Mount Analogue

Last year, on an absolutely crazy whim, I decided to get Wilderness First Aid certified. My roommate, in her last year of college, was trying to figure out what she wanted to do as a career once she was of free class-taking and homework-doing. We all started toying with the idea of her being the perfect Adventure Travel leader – she was extremely active, friendly and outdoorsy. Many of the programs we found, however, required that the candidate be certified in Wilderness First Aid. I decided to come along for the ride. The thing is that I had never even really been camping, if you want to know the truth. I mean, really. I’ve been to cabins and I’ve slept in tents, but the tents were never really in the wilderness and … I mean, cabins? Even I feel like that’s a bit of a cop-out. It was very intimidating, then, for me to come to this little weekend getaway with all of these intense youth-leader outdoorsy types (this class was specifically for people who lead youth groups… they gave us an exception but were nonetheless confused by our presence) who had been hiking and camping and otherwise frolicking about in the outdoors for years on end – and were in fact even in charge of the outdoor frolickings of other! So when things turned out perfectly fantastic, when I ended up learning a lot, getting to talk to really interesting and awesome people, and developing a new appreciation and thirst for outdoor adventure, I was pleasantly surprised. Imagine how much more delighted I was when I had this fantastic chat about books with our Wilderness First Aid certifier, who turned out to also be a high school English teacher. His favorite book, he told me, was Mount Analogue, a allegorical story about mountain climbers. I thought it was pretty endearing that he managed to combine his two – at first glance uncombine-able – loves, and eager to experience the combination of one of my tried and true favorites with a new interest, I vowed to seek it out. It took me a while to find it because I kept spelling it ‘Analog’ and cursing at Google when nothing would come up. But I finally discovered that it’s an unfinished novel by French surrealist Rene Daumal. Immediately, I did as any good little, well-trained Northeastern student would do – I NUCAT-ed it. Alas! It wasn’t to be found! Nor was it at the BPL in Copley – the search for this book was becoming ironically similar to the fruitless search of the men in the story. Luckily, Emily helped me discover the inter-library loan option on the library’s website and – success! – two libraries in the system carry it! So the day ended with a library lesson learned, everyone was happy, books were distributed. Goodness: such power.