The Sleeping Lady

Mount Tamalpais, Marin County by Tom Killion

I can no longer see Mount Tamalpais from my living room window—not only am I now living in a small house in the flat lands, with no height to raise my line of site above multi-story buildings, utility poles, and the tops of trees, but my house is on the wrong side of the street, so instead I can only see a bit of the Berkeley Hills, green in the winter and brown in the summer but always dotted with houses like the one where I used to live, the house that had a large picture window facing west toward the shining waters of the San Francisco Bay and the dramatic outlines of Mt. Tam against the sky, though that magnificent view used to make my heart ache because I’d heard the Coast Miwok legend that the mountain was in the shape of a reclining woman, a sleeping Miwok maiden that the mountain had taken pity on and saved from defilement at the hands of a rival tribe

(the first time he hit me was a year after our first child was born when I told him I wanted to go back to college, and then he knelt down, put his hand on his heart, and swore to me he would never do it again, and then after our second child was born and he broke his promise again and again, I just felt so trapped—there I was with two children and no money of my own and no education and besides he kept saying that if I ever left, he would take the children from me)

but the thing was that in all the years that I lived in that house, no matter how often as I studied the mountain, in different types of weather and in different kinds of light, I could never see the Sleeping Lady in its shape

(I married too young, you see, when I was just a college freshman because I was having an affair with my French Literature professor and got pregnant, and, though my parents urged me to get an abortion, when my professor offered marriage instead I was so in love with him that I decided to accept his offer, and it wasn’t until years later when I saw the expression on my older child’s face when she discovered me cowering in front of her father that I finally told my mother the truth, and she came and took my children and me away from that place and then found us a lawyer, who told me that I did have rights and money too and there was no way she would let him take my children away from me)

and now when I do see Mt. Tamalpais, whether from the water’s edge at the Berkeley Marina or when I’m visiting someone in my old neighborhood, I still can’t see the Sleeping Lady in its shape, but it turns out that the Sleeping Lady legend never had a basis in Coast Miwok myth and is instead a romantic piece of BS from the Victorian-era (with the same “legend” and the name “Sleeping Lady” being used for other mountains on this continent and also around the world), so I understand now that I did see Mt. Tam with some clarity back then because it is just a mountain after all, from a distance a beautiful silhouette against the sunset but up close a complex ecosystem teeming with life, including the tallest redwood trees on earth, majestic oaks, tiny wild iris, delicate California poppies, and animals of all kinds—deer, coyote, chipmunks, snakes, and even salmon in the streams—all living out their lives, whether long or short, with the occasional wildfire tearing through it all.


by Nina Zolotow

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