Come Down from the Mountain

Marvel at the horns of the Rockies’ toughest sheep—spiraling towers of keratin arcing from its skull, forged by time and battle. But hard shells often protect the softest interiors, and above the treeline, the bighorn suffers.

Grazing on woody willow and mountain mahogany—the toughest plants in the alpine cold—the bighorn yearns for something it doesn’t know. I don’t know what it feels, nor do I know what it’s like to be a bighorn sheep with a towering crown of keratin horns—but I recognize when a fellow creature is coping with pain it can’t articulate.

Meet lichen: a symbiotic organism that grows where few others dare. One part fungus, one part alga, the duo spreads slowly, quietly. It can take a hundred years for lichen to cover a single square inch of stone. Mysterious and relentless in its survival, it is older than language.

Lichen can endure eighteen months on the exposed exterior of the International Space Station—suspended in orbit, thriving in the most inhospitable vacuum known. Such endurance, such rarity, is seductive to the suffering bighorn ram.

Food is scarce where the air is thin, and the bighorn must eat to live. Opportunists by nature, they consume shrubs, grasses, moss, and even lichen to fill their four-chambered stomachs. So, atop the mountainous Colorado skyline, the bighorn is pulled to its symbiotic seductress by the natural forces of survival.

What does the midnight-purple tongue of the hungry bighorn ram experience when it first licks the dry, green flakes of lichen from an alpine rock?

Bitterness.
Then, stillness.

The bighorn is high—high above the lakes and valleys below… and high off the psychoactive compounds in the lichen. The feeling of hooves upon stone transforms into a gentle swaying, like a sailor rocked by nurturing waters. Wind flows through the bighorn’s ears with operatic harmony. And for the first time, the tension in his muscular, battle-ready shoulders subsides.

The most dangerous part of a ram high on lichen is how wonderful it feels. Suffering disappears; fear becomes a distant memory. Life is no longer a game of survival. Magic enters the world of the bighorn—music, colors, peace.

But temporary peace is nothing more than the illusion of peace. The high fades. Hunger returns. The watchful eye of the mountain lion rises again in the bighorn’s mind. And now, the ache is accompanied by a new companion: craving. Because just moments ago, the world was, for a second, a sanctuary of sensation and understanding.

Magic is real, and the lichen reflected that truth to the bighorn. But the reflection came through a trick mirror. It distorted. It confused. It confounded. In the mind of the bighorn, the only doorway to peace—to magic—now lies in the dry flakes on the alpine stone that took a century to grow.

Lick, lick, lick.
Climb.
Search.
Desert.
This is the life of the strung-out sheep of the mountain.

After peering into the world of lichen-induced utopia, the bighorn can no longer plant his hooves in the uncomfortable truths of reality. He is dependent on what works. And if the mission is to quell suffering—the lichen works. It works faster than family, faster than shrubs, faster than even the clearest Rocky Mountain water.

Bighorn sheep are social animals. They live in herds.
Once hooked on the dry green flakes, a bighorn leaves his kin behind in search of more.
More.
More.
Alone.
Alone.
Alone.

That is the life of the departed. The dependent.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a bighorn ram with a towering crown of keratin horns—but I know the feeling of endless yearning. I know the weight of debilitating dependency. Once you get a taste of magic, it is forever dangled before you like a key on a string. It pulls you up the mountain, through cracks no other creature dares to go, until you are all alone—perhaps on Mount Elbert or the fittingly named Mount Massive, somewhere in the snowy abyss of the Rocky Mountains.

Alone, searching, and dependent.

Come down from the mountain, bighorn.
You will not find what you are looking for up there.
Only ever-increasing fear and loneliness. And your attempts to suppress them—with a lick here and a flake there—will be futile.

Magic is real, and it is not a fleeting high. It is eternal and ingrained in the fabric of reality, like the cliffs of the mountain, the setting of the sun, the tufts of your fur.
It is the melted glacier water, the mountain mahogany, the horns of your father, the hooves of your sister.
It is you, bighorn.
It always has been.