His side of the mountain

By Paul Kandarian

Whenever I am in the blessed company of the great wide open, I feel overpoweringly small, lost in the expanse of nature and nature on the planet and the planet in the universe, we just being specks along for the ride on this blue orb spinning in a dark blanket of uncertainty.

Which is not an unusual way to feel. When we are children, our world is the space and time and people immediately around us, and it all seems immense, vast and measureless. When you’re little, everything is big, our parents, our yards, our streets, everything we know that is familiar is huge.

And of course as we get older and realize our place in the world, the world gets smaller, more manageable, easier to fathom. But even then, when we stand in the midst of a great forest, or on a mountain top, or at the edge of an endless sea, we get very, very small. Because against the measure of everything, we are.

My dad loved the mountains. He felt at home there, respectful of the power they held to swallow a man whole. He was, or liked to think of himself, as a mountain man, a Jeremiah Johnson, fancying himself able to care for himself in the wild as that Robert Redford character did. Whether he could or not was luckily never put to the test.

We had a hunting camp in Maine that he and friends built in the early 1960s that became more of a man cave – a place to escape, be with buddies, drink too much, and do a little bit of hunting. But it was on the side of a mountain in a tremendous expanse of nothing that to him was everything.

I love the mountains now, and there is no doubt at all that that love stemmed from watching my dad transform into the most relaxed I have ever seen him when he was in them.

I also love the feeling of wandering, just getting up and going anywhere, feeling nomadic and free. I remember clearly times with my family, my dad at the wheel, driving through the mountains with him chomping on a cigar and bellowing “Old Man River” and proclaiming how great and clear his voice was. It wasn’t really. But really, it was. There are memories we cling to that shine with the greatness they so richly deserve.

My dad was a wanderer, he had that nomad spirit, in mind and body. This was a man who couldn’t sit still, always anxious to see what was out there, what things he could try, where the road, any road, might lead him.

To say I am more than proud to follow in his peripatetic footsteps is putting it mildly. As he drove, I drive, as he saw, I see, him then, me now, both of us always aching to see what is around the next corner, eager to poke our toes into the great unknown, giddy as a schoolchild in the discovery, satisfied by the find and moving on, always moving. Always. Moving. Always. Moving. Always.

I had the remarkable good fortune this winter to find myself in Utah to do what I love: act in a film. It is a glorious place, Utah specifically and the west in general, where mountains loom on the horizon like gigantic rock-spined beasts, jutting into a crisp blue sky seemingly bound for the moon. I drove highways there in Salt Lake City next to these mountains and wondered if the people who grew up there ever tire of a landscape painted by the gods, or at least the immensely talented hands of artists like Albert Bierstadt and others who created works of art so pure and realistic you feel like you can walk right into them.

I had a lot of down time so I set out on the open road, as I always do when I’m in a new place, the road and its unending corners the metaphor for my life, as it was for my dad’s. I would stop wherever I could, embraced by the cold and the quiet and welcome the smallness I felt in this tremendous and open land framed by mountains and sky, happily lost in the expanse of nature and nature on the planet and the planet in the universe, thrilled to be a speck along for the ride.

When I stand in a place like the mountains, especially mountains like those that touched my soul in the West, I feel at once lost in their frozen, wind-swept expanse but embraced by the warmth of my father’s soul reminding me to appreciate what I’ve found and then urging me to go around the next corner. Always.

And there, in the haunting howl of the wind I always hear “Old Man River,” clear as a mountain stream.