a mountain is a mountain

Sometimes I get a kick out of the banality of my Instagram feed. I mean, I click on the thing, and I scroll through the regular mix of artsy angles of alleyways, food sure to put my BBQ’d corn and smokies to shame, and children-children-children – not to mention the peak-of-the-day featured by every mountain-running, outdoor-loving photographer I follow. On Instagram, the masses become mundane: another mountain, then another. Rocks, trees, sky, dirty shoes, outstretched arms, tents, pristine lakes, jagged peaks. Scroll...

But the perspectives make them different from one another. I saw a photo from Ha Ling this week – a Canmore favorite. The caption: “I have conquered my fear of climbing to the top! Survived Ha Ling!” While I have my own shake-in-my-booties peak memories, my own and only Ha Ling experience could instead be captioned: “Maneuvering tourists and beer coolers on Ha Ling, Canmore’s Grouse Grind” or “Ha Ling: Eating dust while my friend eats the mountain for breakfast.” Depending on the person – and the day – dear old Ha Ling may strike fear, breed frustration or put a girl in her place.

Ha Ling becomes the conquered, the pesky, the challenging – not to mention its sketchy (former) identity as “Chinaman’s Peak,” for a young man who bagged it before lunch, impressing (and surprising) the local crowd in 1896. One mountain – much less many – can have many meanings, despite similar representations on social media through fish-eye lenses and Mayfair filters.

Despite this, I once heard a university professor state unequivocally: a mountain is a mountain. She was, of course, referring to the science of the thing. Mesas, buttes, domes, peaks – these are set. They follow patterns, laws, rules of the natural world. Regardless of whether her students are outdoorsy, bookish, urban, literary (making poetic decisions between palisade, precipice or pike), hailing from Saskatchewan or the Himalayas – a mountain is a mountain that can be taught, discussed, analyzed and diagrammed uniformly in a geography classroom.

That being said, I’d love to know a mountain like this girl I once saw skip across a razor’s edge peak while I clung to pebbles and alpine brush for security, stomach in my shoes. Or like my Pops, who’s familiar with every road, range, rock in the Western US and Canada better than Rand McNally. Or like a student I know from Bolivia, who says she’d never heard of hiking until she came to Canada, though she daily walked in the mountains the way I walk from my parking spot to the coffee shop. Or like the Stó:lõ people who keep the jagged Fraser Valley skyline always in sight – not only for geographic orientation, but to connect them to one another and their shared history within that landscape. Pop all four of these in an Alpine hut over a bowl of spaghetti Bolognese, along with my friend the professor (who may quickly find herself being schooled), and now we have a geography class…

Without such a luxury, I’ll continue my perusal of Instagram, where – whether a mountain is a mountain or not – masses of mountains share clips and glimpses of what it means to drive through, camp below, trudge upon, live amidst, scramble up, cling to, sit atop, scurry down, mark, and meander among them.

when people ask what my thesis is about

JK Marah and Nyima at home

There’s a competition at the university called “Three Minute Thesis (TMT).”  It’s where grad students summarize months of work in three minutes, wowing the (also academic and verbose) crowd with their ability to summarize complex and precise information into something digestible. Something is lost, I’m sure, in the process – those hours of research and abundance of knowledge about a single subject – but something is certainly gained. More than anything, a pithy response for every drink-in-hand or coffee-lineup question about research progress: my thesis? Oh yes. Coming along, coming along. It discusses…

Now that I’m getting closer to wrapping up my own work, I realize how few people actually know what it is I’ve been doing. They know about The Thesis, the Thing that takes me away from Nordic ski weekends and Saturday afternoon coffees. But what do they really know about it? When asked, I typically say it’s about something like global education, because it sounds relevant, contemporary and understandable enough that people can respond, oh yes, of course, and move on.

But there is a story.

Back in my teaching days, I traveled to Kabala, Sierra Leone, with a few of my grade 12 students to spend time at a sister school in order to foster friendships between our communities. Before we left, I read (and viewed) everything I could find about Sierra Leone, which was pretty much limited to a few online reports about the country’s abysmal place on the Human Development Index, a couple of memoirs sharing children’s experiences with the war, such as Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone and Mariatu Kamara’s Bite of the Mango, and last but not least, the blockbuster film, Blood Diamond.  I was prepped for the need for development - lack of infrastructure, bombed out buildings, and missing limbs - I’d see around me. 

Which I did.

But I also spent a few days with a man named JK Marah and his family. Every evening, after the sun went down in the early evening, the children would study their lessons aloud in the dark – and JK Marah would tell me stories over games of Scrabble, which he got a kick out of playing with a native English speaker.  His stories were different from those online or in the memoirs. Not to say there weren’t similarities – he told of fleeing his village during the war, being separated from his children, and watching people close to him die. But they weren’t the organized tales told by Beah and Kamara. Sometimes I struggled to track with his narrative, which followed timelines that seemed out of alignment to me, were shared in English punctuated with Krio and Kuranko, and were often interwoven with current stories of his family and his work with the local school and church. While he narrated, he also seemed keen to school me on the Kuranko, Limba and Fulu people who live in the area around Kabala, the business and agriculture of the region, and in Scrabble – expecting me to put the pieces of his tales together.

Over my weeks in Kabala, JK Marah’s stories were both reinforced and challenged by other people I met. Some said the violence of the war still ran deep below people’s superficial interactions, bubbling up late at night in streetfights after a few beers at the disco. Others shrugged off the war, saying people had done what they had done in order to survive – so there was no point seeking either retribution or forgiveness; rather, it was better to simply move on.

The diversity of the stories, along with my growing misapprehension of what had happened and what I had to do with any of it made me question what I’d read and experienced prior to visiting. I felt displaced. I hadn't come to Sierra Leone to help rebuild after the war – I was only there to form relationships, to build connections between a school in Kabala and my own. It wasn’t my work, therefore, that was challenged – the relationships were building by the day. It was my identity, which was at least in part shaped by my understanding of the identities of those in Sierra Leone. An identity that said I was here to help people who needed my help, even though my Official Business in this country called for no such thing.

Through the stories I heard, I began a process (still going!) of confronting who I thought I was, what I thought my responsibilities were to these people – and where I’d got these ideas from in the first place. Something was up with the stories I’d read before flying, ferrying and bussing out to Kabala – and I wanted to figure out what it was.

In less than three minutes, my thesis:

It looks at stories, as well as how we teach and read stories – especially those unexpected ones (like those told over Scrabble by dark, which only partially make sense and therefore make us wonder) – and how they can transform our understandings of ourselves and our relations to other people. Bam.  Not sure why it took a hundred pages to say that.

The whole household