VII
Sara
The Appalachians are ancient mountains, battered down by the eons and hollowed out by underground rivers, easier to climb up on the outside than down on their insides. Sara had always been intrigued by the caves but had sensibly only gone down inside them with groups of individuals each of whom she trusted with her very life, both their intentions and their skills. She herself relied on the skill of others to instruct her in the bodily contortions and subtle shifts of weight often required to get back out of the cave when the exit was tight, steep and, naturally, slippery. Once she had despaired of getting out at all when she had worn tennis shoes with no grip. That day she learned to hold herself from slipping by wedging a shoulder between two small rocky outcroppings and then to free herself upward by arching her back and turning sideways, this way, then that, slowly and gently and no weight whatsoever on those slip-slidey canvas shoes, until she could carefully reach an arm upward through the hole and be pulled up by the big burly hand attached to the soft, patient voice that had guided her. That day, that voice was the voice of god to Sara.
Always looking for analogies between nature and human psychology, Sara wrote at length about the craft of caving as a physical counterpoint to the craft of survival in the isolated mountain communities: subtle, slippery, contortionate. Other students were writing about the impact of language on thought and culture; Sara wrote about the impact of landscape on language, thought and culture. No word was without multi layers of meaning in this land atop a complex system of caves. This was a landscape that inspired myth, kept the mind tightly leashed to an increasingly ancient history and emphasized shadow and speculation, secrecy and intuition over clarity. Mountain people of few words might be perceived by outsiders as direct and forthright but that was only part of the deception intended to keep outsiders where they belonged: in the light where they could best be watched. Mountain people were part of the mountains themselves, the forests, streams and springs, the caves, all endangered by civilization and its shriveling glare. And like the very earth, mountain people were, above all, wary, keeping a part of themselves resolutely “primitive”…those that stayed, those whose survival depended on staying.