Hiking Beacon Mountain

From Patience: Taking Time in an Age of Acceleration

by Akiko Busch and photographs by Emil Alzamora, May 26, 2011

The switchback trail up Beacon Mountain threads its way through a forest of maple, hemlock, and oak, thickets of white birches or thin groves of black birches, their trunks etched with silver hieroglyphs. Laddered with roots, the path is carved by stone and strewn with rocks and gravel. Where the slope levels off, a bed of ferns has taken root. Every rift in the granite offers its own still life—a pocket of citrus-colored moss, or a handful of wild grass. A tiny, orange spider negotiates its way across both of these; a red eft scurries across an oak leaf in its own vignette of determination.

It’s a roundabout way to the summit. A century ago, an incline railway brought visitors directly up the mountain to a casino, an amusement park and dance hall, but what’s left of these now are only a few overgrown pathways, cracked concrete platforms, a grove of elm trees, some old stone walls, a few chunks of concrete steps. This afternoon, the remains of gaiety are simply a monarch butterfly, a stand of goldenrod, and the sound of wind rippling through the leaves of an aspen tree. The disintegrating brick walls of the powerhouse for the old railway read as a graph of decay, and inside, ferns and sumac bloom over the giant, rusting wheels and pulleys that once hauled the cable cars up the mountain. Its system of cogs and weights has been threaded with wild asters and purple clover. A random calligraphy of graffiti and wild ivy—that universal language of abandoned places—streams across the bricks themselves, which are now turning to powder while flakes of rust adorn the machinery.

Considering the carnival tents and gaming tables once poised on this arid ledge of the earth’s crust, I wonder at our abiding instinct to bring a sense of spontaneity to those places where it seems to least belong. Surely, among our transactions with the natural world, this is among the most inexplicable—odder than insisting that we can climb an icy cliff or maneuver a kayak down a thundering river is that impulse to bring a sense of play where it is most out of place. But it is probably more than the contrarian in us. For all its lightheartedness, play can be a driving force in endurance.

In her book, Rapt, Winifred Gallagher suggests that there are times in which play—that is, turning work into a game, a rote activity into something that engages the imagination—can be a way of focusing attention on the present moment. High achievers, she suggests, have this ability to construct little puzzles for themselves. Thomas Jefferson, when not occupied “with the demands of the Revolution or the presidency, for example, delighted in making and designing simple, useful things, such as keys and a plow.”