There is no way Nan Shepherd could have predicted its success, nor the uncommon staying power, of the book she had stowed away in a drawer for decades. After a quiet release in 1977, The Living Mountain became a surprise sensation in the United Kingdom after Canongate reissued it, three decades after her death, in 2011. A newcomer to the text, too, might be surprised by such enduring allure. In this age of focus groups and studio notes, conventional wisdom suggests that broad appeal is made through similarly broad strokes: universally relatable content in which there’s something for everyone. And yet The Living Mountain is about a specific set of mountains in northeast Scotland that many readers will never have visited. 

Shepherd’s poetic evocation of what Robert Macfarlane calls her “parish” is breathtaking indeed, and likely thrilling for anyone who has visited its slopes. But as a Californian reader, what I appreciate most about this text is precisely the thing that it has to offer to those who have never been anywhere near the Cairngorms. The Living Mountain endures, for Macfarlane and countless other readers, because it describes a relationship, a certain form of attention, and a cultivation of the senses that transforms beholder and beheld. The book presents itself as a manual for observation—not the purely scientific kind, but the kind that involves you so completely that you might, as Shepherd puts it, “walk the flesh transparent.” For anyone with an abiding love for a place, Shepherd’s attitude will be both affirming and instructive.

Not far into The Living Mountain, it became to me a book about two places: the Cairngorms and the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, which I grew up near, can still see from my current neighborhood, and visit several times a year. Shepherd’s telling of how a mist can transform an entire landscape in mere moments conjures for me the San Francisco marine layer, a merciful bank of fog that drapes its fingers eastward over the Santa Cruz mountains every summer. When Shepherd mentions lives lost to the Spey and the Dee, I think of the treacherous beaches on the other side of my mountains, where every year the cold and frothing Pacific Ocean, in the form of rogue waves, claims the lives of unsuspecting visitors. And Shepherd’s incredible image of a duck and a drake flying in a such a manner that they appeared to be two halves of a single bird brings back a memory of something that stopped me in my tracks on a remote trail in Grabtown Gulch, on a silent foggy day when I saw almost no one: two bright yellow banana slugs trailing each other in a perfect circle, like a symbol of regeneration.

Throughout all of this, what I recognized most was the fundamental quality of Shepherd’s relationship to the Cairngorms, a blend of obsession and humility. She tells us right at the beginning what the point is: going to the mountain is “a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it.” Her depictions of the landscape, its life forms, and its visual tricks are suffused with a breathless fixation on a subject that exceeds all description. Desire becomes the engine that not only drives her writing but also compels her back to the place, over and over again, each time revealing more complexity. “This process has taken many years,” she writes, “and is not yet complete.” It can never be complete; she goes back because she knows she will always find more.

The mountain in The Living Mountain is “living” not just because, as the book vividly demonstrates, the life of air, light, flowers, and water take part in it. It is living because Shepherd affords it the capacity to be alive. She does this by enacting what I have referred to as “unfreezing something in time”: holding a single organism or area constant in one’s attention so that its unfolding changes become perceptible. The shifts she catalogues take place all along the temporal spectrum: the carving of the mountains’ astounding forms during the last ice age; the ancient place-names; the solid, long-lasting snow of the early 1930s that gave way before a series of warm summers; the changes in the coats of deer each winter and spring; and an overflowing catalogue of flowers that appear after the snow has disappeared; the way that fog and mist can, in a matter of minutes, change one’s entire visual field. Even within the seemingly unbroken “gray desolation” of early spring, Shepherd’s world can be transfigured by a sudden combination of weather and attention: “if the sun comes out and the wind rises, the eye may suddenly perceive a miracle of beauty. For on the ground the down of a ptarmigan’s breast feather has caught the sun. Light blows through it, so transparent the fugitive spindrift feather has become. It blows away and vanishes.”

These near-magical phenomena hover around the Cairngorms like their own mist; they are things that can only be witnessed there. Even the required vocabulary has the specificity of alpine flowers: cleft, cornice, corrie, and cataract; spate, spicule, scree, and scaur. This peculiar environment has effects on Shepherd, most notably “mountain feyness,” a kind of intoxication and taste for risk that disappears when she leaves, but reappears as soon as she returns: “God or no god, I am fey again.” Perhaps this is why Shepherd seems strangely ageless in the book: we only see her on the mountain, in her mountain state—which, while it evolves, has nothing to do with the categories and timetables of the off-mountain world. This too I recognized. For a long time, I have joked that depending on my location, I’m either “me” or “mountain-me.” Mountain-me is a different beast, nebulous yet earthly, containing all of my selves from childhood onward in something less than a hierarchy. It would be impossible to try to describe mountain-me without painting a portrait of the mountain, or making lists like Shepherd does: serpentine rubble, beard lichen, blood-red dragonfly, flustering of quail, shrieking scrub jay, crisping buckeye flower, and scent of sage. But no matter how much I recite this litany, or picture the Santa Cruz Mountains, I am like a werewolf waiting for the moon: the only way to become mountain-me is to be in their presence.

