Sanctuary: Rock: Mountain: Home

Whether prison walls, plot boundaries, or borders between states, being fugitive implies that borders have been and/or are still to be overcome. One might assume that flight ends when the borders that stood between the captive and their freedom have been successfully crossed. 

--Paula von Gleich, Afro-pessimism, Fugitivity, and the Border to Social Death 

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The summer of 2018 I ran away to the mountains, living at the base of the Pisgahs, a part of the Blue Ridge mountain range in North Carolina. 

My running away was not a big deal in the scheme of big deals or even in the scheme of running away. Running this way was just a pattern of discomfort; perhaps post-breakup, but more likely a rupture of the edging loneliness beneath the surface of my well-polished independence. Loneliness shifting under my life like tectonic plates. I felt the ground begin to rumble and grabbed the go-bag. 

I don’t know if this type of lonely rupture happens more often to me than other people, but it certainly feels like more. It feels like a wish for safety I have had my whole life. I was a soft, dreamy child and I still want to love the world that way, to feel like it is safe to love the world in such a way--with heart and hands wide open. 

I came to those mountains because I believed they are sacred. This is kind of a lie. Not that I believe mountains are sacred, but that I believed the Blue Ridge to be mountains. 

After three months of living in Asheville, I hadn’t been able to call them mountains yet. They didn’t look like mountains to me but simply large furry hills. Their rounded summits weren’t daunting against the sky, no sheer faces taunted climbers. I learned this arrogance from the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, young mountains that thrust up showy in their new crags, dramatized by shadows of snow and crevice. Those were not humble mountains but apexes bold in their majesty, requiring an equally bold character of those who wanted to ascend their peaks. I had not acquired that brand of boldness, but I still felt comfortable snubbing the Pisgahs, and in fact the whole range of the Appalachia, by denying them this title. 

I was lonely, having moved to town knowing no one and nothing but my own desire to get to mountains, mountains, mountains, after a summer in Brooklyn. 

More than that, I had been traveling for eight months straight. 

More than that, I had been praying to feel home. 

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I think of the Mary Oliver line often: “tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine/Meanwhile, the world goes on.” 

I want to say it another way: “tell me about your home and I will tell you about mine….” 

I wonder how many people know their homes. 

I wonder how many people know their homes without longing or separation. I wonder how many of us feel home without a sense of grief. Or if that is part of what makes home. 

I wonder if what makes home is a leaving and rediscovering of it; the destruction and the recreation of it over time. 

I left home when I was 17, just for a time, and lived in the mountains of south central Mexico with a tenuous amount of Spanish and a host family that didn’t speak English. I was alone, marooned with the mountains and the small town of crumbling adobe. Until I wasn’t. A group of friendly teenagers enfolded me and, six months later, I cried to leave the new world I had let be made around me. 

I came back to the town I grew up in, which I thought was my home, and felt how much it hated me, hated my brown skin against the gray cloud cover, under the white gaze. 

Meanwhile, the world goes on.

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My grandfather holds my first memory of mountain. 

He was not mountainous to look at. He was slim and wiry through the forest. I once wrote a poem about him walking the woods “loose-hipped, legs swinging like a whip.” 

Tatoosh Peak was my first summit, a summer I was nine and, being so young, much of my gear was distributed through the packs of three adults. This left me light-footed enough to clip the heels of my grandfather leading us through high alpine meadows with slopes so green and so vibrant, it hurt the eyes under full sun. We walked as many deer trails as human hiking trails. Deer trails marked only by a crushed leaf or one bent blade of grass, delicate and subtle, as if walking a mountain was a refined act. As if the tread should reflect such reverence. 

We slept without tents on a ridge that bottomed out to a lake, still aquablue from ice. We had passed a wolverine that afternoon but no one seemed worried about that. 

The stars were many, so many beyond how we had learned to talk about them, that we didn’t. We stayed quiet and awake much of the night, sleeping bags pressed together beneath a sky glistening as glitter, trying to keep our eyes open. 

Trying to capture all the light we could. 

