I’ve often joked about how my children have a “looking disorder.” How, if I ever really wanted to hide something from them, the best place for me to put it would be right out in plain sight, because the chances of them finding something when it is sitting in the middle of the kitchen table are roughly the same as the chances of them finding it hidden deep inside the heart of a forgotten Incan tomb. (Actually, they probably have a better chance of finding it in the Incan tomb—at least the video game version of an Incan tomb. This is because in video games it seems like the description of all important objects magically appear on the screen in front of you if you hover over the object long enough. Maybe that’s what my children are waiting for in real life: “Math Homework, due today” floating in bright yellow letters above the kitchen table.)
Still, as much as I’ve come to accept that their looking disorders are simply a part of who they are, I never before realized that this disorder included not just the objects they were actively “trying” to find (supposedly), but also objects that are part of their everyday landscape. Big objects. Really big objects. Like, literally, mountain-sized.
So literally, in fact, that my son, Clyde, who has lived his entire life at the foot of the tallest mountain in Arizona, has only just now noticed it was there.
It happened while we were waiting in line at the Dog Haus drive thru. Temporarily freed from the tyranny of the screen, Clyde was forced to look out the window to entertain himself. And that’s when he saw it.
“What’s that mountain?” he asked, clearly startled to have a 12,000 foot piece of landscape sneak up on him like that.
I glanced over just to make sure that a new mountain hadn’t, in fact, moved in while I was ordering. “Those are the San Francisco Peaks,” I said.
“Oh,” he replied. His disappointed tone revealed that he had just made the same mistake so many people do, and assumed that the “San Francisco” part of the name referred to the town a thousand or so miles to the west, making the Peaks closer to the Pacific Ocean than they were to Flagstaff. (The perils of having essentially the same group of people name so much of the Southwest.) “Can we go there someday?” he asked. His tone revealed that he was clearly resigned to hearing one of the many different parental versions of “we’ll see” in reply.
And I was prepared to give him one. Until I looked over at the mountains and realized how long it had been since I had really seen them. Which is how we ended up turning right, rather than left as we exited the Dog Haus.
Twenty minutes later we were parked next to an Aspen grove a thousand feet higher than we had been before. What had been a warmish day was now a little chilly. And the Peaks, instead of being an abstraction, were now very real—as real as the ground beneath our feet.
Clyde wandered through the grove for a bit (neither one of us was prepared for a real hike) and I sat and listened to the rattle and clack of the aspen leaves in the wind. It was calm, and peaceful, and an utterly different experience from the Dog Haus drive thru. When Clyde returned we got in the car and drove back down, talking as we went about what we had seen and when we could come back, this time to hike to top. The mood in the car was light and happy: you could even say that it was relieved.
And why shouldn’t it have been? After all, it’s always such a relief to find something that has been lost.