Green Peace
February 8, 2010
I awoke one Sabbath with the urge to get high, mountain high. I had just changed jobs and my new responsibilities pressed in on me like a crowd in an elevator.
An image jutted through my mind. It levered me out of bed: I saw myself in an alpine forest, dewdrops on morels, sunbeams on water, me sniffing mountain air so fresh it seared my nostrils like a nip of wasabi. I dressed, blinking, squinting. My limbs moved unconsciously toward the car.
It wasn’t long before I found myself on a wooded trail deep in the Cascades without remembering quite how I got there. Soft needles crunched under my feet and a breeze tugged at the mossy beards of the pines. I was alone, except for my iPod, and as I trotted past a huge obsidian flow I heard the first notes of Mozart’s Symphony #40 tinkling in my ears. I smiled. The strings dipped and sawed and eventually knifed their way through a melody that was clearly going someplace, as I was.
Ninety minutes later, I arrived, standing on the banks of Green Lakes: three splashes of verdant color on a saucer of cinder and ash. Two contradictory peaks rose to either side. They glared at each other: on the left, a voluptuous white giantess; on the right, a dwarf of black spires and fangs. I could imagine them staring each other down, stony arms folded and smoldering for millennia.
I looked away.
The water of the lakes was translucent, not the tea-green milk of glaciers, but true emerald–glassy, deep, and clear. I tore off my cloths and dove in, pleased to have the crystal shatter beneath me and cut me like a knife, stopping my heart until I saw stars.
The breath left me in silver bubbles and I sank,
flapping lazily like an old coat,
into darker and darker regions of green.
Far above me,
the surface flickered like a candle,
and went out.
My lungs jerked,
I was tempted to let the icy juices invade them
and immobilize me forever,
embalmed in a jade sea,
my heart thumping once every thousand years,
to wake in some future time,
with no name and no responsibilities.
But gradually the deep gave me up,
the light grew stronger, almost warm,
and suddenly my head was whistling
with the in-rush of thin air.
With a hiss and bellow, I surfaced. My cryogenic fantasy was over. There would be no cold fugue to rescue me from life, no long winter sleep with the promise of spring, only refreshment, having been in the grasp of eternity and then released.
I swam to shore, steaming in the sunlight, and looked back at my freckling path, where the sun laid golden coins across the water. I shivered to a thrill deep under my gooseflesh.
True to their promise, the mountains had cleared my head, but like a siren song they had stirred something else–desire–a pull and tug that was strangely familiar, but always new. I had the impression I was being wooed. Like C.S. Lewis, I felt surprised by something that could only be described as joy, the pang of it going deep into my chest, beckoning me towards something, someone, bigger and grander and older than myself. The invitation lingered, rippling there on the water. “Plunge again”, it said, “and again and again and again.”
The surface returned to calm. In the aqueous mirror I saw a fleet of anvil clouds and beyond them, or below them, the deepest sky. I stood there for a moment, dizzy and disoriented, looking down at the brink of heaven, with all of Newton’s laws pulling me headlong into a new and fair country. And the voice said, “Plunge again”.
And I plunged. And it has made all the difference.
If you enjoyed this post, be sure to read the rest from this author. Marc is a local writer, musician, and physician. He is a regular contributor to ConneXions and has written reviews for Spectrum: Adventist Forum. He loves words and music, windsurfing, and going on adventures with Janine and the kids.(Read more from this author) 
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