river rat: Schmatterhorn The moon rises slowly over the Schmatterhorn casting a long shadow cloaking the dark side of the river. Seven hundred feet of rock face covered in hard scrabble pines rises out of the railroad tracks on the river's eastern shore a mile from town. We dubbed it the Schmatterhorn after a Bugs Bunny episode's reference to a mountain in Germany when it's really not even a mountain at all.
Curt, our pal Curt Lyter, and I talked about scaling the face every spring and fall since we met as young boys. Summer would creep up on us with the important business of swimming and fishing pushing thoughts of sweating our way up the seventy degree pitched rock face out of our minds.
"If you boys are going to climb that thing," our father guided us each time we talked big about the mountain, "for God's sake do it in the fall when the snakes are all headed to sleep." Dad dislikes serpents more than most, almost more than I do. His practical nature and need to give advice demanded he expound on the loose shale piles in the spring, the bug filled heat of summer, and the ice of winter. He climbed it before it had a Looney Tunes name.
The first time we called each other on the bluff of actually doing it, actually paddling across the river, crossing the tracks and climbing up was indeed a cool fall day. We picked a day without a single cloud between us and a warm, fall sun. We started off with monstrous, rubbery cheese omelets cooked on our small kitchen stove, our father telling us what to look for like a two dollar tour guide. Dad was more excited than we were, and that was saying something.
"See if you can find the caves," he said over the smacking of lips and slurping of orange juice. Curt, Lyter, and I were focused on inhaling our food and getting on the water before seven a.m.
Fifteen years prior to our first climb, brothers Bill and Dave scaled the face in late winter to find the caves. Over the years our brothers were encouraged to believe that hermits lived still in the caves once occupied by Susquehanna Indians. Everyone wanted to be able to say they went to the caves and disproved the hermit rumor. More than that, they wished to say that there still was a hermit in one of the shallow caves that looked out over our town like dilated, pinprick eyes in the side of the mountain. Dave and Bill pulled themselves up the face holding onto one scrubby tree and then the next until they crested the hearth of the larger cave's mouth and pulled themselves up to its powdery surface.
Our climb started with a great find. After a half hour easy crossing of the mile wide water we found where someone slaughtered a monstrous snapping turtle near the railroad tracks leaving the shell to stink in the sun. Flies gathered around the black, blood crusted remnants of the turtle's musculature in such great number the sound when they flew off and then right back was exactly like a light saber's electric thrumming. We spent a few minutes modulating the flies' sound effect, waving sticks at each other in Luke Skywalker pantomime before gagging at the wind's direction change, washing us with a waft of sun tortured death. We decided to come back for the shell and wash it in the river, take it back with us. The first step upon the steep base of the mountain was like any other quick step onto a roadside bank. There were thick briars and reedy grasses to navigate, and it was steeper like that all the way up. It was exactly like the first five steps up the bank by the road at Gothel's farm where we harvested elderberries for Bill to make the sweet red wine mom loved so much. This would be easy, we told ourselves. The climb quickly turned into a race.
My brother and Lyter made it so much further up the mountain than I did in the first half hour. Running isn't exactly what they did and climbing doesn't quite cover it either. It was more like an orangutan's loping movement, grabbing limbs and pulling up to the next limb, keeping their feet moving beneath their swinging, pumping arms. Loping up the face from tree to tree like that put a hundred feet between us, my breath came in asthmatic wheezes punctuated by vile expectorations. Slow and steady, I told myself.
One hour into the climb the two Curts stopped to let me catch up. Through the dense, twisted pine boughs they could be seen draped over identical crotches of two of the mountain's largest oaks growing sideways from a rock outcropping. Hand over hand amidst jeers and taunts of being a pussy, a wimp, a lazy ass, a fat ass, a lard ass; I climbed steadily skirting a wash of small gravel eroding down the mountain. The way to make that climb, I'm convinced, is to keep one's head down and pull steadily, slowly until all of the trees are below and only the sky is above. Climb steadily and don't listen to the assholes lounging on the oak trees above.
I looked up from keeping my head down, from plodding my wheezing ploddings to see the two monkeys turned around, facing the summit, their backs resting in the crooked oaks' trunks, ignoring me. I'd sneak up on them, I thought. Carefully picking my way across the wash of gravel and shale, flanking them, I pulled quietly hoping for a break in the hacking cough the climb had given me thus far. The large, two stair step at a time progress I'd been making slowed to a stealthy half step stalking; a kind of shuffle where my sideways progress equaled vertical aspirations.
