​  The way to Black Peak slips over a heathery saddle at 6200 feet, where the mountain comes into view at the end of a long, tiered valley.

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     Beyond the saddle, the ruins of Corteo Peak create the kind of sprawling boulder field that mountaineers dread, a lottery for turned ankles and snapped tibias. Dread was perhaps what put Sa’id a hundred yards ahead of me, getting it over with as fast as possible. A boulder field breaks a climb into jarring leaps and awkward pivots, necessitating a thousand sudden decisions, but I found it a pleasant enough improvisation. The soles of my feet read the angles, steering my eyes to the next precarious perch. If I mistook the rock’s tilt or it tipped me off in an unmeant direction, I countered with a core twist or tossed my head. Once, the crampon shelf on the back of my boot got stuck in a crevice, trapping me until I backed up. More than once I stepped onto a high rock with too much force, so that instead of teetering there long enough to coordinate the next move, I toppled into a hole beyond. In the course of these negotiations I found myself imagining the piano keyboard as a kind of boulder field.

 

      For some weeks I had been practicing the Enescu third sonata and a Rachmaninov etude-tableau. Away from the piano, I would catch my fingers persisting in near-imaginary movements, as if the work at the keyboard had cued a background process, and next day I would find certain obstacles dissolved as if by magic. Perhaps such subliminal rehearsing on the way to Black Peak led to an analogy that seemed at first absurd. A piano is all elegant symmetry, while a boulder field is where geometry goes to die. No two of these rocks were shaped or sized alike, and they had come to rest at accidental angles, leaning upon each other for a moment, incalculably unstable. This one was a discus, that one a sickle moon; here were sarcophagi and love seats, melted shotputs and half-eaten biscuits all in a heap. The mountain’s procedures had minted a million senseless facts. And even the Enescu sonata, with its mutating tunes and dissolving tonalities, makes enough sense eventually to be memorized, whereas the mind is no more capable of remembering so much randomly piled rock than the body is of carrying it home.

     But to be fair, I thought, if a boulder field were one’s keyboard, or perhaps rather, score, there would be no need to memorize the entire heap of notes, but only to learn a route across it: some sequence of leaps, side-steps and grapples that would bring one to the other side, much as one staggers across Rachmaninov’s terrain, and perhaps with similar dread. The hands make fine Swiss army knives for classic human challenges like opening jars and pulling triggers and clinging to a cliff face but aren’t meant for the naïve and linear piano. A tune that rises from thumb to pinky on the right hand runs pinky-to-thumb on its sinister partner, as if one hand had been built upside down. Each finger has a different length and strength: the middle finger jams the fallboard while the pinky barely reaches the white keys. Preposterously strong, the thumb must be constantly shushed, while the ring finger is like a delighted but wobbling toddler. As the arms carry this odd assortment of characters into battle, the pianist leans like a cyclist taking a corner to avoid the slant arm that would pull the pinky off the keys or keep the thumb from crossing under.

      Still, considering that pianos were not inevitable, and neither were these bodies, and that music must be made on other inhabited worlds with whatever is at hand, perhaps it wasn’t silly to imagine music played on a boulder field. But to hopscotch across it would be just the start. Will there be legato? Some notes should be caressed and others crushed; some hopped off of while others are brushed into glissando. Two notes can hardly be called a chord and thus four legs or even twelve would be desirable. Of course, music played by giant centipedes on boulders might evolve parameters that differ from our own, but would that other world’s musicians persist in tedious enough rehearsals? Backing up to repeat a set of jumps, revising the fingering to work in speed, layering rubato and dynamics until the passage achieves its full velocity, clarity and emotion? Or by then would audience and performer alike have begun to feel it would be enough to get across the boulder field and reach the lakes and peak beyond?

 

     From Lewis Lake we booted up beside waterfalls to a high tarn with a scatter of larch trees and brush. Snow-covered scree led to another saddle, and from there we caught the ridge as far as a flat spot. With its one-eighty view and a prayer rug of grass, it would have made a fine place to contemplate life’s questions, but our purpose was to tag the summit. We circled the summit block, chose a crack, toed ledges, tested holds, inch-wormed up a chimney.

     The summit was rowboat sized. The south face was a lovers’ leap; looking north, we could trace our route over the saddle and up the long, tiered valley. What sprawled away in every direction seemed less a range than a sea of mountains, each peak a frozen whitecap. But altitude concealed the tedious irregularities we had endured on foot and lent the landscape the reassuring coherence of an overview.

‘From here,’ I observed, ‘that boulder field looks almost reasonable.’

‘Which we know it’s not,’ said my exasperated friend.

     The way down went faster. We knew the chimney and the ledges now, remembered loose and stable patches in the scree. The scene with its larches and lake had smudged its way into our neurons. Already it all seemed less vivid and eventful, and thus faster by the clock that measures density of information. Sa’id groaned at meeting his nemesis again, but even the boulder field proved tamer, as in a second read-through.

By now I sensed that other denominator of time: leg muscles tiring; irritated knees; the wish to be done already. Safely past the decaying flank of Corteo and onto the saddle’s friendly, heathery soil, Sa’id reached into his pack and pulled out earbuds. ‘Sorry,’ he said, smiling as he stuffed them into his ears. ‘Gypsy Kings.’ With music as our analgesic, we went down through fir and tamarack in the dark.

 

 

     The sun was well up when we crawled out of the tent and strolled up Thunder Creek, a torrent of turquoise glacier-melt guarded by dense and malicious weeds. Perhaps their malice, or the fresh scent of cedar, or glimpses of the Neve Glacier in rocky arms far above us led Sa’id to volunteer that he thought the world had been created for a purpose and, as the Qur’an described, in seven days. A health care analyst, my friend took a scientific approach to wilderness outings, plotting miles and weighing rations, only to give away his cornucopia and surprise me with romantic confessions.

A day, of course, was metaphor. But what was the creator’s purpose?

‘Love,’ answered Sa’id.

     This morning we were purposing a swim. A mile upstream we spotted a sandy margin and fought our way through devil’s club to the stream’s edge. Sa’id threw himself into the current and came up hooting, then swam a dozen strokes to a rock island. He sat glistening in the sun like a young god while I eased myself in. Thigh-deep, I retreated to the safety of the bank and stood there, ankles aching. On second attempt I waded farther out, leaning upstream against the powerful current. With practiced self-deception, I stalked to the riverbank again, then whirled and threw myself in. I swam to Sa’id’s boulder and crawled up beside him.

‘That’s heart attack temperature,’ I panted.

‘Takes away the pain,’ he said. ‘I feel like a new man.’

‘You were already newer than me.’

‘That boulder field, my god,’ said Sa’id. ‘If I never have to cross that again, it’ll be too soon.’

Sleep had done its background magic and now cold water numbed our tendons and brightened up the mind’s rooms. I caught Rachmaninov quivering through my hands.

‘If way back when,’ I said, ‘I’d thought of my hands as athletes rather than poets, I might have stayed out of pain.’

‘The tendinitis, you mean.’

‘And the heartache,’ I said. ‘For twenty years I didn’t play.’

‘One day your pain will become your cure.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Rumi,’ said Sa’id.

     The river thundered around us, silt blue with dissolving boulders. Some aches were being forgotten by the creator’s design while others became our tissue. I heard out my friend’s latest romantic woes before we lapsed into companionable silence. There was something delightfully long about these moments that brought no news and were in no hurry to endure. One wrist vein pulsed andante. A pair of clouds drifted overhead as if shadowing thoughts. From time to time a variation emerged in the river’s roar or the way it struck the eardrum.