by Eric Miller
1.
On occasion, a long epoch of concord with a favouring breeze may seem to grace us: inspiration in the sense that birds must relish it. What a divine—almost avian—thing it was for us, the hotel kitchen staff, to pack cheesecake, kiwifruit and champagne into our rucksacks, to tighten the straps that secured these dainties on our shoulders, and to climb right from the back exit with its tubs of lard to the stark summit of a Rocky Mountain in Alberta.
We felt we flew or, to speak more precisely, scudded upward. I wore shorts and a clean undershirt and sneakers with no socks, my colleagues wore nothing more substantial, and we scaled the steep flank of the darkling peak as though, like magpies, we half hopped, half sailed, never shaking off an appearance of indolence in spite of the winged celerity of our ascent. We might have kicked altitude away beneath our flexing feet, bubbling giddily like divers whom ebullience, in shimmering snorts of submerged laughter, expedites to the water’s surface.
After night fell, a thunderstorm broke out well below us in the valley. We were dry. We watched the lightning flash and fret; it resembled the dome and tassels of a jellyfish aglow in a cove. The spectacle of electrical unrest promoted our repose. When one couple began to thrash in a single sleeping bag, they rejoiced us, intimately clustered on that narrow summit, with the audible excess of their droll yet solemn ecstasy. The sounds they made as they scaled in duet the scarp of their pleasure amounted to musical improvisation, disclosure rather than presumption of form: a gasping flag or panting plume to mark—to augment—the height of the mountain and our happiness. Making instruments of each other, musicians of each other, they performed for and they warmed us. Sonorous fire! Read more »