In four months I’ll be on pilgrimage in Scotland, leading up to that time I’m relying on Nan Shepherd to orient me to her native landscape (and weather)…
________
The Cairngorm mountains as Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) shares them in The Living Mountain are, to borrow words she uses in her chapter on water, like “two movements in simultaneous action” (31): compelling and threatening, intimate and obscure, endearing and fearsome. The mountain’s “elementals” effect the narrator, her companions, and other people—residents, explorers, soldiers, students—either living amid the “movements” of the mountain, or finding final resting places wrapped in cloud, lain on the granite, or perhaps within a swathe of vegetation—a softer spot, sometimes which will flower.
In this tiny book, Shepherd offers lyrical praise of such truths of this landscape. Through the eyes and in the hands of another mountaineer, we’d have here an expedition story likely centered on the narrator rather than the mountain, a trail guide suggesting optimal routes to reach photo-ready vistas, or a snoozy catalogue of features and flora. Thankfully we, and the mountain, get Shepherd—attentive and expressive—to direct our Cairngorm experience. With Shepherd, these mountains, these “static things [are] caught in the very act of becoming” (10). Becoming; in motion and emotive, because of Shepherd’s poetic prose, which offers direct lessons in this way of writing.
Combining words and images that are unexpected, perhaps bordering non-sensical, Shepherd enlivens her prose like nature does her mountain, in ways that can seem impossible, excessive even. But this is how Shepherd “make[s] visible and audible some essence of the free, wild spirit of the mountain” (61). It is in this approach that she defies the expected turn-by-turning, and listing of life forms to which nature writing often conforms. “But why should I make a list?” she asks rhetorically, “[i]t serves no purpose, and they are all in the books. But they are not in the books for me – they are in living encounters, moments of their life that have crossed moments of mine” (67).
Shepherd shapes an encounter on the page for us. She writes, as examples, of: “wad[ing] on into the brightness” (12), “this havoc of boulders” (24), how “snow is taking possession” (34), how “snow sunned itself away,” (36) the moss campion which sustains “the commotion of many winters” (50), and of “when my eyes were in my feet” (46). This is experiential language, carefully selected, as a hiker picking her footsteps while descending a steep scree field, is pure, felt-from-the-inside beauty.
The equinoctial storms had been severe; snow, that hardly ever fails to powder the plateau…had fallen close and thick, but now the storms had passed, the air was keen and buoyant, with a brilliancy as of ice, the waters of the loch were frost-cold to the fingers. (9)
Prose like this reads naturally, delightfully, if not also somewhat crushingly in its embodiment of this place. Its realness suggests writing it would be simple, based on observation, sensation. But the sensed simplicity does not equate to ease. Shepherd’s triumph of the challenge of writing like this, like how she engages the challenge of the mountain—the stark with the soft, the close with the vast, the obscure with the well-known, the urge to remain with it while cursing it—enlarges this book beyond its physical stature. Like the Cairngorm, often mistaken under the shroud of mist and cloud as less massive, less looming, this small book must be entered with wakeful alertness. “[H]aste can do nothing with these hills” (11), likewise, rapid reading will miss this experience of the language, which like the mountain, is so very alive.