“You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, so…get on your way!”
—Dr. Seuss
One mountain seemed to loom over our entire day: Mount Shasta. We knew when we set out this morning after Mass at San Francisco Solano in Sonoma, CA that we would be driving past Mount Shasta. I don’t know what I expected. But I didn’t expect to see it from nearly a hundred miles away. John Muir in 1874 wrote, “When I first caught sight of it [Mount Shasta] over the braided folds of the Sacramento Valley, I was 50 miles away and afoot, alone and weary. Yet all my blood turned to wine, and I have not been weary since.” At first it was just a shadowy triangle on the horizon.
We drove through more wine country, and were a bit surprised to see vineyards growing at the foot of snow-capped mountains.
We even stopped at a winery in the shadow of Mount Shasta, Burnsini Vineyards, where the winemaker told us they got over a hundred days of heat over 100 degrees last year. In Northern California. Close to a mountain with seven named glaciers on its slopes!
Wine country gradually gave way to olive country. We stopped at The Olive Pit in Corning, CA and sampled so many locally grown olives and olive products that we didn’t need lunch. We bought more olives than we will consume on this trip. (They were delicious…and they will keep!) From the parking lot we could see Mount Shasta.
As we traveled down the road, the mountain seemed to travel with us. We passed areas where forest fires had charred the side of the hills. Mount Shasta was still there. We stopped in Dunsmuir to visit Hedge Creek Falls (which was not easy to find), and there was Mount Shasta. We paused for a break at a McDonald’s in Weed, CA where seagulls (?!?) were making their presence known and where we had a particularly good view of Mount Shasta.
We went up into the Cascade Mountains where Mount Shasta commanded one side of the road. The other side of the road was like terrain we had seen in New Mexico.
After coming down out of the mountains we passed through Butte Valley where the land is flat and intensively farmed. The mountains were now behind us, but we could still see Mount Shasta in the rear view mirror.
Tonight I am in my room at the Running Y Ranch Resort in Klamath Falls, Oregon, thinking about mountains. The local Shasta people have a legend about a global flood. (Almost every people group on the planet has such a story as part of its oral culture.) The Shasta say, “At last the water went down…Then the animal people came down from the top of Mount Shasta and made new homes for themselves. They scattered everywhere and became the ancestors of all the animal peoples of the earth.”
Nineteenth century American poet and novelist Joaquin Miller wrote, “As lone as God, and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the heart of the great black forests of Northern California.”
Even President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 said, “I consider the evening twilight on Mount Shasta one of the grandest sights I have ever witnessed.”
Mountains, it seems, make impressions. English artist and writer John Ruskin said, “Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.” Mount Shasta seems so solid, so stable, so very…present. But it is not a tame mountain. It is a “potentially active” volcano which last erupted in 1786. People living in the shadow of such a mountain have a healthy respect for it while admiring its ever present beauty and benefiting from the fresh spring water from its glacial melt and the mineral rich volcanic soil at its base.
Yet this magnificent mountain is insignificant in comparison to the One who created it. This God is not tame either. But He refreshes us with living water and feeds us not only with the richness of the earth He created, but with His very Self.
The psalmist wrote, “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” (Psalm 90:2) Truly, a mountain, eternal as it seems, is only the barest whisper of the everlasting glory of our God.
On our journey so far I have traveled across plains and rivers, across deserts and along coastlines, and through mountains and hills. Even more than Mount Shasta today, God has never been out of my sight. At times He hides Himself, as when Mount Shasta briefly is obscured by a much smaller but much closer hill or tree. And at times I may close my eyes and miss Him. But He is always there, always speaking, always calling me to Himself.
“I lift up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” (Psalm 121:1-2)
