What the Mountain Gave Me

For my student Morgan Harrington, on the Sixth Anniversary of her Brutal Murder at Age 20

I know who you are, old Grandfather Mountain.
You are no hibernator, you massive, still composer. You've slept not a wink up here since time birthed your stony form.
Eons ago, your earthen heart began its unbeaten metronome, and you have now forever conducted the plummeting constellations sounding down the dark violin of space.
At your age, you must know how time and death operate.
I return again from hundreds of miles away, to look at you, to breathe you, to try to catch the evanescence of the right questions you raise.
Blunt evergreens serrate you. They zig-zag your contours, black-green shark fins cutting your ocean of deciduous colors.
I think you do not see from your billion-year-old feldspar eyes.
Nor do you count or name your trees.
But your intelligence is not blind.
You are not without awareness of what climbs upon you. I can feel you feel your company.
Do you accept that we briefly belong?
I have noticed the struggle of hesitant souls gazing up at you from the parking lot, willing their eyes to break the habits of their own dull offices, their creative circuitry dried like stains in the throats of discarded styrofoam cups.
On your steep trails and bolted ladders, I have smelled vinegar men with ashtray fingers, their bullish calves bulging and sweaty, their uncertain wedding rings sliding. Against your silence, they all talk as big as mountains, though nervously, because in their descending hearts each blustery man must know that he has always fit into a silver thimble of quick time, conquering nothing.
Can they see themselves climbing, these little gargoyles, sporting mountaineering regalia?
Do they hear in the thuds of their stiff boots the baffle of inconsequence?
Standing in my own boots, atop you somewhere, I am trying to see you. I see:
Your hair is balsam.
Your liquor is fog.
Your musk is clean.
I think you are never perturbed.
Your ego has never existed.
And after a spell of quiet in our stillness together, yours and mine, there! I can just make out the shape of a question, enveloped in fast cloud.
Here is the question as well as I can see.
When a leaf falls, when one particular leaf floats--this way and that way, see-sawing down, finally down from the air, to land upon you, to remain on your ground--
motionless as a murdered girl--
as each leaf will, in Autumn--save the rare ones, clinging impossibly: the canoe-shaped mountain ashes' leaves, Pyrus americana, with their crown of fire-berries; or the safe green balsam needles attached by stubborn turpentine sap; or the drooped leather rhododendrons'--when one leaf does hit the ground, do you feel the eyelash weight of its dead end?
We do feel ours, who have fallen in Autumn.
I'm thinking about what you are, old mountain.
You are not just grounded. You are the ground.
Would you tell us, Grandfather:
If we knew our ground, as you do, then we could, more like you, mourn the leaves less as fallen--
and, instead, know them more as becoming?
I have studied the answer you gave Walt Whitman, about leaves, and lives finished:
"Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged.
Missing me one place, search another.
I stop someplace
waiting for you."
But you see, old Grandfather: the frightened, the exhausted, and the heartbroken among us will all complain together that a fallen leaf can not just decompose and its leaf litter then become a girl, not in any time pitched to human scale.
And never the same girl.
Never again Morgan.
No theory helps.
The word reincarnation does not help.
So show me something moving.
I stare at my old friend, the Grandfather of my childhood.
The bitter quinine sways.
Something moves.
And suddenly, within seconds:
A scarlet tanager flies from the plants.
An indigo bunting crosses its path.
A goldfinch speeds in from the other direction.
This triple-crown of primary colors feels choreographed--a flying masterpiece presented just for this instant--a startling performance--gone in a heartbeat.
Gone!
So will any bird flight after this ever be as beautiful?
Will any convergence ever be as perfect?
These are my disappointments, as I grab at the air, clutching too late to catch the wavering tips of all the colored birds' paths, not a feather of insight gained.
The mountain waits for me to see.
But I must go. Now it is time to go.
And I am frustrated.
I think: I make these appointments with the mountain, I come all this way, and I expect my results.
I want results now.
I want this to be a conversation.
I want results before I have to leave.
My heart argues with the mountain as I begin the long hike down: Come on! I am earnest! Give me what I want. Intercede for God. I need answers.
I have big questions.
I want to know:
Did Morgan matter?
Is she somewhere?
Is beauty a sign of her?
Can she see us?
Is everything that was Morgan lost?
Are we, after all, are we all only dust?
And the meta-question about questions:
Why does no one answer?
I feel jilted.
But Grandfather Mountain has been answering me since before I was born, and continues to answer as I descend, as I shift to low gear, as I follow the hairpin turns down the lower part of the mountain, as I drive away, back to my room in Blowing Rock, as I drive hundreds of miles home to Blacksburg, as I eat and work and sleep and wake, throughout the days and weeks that follow and pass after my visit.
Shhhhhh.
As people silently pray, mountains silently answer.
See if you can sense a phrase or two with me.
They are delivered silently and slowly. They are streaming slowly toward us right now.
Listen.
If you listen, you will begin to hear your memories, but try to understand: you are not selecting them.
You are not recalling the past.
The past has been recalling you.
They are recalling you.
She is recalling you.
You thought you originated the memories.
They have been your answers all along.
Yes! I matter! I am here!
When you are with me, I am with you.
You have for so long been seeing the order all wrong, Grandfather has been trying to say.
What you have loved will always find you.
Will come back to you from any distance.
Will only keep returning.
You've thought you needed to search.
You've always already been found.
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On this Saturday, October 17th, please remember Morgan Dana Harrington, her family, friends, and all those who love and miss her: the daughter whose mother, Gil Harrington, describes as having been "chock-a-block with potential."
Morgan was murdered on October 17, 2009. She was 20 years old.
Convicted rapist and attempted murderer Jesse Matthew has been charged with First Degree Murder in Morgan's case. He also faces a Capital Murder charge in the death of the beautiful Hannah Graham, with Hannah's trial to begin in July, 2016.
Morgan's long-awaited trial is set to begin October 24, 2016.
Remember and celebrate beautiful Morgan through your own positive conduct and by knowing her legacy.

Jane Lillian Vance
Vice President, Help Save the Next Girl, and
Morgan Harrington's professor in the last Spring of her life