Kleiner's Blog

“It’s so good to learn that from right here the view goes on forever and you’ll never want for comfort and you’ll never be alone” – The Mountain Goats

Perhaps the above quote is the best way to describe how I felt on the mountain Friday morning. Jackie, Michelle, Sabrina and I went hiking up the side of the Lehigh Gap, heading for the Devil’s Pulpit. I cannot express in words, I honestly can’t, the feeling I get at that place.

There are very few locations like this in the world. At our worst, our species commits a crime like the one committed to the Appalachian Mountains around Palmerton PA. The Zinc pollution that took place there is common fodder in Environmental Science textbooks, Chemistry textbooks, Biology textbooks and every sub-genre formed between the three.

Here it is, in our backyard the place where a man (Dan Kunkle) took a stand, and saved a mountain. A place where the worst of our world is erased in the promise of restoration – in the new life of trees, grasses, birds – it is life exploding.

This is hope. Hope defined. For all the ills of the world, the destruction, the inequality, the hatred, the poverty, the famine, war, greed, planned obsolescence, waste, plastic islands, global warming, all of it, there exists a place like the mountains of the Lehigh Gap. Go there. See it for yourself. Honestly, every word I have written on Remember is meaningless in contrast to the experience you can have abandoning the nonsense of our wasteful, hateful society and stepping into a restored wilderness.

That quote above – see when I got back into Allentown I thought about the fact that what happened on the Lehigh Gap is possible everywhere. That readers – that view that could go on forever – in the face of the personal ills (failure, anxiety, having piss poor nonexistent luck with women, a few extra pounds) whatever yours may be – is salvation.

On a funny note and because they didn’t think I would… the girls got trapped in the ancient spirit of the 400 million year old rock that we climbed down to rejoin a trail and in a moment of pure jubilant freedom – the ladies flashed the mountain.