language about Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy was so biblical—mountains
are ‘‘cathedrals’’; prominent rocks and valley floors, ‘‘sacred altars.’’ Muir
has had much referential company, too. During the s, in a faraway
part of another Europeanized world, the South African general and states-
man Jan Christian Smuts was famously photographed atop his favorite
spot, Table Mountain, which towers above Cape Town. There, during years
out of political favor and office, he had befriended young botanists, con-
ducted his own research, and emerged as a sage himself, the Philosopher
on Table Mountain. The reputation derived from Smuts’s critical partici-
pation in a British Empire–wide discussion of plant communities. The
general created a new, holistic ecology with ambitious political purpose,
namely, the reconciliation of hostile Europeans within the Union of South
Africa, plus justification for the segregation of Coloureds, Indians, and Ban-
tus. Such was Smuts’s version of ‘‘thinking like a mountain.’’ Another ver-
sion, with opposite aspirations, is an Afro-Cuban song, ‘‘Bruca Manigua,’’
presented most recently by Ibrahim Ferrer, the charming lead singer of
Buena Vista Social Club.Yo soy carabali, the song begins, ‘‘I’m from the
Carabali coast,’’ referring to the slave coast of Nigeria,negro de nacion. ‘‘This
hostile world’’ of slavery has made the singer bitter: ‘‘I’m crazy within.’’
Then comes a chorus: ‘‘In the mountains lies the answer,’’ and the singer
responds, ‘‘Show me the paths of freedom / Mountains.’’ The lyrics remind
us of more recent Cuban history, too: that Fidel Castro’s revolution began
in the Oriente highlands and swept down onto corporate sugar plantations
worked by dark-skinned campesinos. Simultaneously, West Virginia’s gov-
ernment and corporate interests persistently blended mountains and lib-
erty in branding the state’s identity, without suggesting abolitionism or
communism. Before this poor economic colony in southern Appalachia
was ‘‘Wild and Wonderful’’ (the current highway greeting and license plate
slogan), West Virginia proclaimed, ‘‘Mountaineers Are Always Free.’’ It’s a
nice notion, as is the idea that mountains are clean and spiritually uplift-
ing. Certainly everyone seems to agree that mountaintops induce clarity of
vision, ambitious hopes, and wisdom.^17
Yet except for the wealthy few and perhaps weird holy people, actual
mountain people have not lived on top. These include the first human resi-
dents of the Appalachians, ancestors to the Cherokees. In the Cherokee
creation narrative, the mountains were made not by a violent albeit imagi-
native old white man but by the Great Buzzard, who, wearying of long flight
over a wet, level Earth, finally alighted and, to keep himself from becoming
mired, flapped his gigantic wings, stirring the uninteresting terrain into