And the upshot of our talk, and of many meetings and more talk, was that hardly two weeks later we alighted together from the train at Peterborough, New Hampshire, and with two backpacks — a small one, and one so big and heavy that I could hardly lift it from the ground — were driven as near possible to the base of Mount Monadnock. Instructing the driver to meet us at that spot one week later, we were left alone. And now — not against the background of New York, its torn-up muddy crossing, its littered streets, its din of traffic, but in the calm and sweet environment of the New Hampshire forest — let us look at Gretchen.
Yes, she had golden hair and light blue eyes, and red, inviting lips; and in her face this day there shone the anticipation of such a mad adventure in happiness as she had never known and doubtless never dreamed of. All was so new to her, a city girl, a dancer in the Follies! All was, somehow, so right for her. She, with her sturdy limbs, her trained agility, her strength and grace, was right for what we planned to do; to climb the mountain, on its high ridge pitch our tent, and, for a whole week, live there. So, no sooner had our conveyance passed from sight than we, eager to reach our goal, shouldered our packs and set out on the trail.
To that one week I could devote a book, so vivid is my memory of it; not as part of life but as an experience so utterly remote from that mainstream current upon which most of us, from the cradle to the grave, are borne along as to appear an interlude of living in another world. Time, they say, marches on: “Hold it!” we said to Time. “In one week we’ll be back.” Alone at so serene an altitude that mankind far below could no longer be distinguished, his villages appearing as mere specks, their mightiest steeples, emblems of morality, quite impotent to prick the lower atmospheric shell of our ethereal universe, aloof and far removed from obligations, duties, custom, law, and all the fabric of society, we had no sense of guilt; and, like Eve and Adam following their fall, could abandon ourselves to the enjoyment of every pleasure that the body and the soul of man might crave. Naked we’d roam that treeless ridge, climbing its ledges, leaping their fissures, bathing from time to time in its warm rainwater pools. We burned, and then grew brown as primitives; and when toward evening the shadow of the rocks that sheltered our campsite fell upon us, we would sit before our fire, cook and eat our evening meal, and watch the shadow of the mountain creep and enfold the land in its dark mantle.
— It’s Me 0 Lord, The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent, 1955, by Rockwell Kent, Dodd, Mead
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