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What this means is that, like mountain feyness, certain thoughts and feelings can be said to occur only in certain places. Or rather, they occur somewhere in between us and those places, as evidenced when Shepherd says that “something moves between me and it.” One cannot subtract the mountain: while it is Shepherd who brings part of the thought, “the forms must be there for the eye to see.” For me, this idea of mountain-as-text puts Shepherd’s relationship with the Cairngorms into conversation with pre-colonial relationships to place. I think of what Keith Basso describes in Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, where the Apache associate cautionary tales and traditional knowledge with particular locations and features of the landscape, making them as much a substrate of collective wisdom as human storytelling is. Lose the places and you lose the knowledge. Closer to home, I have heard Greg Sarris, a local author and Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, describe how his ancestors saw the surrounding landscape as a “sacred text.”

To be sure, Shepherd’s mountain-thinking represents something different and more personal. What is similar is the way in which the Cairngorms come to collect her life’s experience and wisdom. The mountains are scrawled over with her memories, images that are not just descriptions but stories: “Once I was inside a cloud that gave no sensation whatever.… We were on the flank between Sgoran Dubh and Sgor Gaoith”; “once in Glen Slogan a pair of golden bumbles bees (as it seemed) sped past me in a whorl of joyful speed. But it couldn’t be—they were too large. I stalked them. They were young wrens.” My memory-map of the Santa Cruz Mountains has its own points: Once, from the summit of Black Mountain, I saw a rainstorm two hours out to sea and barely made it back to my car without getting pummeled; once, at Pescadero State Beach North, I realized a divot in the sandstone cliff was perfectly echoing the crash of ocean waves, so that it was like standing between two seas. If such experiences are unforgettable, it’s not so much because they’re beautiful as it is that they cut you down to size. Shepherd knows this dynamic intimately. Each of her place-memories share the feeling of a parable, a reminder involving perception, infinity, and how “the thing to be known grows with the knowing.”

Of course, anyone living today who loves any place is likely aware that its personality hangs in the balance, or will soon. Taking landforms and non-human life seriously as co-authors and co-thinkers means believing that the future facing our environments represents a double threat: the mountain is in danger, therefore so is the ability of certain thoughts to come into being. I’m not only uncertain of how my mountains will change, I’m uncertain of who I will be without them.

While reading The Living Mountain, I visited a favorite bench in the Santa Cruz Mountains with an older friend who has lived near there for decades. Facing Butano Ridge, a miles-long, solid blue density of redwoods and firs, I told him about how that ridge felt like one of the oldest words I know, how I’d memorized its shape, how it was in the background of photos of me as a baby. But from where we were sitting, we could see burn scars on the ridge from a destructive and out-of-control wildfire from 2020, the kind now typical in a state facing both climate change and the debt of decades of mismanagement. For years after the fire, whenever I was in view of Butano Ridge, I could not bring myself to look at it, exhibiting the denial of someone who doesn’t want to go to the doctor and hear the details of how ill they are. I thought of this as I reached the end of The Living Mountain, whose descriptions of snow I loved so much. A Scottish climate study has predicted a decrease in snow in the Cairngorms in the coming decades, with a likelihood of some years with little or no snow by 2080.

With this in mind, there are two very different possible ways of reading The Living Mountain. The first, melancholic way would be to read it as an archive, a snapshot of phenomena that may never occur again, at least in such abundance. In this reading, the unbroken snowfield, the ptarmigan who changes to match it, and the many other endemic phenomena of the once-living mountain are like exhibits in a museum. But the second is, again, as a model of relationship—one that might even help us avoid such a future. Sarris, the tribal chairman, once told me that we all, native and non-native alike, needed to repopulate the land with stories. I see Shepherd’s care and attentiveness, her memories and observations, covering the mountains like a protective layer of heather and juniper, roots keeping them from eroding into anonymity. In return, the mountains brought her to life. This mutual sustenance is what I take most to heart from Shepherd. For if we do find answers for how to brave the present, with its floods and fires, and still keep the faith, they won’t come from us alone. They will come from the strength that results from a tightened weave, story after story, between ourselves and our places.