Flat Mountain
Publisher: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Volume 15, Issue 2 | Author: Nadia Ghent | Genre: Non-Fiction | Publication Date: July 3, 2008 | Publication Type: Print, Online Journal | Content Type: Essay
This story was told by Nadia Ghent at the funeral service for her father, Emmanuel Ghent, on April 7, 2003, New York City.
WHEN I WAS FOUR, MY MOTHER, NATHALIE, AND MANNIE, WHO WOULD soon become my stepfather, and I took a drive in the country. Mannie had told me about a great place up the Hudson called Bear Mountain, and even though I wasn't sure about the bear part, he made it sound so enticing that, with typical four-year-old exuberance, I just couldn't wait to get there. It was a long drive in his 1957 dark green Lark convertible, and the top was probably down, and our hair was flying in the breeze. We had made a late start, and the afternoon was drawing to a close, but we still hadn't gotten there yet. I was getting quite impatient and cranky, unable to wait much longer to see the bears at Bear Mountain. Also, although nobody could have known this, the next morning I was to come down with a fulminating case of the chicken pox, so the virus was probably already affecting me, making me even more irritable and hard to deal with. Bear Mountain was still a long way off, many more miles of driving with a petulant four-year-old than my mother and Mannie were prepared for. So all of a sudden, my dad swung the car off the road onto a little parking area and told me with great excitement and glee that we had just arrived at the most wonderful and amazing place in the whole world, called Flat Mountain, a place thousands of people drive for hours and hours to get to but often can't find at all, and weren't we so amazingly lucky to find it right here right now! Of course, he said, Flat Mountain is way better than Bear Mountain because it is so difficult to find and so unusual and so special. Most people miss it completely and never get here at all.
It was probably just a turn-off from the Palisades Parkway with a small patch of grass, but I didn’t realize that until many years later. It was completely enchanting to me! So I jumped out of the car and cavorted in the late afternoon sunshine. I remember running around in just my underwear—I must have been getting feverish by then—but I didn’t feel it at all because I was absolutely happy that we had gotten to this spectacular place called Flat Mountain, which couldn’t possibly compart to Bear Mountain, and anyway I didn’t really want to see those bears. I still have a photo from that afternoon of me lying on the grass gazing rapturously up at the sky, my mom Natalie and my dad with their arms around each other, watching me, probably quite relieved that I was so happy to be at Flat Mountain.
So it took me many years to figure out that Flat Mountain wasn’t a real place at all, that it was only a stop made necessary by a hot, tired, cranky, and whining four-year-old, but my dad never told me that. He must have listened to my telling the story of our happy trip to Flat Mountain so many times over and how special and rare a place it was. I completely believed in it, and it was only when I had grown up that I realized what he had done for that cranky four-year-old so many years ago, how gently and imaginatively he created this whole contradictory place for me, a mountain that was flat, and how wonderfully I had remembered it. To me, Flat Mountain came to stand for my dad’s incredible way of making a bad situation good. I realized that he was telling me that although you didn’t get where you intended, all is not lost because you are here in this other place, and what a wonderful place it is! And this is how he helped me learn how to deal with the different pathways in life, and how I can make sense of my life and our lives now, without him in it. We never intended for him not to be in the same place as we are, but now he is not, and we are here in this other place. And although it is not wonderful to be here without him, it is just like a sad patch of grass right by the side of the highway that nobody sees because they are driving too fast. We are here in this sad place, and we need somehow to make it work for us, to have the grief and disappointment of not having him with us, and in time carry the memory of him with us to make this sad place bearable, to connect, in time, with the happiness we must create for ourselves. This is his gift to me.
This story was told by Nadia Ghent at the funeral service for her father, Emmanuel Ghent, on April 7, 2003, New York City.
Also published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Volume 15, Issue 2 are the Reflections on Flat Mountain as recorded by Anthony Bass Ph.D.