Thomas Festa
Beyond the Pass
After I drop out of college—my first flush of unsuccess as an adult—my father takes me to climb Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States. We set out before dawn under a full moon, our headlamps bobbing and flashlights swaying. Endless switchbacks, punishing monotony. By sunrise, hammers pound the balls of my feet and toes. Dizzy and nauseous, parched and famished despite canteens and jerky, I follow my father toward the peak’s fractured bleakness. Passing 14,000 feet, we stop every few steps to gulp thin air. Not much talking possible at this altitude, all to the good. Below us, the Sierra Nevada’s summer lushness spreads out in miniature. The human scale seems oddly consonant with vast sweeps of geological time. The physical residue of monumental and even catastrophic change—a tiny lake, the shifting dunes of foothills—now appears comprehensible: the consequences of choices made while growing up.
climbing toward a Buck Moon my father's ashes
About the Author
Thomas Festa is a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, and the author of a chapbook of poems, Earthen (Finishing Line Press). Other work includes an ecopoetic reading of W.S. Merwin’s late poetry (in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) and poems in Bennington Review, Drifting Sands Haibun, and Haiku Journal.