Mountains and mental models.

As I continue to struggle with the reality of having left my beloved west coast and trying to make sense of all the things on the east that seem so off-kilter, I was struck once again while driving through North Carolina how most of my unease is due to upsets in my mental models. Take, for example, the mountains. Pictured above, we have the Olympic mountain range on the left, the La Platas in the middle, and the Blue Ridge mountains on the right. Obviously, one of these things is not like the other.

The La Plata mountain range in the middle is the range most familiar to me. I don’t remember the first time I laid eyes on these frosted peaks because I was baby when I did. They’re in southwest Colorado, looming over the town of Durango, where I spent the better part of my childhood. Mind you, it wasn’t just this range in isolation that I grew up around. The western half of Colorado is the Rocky Mountains, and there are mountain ranges like this from north to south, east to west. I grew up over a mile high with these mountains in constant view, snug in the valleys of these beautiful, 14,000 ft forms. My eyes spoiled by their loveliness. My lungs billowed with their crisp freshness.

The mountains on the left are part of the Olympic mountain range, which lies to the west of Seattle, across the Puget Sound. These powdered-sugar dusted peaks are visible from the front porch of Will’s house on Queen Anne. They greeted me on a regular basis for the more than four years I lived in that house. Very craggy and rocky, they represent the other mountain ranges in Washington state. Sharp, jagged, and white.

To the left are the Blue Ridge…er…mountains of North Carolina. Beautiful as they are, I hesitate to call them that. As you can see, they look more like the foothills leading up to the real mountains I grew up with in the west.

It’s something very hard for me to get used to out here; an example of yet another aspect of this east coast interface that doesn’t behave as expected. This concept of hills being mountains? Utterly foreign to me. It throws me for a loop every time someone says they’re going to the mountains for the day. THOSE ARE NOT REAL MOUNTAINS, PEOPLE. Geologists might disagree with me, but as far as I’m concerned, real mountains don’t exist east of the Rockies.