Chapter 12 What the Mountains See
On the twenty-third day, she climbed to the high pasture.
This was not on the plan. She had been planning to spend the morning on the accounts — the third-week review, the assessment of what the month had cost against what she had projected, the updated forecast for the remaining weeks before she would need either income or a different plan.
The accounts were important and the climbing was not on the plan.
But it was a clear morning, the kind that Colorado occasionally produced in December as though demonstrating what it could do when it chose, the sky a specific, vivid blue and the mountains doing their full version, every peak visible and every peak doing exactly what it did in that light, which was: be entirely itself without apology.
She put on her heaviest coat and her boots and she climbed.
The high pasture was the upper section of her land, the section that ran up toward the timber line, that James had said was not practical for grazing in the current management plan but that her uncle had sometimes used in high summer.
She had not been up there. She had been learning the parts of the land that were immediately relevant and had not yet gotten to the parts that were relevant only in theory.
It took twenty minutes to reach it. Twenty minutes of her own breath and the crunch of snow underfoot and the silence that was not really silence but the sound of the absence of human noise, which was different and which she had never, in seven years of Kansas City and three years of St. Louis, experienced.
The high pasture was, when she reached it, extraordinary.
Not dramatically extraordinary — not the kind of extraordinary that required exclamation and gesture.
Quietly. The pasture was a cleared area on the shoulder of the hill, ringed by the dark timber that ran up toward the peaks, and from it you could see the whole valley: the creek threading south, the Caldwell place clearly visible to the north, the Breck property adjacent to hers on the west, the road to Pinecrest running past the Granger land.
The whole of the community laid out below like a map of itself, specific and real.
She stood in the high pasture in the December morning and looked at the valley and thought about what it was that she was looking at.
She was looking at the place she had decided to stay in.
From up here, she could see the shape of it — the geographical logic of it, why the creek ran where it ran and why the properties were arranged as they were and where the weather came from and where it went.
From down in the valley you were in the valley and you could see the parts you were adjacent to. From up here you could see the whole.
She could see the Vance place from here.
She could see the house and the barn and the south pasture that was going to have cattle on it in the spring and the north section where the heifer had come through the fence.
She could see the apple tree, bare now, at the corner of the kitchen garden, smaller from this distance but unmistakably there.
She thought about what it meant to own something.
She had been doing the accounting and the planning and the fence learning and the morning routines and the progressive building of a life in a new place, and in the doing of all of it she had not yet stopped to look at the whole of it. She was looking at it now.
It was real. The land was real and the house was real and the work was real, and the man who was helping her understand all of it was real, and the community that had been absorbing her with the specific warmth of a community that had decided she was one of them was real.
She thought: I am going to be here in June.
I am going to be here when the columbine blooms at the creek bend, which Mrs. Hobart had told her about at the Sunday lunch.
I am going to be here when the apple tree flowers in the spring and when it fruits in the fall and when the winter comes again and I know more about managing through it.
She thought: I am going to be here.
This was the feeling under the apple tree, restated from twenty feet higher and three weeks further in. The same feeling, confirmed by evidence.
She stood in the high pasture until the cold told her it was time to go back down, and then she went back down, and the accounts were waiting, and she did them, and the afternoon was good work and the evening was the stove and the notebook, and the day was exactly what a day should be.
* * *
James was at the property the following morning and she told him about the high pasture.
"I know the spot," he said. "Harold called it the lookout. He went up there in the evenings sometimes. Said it helped him think."
"It helped me think," she said.
"What were you thinking about?" he said.
She considered how much to say. She settled on: "About what I'm here for. The whole version of it, not just the practical parts."
He looked at his coffee. "The practical parts are considerable," he said.
"They are," she said. "But they're not the whole of it."
He looked at her with the quality she had identified over three weeks as: paying the full attention. Not the professional assessment quality, which was also full attention but with a specific purpose. The full attention without a specific purpose, the kind that was simply about the person.
"No," he said. "They're not."
They were quiet for a moment. The kitchen had the quality it had in the mornings when nothing was required of it except to be the place the conversation happened.
"James," she said.
"Yes."
"Why did you decide to work my uncle's land?" she said. "Not the arrangement version — I know the arrangement. The decision version. What made you agree?"
He was quiet for a moment. The thinking kind.
"Harold asked," he said. "He was a man whose asking meant something.
When he asked, you said yes because the asking was serious and because he would have done the same for you.
" He paused. "And the land was good. Working good land is — satisfying.
In the way that doing the right thing well is satisfying. "
She thought about this. "You could have just said the arrangement," she said.
"You asked for the decision," he said.
"Yes," she said. "I did. Thank you."
He drank his coffee. "Holly," he said.
"Yes."
"Why did you decide to stay?" he said. "Not the apple tree version. The decision version."
She looked at the mountains through the kitchen window. They were being the mountains, which was what they were always doing.
"Because I am tired of being adequate in the wrong place," she said.
"I have been adequate in several places and I have been good at the work in those places and it has not been enough.
It has not been right." She paused. "This is different.
This feels like the right place, and the right place is worth the difficulty, and the difficulty is real and present and I am not pretending otherwise, but it is the difficulty of a thing that is right rather than the smoothness of a thing that is wrong, and I choose the first."
He looked at her. The mountains were in the window behind her.
"That," he said, "is the decision version."
"Yes," she said.
"Harold would have understood it," he said.
"I think he did," she said. "I think that's why he planted the apple tree in his first year. He understood that the right place was worth putting the work in."
James looked at his hands around the coffee cup. "Yes," he said. "I think that's exactly right."