Shasta...the white mountian. It stands different and it stands tall.
A recent trip to shasta and I saw some things that I don't associate with this hood.
Eeerie silence on freeway and around lake making it seem like ghost-town.
Long, dark patches of nothingness.
Lots of 'Got Weed?' mugs in gas stations.
Shasta, and its seasons, are very disparate.
Hot and lively or cold and silent.
The winters are cold but peaceful - not a soul on trails, not a fisherman in sight, not a creature lurking in or around the five fingered water-body.
The house-boats, like parked cars, line up the docks...the gentle tap of water throws them against docks and the a faint echo drowns in shallow blue-greem slime of lake.
The sun creeps across the lake gently and steadily...its rhythm matching the sound-less beat of still water.
The tips of shasta briefly peek thorugh the ever-present lenticular cloud. They shine in setting sun like golden inverted cones and then blush away in shades of pink and orange.
There's something about evenings in mountains. It is as if cold and silence are out to play as moon shines over snow turning it into silver playground. And then there is a storm brewing...
Watching snow move through a valley is like looking at white sheets being blow dried in air...cotton ripping from the sheets like crumbs.
A mountian so isolated and yet so dominant. A poet describes it as -"Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the heart of the great black forests of Northern California."
On a clear day it can be seen from fifty to undred miles away. If anything it teaches us to stand tall even with our peculiarities.
