Goodbye, New Hampshire. I hardly knew ye.

Not too long ago, I read something a friend had written, a simple and at the same time profound imperative regarding how we should conduct ourselves while on the planet. Breathe until you are breathless. That has really stayed with me. When I'm caught up in a big moment, something I know I'm going to want to hold on to, I often find myself saying over and over, remember this, this is now. And I can breathe.

One of the problems I am having concluding this thing is that to wrap it up means it's over and done. When you look forward to something for so long, everything you imagined about it, all you wanted it to be, and then it all turns out to be indeed pretty big, the resulting memory can become an entity in and of itself. Some of us girls are like this about our weddings, where we obsess about the lace on the bottom of the front of the brides maids’ (nine, not five) dresses, and whether the scalloped-curved icing on the top layer is from left to right or right to left, and ultimately, we are trying to set it all up so it is the perfect memory. Never mind the experience or what happens after the wedding. Ok, after is quite nice, but I mean the years and the world after the wedding.
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That whole morning , my mantra had been "remember this, this is now." From the time my alarm went off to when I was grunting through the fog toward the top, I was so focused on being as aware as I possibly could that it never occurred to me that the energy from every twitching muscle, every firing neuron, every cell might possibly be rerouted from my brain to my badly suffering body. This hill climb was such a thing to me that I wanted to remember it so well that I’d almost completely forgotten why I was trying to remember it all.

The Mt Washington Hillclimb is not a “check out the beautiful surroundings kind of event,” even though we did get a t-shirt. It's called the toughest hillclimb in the world which is why I just had to do it. Technically it's a race, a race to see who can get up the mountain fastest. Because this was not going to be the trip where I'd be able observe the vegetation or take notice what happens to the view once above the treeline, I really wanted to hang on to what I was able to attend to, or at least what I thought I’d attend to during the experience. Truthfully, I really didn't even care about what the others around me were doing. Who was passing me, who I was passing, what place I was in…it didn’t matter much at all at the time. You're on the mountain with roughly 599 other racers, a mass simultaneous time trial basically. It's the most intense physical experience I’ve, um, experienced, after the wedding excepted, of course.

I was so intent on preserving the memory and memories of the thing, almost as if trying to create a permanent retinal afterimage. Yes, that was it, record it like my personal visual time capsule, my very own internal home movie. In cinematography, when a dolly track is properly lain, the camera moves effortlessly along, capturing the scene on film. Similarly, when an actor is mounted on such a dolly and the camera moves with him simultaneously on a parallel track, the actor appears to almost levitate above the ground, smoothly moving forward as if on a elevated conveyor. This has always struck me as sort of dreamy whenever I've watched scenes in movies using this technique.

The last two miles of that hill climb were nothing if not full of effort, yet when I hit that last pitch, the 22%er, I was on that dolly track, floating, gliding, almost oblivious. Ironically, I have little if no recall of propelling myself forward and up in the final 50 yards, no memory of much sound at all besides my own very heavy and frantic breathing, no real sense of what was going on around me. Unspeakably surreal. Then, crossing the finish sweating and shivering, hungry enough to eat the chocolate gu and the wrapper, I slipped past other finishers, into the fog.

Crescit Eudo, it grows as it goes. Although I've known the phrase for 20 something years, I only recently discovered it is the New Mexico state motto. Warren Smitt, Professor of Classics at UNM, writes, "In context it refers to the motion of a thunderbolt across the sky, which acquires power and momentum as it goes." Sort of like a Chinese secret, it winds, changes, develops into different things with new angles and new ways to put yourself into it. If ever an experience and the resulting memories could be thought of as organic and shifting, this sure would be one of them.

Some of it was fleeting, some was not. What has stuck, though, is really important to me, and I hope it does gain power and momentum over time. I set out to do something I knew was way bigger than me, and I actually did it. I won't forget doing it, but I already look back and ask myself how I could undertake such a task. It always comes back to that breathe until you are breathless thing. Before we loaded up the bikes to drive back down, I scurried over the summit rocks, through the dense fog to find a couple of small pieces of granite and a nice tuft of moss as evidence of having been there. I stuck them in the pocket of my down vest. I thought it only fair that I carted off some of that mountain. It had taken a pretty big piece of me.