Something Peculiar

Bear-Bait #035

Oct 22, 2025

The mountains do a funny thing to us.

On a sad day, you drive up and down a mountain road. Through the dancing shade of aspens and beneath the towering pines.

You turn on your favorite sad music and play it loud.

You look through the vast forest and think of simpler times.

You see the rushing river and think about how cold it is.

You reflect on younger years when you rode this road in the backseat.

But now, with big adult worries and big adult dreams, you drive them alone. You drive them as you seek repose.

You drive them because what else are you going to do with those big feelings.

As good as they are at handling those emotions, sometimes the mountains preceed (and even cause) the ushy gushy.

Like on the drive back up to school after visiting family. You’re just enjoying the music and solitude of a sunday evening drive.

Then a light catches your eye. The last rays of the day persevere over the peaks of Sardine Canyon. They break through the purple haze and warm your heart.

You remember younger years—when you walked through crunching leaves and the chilly breeze.

“Gosh dad used to walk so fast.”

Those majestic mountains give you a shift of feeling.

You turn off the Ariana Grande and have Siri change it to Caamp.

You think about how much you missed your mom and how big Oliver is getting.

It’s officially “sad-boy hours.”

Now you’d think I’d be writing about how powerful the mountains are. How nature heals us.

That’s a little too low of hanging fruit for me.

No, I’m thinking about another force that’s almost as miraculous as a person’s random desire to summit a mountain.

Music.

In both of aforementioned scenarios, it’s an integral part of the experience…almost as powerful as the looming granite.

It helps us express feelings that are usually frustrated through clumsy speech.
Music validates, music empathizes, and music understands.

There’s something universal about it.

Picture a Lakota warrior, stomping his feet. Ducking and diving with the drum to tell the stories of his great planes ancestors.

Picture an African man, humming as he cuts his hands picking cotton.

A paratrooper, flying over normandy, singing to make it all seem less scary.

Big feelings. Music.

Picture a runner, blasting her pump-up song before a race.

Picture a grandmother, “youtubing” songs she used to hear on the radio way back when.

Picture a child, afraid of the dark. Singing, “Whenever I hear the song of a bird, I know My Heavenly Father Loves Me.”

Big feelings. Music. Understanding.

Humans really are funny creatures. We need to eat, sleep, and breathe like every other living thing.

But we also climb mountains for fun. We get in cold water just for the heck of it. We travel great distances just for the love of the game. No grizzly bear would ever do that.

We also feel big. We feel left-out. We feel lonely. We feel overwhelmed. We feel joy and gratitude and love.

We write sonnets. Compose music. Paint pictures.

With these big brains of ours, we struggle to express.

Maybe that’s why we sing in the dark, climb mountains when we’re tired, and cry at songs we’ve heard a hundred times.

I think we need to be more okay with that.

Recently I stood in the office of a friend’s dad. He showed us a treasured gift—one that was given to him by his best pal.

This grown man told us how much he missed his buddy. How weird it will be to go hunting without him.

He wasn’t afraid to express sadness over his friend’s passing.

I was moved.

The truth is that a lot of us walk around with terrible tension in our throats and burdens on our shoulders.

We make ourselves crazy fighting off our feelings.

It’s been a big problem lately, especially among men.

My challenge for you today is to be a little more willing to feel. Sing a song. Look at the leaves.

Accept that to be human is to feel.

“Remember when our songs were just like prayers
Like gospel hymns that you caught in the air?
Come down, come down sweet reverence
Unto my simple house and ring
And ring”

-Gregory Alan Isakov “The Stable Song”