An Excerpt From RIGHT HERE

© 2015 Peter Grudin

Mount Greylock

I. Coming Home

Now Hector could see that pastel tinge in the hills, more than a few maples glowing with their swelling red buds, willows along the streams and in the hollows flushed yellow against a ground that was still dark brown. In a few weeks hawthorn would bloom, its white blossoms clustered and looking like puffs of smoke from artillery, but the oak and the nut trees — the walnuts, the butternuts — would wait almost until June before they broke leaf. Everything was still open and bare. This was the most naked time of year for the earth. Whatever there was was visible for this moment after sleeping under the snow and before drowning in green. Hector loved this bareness, the clear views. This was the time when, from his kitchen window, he could see the vascular tracing of logging paths on Hoosic Mountain and when sight can penetrate most deeply the woods beyond his front field.

He looked forward to planting. The weather might be miserable in April, but it was a misery full of anticipation. In April he would start things from seed in his greenhouse, beets, peas– why he could start these the very next day, he realized with a rush of happiness. Towards the end of the month he would start tomatoes, peppers, cukes, and melons. He was well off. He grew things only for himself and friends with the excess sold off at a stand on the highway. Soon the trees would break leaf, the soil would be dry enough to till, and he would feel the blessing touch of the sun on his eyelids as he left the house for his fields.

Now he was about to crest the Taconics, the tires hissing on the dry pavement, shrieking on the curves. Around a last bend and he was at the summit. Around another bend as he descended there was Mount Greylock, asymmetrical, dispersed, and protean. It could be seen in thousands of forms from thousands of perspectives, stone solitary, the great monadnock in the middle of the Hoosic valley, the magnetic pole for where he was. Now he needed no compass, no computer. Hector had been looking at it all his life, this great mass of peaks assembled, touching at angles — a shape transformed almost beyond recognition when one’s point of view changes ten or fifteen degrees. It had been visible from his bedroom when he woke as a boy. He had gazed at the big mountain out the window, on summer evenings, when he read to Emily, his youngest child, or told her stories until her breath became shallow and regular, and her eyelids fell over her lovely eyes.

In the short days of December and January, the sun rose on the mountain’s east side, and just cleared it at the zenith. Whitney said that Herman Melville viewed that mountain from his writing table and from the south, where “a snow hill in the air” looked entirely different from what Hector looked at now.

When Hector was young, eagles had still bred on the mountain’s high summits. He could hear their fierce cries and see their primaries spread as they coasted down current and breeze, seeing him a hundred times more clearly than he could see them. He envied their flights, their eyes. He wished for the vision of place in their places.

He slowed, looking down into the valley. There, on the left a glimpse of Pine Cobble, another Taconic hill, and behind it, about 15 miles away, where the river twisted northward, was his house. Fifteen miles now. He wished he could bend his gaze around that mountain to see it.

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