For those who know me well, my use of green “Green Mountain” in a title is familiar. I’ve attached it to various essays over the years, and it is the subject my unfinished work, not just of writing, but of living. I have grown used to iteration and transformation. I choose the end of this year for my latest version because it is the 25th anniversary of the Monteverde Institute (MVI). The MVI is an international study center focused on tropical biology and sustainability, and Monteverde is a mountaintop community located in the tropical Cloud Forest. I served as Executive Director of the Monteverde Institute in Costa Rica for a number of years (1992-95 and 1998-2005) and first visited and lived in Monteverde in 1987-88. I wrote the first Trail to Green Mountain essay in 1993 while living in Monteverde.
“Green Mountain” is an allegory for the relationship between the wild and human community. It is at once both an ideal and a reference to real geographies and people. This requires that I pay attention to both empirical science as well as a more personal and literary approach to human experience.
In addition to Monteverde in Costa Rica, Green Mountain may refer to any place or time that moves the story forward. Some of the other places that will appear in this version of Green Mountain include various locations in and around the White Mountains in New Hampshire, as well as other parts of the world that I have traveled to. A few of these spots are worth mentioning at the outset because they will play such a prominent role.
Much of the writing will take place in a studio on the Sandwich Mountain Farm located on the southwest side of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. From here I can see Welch Mountain and its rocky ledges. Over the years Welch has come in and out of my life as both a place for physical work and intellectual inquiry. Franconia Ridge, also in the White Mountains, will also play its part. Along with Sue Demming, I am current adopter of the Upper Greenleaf and Franconia Ridge trails. We follow carefully in the footsteps of Laura and Guy Waterman, keeping up the tradition of the West End Trail Tenders.
As is fitting to a central idea of Green Mountain, the name Monteverde almost translates as “green mountain.” In the context of Costa Rican Spanish and local usage, monte refers to uncultivated [wild] land, usually located on steep, mountainous slopes. Lucky Guindon, one of Monteverde’s Quaker settlers who participating in naming the place, was always quick to remind of this, that mountain wasn’t what they had in mind. Stubbornly, I stuck to my creative translation. Verde, of course, consistently does mean green, so I was on safe ground with at least that part of the name. It seems the misnaming has stuck: I noticed on the Monteverde Friends School website an official looking statement:“And so it was that with green forests, green pastures, and green crops growing the year round, we named our new found land Monteverde (Green Mountain).” I apologize to Lucky for whatever role I played and continue to play in perpetuating this mistranslation.
For this version of Green Mountain I will spend 1 year, December 21, 2010 to December 2011, writing with the Green Mountain analogue in either the foreground or background. This will take form of weekly posts on the Green Mountain blog. There are three different types of posts that will appear and over time interleave:
A series of posts that more or less are a narrative of my experiences in Monteverde, Costa Rica.
- Posts that begin with between one and three paragraphs describing the moment and place of the start of writing, followed by and integrated into an essay. These essays will more or less address elements to Green Mountain. To see an example of this structure you can look at Nat’s Blog.
- Past journal entries from 1997, the year I spent studying at Antioch New England Graduate School. This was a fruitful period for my articulating ideas pertinent to Green Mountain, and just before my moving to Monteverde for a third time in 1998. These will be introduced gradually as they seem to be relevant.
- A scatter of other past journal entries. These will also be introduced gradually as they seem to be relevant.
Posts will make good use of hypertext linking to either external web sites or, internal to the blog, other Green Mountain posts. Internal links may “backtrack” to a previous post or link forward to a future entry. Obviously, links that move into the future can only be created after the fact and require editing an old post. The use of hypertext linking means that after a time the blog can be read either as a linear narrative or as a kind of meandering, non-linear bushwhack through reflections that emerge in the allegory of Green Mountain. Repetition with difference will be a key feature of the blog: repeatedly describing the same places and intellectually climbing the same metaphorical mountain, but always with a difference — the difference of season, the difference of time of day, the difference of emotion, the difference of intellectual approach.
Green Mountain is hosted on the Rey Friends experimental “social-environmental” network. Members of the network will be allowed to post comments to Green Mountain posts. This will add dialogue to what is otherwise a monologue. Due to problems of spamming and irrelevant commenting, this will be on an invitation only basis for the time being — anyone request an invitation by emailing me at nat@reyfoundation.org. After one year, on December 21, 2011, I will stop posting on the Green Mountain blog, but it will remain accessible for exploring online. I will then compile and edit posts into a readable, linear narrative suitable for print publication.
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My desire to write of a allegorical mountain has its origin is in a curious unfinished novel, Mount Analogue, by René Daumal. In this story the narrator (who we presume is Daumal) is surprised to get a letter from a Pierre Sogol who wants to organize an expedition to Mount Analogue — the fictional Daumal had posited the theoretical existence of this odd crag in his essay on the “symbolic significance of mountains in ancient mythologies.” However, for Daumal Mount Analogue is a “literary fantasy,” and he is uneasy that someone has taken him seriously. Nevertheless, he meets Sogol and they mount an expedition. They eventually do find the base of Mountain Analogue and begin an ascent.
As mentioned, the book was never finished, and perhaps never could be. Daumal tells us:
For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, I concluded, its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to humans as Nature has made them. It must be unique, and it must exist geographically (page 42).
If the summit of Mount Analogue is inaccessible, then the expedition could not have ever reached the summit. Earlier he says:
…in the mythic tradition the mountain is the bond between Earth and Sky. It’s solitary summit reaches the sphere of eternity, and it base spreads out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the way by which man can raise himself to the divine and by which the divine can reveal itself to man. (pages 40-41)
What is essential is that Mount Analogue be both real (accessible to humans as nature made them) and ideal (with a summit that reaches eternity). Green Mountain as a version of Mount Analogue is myth as it is meant to be: the stories we make of real places. This is fiction as shaping and creating the world. It implies that our minds and culture as well as our instincts and drives are a force of nature among others. The current environmental precipice, which exists in a “real” world, is produced, in part, by the ideas and ethics that guide human action.
