. He forgets the concept, he says to himself I’m just going to step down to that lake there, and whoops, over the edge he goes.”
“Nah,” Brian says. “It doesn’t work that way. Concepts don’t need language.”
“What?” Peter cries. “Concepts don’t need language? Are you kidding? Man I thought Joe was the crazy one around here.”
“No seriously,” Brian says, shifting rapidly from his usual reserve to interested animation. “Sensory input is already a thought, and the way we field it is conceptual. Enough to keep you from walking off cliffs anyway.” Despite this assertion he looks over his shoulder again. There stands Joe nodding as if in agreement with him.
“Yes, language is a contact lens,” Joe says.
Peter and Brian look at each other.
“A contact lens at the back of the eyeball. Color filters into this lens, which is made of nameglass, and its reflected to the correct corner of the brain, tree comer or rock corner.”
Peter and Brian chew that one over.
“So you lose your contact lenses?” Brian ventures.
“Yeah!” Joe looks at him with an appreciative glance. “Sort of.”
“So what’s in your mind then?”
Joe shrugs. “I wish I knew.” After a while, struggling for expression: “I feel things. I feel that something’s not right. Maybe I have another language then, but I’m not sure. Nothing looks right, it’s all just… color. The names are gone. You know?”
Brian shakes his head, involuntarily grinning.
“Hmm,” Peter says. “It sounds like you might have some trouble getting your driver’s license renewed.” All three of them laugh.
Brian stands, stuffs plastic bags into his pack. “Ready for some ridge running?” he says to the other two.
“Wait a second,” Peter says. “we just got here. Why don’t you kick back for a while? This pass is supposed to be the high point of the trip, and we’ve only been here half an hour.”
“Longer than that,” says Brian.
“Not tong enough. I’m tired!”
“We’ve only hiked about four miles today,” Brian replies impatiently. “All of us worked equally hard. Now we can walk down a ridge all afternoon, it’ll be great!”
Peter sucks air between his teeth, holds it in, decides not to speak. He begins jamming bags into his pack.
They stand ready to leave the pass, packs and snowshoes on their backs. Brian makes a final adjustment to his belt—Pete looks up the spine they are about to ascend—Joe stares down at the huge bowl of rock and snow to the west. Afternoon sun glares. The shadow of a cloud hurries across the cirque toward them, jumps up the west side of the pass and they are in it, for a moment.
“Look!” Joe cries. He points at the south wall of the pass. Brian and Pete look—A flush of brown. A pair of horns, blur of legs, the distant
clacks
of rock falling.
“Mountain goat!” says Brian. “Wow!” He hurries across the saddle of the pass to the south spine, looking up frequently. “There it is again! Come on!”
Joe and Pete hurry alter him. “You guys will never catch that thing,” says Peter.
The south wall is faulted and boulderish, and they zig and zag from one small shelf of snow to the next. They grab outcroppings and stick fists in cracks, and strain to push themselves up steps that are waist-high. The wind peels across the spine of the wall and keeps them cool. They breathe in gasps, stop frequently. Brian pulls ahead, Peter falls behind. Brian and Joe call to each other about the goat.
Brian and Joe top the spine, scramble up the decreasing slope. The ridge edge—a hump of shattered rock, twenty or twenty-five feet wide, like a high road—is nearly level, but still rises enough to block their view south. They hurry up to the point where the ridge levels, and suddenly they can see south for miles.
They stop to look. The range rises and falls in even swoops to a tall peak. Beyond the peak it drops abruptly and rises again, up and down and up, culminating in a huge knot of black peaks. To the east the steep snowy slope drops to the valley paralleling the range. To the west a series of spurs and cirques alternate, making a broken desert of rock and snow.
The range cuts down the middle of it all, high above everything else that can be seen. Joe taps his boot on solid rock. “Fossil backbone, primeval earth being,” he says.
“I think I still see that goat,” says Brian, pointing. “Where’s Peter?”
Peter appears, face haggard. He stumbles on a rock, steps quickly to keep his balance. When he reaches Brian and Joe he lets his pack thump to the ground.
“This is ridiculous,” he says. “I have to rest.”
“We can’t exactly camp here,” Brian says sarcastically, and gestures at the jumble of rock they are sitting on.
“I don’t care,” Peter says, and sits down.
“We’ve only been hiking an hour since lunch,” Brian objects. “and we’re trying to close in on that goat!”
“Tired,” Peter says. “I have to rest.”
“You get tired pretty fast these days!”
An angry silence.
Joe says in a mild voice. “You guys sure are bitching at each other a lot.”
A long silence. Brian and Peter look in different directions.
Joe points down at the first dip in the ridge, where there is a small flat of granite slabs and corners filled with sand. “Why don’t we camp there? Brian and I can drop our packs and go on up the ridge for a walk, Pete can rest and maybe start a fire later. If you can find wood.”
Brian and Pete both agree to the plan, and they descend to the saddle campsite.
Two men ridge running. They make swift progress up the smooth rise, along the jumbled road at the top of the range. The bare rock they cross is smashed into fragments, splintered by ice and lightning. Breaking out of the blackish granite are knobs of tan rock, crushed into concentric rings of shards. They marvel at boulders which look like they have sat on the range since it began to rise. They jump from rock to rock, flexing freed shoulders. Brian points ahead and calls out when he sees the goat. “Do you see it?”
“Sure do,” Joe says, but without looking up. Brian notices this and snorts disgustedly.
Shadows of the range darken the valley to the east. Joe hops from foothold to foothold, babbling at Brian all the while from several yards behind him. “Name it, name it. You name it. Naammme. What an idea. I‘ve got three blisters on my feet. I named the one on the left heel Amos.” Pause to climb a shoulder-high slab of granite. “I named the one on the right heel Crouch. Then I’ve got one on the front of my right ankle, and I named that one Achilles. That way when I feel it it’s not like pain, it’s like a little joke. Twinges in my heel”—panting so he can talk—“are little hellos, hellos with every step. Amos here, hi, Joe; Crouch here, hi, Joe. It’s amazing. The way I feel I probably don’t need boots at all. I should take them off!”
“You’d probably better keep them on,” Brian says seriously.
Joe grins.
The incline becomes steeper and the edge of the ridge narrows. They slow down, step more carefully. The shattered rock gives way to great faulted blocks of solid mountain. They find themselves straddling the ridge on all fours, left feet on the east slope and right feet on the west. Both sides drop sharply away, especially the west. Sun gilds this steeper slope. Joe runs his hand down the edge of the range.
The ridge widens out, and they can walk again. The rock is shattered, all brittle plated angular splinters, covered with lichen. “Great granite,” Joe says.
“This is actually diorite,” Brian says. “Diorite or gabbro. Made of feldspar and darker stuff.”
“Oh, don’t give me that,” Joe says. “I’m doing well just to remember granite. Besides, this stuff has been granite for a lot longer than geologists have been naming things. They can’t go messing with a name like that.” Still, he looks more closely at the rock. “Gabbro, gabbro… sounds like one of my words.”