She's at Cold Mountain

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn't melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart's not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You'd get it and be right here.
--Han Shan (寒山)
9th Century Tang Dynasty Chinese Poet/Hermit
(tr. Gary Snyder)


The first and last time I saw her was at the a San Francisco Symphony Concert with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting a Hector Berliloz's program. That night, she sang in the Lélio ou le Retour à la vie chorus. Now remarried, she and her children of the first marriage are settled in North Carolina.

She was originally from northern California. How she ended up in the Blue Ridge Mountains was partially my doing. When Charles Frazier's book Cold Mountain first published 1997, I recommended it to her through a classical music forum. She read it and was smitten with Frazier's eloquent evocations of the North Carolina landscape. She packed up her children and moved there. She's found her Cold Mountain.

Frazier quoted the first two lines of the preceding Han-Shan poem in the epigraph of his book. The main character of the story, Inman, died at the gates of his beloved Cold Mountain. I will leave the transcendental and metaphorical discussions of Han-Shan's poem and Frazier's work to others.

The cable channels are showing Cold Mountain this week. This film, however, barely does justice to the book which it took Frazier six years to write.