Spinning Pins

Points: Mt. Whitney is the highest point in the continental United States. But from Lone Pine, California, it looks shorter than Lone Pine Peak because it is further west. You learn to identify it by the two fingers of rock to the left of the peak. It and the imposter are like the twin trees on our land.

The highest point is in some sense a point, infinitely small (though its altitude is measurable) but supported by acres, volumes, infinitudes of Sierra granite rising from the earth. A cone of granite holding up the noted point.


A guy we met at the hotel mentioned "touching the summit." Then we discovered that we are all from the Pittsburgh area. Then he said Anawanna, the name of a Boy Scout Camp 3,000 miles away in Amity, Pennsylvania, the village where I grew up and my mother still lives.

Then I talked about a gas well in Amity that I saw for the first time last week, between Anawanna and my mother's house, which has invaded with noise and bright lights and earthcuts and erosion a hillside on a formerly beautiful farm in a formerly lovely valley. The farm was previously owned by the obstetrician who delivered me in 1977. The pump grinds up and down all day and all night, extracting money via a narrow vertical shaft, privileging one lucrative lubricated point over all the surrounding land, all the homes, all the neighbors' living senses.