Mara Simmons: Mountain Gods
Gwangeon had mentioned something about a minor religion that worshipped the mountain. On the creaky little red bus that would take us over the bridge, out of the city to the foot of Palgongsan, I was zoning out, staring at the back of the balding head of the man sitting in front of me. The trip was too bouncy to sleep and too far into the highlands to use our phones. I asked Gwangeon more about the mountain, using a hushed tone to avoid getting glares from the five other passengers on the silent squeaking bus.
He described, with many pauses as he glanced around the bus, the popular tourist spot. Palgongsan was one of the mountains that made up the enormous chain forming the "backbone" of Korea, as he called it. Considered one of the sacred mountains during the Silla dynasty, it lay just beyond the northern border of Daegu City. There was a long cable car ride that would carry us nearly to the top, where we could stand at a shrine (a few meters from a mountaintop restaurant) and look out over the spine of the peninsula. I was somewhat more excited about my first cable car ride than I was about the mountain. I mean, there were mountains back home. I was no stranger to mountains. Gwangeon slowly shook his head. That was when he mentioned the mountain religion.
"There are people who believe the mountain is a god?" I said in surprise, realizing only after I’d said it how insensitive I sounded. He raised his eyebrows.
"I've seen your mountains. This is different, and you will see," he said mildly. I felt slightly chastised, and also suddenly a little defensive of Appalachia. But I was also curious. As far as I knew, most people in Korea fell into one of three religious categories: Buddhist, atheist, or Christian. The thought of a religious subset that worshipped a mountain as a god felt out of touch with the Korea I had experienced, which was largely urban and modern. The bits of old Korea that had survived the economic burst of the '60s existed in little bubbles: shrines in city centers, palaces from the 14th century and earlier surrounded by skyscrapers, the occasional elderly person wearing woven shoes and pulling a wooden cart down a street filled with taxis. But a whole group of people believing in and worshiping a natural object… I had never encountered anything like it in person.
The cable car ride took almost thirty minutes. For most of that time, I was gripping my seat with white knuckles, staring through the clear plastic floor to the treetops that seemed miles below us. Gwangeon laughed at my tension every time the cable car traveled over a juncture.
The mountain path from the cable car station to the very top of the mountain was a wide set of stone stairs crowded with people flowing down and climbing up. Ten laborious minutes later, we came to the beautiful entrance of the stone shrine, and then we turned a corner and the rest of the mountain range came into view.
Clouds snaked through the enormous peaks and rolled down the face of the mountain to billow over the people standing on the giant balcony overlooking the foliage-filled valley. Light, chilly rain drifted over every human atop that rock as the colossal clouds passed directly above our heads. I was too dazed by the scene to capture a photo for some time. The vastness of the spine of Korea left me without breath. It almost felt as though a gigantic heat lay just below those granite mountains, dormant but very much alive, on the verge of breathing in.
The rain gradually came down harder and the mountains slowly disappeared below the weight of the sky. Everyone shuffled inside the mountaintop restaurant, where there was plenty of hot traditional food like fish broth and acorn jelly. Despite the restaurant being so packed that half the people, including Gwangeon and myself, had to stand and eat, there was a pervasive silence as the rain came down outside the large windows.
This mountain was sacred, even now.
It felt as though everyone under that roof, despite not all sharing a language, shared some kind of understanding--or at least a vague feeling--that over the thousands and thousands of years humans had been on this peninsula, through the rise and fall of dynasties, through conquest and revolution and bloodshed and temples being built and firebombed and rebuilt, these mountains had been there to watch all of it happen, supporting all of the chaos of our short lives.
The trancelike silence was broken by a baby crying, of course. But the strange, almost spiritual awakeness and connection I felt to the people huddled on that mountaintop with me remained. It remains still. The world is very, very big and old and strange, and I still forget that sometimes, until I climb above circumstances, outside of myself, and regain perspective.
Mara Simmons is a Psychology major who, with any luck, will graduate in 2021. They did their Breakaway in the fall semester of 2018, and if they have to hear one more joke about “So when you say ‘Korea’ do you mean the North or the South?” they might commit an actual war crime. After Lander they plan to take out a bunch of loans, use them to travel all over the world, and then fake their own death to avoid the consequences of their own actions.