Deanville Mountain

This piece is about the destruction of a mountain. Deanville Mountain is the highest point in the Thumb. If you look at a map of Michigan, you’ll know where it is.

Can a man own a mountain? Carve out the center and cart it away to shopping malls and garden centers? Can he haul it off to adjacent counties and bordering states where people won’t appreciate that their gravel made up a mountain? This mountain . . . our mountain. This land . . . our land. What farceness. What? I can’t make up a word? One man can own a mountain and truck it away in exchange for stuff from malls full of sullen children who have never climbed a mountain. One man can disfigure the landscape and transform the view and there are no words for that.

This mountain was our mountain, ten o’clock on our compass, our history and barometer and weather maker. Deanville Mountain and the road that crossed it—lined with trees tall enough to support elaborate nests and birds of unblinking eye—was a place for teenagers to be bad in the dark. A place where rumors were invented and secrets uncovered.

Too bad our mountain held such a rich lode. Too bad about mining and ownership and the rumor that didn’t travel far enough into the right hands fast enough. Too bad about the gaping wound and the collapsing side that I thankfully can’t see from my porch . . . yet

Too bad it was never ours.

My grandfather insisted that the mountain changed our climate. Storm clouds moved around Deanville Mountain like storms off the Pacific deflected by rugged coastline. Rain would fall to the west or skirt the entire bulge to head out over the lake. It was a mountain to be reckoned with and perhaps compensated us beyond our comprehension. Perhaps we’ll now have more of the rain that a farmer can never seem to get enough of.

(They’ll tell you all about that in the Central Valley.)

But the mountain isn’t grand anymore.