Mountains

Eine Alpensinifonie; Richard Strauss, composer; Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Daniel Barenboim, conducting

In June of 1980, my sister K. boarded the Empire Builder at the Amtrak Station in Fargo, North Dakota, bound for Montana, just days after Mount St. Helens had erupted. She had taken a job at Sperry Chalet, a remote lodge deep in the wilderness of Glacier National Park and accessible only by hiking or by horseback. A few weeks later, we started receiving letters that chronicled her adventures. She also sent pictures.

Before that time, mountains were tall, far-flung landforms that I read about in encyclopedias and saw in the movies. What could they matter to me? I had never seen one and knew of nobody who lived near one … until now. K.’s photographs opened my mind and soul to the beauty of snow-capped peaks, flora-clad valleys, deep lakes, ancient glaciers, cautious sheep, curious goats, comedic marmots and noble moose. If this is what you saw when you went to the mountains, then I wanted to leave to see them yesterday.

In June of 1983, I, my sister D. and the Sioux Valley High School Band and Chorus boarded coaches headed for Colorado Springs, Colorado, for a music festival. I don’t remember where on the map we started to see mountains, but from the moment that I saw them, I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. They were almost two hundred miles away … and I could see them plain as day. I was at pains to drink in the scope of this beautiful sight. And those pains didn’t let up throughout the entire trip.

During the spring of 1987, I determined to do something different over the summer. I landed a gig as a waiter at the Grand Lake Lodge in Grand Lake, Colorado, right outside the west entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. My friend G. was driving to a job at the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico, and offered to drop me off at my job on the way to his. This necessitated a spin through Rocky Mountain National Park. Like before, the magnitude of beautify and dimension stunned me; and I couldn’t believe that I would be spending my whole summer here.

On the summer solstice, the management closed the lodge early so that all of the crew and staff could ride up to the highest point in the park attainable by car. We sat on an outcropping of rock on a carpet of fragile tundra to watch the sun descend beyond a sea of pine trees, casting color residue in the vestiges of clouds that hovered above the grandeur. About twenty minutes later, we turned to the east to see the lights of Boulder and an electric thunderhead down in the valley. Then a full moon made his entrance behind the city lights, climbing effortlessly in the sky, endeavoring to bathe nature’s resplendence with an eerily decorative, lunar glow.

“An Alpine Symphony”, Richard Strauss’ fifty-minute long tone poem, decries its designation as a symphony by forgoing the traditional three to four movement structure. Nothing less than twenty-two continuous sections of music tell the story of an eleven-hour trek (from just before dawn to nightfall) over an Alpine mountain. The twenty-two sections have labels that depict the view or activity during the hike: Entry into the Wood, Wandering by the Brook, At the Waterfall, On Flowering Meadows, On the Glacier and many more. I find it interesting to note that, in 1983, the 1981 Berlin Philharmonic’s recording of Strauss’ “Eine Alpensymphonie”, under the baton of Herbert von Karajan, became the first compact disc ever to be pressed.

I haven’t had that many paying jobs that strayed very far from music. I pulled volunteer corn out of the bean fields for our neighbors. I once moved desks from one campus to another in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for my aunt who worked in Continuing Education at SDSU. And in 1987, I was a singing waiter at a tourist haven in the mountains of Colorado. I was a good singer. I was not a good waiter.

Credits: To the Grand Lake Lodge, a rustic mom and pop joint that offered more fun than glamour. She is for sale if you would like her.