High On the Mountain Again By Michael Capuzzo
Connecting with old friends without a phone or e-mail address can be hard. But it’s always worth the time.
In the early winter last year, I drove up the mountain the first time, with the creek, Slate Run, rising in the sharply angling woods along the road until I turned left and the creek fell off right out of sight in the trees. Near the top of the mountain in the winter you could feel the light coming like you sense the air of the ocean calling you near the shore. But now in summer the plateau at the top was dark and choked with green and closed in on us in the car and we felt claustrophobic. It was Sunday morning but it felt like dusk and the mountain was deserted except for bears and other animals unseen and Bob and Dotty Webber, we hoped. We hoped they were home.
Do you have a friend you can’t e-mail or even pick up the telephone and call to see if it’s a good time to visit? You can write a letter to the Webbers to arrange a visit, and remember what it used to be like to write letters, with a little mystery, and the pleasure of waiting.
If there’s anything in this part of the world you can wait on and be sure of, it’s Bob Webber. In the winter, in his 70s and as lean and solid as the hardwood canes he carves, he hikes once a week down the ice-coated sheet of the mountain down into Wolf’s General Store and Slate Run Tackle Shop to get the mail. He catches up with Tom Finkbiner, the owner of the general store and good friend for many years. For these men, catching up is telling stories, not rushed lines but long stories, the good ones, and there’s always laughter. But Tom has a busy general store to run with his wife, and Bob has a wife on the top of the mountain and a whole world to create up there every day so he puts the mail in his knapsack and walks out of the store and out across Slate Run and climbs up on the ice. In the winter the roads are impassable and there’s no other way to do it.
The lob cabin at the top of the mountain Bob and Dotty built is a honey, with tiny windows like a cottage in an old story and a green metal roof. The outhouse is a fine one, decorated inside with an old colored print of an Indian Green Corn Dance. The water is pure and clean, and the Webbers’ fetch what they drink from a mountain spring they reach on skis in deep winter with a wood pole over Bob’s shoulders balancing plastic gallon jugs. Food comes from the garden, a beauty that goes on forever with matching views, from Bob’s rifle, and also from the supermarket Tuesdays and Thursdays – they’re not out to make any point about all this, it’s just life for them and they love it. “Our philosophy is we live to live,” Bob said, putting to rest as far as I can see several centuries of different ways to put it, from Plato on.
The north wind provides fine refrigeration, keeping the butter hard and the meat frozen in its clean new galvanized can raised on rocks. The light is lovely, and the light there comes from the sun over the mountains, and the best place is to stand at The View, as Bob calls it, where you can glimpse all the hills of Tioga County, the valley at Cedar Run and Blackwell and Bloss Mountain and all the rest, clear up to the county line in a single glance. Bob has a story for each hill, some of it history, some about the trails he carved up each one as a state forester and on his own. He still carves trails through the woods. The other light is the kerosene lamp on the small wooden table in the front room with the old black stove and the woodsman’s print on the smoke-darkened walls and the cats snoozing in boxes. The lamp sizzles on and Dotty Webber, just beautiful with snow-white hair and eyes so summer-creek blue you figure you had to come this far to see them, reads Emily Dickinson and the Bible and other favorites as the woods settle into night. Bob listens to the radio, he gets stations from Mars and Venus up there, so he knows more about the world than the rest of us, and he’s glad to be up on the mountain with his wife, sipping green tea in the dark. Dotty plays the piano. They cook with saffron out of the garden. Bob tells grand stories and boy can he sing.
Late night, he shuts the door against the bears who mark his trees (they have some disagreement over who owns this land), shuts out the bears and all the rest. In the halo of the lamp the pen scratches on paper, and he or Dotty write back, and says, yes, that would be a fine time to visit, we’ll be here. After I wrote about them in January, letters came flooding in from the Williamson School, Bob and Dotty went down to visit the school, and the students to prepare for them sat in the dark in the classroom sipping green tea. On Sunday morning my wife and I drove down the darkened green path through the woods, the mystery and the pleasure something like waiting on a letter though we hadn’t written one, and were surprised and delighted to find them home, at their “home on the rim.” We talked and looked at The View and told stories, and Bob got warmed up and told grand stories and he sang. |
