Many years have come and gone since I have been struck by the majestic, towering presence of the Grand Tetons, the crisp air as biting as I last remembered, the green of the grasses slightly yellowed with the season. Once again, I hear the lone highway humming with a steady buzz of canoe-topped cars framing the landscape of cloud-piercing mountain peaks against still-frozen vegetation. The day has come when I look out at billowy grasses, in which the cold wind carves evanescent ridges and lines, patterns that disappear seconds after the ever-changing wind does, forms that remain only in my mind’s eye.

These patterns are the ones that have stayed at the forefront of memory, the permanence of impermanent forms marking my memory. It is these that I remember first, when alone with swirling thoughts my mind returns back to the Grand Teton mountain range, a tranquil memory juxtaposed with the insanity of daily life. It is no coincidence that the instant I conjure up images of the serene lakes, their water as blue as the sky they reflect, unrivaled restoration floods my body, wacking off years of weariness as I return to the age I once was, staring out at never-ending pines. How often have I used these very memories to rescue me from the worst torments of the soul, to trap me in a bubble of happiness that I may exist in if only for the slenderest splinter of time?
The sheer power of the Grand Tetons never fails to astound me, to draw me back in, especially in its ability to pluck me out of anguish and instead embrace me in the warmth of cold cliffs and waterfalls, of rocky crags and jagged sagebrush. Seemingly harsh and unfeeling, a place where the stretching rays of the sun never seem to quite reach, where the mountains’ shadows embrace the biting frost long after the moon has gone, how often has it brought me the warmth and joy that even the hottest summer days could not!

But now, both looking out at the landscape and looking back at the past, with a reflection as clear as that the lakes show, my experience here years ago only reveals to me simple naivety and ignorance. I walked among these very pines unburdened and unknowing, every step I took was buoyant because the pains and pleasures of the world around me were a blur and unfocused, I could only just barely make out the lightest, happiest swatches of color. Unbeknownst to me, the darkest pains were always there, just swirled around in the tornado I was in. My eyes have since focused; the dark streaks are painfully clear now, at times overpowering the light, which once I only saw. I naively believed that the beautiful dashes of pure, untainted light were what life was, and the dark slices that stained it would never truly affect me, for I was above it all, pain could never truly lay its intrusive hand on my head.

That is not so now. I am here, among the very landscape whose pines once reached slender branches protectively over my small head, whose flat rocks served as trays for my many fruit snacks and animal crackers, whose deer looked intensely into my own wide eyes, two random creations of nature crossing paths at that moment at this haven in the world. Now however, the trees are just trees, their branches beckon only to the birds whose songs swirl around like the tornado that I used to live in blissfully, a contradiction to the sharp focus I now see. The rocks are sharp and jagged and the deer have long learned to run from humans. But the Grand Tetons are as beautiful as ever. They are still the backdrop that I picture my happiest moments in, the place where dark streaks are lightened though as briefly as the wind bends patterns in the tall grasses. The beauty of the Grand Tetons is that they don’t change, not physically at least. When the world is stained and engulfed in shadow, the lakes are clear and the water runs as crisp and cold as I last remember. Even if in my mind I see the trees as stoic and inanimate, and the rocks as unwelcoming to my snacks, somewhere in the endless expanse of life that makes up the park, there is a flat rock, above whom branches reach to protect the deer that cross underneath.