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Show 156. celebration. As Kerouac describes it, I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that flash I realized it's impossible to fall off mountains you fool . . . Muir had his own version of this dance on the mountain, and his dance suggests his trust in the mountains, in the living wholeness of the rocks. If for a moment you are inclined to regard these taluses as mere draggled, chaotic dumps, climb to the top of one of them, and run down without any haggling, puttering hesitation, boldly jumping from boulder to boulder with even speed. You will then find your feet playing a tune, and quickly discover the music and poetry of these magnificient rock piles - a fine lesson; and all Nature's wildness tells the same story . . . With the vision of living rock comes trust, and also responsibility. I have an anthropological friend who says he knows a Navajo who apologizes to the rocks before he steps into the cab of the bulldozer he operates at a coal mine in northern Arizona. My friend says he cannot personally understand this. I answer him that he has not listened long enough or deeply enough to the wind that blows through the pinon pines, the wind which once blew through the rocks at Betatakin. |