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Less than 3 miles from where I now live is a huge stone, an ancient monolith protected by the Jamestown S'Klallam tribe, called the Tamanowas Rock Sanctuary. There are two gates into the trailheads: two beautiful wooden fences, both formed by L-shapes coming towards each other so that you enter on the right, turn to the left and then exit onto a heavily forested path. The effect is a brief moment in which you are between two cedar walls, a moment which feels long and still even though you are walking. A moment that feels deeply private before the path presents itself before you. 

This is a threshold. 

The interpretive brochure informs that Tamanowas Rock was formed before the surrounding Cascade Mountains range. It is older than those mountains. 

Tamanowas Rock is 43 million years old. 

I press my ear against its eastern side, the side green with moss and ferns where squirrels with short tails are chirping their scattering announcement of my arrival. When I find its cool rough surface and lean my body against it, I can hear that Tamanowas Rock is 43 million years old. I can hear its 43-million-year-old heart, a low rumble 40 or 50 feet in towards its center. A rumble like far thunder or the beginning turn of a volcano, something simultaneously immense and intimate. The surface of the earth will change from this place but first, a sound like a deep belly hum, almost a lullaby, a sound like a cradle, rocking us along. 

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Meanwhile, the summer of 2018, living at the base of the Pisgahs, I started making sure to fill up my gas tank only while in town, having stopped two or three times at a country sideroad station alongside a large truck with a confederate flag decal on the rear window and a MAGA sticker on the bumper. 

Glad for self-service, I filled my tank quickly, suddenly damp and sticky beside the pump, not knowing when the vehicle owners would come out of the convenience mart, not knowing if they were southerners who valued politeness over an opportunity to flex power. I only knew that if the conditions weren’t just right, there would be little they’d suffer in the way of consequence should they deem my black-woman body as inflammatory and choose to dispose of it in any way they saw fit. 

I circumambulate this knowing nearly every time I have left the house since the age of 12. This knowing circumambulated me even before then, when drunk men would stumble onto our front porch, and my single mother, there with her two daughters, would joke and laugh them gently down the front steps of our home. 

Meanwhile, the summer of 2018, I remember this knowing again as news begins to surface of “tender-age camps” at the southern border of the U.S. Images of children behind wire fencing, six year olds taking care of two year olds. Rumors, then proof, of sexual abuse by armed guards. Parents by the hundreds trucked miles away. 

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Mountains are threshold places: earth as it appears closest to the heavens and landscape best suited for those who can live liminally, between worlds. 

There is Mount Taranaki, sacred in Maori mythology as a site where life is given and where people are returned after death. 

Tibet's Mount Kailash is a sacred place to five religions: Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Bon Po (a native Tibetan religion prior to Buddhism), and Ayyavazhi religions. According to some Hindu tradition, Mount Kailash is the home of the deity Shiva. 

According to the Torah, and consequently the Old Testament of the Bible, Mount Sinai is the location that Moses received the Ten Commandments directly from God. 

Mount Meru is a cosmic mountain which is described to be one of the highest points on Earth and is the center of all creation. Folklore suggests the mountain rose from the ground piercing the heavens, giving it the moniker "navel of the universe." 

These mountains are associated with the masculine god, but doesn’t that phrase “navel of the universe” make you think of an umbilical cord? Doesn’t it make you think of your own belly button, puckered tight after the separation from your mother? 

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I grew up in a land of mountains and water. Water from the sky and crisscrossing rivers, the mountains held the strongest points on the horizon, containing the valley. 

The places I grew up in the Pacific Northwest felt seeping, water-logged, with edges and boundaries that slid and suctioned with the heft of mud. These are adjectives that could be used just as easily to describe the dynamics of my family. Not harsh, but with so much leaching out, so much being sucked under, it was not necessarily safe either. 

I once wrote a poem about my maternal grandmother and my mother. I wrote about them and the sea. The wild sea, the tempestuous sea. The sea aghast and suddenly violent with its own power; the motherhood that tosses the smallest bodies about the waves. 

