It’s written on my grandmother’s headstone that she never saw a mountain. My cousins interpret this epitaph metaphorically. They believe it means that my grandmother never saw an obstacle that she couldn’t overcome.
I, however, know the phrase is very literal. My grandmother never saw a mountain. Literally. She also, to borrow a phrase from my mother, saw obstacles everywhere.
Long before she died, my grandmother had been obsessed with her epitaph. Her goal in life was simple: to be able to write on her headstone that she never, ever saw a mountain. The phrase resonated with her in a way that the usual identity markers — loving wife, devoted mother — didn’t. Her mountain-less state was the ultimate symbol of her singular determination to not do things: to mark her life by an absence rather than a gain. She’d refuse to go on vacations with my parents and I, lest we stray within the vantage point of a mountain or two. Even a trip over the border to Pennsylvania, rolling with Appalachians, Poconos, and Alleghenies, was out of the question.
I doubt she ever left Ohio her entire life. (She may once have gone with us to Frankenmuth, Michigan’s Little Bavaria, but this would have been as close to a mountain — or to her family’s Germanic homeland — as she ever got.) She was born in Cleveland sometime in the 1910s. She was a child of the Great War, a teenager of the Depression, and a married wife, pregnant with her first child, during the Second World War. My grandfather stormed the beaches at Normandy. She stayed on the home front and birthed my mother. She spent two weeks in the summers at a rented cottage on Lake Erie. When her children were grown, she’d watch the dogs while our families went away on vacation.
I adored my grandmother. She’s been gone for over 30 years and I still miss her. I wish she’d had more time to live out some of her other goals, like seeing all four of her grandchildren graduate from high school and go to college. But I don’t want to be her.
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In 2000, I realized just how far I’d come from my grandmother, both literally and metaphorically. I was on a flight from Rome to London, somewhere over the Alps on a cloudless November day. Below, the mountains cut through the earth in all directions, their snow caps so close that it seemed that, if they stretched just a little higher they could scratch the belly of the plane. I was mesmerized. I sat at my window seat, camera pressed to the glass, snapping through what remained of the film I’d taken to Rome.
I had just turned 21. I was spending a semester abroad in London and by that point in my life, I’d technically seen mountains before. I’d spied the Smoky Mountains from another airplane seat, and had driven through the foothills of the Alleghenies, but I’d never before laid eyes on what you’d call a proper mountain range, with rock and snow and crevices cut from where the melt drained. The sight was literally unlike anything I’d seen before. But beyond the stunning beauty, what fascinated me most was the fact that I was seeing something that my grandmother never had; just as she had marked her life by what she hadn’t seen, I was beginning to define mine by what I had.
Since then, I have spent whatever free time, and money, that I have traveling the world, to places my grandmother never imagined seeing. To be fair, I have far more advantages than she ever did. I live in a time where women have their own earning power, air travel is ubiquitous and (more) affordable, and the world more accessible to Americans than it was during much of my grandmother’s lifetime. I have options she never had, and, I suspect, never would have taken if she had.
I’m 43 years old and so far, have visited 38 countries and territories. I’m probably not going to get to every country in the world at this rate, but that’s okay. I tend to travel in batches, visiting one or maybe two countries at a time, rather than follow a more traditional backpacker’s schedule. I’ll be using this blog to share narrative essays of my journeys – many of which I’ve already taken, and which I will be writing about retrospectively from my memories and trip notes.
In some posts, however, I’ll be sharing narratives about trips as they happen. For my first posts, I’ll be writing about my adventures in Bosnia and Herzegovina – specifically, the cities of Sarajevo and Mostar — where I am through the first part of January. First post coming soon!
Robin J Kish, Writer 