Mountains and Snow

"I would love to live in a little New England town," I say, gazing up the picturesque main street of Andover, MA. My older sister is less convinced.

"No you wouldn't," she says, and she knows me better than most, so it must be true. Still, I find a mystique in these little towns that dot the Northeast that my childhood was decidedly lacking. I grew up in an oppressively flat part of the country that was also, perhaps paradoxically, subject to extremely short horizons. There are some parts of the United States that I have visited that I characterize as having "wide skies." Nebraska, for example. Jacksonville, not so much. It is an expanse of low buildings that give the whole landscape a sense of claustrophobia. The road that runs through the center of my neighborhood, a broad six-lane monster, flows through an endless stretch of suburbia. If I were not familiar with the landmarks from a lifetime of traversing it, I would think it was composed entirely of recycled scenery.

Mountains long posed a fascination for me. I saw them for the first time on my first trip north, around the age of four. Somehow they left such a powerful impression that on the two later trips north that we made when I was young, I eagerly stared out the car window as we left Boston and drove north into the granite state. "Dad, are we in the mountains yet?"

"No, Aliza, that's a landfill."

In my seven years spent at camp in rural Georgia, I never grew tired of the novelty of topography. I liked land that had character, that had shapes and forms because of ancient geological processes. A world with bedrock, not the glorified sandbar of a state where I'd grown up. I'd return from every summer with clay-stained socks and bulging calves only to face the unrelenting flatness of Jacksonville, Florida, the land that plate tectonics forgot.

Snow, too, has never lost its novelty. This is my third winter north and the sight of white flakes swirling or tumbling past my window still fills me with the kind of wonder usually reserved for small children. It always feels warmer when it snows than when it doesn't, which I know doesn't make sense. Winter weather is another thing that bypasses Jacksonville entirely - as if my very presence on this earth repels powder, there has not been significant snowfall in my hometown since 1989.

So, obviously, the sight of a snowy New England hamlet is utterly irresistible.

I live in a city with artificial topography. I have taken an archeology class that taught me that this island used to roll with hillsides and valleys where Lenape tribespeople hunted and gathered, but the city has since been flattened into submission by advancing construction. On top of it rises a landscape of artificial mountains, Himalayas in the financial district and midtown bordered by foothill tenements on either side. From the window of my twelfth-floor apartment, the sky seems infinitely wide. The towers go on forever. It's not a thing like Jacksonville.

I have my mountains. They were just constructed by a different force of nature than I anticipated as a child.