A meter or two from surprising Lyter with a lunge and planned grab at his ankle the day quickly turned out to be the first time I found out how allergic to bee stings my body had become since the last time a bee fell in love with my skin. The immediate shock of the sting wasn't enough to upend me. Curt and Curt heard my tightlipped gasp when the needle prick stinger pierced the back of my hand. Their laughs could've been heard across the river. The laughing and anger at their laughing didn't upend me either. It was the rapid swelling changing my hand from hand size to grapefruit size that caused balance to go on hiatus for a few seconds. I tucked my feet beneath my body when the fall was a sure thing, my knees hit and slid from under me, my chest thudding to the shale, starting my slide in earnest.
The slide down the hundred feet of shale wash lasted four seconds or less. It was a slow grind. I'd catch hold of a rock, a root, something; then the slide would continue agonizingly scrubbing the skin from my left arm. Despite being a righty my left hand was doing all the clumsy work slowing my descent from surprise to shame. Shale filled my mouth, I could feel and taste the oily smoothness on my tongue. Later I would find shale in my tighty whities.
During the slide my body protectively, instinctively rolled over when the pain in my left elbow became hot and insistent. If the slide turned to a tumble there would be a very good chance for a broken neck on the trees below. I rolled myself back onto a raw stomach, coming to a stop when a sapling found its way gently up between my legs, wracking my nuts just enough to let the boys join the chorus of complaints the mountain was conducting with all my other body parts.
Recognizing the peril and temporarily over their laughing fit, the two Curts launched themselves after me, high stepping their way down the edge of the gravel, so as to not add more of an avalanche to the situation, away from the loose center where I lay crumpled. I swear they covered the distance in a tenth the time it took me to grind down the face. When all movement stopped save for a trickle of gravels rolling down below us, Lyter lowered a black snake to my face. He'd found the drowsy snake up at the flat rock where he and my brother had been resting, and knowing how little love I had for all things herpetological, he thought he'd bring it with him, to aid in my rescue, cheer me up. If it weren't for my balls being wrapped around the pine tree it's likely that the snake would've contributed to my death as I leapt backwards away from it, pinching my nuts against the tree once again. It made me want to pound that snake up his ass.
My hand stopped swelling when it reached a comfortable size somewhere between grapefruit and eggplant. My left arm, the stung arm which slowed my progress during the slide, was a bloody, strawberry mess from my elbow to my wrist. Twenty five years later I still have a quarter sized scar on the inside of my elbow that resembles the badge of ten years of heroin addiction I once saw on a junky.
Bill and Dave never found a hermit. We didn't find one either. When our brothers and their friends first climbed the Schmatterhorn to the caves all they found was evidence of bonfires and empty liquor bottles. Bill took off his shirt, tore it down one side to spread out the fabric, and fashioned a flag he was sure he would see from the dormer window in the attic. His flag stayed up the whole summer and even stayed tattered hanging down on the tree where he tied it the next summer. Dad let him visit it with binoculars from time to time after he got over being grounded for leaving his shirt there and coming home bare chested under his coat.
With a swollen paw and bloody forearm I was more determined than ever to make it to the top of the mountain. We stopped briefly at the site of the caves, their roofs having eroded long ago, collapsing on themselves rendering the shelter they might have once provided into a jagged heap of rubble and broken glass.
Lyter crested the summit first. He stood at the top waiting for us, shaking his head.
"It's a damn field." He said disgusted, disappointed. "This thing's some kind of ridge or plate that heaved and the top's a damned field."
We stood next to him for a minute, equally disgusted. Dad knew this and never told us. Part of his excitement at our first climb was knowing the lesson in geology and geography we'd bring back across the river. He knew that from then on our understanding and appreciation of the world would be different. He was right. We turned and surveyed the river valley thinking about the lay of the land in a whole new way. Knowledge of what the mountain was, what was on the other side of it, was integrated into how we looked across the river from then on.
Two years ago the mountain caught fire. I still call it a mountain even though I know it's a minor tectonic plate that heaved slightly thousands, maybe millions of years ago, maintaining a flat surface up top while creating a sheer face eroding down to the river. No one tried to put out the fire, it was pointless as long as the train tracks remained safe, and they were at the bottom, away from the abundant fuel that fed the blaze. At night for a week the glowing roots and clusters of smoldering dead wood reddened the eastern sky, the embers dying finally in heavy rain.
It's easier to find that wide wash where the skin of my left elbow left me. The saplings growing now are uniform and strong except for that patch of gravel and a few others upstream. Late fall's a good time to climb, no snakes. I wonder if Lyter's wife and my wife will let us climb it again, and then I wonder why.
