The Wall of Snow

We came around a forested spur and the mountain was simply there, a wall of snow and ice filling the upper half of the world, close in the way only very large things can be close, patient, lit, enormous. Yan pulled over without being asked. She has seen it two hundred times and he still pulled over, which tells you what class of mountain this is.

I climbed onto a boulder and yelled with both arms up, wordless, unphotogenic, entirely sincere, and the self-timer caught it: creased shirt riding up, cap crooked, a woman being approximately nine years old at altitude. There are mountains you appraise and mountains you answer. This one asks a direct question and the body replies before taste can intervene.

We drank thermos tea on the tailgate. The glacier ticked and glittered across the valley, doing its slow work of outlasting everyone who has ever yelled at it. I have rarely felt so correctly small.