Among the dozen or so courses I taught in my
career at Mount St. Mary’s, botany was among the ones I
enjoyed most. Teaching it was a special challenge, because
most of the students didn’t think it would be relevant to
their careers, and they had their minds made up beforehand
that they weren’t going to like it. So in addition to
showing them how knowledge of plants was important, one of
my goals was to get them to enjoy it by the end of the
semester. I judged that I was achieving this goal when
graduates came back years later; uniformly, they remembered
the field trips at the end of the course as a favorite
experience.
One of those trips was a walk of about a
mile to Indian Lookout, a rock outcrop at an altitude of
about 1200 feet on the north side of College Mountain.
Walking through the forest on the way up, we could see
examples of most of the major groups of plants that we had
covered in the semester and make observations about their
ecological relationships. At the Lookout we could rest a
bit, with the town of Emmitsburg spread out before us and
the Gettysburg battlefield visible in the distance; we could
talk about the legends of students being disciplined for
skipping classes to go up there and watch the battle in
1863, and the changes in the forest since then. Over the 41
years that I taught the course, I was able to observe those
changes first-hand as the forest underwent succession to
recover from lumbering, the chestnut blight, invasion by
gypsy moths, and occasional fires.
In the early years, if the class was large I
often divided it into two lab sections and made two trips up
the mountain in one afternoon, but as time passed I found it
was prudent to schedule them on two different days. After I
retired the trips became less frequent; grandchildren
enjoyed going up there for a picnic when they were small,
but in recent years those occasions became rare. Then, this
spring I was asked to teach botany as a tutorial for one
student who had not been able to get it in his regular
schedule, and early in May I found myself trudging up the
trail again.
The mountain is a lot steeper now, and the
walk took an hour longer than it did 40 years ago. My
student was doing a research project with another professor
near the peak of the mountain, Carrick Knob, which is half a
mile west of Indian Lookout and some 400 feet higher. He was
studying how the forest grows back after the mature trees
have been killed by gypsy moths, and he needed help in
identifying some of the plants in his research plots. So we
spent a couple of pleasant hours clambering about over logs
and rocks, recording the various weeds, briars, and tree
seedlings that spring up when a formerly shaded forest floor
is exposed to sunlight. And then we sat down at the summit
and let our minds wander.
Sitting on a mountain is a fantastical
experience. I can never do it without thinking about how
both the mountain and I came to be, and I think I understand
the mountain better than myself. The rock itself was formed
at the bottom of some unknown sea 500 million years ago; it
began to be lifted up at the end of the Coal Age by forces
like those now active on the west coast, and geologists tell
us it once rivaled the Rockies in height. Erosion began even
while it was still growing, and eventually wore it down to
its present level. Rain and wind still remove the soil from
the highest places, so our seat on Carrick Knob was bare
rock; slightly below us there was some soil, but it was too
thin to hold much water, so the trees were stunted and we
could see over them. Since it was a fine day, we were able
to see the mesa-like form of Sugarloaf, rising from the
foothills over 30 miles to the south. Closer at hand we
could see patches of forest that looked like paintings done
by the Hudson River School of artists; but just beside them
were patches of tree skeletons killed by the gypsy moth
invasion. The juxtaposition of natural beauty and spreading
ruin seemed like a metaphor for the condition of the world
today. If you ever wanted to know how Moses must have felt
when he was allowed to go up and look at the Promised Land,
knowing that he would never actually get there, or how
General Jan Smuts felt as he delivered his speech to
dedicate a memorial to African soldiers killed in World War
II, this would be the place to experience it.
The mountain’s place in the scheme of things
can be predicted with some confidence by knowing its past
and present, but my own is not so easy to understand. A
human life is the product of many things. I enjoy botany
because my parents’ families had been farmers for many
generations; I am frugal and cautious with money because I
grew up in the Great Depression; the ethical principles that
govern my conscience trace back to teachings by my parents
and the church on the hill in Meadowdale; I enjoy reading
and learning because of individual teachers I was lucky
enough to have. These qualities are obvious; no psychiatric
analysis is needed to explain them. But under the surface,
there is an uneasiness around crowds, a dislike of cities,
and a need for occasional solitude that is satisfied best by
being on a mountain. Perhaps I am like the baby geese that
followed Konrad Lorenz around, thinking he was their mother
because he was the first thing they saw when they hatched;
perhaps the need for mountains was imprinted in my brain by
growing up in West Virginia. Or, perhaps I absorb some sort
of spiritual aura from being in the mountains, as John Muir
apparently did when he first saw Yellowstone Park; perhaps
it is one of those things science does not explain.
Whatever it is, it is real. I got home
exhausted, with aching joints and cramped muscles, and was
firmly scolded by my wife for being an old fool who should
have known better than to try to climb a mountain at my age.
That evening, I was inclined to agree with her; but the next
day I felt better than I had in years. At the next
opportunity, I will go back.
Read other articles by Bill Meredith