Disappear Mt. Rainier

I can’t remember what I feared would happen when I first tumbled with my first lovefriend, Eden Everclear. She was experienced, a year older, on birth control: we would be like an eagle (she) and an otter (me) attempting to get it on. Alas, she was human, whereas I was the one whose first experience with shared sexual pleasure sorely affected everyone in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Oh how we all had digital images of Mt. Rainier on our computer desktops! Oh how framed pictures of that snowy peak appeared in all our bathrooms! Not a home unadorned with a snapshot of father or brother, mother or sister, in front of that gorgeous volcano! Mt. St. Helens had made us aware that Rainier would blow in our lifetime—an unfathomable, yet easily imaginable event: the plume would dwarf all below and we’d see the world through unreal sheets as western sunrays made it through a blizzard of ash without end. But even easier to imagine would be the absence—like the loss of a beloved—of a reliable presence always either obscured by clouds or majestic as all hell, a perfect form, 15,411 feet from foothills to summit, the tallest mountain in the Lower 48. On the other side of the country, my cousin first had sex in Hoboken, New Jersey, early morning, September Eleven, a coincidence that scared her considerably. What time her boyfriend first entered her she does not know exactly, but for sure, she now says, she heard the second plane hit as she and he cooed once her first time was over. I remember disbelieving her story, just the way I imagine you doubt everything I say, too. And this disbelief is exactly the target of this story about my first sexual experience: why it was Mt. Rainier disappeared the exact moment I entered the ready/willing amorous domain of a certain Miss Eden Everclear. An early-April afternoon after school: I was fifteen, she sixteen, we were together in my bed, overlooking the harbor and Mt. Rainier. E.E. strenuously kissed my ever-ready teenliness, and as she attentively applied herself to this action I envisioned the immoderate lips of some movie star/she-goddess descending from the blue oblivion, swallowing Mt. Rainier whole, licking its snowcaps dry until the holy rock heaved with an eruptive bliss peculiar to mountains sucked off by the plush lips of goddesses descended from the sky. Oh how me and the mountain were one that day! How many had communed with its awesome mountainousness before me? How many had made a similarly strong connection between mountain and member? Millions, most likely. Surely! But then I know that only one among these many million connected with the mountain so intensely that, as their own personal version of Eden Everclear raised a tropically lush valley into the charged air between those two expanses of pubic hair and lowered this welcoming valley of gummy loveliness down upon their mini-mountain of teenage manliness, anxiety surging all the while like electric lava shot through the earth’s mortar, I know that only one among the many million in history who stared down Mt. Rainier at similar moments in their lives and saw the sky or the valley or the sea or the sun or some such other earthly or heavenly body envelop the mountain with cascades of caressing love, I know that only then, as Eden Everclear eased herself down upon me and commenced sucking upon my neck, did I see what I saw, what so many billions saw on televised tape across the planet: I saw Mt. Rainier disappear. Once the tallest peak in the Lower 48, now nothing more than an unseen monument to what once was and may never be again—that is, unless we can summon its return by retelling the stories of our first times to ease the anxiety of all those worried folks on the inexperienced side of the sexual divide. A moment of heat, of pressure, of viscosity and all that pre-coital buildup bursts and is thereafter gone. The chances of what happened to me happening to you are very slim, especially if you live in the Seattle/Tacoma area. It is perfectly possible, however, that right now a boy or girl in Portland is reading this, thinking my god I will not have sex for the sake of Mt. Hood. In Northern California, a young man may be more in love with Mt. Shasta than he is with his teenage lovelady and he will not succumb to desire because he can’t imagine a world without that mountain. In Tibet. In Kenya. In Switzerland. In Nicaragua. In Bolivia, the same. Virgins all over the world may be sacrificing the loss of their virginity in favor of mountains retaining their mountainousness! Is this a good thing? Do we need mountains more than sex? Do we need mountains more than the intimate syncopations of breath and body? These are questions I can’t answer for you. All I can say is that my first time cost the world a mountain. And so it’s quite possible yours will cost the world something serious, too! Or not! And if this uncertainty causes you pre-sexual anxiety, it’s probably better to think about the disappearance of a mountain more than your performance (inevitably inexperienced!) or your nudity (somewhat necessary!) or the unhappy, potential consequences of disease or pregnancy. No matter what happens, for some it will probably be a natural, momentous loss in its own right. For others, it may feel like something mountainous has begun to rise from your heart—something right, something absolutely within you that will always hover like Mt. Rainier did before I had sex with Eden Everclear and made that particular mountain disappear.