Pushcart Press, 2006
Hardcover, 280 pages, $22.00
Vulnerable to the Holy
Sacred places are not always human-made (such as a cathedral, for instance)–they are “often at the meeting of land and sky,” writes author Rob McCall, and visited for renewal and inspiration. A passionate nature observer of his own locale, McCall affirms that Blue Hill’s mountain–Awandjo in Algonquin or Algonkian–and the Falls hold what he calls a “numinous energy.”
“Certain places, particularly mountains, make us more vulnerable to the holy,” he observes.
Small Misty Mountain weaves threads of big thoughts such as nature manifesting God, our place and responsibility in creation and how we sometimes muck it up, with precise and visually rich observations of birds, wildflowers and weather.
Structured around 12 moons, each chapter has short entries called “Field & Forest Report,” “Mountain Report,” “Critter of the Week,” and wonderful quotes from writers and poets called “Seed Pods to Carry Around with You.” This structure is perfect as it helps us take in small pieces of nature observations along with the larger more philosophical and spiritual sections — a beautiful balance.
A Congregational minister in Blue Hill for a few decades, McCall writes with a wonderful lack of pretense. He balances the journal/almanac style with wry, humorous comments on society within his record of a year on and around the mountain, touching on hot-button topics like evolution versus creationism, immigration and global warming. Describing huge parts of the Antarctic ice sheet breaking off he adds, “If your house is on fire, you don’t argue about who started it…you put the fire out. Then, you try to determine what caused it.” That’s about as good a sermon on global warming as this reader has heard.
The Native American theme is strong throughout, tying the landscape’s past to the present; Blue Hill Falls was an ancient Red Paint tribe burial ground.
In addition to describing a whale alongside his kayak or paying homage to a grand old tree cut down in his yard, McCall writes of the value of communities, his own and others elsewhere. He fears the loss of small towns, noting both external dangers like development and the internal dangers. “Many of us make a living from the land and the water, ” he writes. “But the battle is on for our land.”
He proposes being shepherds of what one has in places like Blue Hill (before it’s not around to be shepherded). The internal danger, he notes, is feeling “that we are here because we are more deserving than others, that we are entitled. [Or] that pressures from the outside will divide us and draw us into fruitless battles…the native versus the newcomer, the comfortable versus the struggling, the old versus the young.”
An “Un-Natural Event” would be for a reader to not love this 12-moon pilgrimage on and off the mountain in fog, snow, warm breezes or gale-force winds, with nature’s Surround Sound (McCall would fling a witty arrow at the phrase) of the resident creatures. As McCall ends each chapter, “Well, that’s the almanack for this moon, but don’t take it from me. Go out and see for yourself.” Seems he might mean places besides this small misty mountain.
A resident of Torrington, Conn., when she isn’t in Maine, Linda Beyus is a frequent contributor to Working Waterfront.