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By Hannah Merker Sunday, April 8, 2007

A mountain is yours once you have climbed it, carved on your inner landscape, rising through geography already there. Its rocky summit distanced by time becomes an ocean once crossed, a chasm once leaped, a promise given, a risk challenged, suspended in the air of tried things. And why climb a mountain at all?

For Charles Darwin, in 1836, there was the utter "confidence, the feeling of triumph and pride which a grand view from a height communicates to the mind."

Present-day mountaineer Robert MacFarlane writes: "For years now I have gone to the mountains and been astonished by deep time." Why climb, be captured and lured to the world's towering monumental mammoths, indeed?

John Neff invites answers to the elusive draw, with his first sentence: "It is my earnest wish that you will join me on a journey of discovery and wonder." Neff's book is more than a personal pilgrimage. He considers, first, the history, stories, "the people who have made this a unique and special place."

He soon learns there is an abundance of literature about Katahdin and the surrounding North Woods. It is scattered, not easily accessible. His purpose was to gather all these tangents -- the American Indian traditions, the Baxter family and Gov. Percy Baxter's amazing success in having Greatest Mountain (as native tradition has called it) declared, with the surrounding wooded land, a wilderness forever place for the people of Maine.

Katahdin rises in geologic majesty, seeming at first sight remote, alone, but further investigation reveals smaller heights, a complexity of basins, lakes, moraines, a dramatic monarch in Maine geologic time.

When Henry David Thoreau came to the Maine Woods in 1846, climbing various trails with a group, but then at a moment alone, the mystery, the mystic aura of mountains, and especially this one, catches him:

"The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, wither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden but the unhandsealed globe."

Neff brings into the early explorations, the opening of wilderness to hiking trails, sports that delved into the unknown treasures of a forested land. Logging of Maine's vast supply of tall trees opened areas that became sporting camps for fishing, hunting, and always, that climb to a holy mountain.

Edwin Bernbaum (author of "Sacred Mountains of the World," wrote: "Floating above the clouds, materializing out of the mist, mountains appear to belong to a world utterly different from the one we know, inspiring in us the experience of the sacred."

The lure of Katahdin, Neff writes, "is reflected in the Native American stories of the mountain. Maine Penobscot's tribe ascribes the draw of the mountain on people of all backgrounds to the call of the Great Spirit, the need for spiritual sustenance."

He reminds us of the rich tapestry of lore and tradition surrounding Katahdin. Nearly everyone Neff meets in his research travels has a story to tell, the intimate memory connecting person to person to mountain, tales that "humanize an inexplicably charismatic natural feature and in their telling lay an active reverence for the mountain."

Percy Baxter's efforts have provided, as Neff writes, "one of the most remarkable achievements of the American wilderness movement of the twentieth-century, the accomplishment of the persistent dedication of one man."

From 1930 to 1962, he purchased land with a singular commitment, more than 200,000 acres, a gift to Maine "and all who love wild places of the Earth." At one point Baxter knew seeing Katahdin from a distance was not enough. "I must go and stand on the summit of Katahdin myself, see for myself that treasure for which we are contending."

A large group of journalists, educators, other eager followers of Baxter's initiative formed an expedition in 1920, many traveling in rough conditions for the first time.

Arthur Staples, editor of the Lewiston Journal, wrote: "The lure of the woods began to get to me, the mighty dimness, the aisles slanting with the sunlight. You feel in the center of an auditorium of wonders. It is primordial, strange, weird, mystic." Staples' writing, quoted in greater length, hauntingly evokes Maine's great northern woods.

The long Appalachian Trail from Georgia to its northern terminus atop Katahdin is often a moving highway of humanity now in the warmer months. The utter quiet, the awesome solitude, the silent echoing of atavistic ancestral history still whispers through tall trees -- but one must listen more closely to hear it, to sense its august import, what a park and its mountain means in a crowded noisy world.

Neff has captured the legacy of a sacred place that is at once a destination for the wearied of a rushing world and a pilgrimage place that does not cease to enchant.

His research ardently collected here is a gift to Maine as much as its exalted mountain. The Wabanaki say Katahdin "is where Mother Earth reaches out to the sky to feel the interconnectedness of oneself with that of ancestors and future generations."

Reading Neff, we are reminded of the profundity of inspiration on the people he quotes, the artists so affected by one looming summit. Neff has us climbing mountains of the mind, overtaken by wonder -- which, Renes Descartes said in 1645, "is the first of all the passions."

Hannah Merker is a freelance writer who lives in Bristol.