I am also a woman of water, a woman fascinated with how light fractals into depths, a woman constantly dancing the line between anchor and buoyancy. 

Do I seek the mountains for a different kind of holding, something more solid and firm? 

There is an intelligence mandated by existing in the mountains. Some believe the mountains to be a place of extraterrestrial intelligence but I think it must be intraterrestrial. One must be willing to follow their dreaming down into the earth, so deep into the earth as to be near the core of creation, from which everything we touch and see is generated. Into the earth to gather from source the raw material our dreaming wants to touch and be held by.

Origin. 

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Tamanowas Rock Sanctuary was an ancient sanctuary for hunting and ceremony before humans newer to the area decided to utilize it as a bouldering site. Then, covered with graffiti, it was fought to be reclaimed by the Jamestown S’klallam peoples. It was then sold to the Jefferson County Land Trust, who offered to be a bridge loan to the Jamestown S’kallam tribe until they could buy it back from public use to become a sanctuary once more. 

Having been witness to the spiritual tourism and New-Age desecration of Mt. Shasta (mystics excavating stones from the mountainside, self-proclaimed shamans depositing crystals and ash at the springs of sacred origin from which the Winnemem Wintu peoples bubbled forth), the Jamestown S’kallam tribe issued a code of conduct for visitors to Tamanowas Rock. 

There is a clear list designating what activities are appropriate for visitors who are not members of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe. There are times of year the Tamanowas Rock Sanctuary is not open to the public. There are protocols for sitting in passive reverence. The way one might sit in attendance at the church of a close friend of a different faith but who has invited you in anyway. Because there is prayer enough to share. 

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Meanwhile, that June of 2018, the Trump administration established a new policy of separating parents from their children at the Mexican border. Later investigations found that the practice of family separations had begun a year prior to the public announcement. People asking for asylum at official ports of entry were being turned away and told there’s no room for them. 

That June of 2018, U.S. Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, disqualified victims of gangs or domestic violence to be reasonable causes for seeking asylum. 

By the end of the summer of 2018, the Trump administration announced new rules to deny asylum to anyone who crossed into the United States illegally from any nation, at Trump's discretion. Trump signed a proclamation to specify that people crossing the Mexican border illegally would not qualify for asylum; he called the march of migrants from Central America towards the United States a "crisis.” 

He did not mean a crisis for those seeking asylum. He meant a crisis for those of us being asked to share our safety. 

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What does it mean to cross a mountain? 

Some religions circumambulate them--make the circular treks as pilgrimage, winding and unwinding in the medicine of walking, dreaming mountain dreams, each step asking for a vision or a nirvana.

Is crossing a mountain the same as crossing a border? Is crossing a border the same as pilgrimage? 

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It is said the mountains give special dreams, medicine dreams, that should be noted and taken seriously. 

A scientist may relate this type of intense dreaming to altitude sickness. When the body is exposed to low amounts of oxygen at high elevation, it can experience nausea, swelling, headaches, fatigue, dizziness, insomnia, loss of appetite, and (to my dark delight) “pins and needles sensation.” 

I relate this dreaming to the presence of beings powerful enough to have learned to survive in such places, places of thin oxygen and drastic temperature fluctuations between night and day. Places of bountiful sustenance in one season, followed by up to three seasons of scarcity. Or places of bountiful sustenance with as much poison as nourishment, wearing the same subtle dressing, and requiring a still and attentive intimacy to know the difference. 

Once, I slept on a mountain just east of Machu Picchu and dreamt I had the bald head of a vulture but huge rainbow wings that swept up suffering ancestors and sheltered them beneath long bright feathers. 

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I wrote a poem about my paternal grandfather and father as maroons. 

I wrote a poem about them fishing on the Santee Lake in South Carolina, their skin brown as the trees, their bones recognizing the swamp as safe refuge. One of the few places they could strip off their shirts and open their bare chests to the sun. Their feet in the cool water, dangling. 

Were they free here? Like most poems, this story of my grandfather and father is make-believe but possibly true. 

