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mountain? It shouldn’t be attempted
lightly, lest the glory and imminence be lost in shabby metaphors
and threadbare adjectives. At the risk of doing so, however, I will
say that the mountains’ sides and the peaks were mostly a stony,
dark brown and tan, and had a disordered, craggy rockiness that
revealed and confirmed that they had been jammed up high into the
air by crushing, inevitable geologic forces millions of years ago,
leaving them at-once brittle and crumbling, exposed and naked,
while at the same time diamond-hard and concrete. And the forest at
their feet was marching up the mountains’ sides, only to be held in
a line, almost perfectly even, across the mountains’ sides where
the forest ended and the stark brown skin of the neck of the
mountain was exposed. As I watched from the rolled-down jammer
window, I had the urge to climb to the top of one of those peaks
and lay in the sun above the world.
    “ That’s your mountain,
there,” the jammer driver was pointing out his window to the left
at a mountain that stood somewhat alone and had a slight conical
shape. “Mount Sinopah.”
    “ My mountain?” I asked,
snapping out of my daydream and the distant peaks.
    “ Two Medicine camp is down
below that one.” He pointed out across the tops of the distant
trees to our left.
    I looked over at my
mountain. “Where’s the name come from – Sinopah .”
    “Dunno, Indian chief way
back when I think,” the driver said, shrugging.
    I had read that these
jammer drivers were the park’s tour guides, and would provide
commentary about the park and its history to riders as they drove,
but my guide wasn’t very expansive about anything to say the least,
but I realized he kind of already thought of me as one of the team,
not to be treated like some slack-jawed, awestruck yokel from the
city.
    I sat back into the bench
seat of the bus as we drove on, grinding gears up the now-steeper
hills, and I felt lost in the vast wildness of the place. However,
tooling down the road in my weird red bus I felt the nervousness
that had now become a deep part of me – the expectation of what lay
out there in below “my mountain” was worrying me. I wondered if the
others on staff at the store would be nice and decent to work with,
if the job was going to be ok… I glanced at my bushy-haired driver;
would my coworkers be crazy? But mostly, as the bus lurched down
the road toward a chain of lower hills, I wondered if I had made a
huge mistake and come all this way for nothing.
     
    We drove for two hours more, and the mountain peaks didn’t seem
to get much closer. After yet another hour we drove into a large
gravel lot that lay next to a long lake which spanned all way
through a valley and stopped at the feet of Mount Sinopah himself.
I recognized the scene from my internet searches in Atlanta. There
it was – the two-story, very big log cabin next to that very lake I
had seen in the magazine. It was the store and the lake, no doubt about
it.
    After I got out my things,
the jammer drove off, beeping his horn twice as a sendoff, waving
his hand in a flourish and the disappeared past the trees. I stood
in the gravel parking lot next to the store, holding my suitcase in
one hand and my guitar case in the other, feeling completely out of
place. I listened to the birds chirping off in the distance, to the
wind blowing across the lake and getting entangled in the trees
beside me. There were no cars in front of the store, no cars
anywhere, and I could see no other people around. An aluminum canoe
was tied to a tree near the store by the lake.
    I trudged across the
gravel to the steps of the store, taking in the place as I walked.
The store was, as I mentioned, built two stories high with a big,
slate, A-frame room. The whole place was made of enormous wooden
logs, like unfinished telephone poles stacked horizontally, with a
dark slate roof peaked by a glass skylight. Across the front of the
store was a wooden porch stretching