my eyes once again and gave myself up to the spirit of the mountain. With my eyes closed, I felt that spirit through the intransigence of the boulder on which I was sitting, through the perpetual breeze, through the grasses that somehow survived and thrived in the tiny amounts of soil that could be found between the boulders. I felt the spirit of the mountain in my very bones, settling on me an otherworldly sense of peace. The mountain had attached itself to me. As had happened when I had sat in the woods, I once again had a sense of tentacles reaching up from the mountain and enwrapping me, cradling me.

            I noticed how acute my senses were. As I had climbed, I had smelled the sweet odor of pine, felt the caress of a soft breeze, seen the intricacies and interplay of the plants of the forest, heard the sounds of various animals. I had even tasted the pine tar from the trunk of a white pine. Nature had filled the lacuna of spirit that I had been feeling. I felt a sense of calm, a re-merging of body and spirit, a re-discovery of my animal spirit.

            I reached back into my backpack and took out a bag of potato chips and opened it and placed it on the boulder that was serving as my temporary home. Out of nowhere, and faster than a blaze, a chipmunk, with its characteristic black and brown stripes and marble-brown eyes, ran up to the bag of chips and dove into the bag and stole a chip. I was amazed. The chipmunk ran a short distance away, the potato chip in its mouth, stood on its hind legs, and proceeded to nibble at the chip until it was history. I couldn’t help laughing. I was happy to share the chip with the chipmunk. If that chip would help the animal get through the long cold winter on Wachusett Mountain, so be it.

            That animal and I shared a kinship. We shared a space on this modest mountain. Somehow, in some mystic way, the chipmunk and I were tied together. Perhaps, I thought, the chipmunk was my totem. I felt my animal spirit stronger than ever. I was alone on the summit of that mountain but not alone. My connection to this mountain was much tighter and more powerful than it had been when I had started my climb that morning. I was, in the wise words of Aldo Leopold in A Sand Creek Almanac, beginning to think like a mountain. As Leopold wrote so eloquently, “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”[2]

            As I sat on the boulder that was my temporary home, a daddy-longlegs crept out from beneath a nearby rock and climbed onto my naked right leg. What a peculiar creature, with its eight legs protruding from one body segment and two eyes that showed the insect the way forward. The animal crept along my thigh to my kneecap and my calf, feeling its way forward on its spindly eight legs, and I felt a slight tickling as the creature made its way along my skin. After a few seconds, the daddy-longlegs descended from my leg and onto the solid ground of the summit of the mountain. In my younger years, I would have shaken that daddy-longlegs off my leg and smushed it without a second thought, but now, such an action seemed criminal. Instead, I studied the animal’s peculiarly elegant movement on my leg, and I wondered that such a creature could have evolved to be so uniquely prepared to endure in its exposed mountaintop environment.

            My encounter with the daddy-longlegs was brief yet propitious, as if Wachusett Mountain had set out to demonstrate for me the infinite variety of life nurtured by the mountain. As I reflected upon the daddy-longlegs and the chipmunk, I felt more than ever my animalness, my instinctive self, my sensual self, my senses more acute than ever. Slowly, the mountain was revealing its secrets to me. Perhaps, I thought, in my next life I would return as a daddy-longlegs or a chipmunk. The mountain was whispering my fate to me, speaking to me, slowly revealing its essence to me. I felt that sense of animalness, of intuition, of being part of the mountain, of being part of the grand and heroic fight for survival, part of the infinitely varied beauty that can be found in even the most modest creatures on the earth, in the quiet elegance of the mountain, in the secret hum of the mountain.

            Wachusett Mountain was with me, below me, supporting me, wrapping itself around me, making me at home in the world. The mountain was inviting me into its world. For most of human history, people lived in unison with the rhythms of the earth, rising with the sun, bedding with the moon, planting in the spring, harvesting in the autumn. The Industrial Revolution sundered those rhythms, substituting the mechanical arbitrariness of the clock for the natural rhythms of the sun and the earth. Instead of walking—like Thoreau—or riding a horse, we close ourselves up in automobiles and view the world through windows and speed by the world so recklessly that it becomes a blur. We live in cities, far from the animal world, far from the natural rhythms of the sun and the moon and the earth.

            As a result, we are beset with neuroses, with alienation, with anomie. We narcotize ourselves with television and drink and play video games and glue ourselves to our I-Phones. We are alienated from the rhythms and beauties of the world. Our bodies are divorced from our spirits. It breaks my heart when I go on a hike in Lake County, Illinois, where I now live, and pass malls and shopping centers and see hundreds of cars parked in parking lots. Then, when I hike, I might pass five or ten people on the trail. The ratio should be reversed. There should be five or ten cars parked in all of the parking lots, and I should be passing hundreds of people on the trails.

            To hike or climb, even a modest mountain like Wachusett, is to restore oneself, to rediscover one’s sanity, to reconnect body and spirit, to heal the fragmentation we feel inside, to re-open our senses, to reconnect our human selves with the flora and fauna with whom we share the earth, to feel once again danger and wonder and curiosity and gratitude and empathy . . . and hope.

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[1] Henry David Thoreau, “A Walk to Wachusett.” In Walking with Thoreau, commentary by William Howarth, 27-28. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

[2] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970): 240.