I have come to believe bones hold the earth element in our bodies. I have come to believe stones are ancestors. I have come to believe ancestors live in our bones, in the spongy nourishment of our marrow. 

This is how I come to believe that this poem about my father and his grandfather is a real occurrence. I was there in the minds of the ancestors dreaming me forward into eventual being. I recognize the earth-memory in the marrow of my body. 

It is possible that when I write poems like these, I am dreaming, and I have given my dreams a mountain to live on. To circumambulate in prayer. 

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Maroon, which can have a more general sense of being abandoned without resources, entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective marron, meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive.’ 

Fugitive: a person who is fleeing, as from prosecution, intolerable circumstances, etc. Fugitive: fleeting; transitory; elusive. 

Throughout the lands scarred by the Transatlantic slave trade, escaped enslaved people fled to the mountains to form maroon communities. One of the best-known quilombos (maroon settlements) in Brazil was Palmares (the Palm Nation), which was founded in the early 17th century throughout mountain ranges. 

Maroon communities had to be inaccessible and were located in inhospitable environments to be sustainable. 

At its height, Palmares had a population of over 30,000 free people, now called maroons, living towards a freedom that, by chain and whip, had been scarred into them as fantasy. But living it nonetheless. 

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I can’t say mountain without thinking fugitivity. Can’t think fugitivity without thinking sanctuary. Can’t think sanctuary without thinking home, rest, dream.

We are not always escaping. We are running towards as much as we are running away. We are believing, or daring to believe, or praying to believe in something we don’t quite yet, in a future we want to be true. 

What kind of humanity can hold such desperate faith? 

It must be a special being who can reach so far into possibility. It must be a mind like silk thread, supple yet strong as steel, who can imagine towards the very edges of what is known without breaking. And then to step out with the body onto a road of pure conjecture… 

What kind of humanity punishes such dreamers? 

When maroons were recaptured by slave hunters (yes, that first iteration of police), the achilles tendon would be cut, a leg amputated, a castration made public, a roasting made death. When the Salvadorean “train” of asylum-seekers reaches the U.S. border, the children are sifted from their parents to sleep wrapped in foil blankets, barbed wire, beneath gunpoint and uniformed cocks coming for them in the night. 

That summer of 2018 in the Pisgahs, I learned there is an intersection of trails somewhere in the Great Smoky Mountains where a portion of the Underground Railroad overlaps with the Trail of Tears. 

We dream routes to home. Sometimes the dreams are sorrow. The routes anguish, pushing up from our bodies, motoring one foot in front of the other on a dark road we don’t know.

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When I drive now to Tamanowas Rock, older than the Cascades, it is another election year. On the short three mile drive I pass four Trump signs and three Blue Lives Matter flags. News has just surfaced that women in ICE custody have been given nonconsensual hysterectomies, forced sterilization, and yes, the children at the border are there, still. 

My body lurches with such repetition. Is it possible that all time is a loop? How can four years have moved so much like rapid fire, yet so painstakingly slow? How can safety feel even farther away? 

I go to Tamanowas Rock Sanctuary every week, my body tense on the drive and loosening once I pass the threshold to the trailhead. 

I read of the mastodon hunters who perched its heights on lookout. I envision the dugout cedar canoes of the Coast Salish peoples tied with roots to Tamanowas during floods, waiting here safely until the waters receded. 

I dream of ceremony and healing and prayer after prayer pattering this rock like rain, shaping it just as slowly. 

This stone has stayed.

I wonder how many different kinds of humanity it has perceived in its lifetime. We come, we go, we collect and scatter like squirrels. Once, we pressed ourselves bare-skinned with barely any language against this rock, and now, we arrive in GoreTex with cellphones. 

Leaning here, I try to get as quiet and still as 43 million years. 

I sit until I hear the far thunder heart and search in my own body for something that feels the same. Some rumbling lullaby in my most profound center that lets me think maybe I am old also. Maybe I am ancient. Maybe I too have something inside me so sturdy and robust that I can say also, See? There is so much. 

And open up my hands before me.