Cathedral on High

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Morning is the best time, before morning even.  Drive up Going-to-the-Sun Road, up to Logan Pass before daylight, then coast down toward St. Mary with Sunrise painting your face in reds, oranges, and yellows.  

Across the road from St. Mary Lake

Drive along St. Mary Lake and turn north on Hy 89 just as the sun pops up.  You’ve been on the road two hours, and in another hour you’ll come to the end of the road in Many Glacier on the east side of Glacier National Park.  

Two hotels are here, boats on the lake, and horses to rent for the trails.  But everything is closed now, shut down for the winter.  So you park the jeep, put on your backpack and head up one of the trails, happy not to be sharing it with anyone.  

Soon, you’re far from cars, stores and pollution.  It feels like the world is as it was a million years ago, and all of it unconcerned about your wellbeing.  It’s just doing what worlds do, indifferent to human intrusion.  Bears aren’t angry with you for stealing most of their habitat, they just want to eat enough at this time of year, enough to last them through a long sleeping winter.

The sun is up now, you’re feeling the elevation, it feels lightheaded, far away, like whatever happens you’re on your own.  It’s part of a very logical idea you hold: that the older you are, the more risk is appropriate.  So you enjoy your lone journey up the mountain, as life’s journeys are, and you take only those precautions that might help in most circumstances; the rest is up in the air. 

And after while, you’re faced with a cirque, a cutout in the rock where a glacier melted and left behind piles of the debris it carried from up above.  Usually it leaves a lake or two where it carved out basins in the rock.  And that’s your destination for this particular day in the alpine terrain above timber line. 

The cirque is closer now and the trees are smaller, bushes lively with color as their summer of daylight soon gives in to total darkness under snow.

Having climbed for three hours, you stop awhile to consider the rocks.  Sometimes you think you understand them, their layers bent under heat and pressure millions of years ago.  Other times they mystify.  Oh, you have ideas about their formation, but it’s like they went out of their way to confuse and to inspire with art forms, which they didn’t have to do.

Now you enter the cirque, vertical-walled, ice-carved, adorned with snowfields, and occupied by a lake.  This is Iceberg Lake, placed in this cathedral by one long gone, one who sculpted for its pleasure. And along its banks, small supplicants, petitioners in pews, created in its image—not mere snowfields, but the faithful, remembering an ancient truth.

And then you go back down—to the world as you knew it.  But it is not the same, because up there is the way it was, and to where it may return.  Up there is not just an escape, but a reality, diminishing, worthy of holding, and to which some like me will have to return.

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