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Listening to the Mountain
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By Cecilie Scott
When a mountain speaks to me I listen - and remember. That November, each time
I waited on the gurney outside the operating room, I remembered. While
the anesthesiologist knotted a strip of rubber tubing around my arm and
appropriated a vein for the IV that would send memory drifting down the
wordless deeps of body history, I repeated the mountain's message.
For it was a mantra that merged with breath and pulse, re-emerging when
I surfaced on the other side of surgery. It served. Easing me past fear,
stilling anxiety. It was an invitation to float when steering was not
an option.
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On my first trip to Bali I attempted to climb Gunung Agung, holiest
of Bali's holy mountains. As Jero Gede, the water temple priest, explained
to us, when the God is in the lake she is Dewi Danu, when the God is in
the mountain he is Gunung Agung. Balinese call water that which is necessary for life, and maintaining its flow is the work of both peasant
and priest.
Water flows down steep volcanic slopes and pours from lakes into the
rivers and streams that form the web sustaining Balinese life. Water is
borrowed for rice paddies then sent downstream to its next user through
ditches and channels, tunnels and aqueducts. The direction of its flow,
from mountain to sea, is the compass that guides the layout of village,
household, and temple. Kaja points towards the mountain and the sacred,
kelod towards the sea and the profane. Our climb, then, was through sacred
space and towards the God.
Heidi and I had been in Bali for a month when she proposed this climb. We'd
come to Bali with a group of students and extended our stay to travel
on our own. Heidi's delicate frame and impish smile are deceiving. She
is an athlete, a former soccer player who'd been keeping her hand in playing volley ball in the village, delighting in competing at last with men her
own size. Climbing a mountain was a natural for her. But not for me.
Tall and bookish, I swim a lazy crawl or side stroke, I walk, I ramble.
Climbing was something else entirely - and I didn't think my 50-year-old
body would suddenly sprout new muscles.
No problem, we decided. I'd go along for as far as my legs would carry
me and turn back then. We set the date for a month later, to miss the
rains, catch the full moon, and insure no menstrual blood would pollute
the mountain.
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 To learn more about Jero Gede and Bali's other water temple priests, read Steve Lansing's book,
Priests and Programmers:
Techonologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali,
or see the
video by André Singer,
The Goddess and the Computer.
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Our friend and guide, Wayan Budiasa, "Budi" for short, picked us up
at our homestay on Tebesaya early in the afternoon. We traveled in Budi's
van, his driver Gede behind the wheel, winding our way up the side of
the mountain. I needed a few more pictures for a slide show I was putting
together on patterns of Balinese agriculture, so we poked along, stopping
by the dam at Rendang, and again beside rice paddies being harvested,
fields golden with padi bali, the tall, graceful traditional rice of Bali.
A good omen, I thought, to find this link with an earlier Bali, for padi
bali is grown mainly for ceremonies now, and the green and gold steps
of the Balinese landscape are carpeted with short-stemmed rice developed
in laboratories of the Green Revolution.
At Selat, the highest village on our route, we stopped at the police
station to register for the climb. The guide book and Budi agreed that
this was more scramble than climb, but two Italian climbers had been lost
recently. Heidi and I, coming from a Pacific Northwest folded by the Cascades and studded with glacier-clothed volcanoes, were hard put to see our 3,014
meter goal, the rim of Agung's crater, as a real climb. Oh we knew enough
to translate meters to feet, but the lower numbers persisted, limiting
our imagination. We thought of Gunung Agung as temple, as Bali's holy
peak, but not as powerful mountain or living volcano.
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The rim of Gunung Agung's crater is at 9,800 feet, and the road ends at Sebudi,
a scattering of peasant households at 2,900 feet. The last house along
the road was set in a garden of vegetables and roses. Roses? Yes roses.
We had risen above the tropics and entered a temperate zone. The air was
cool on my skin, and with Gunung Agung standing in for Mt. Rainier it
might have been a summer evening in Puyallup. But this volcano's sleep
was not as long, and lava flowed here less than thirty years ago, covering
the village of Sebudi. For Gunung Agung had erupted in 1963. More than
15,000 Balinese were killed on the eastern slopes of the mountain, and
nearly 90,000 were left homeless by the loss of hard-won, hand-shaped
farming land. Now, though, Agung's peak rose behind the corn, majestic
and benign.
The household was headed by a wiry widower of 60, who lived with his
grown daughter and two sons, aged ten and twelve. Other climbers had stopped
here before, bringing welcome income, but not enough to pay for high school
for the children. Budi had brought gifts of rice and coffee, and our host
caught and killed a young chicken for our dinner. We sat outside upon
a mat raised on a rough timber frame and ate rice, corn, chicken, and
hot, peppery sambel before turning in for the night.
Our plan was to rise with the moon at 2 a.m., so we wrapped sarongs
over our climbing clothes and stretched out on the two beds of the main
room while the family slept on woven mats laid on the concrete floor of
the small entry hall. Heidi and I tried to sleep. We felt critters crawling
on us and hoped for fleas instead of lice. Once Heidi gave a start and
flung something off herself that landed on me, a hard shelled creature,
multi-legged and skittering. "What was that?" I whispered. "Sorry. A reflex.
Cockroach, I think," she replied. We stifled giggles.
We were glad to get up when Budi clicked on his flashlight at two. Getting
out of bed I found my right leg and hip had fused into a single unit.
Moving around in the dark, gathering shoes and sweater and camera, I was
just able to move. But not naturally, not freely. Walking was a clumsy,
painful business as I forced my thigh to lift against the pull of shortened
muscles that just would not let go. My hip was a tightly clenched fist,
my leg a finger pried free before each step.
"It's not that bad, it will walk out," I told myself and Heidi as we
set off up the mountain. Pride, I suppose, and fear of being left behind.
Instead the muscles tightened on my other side as we made the first easy
stage of our ascent to the road end and scrambled down into the gulch
that marked the beginning of the climb. There were six of us now. Made,
the older boy of the family had joined us, along with Nyoman, the twelve-year
old son of the pemangku, the temple priest. This boy was our guide, for
it was years since Budi had made this climb. The next few hours were a
curious mixture of pain, frustration, and pure bliss, as I lifted feet
turned clumsy and heavy at the end of legs abandoned by articulation.
And the bliss? That came from being on this still mountain wreathed in drifts of moonlit clouds.
The trail, wide and steep, took off straight up the mountain . . .
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© 1996-2001 Cecilie Scott
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