January 11, 2026

By Arthur H. Gunther

thecolumnrule.com

When you climb a mountain – the real thing or a rising-beyond-a-hill emotion, or physical difficulty or something financial, you don’t exactly know the “why.” It is often much later – sometimes years, even decades – that you understand the journey.

In my neck of the woods north of New York City, there is a mountain made famous in a 1936 play, “High Tor,” written by then area resident Maxwell Anderson. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and was penned to highlight the potential, controversial sale of the mountain’s valuable traprock to a quarry. In 1942, Anderson helped organize the Rockland County Committee to Save High Tor, which raised money to purchase the property above the Hudson River for state parkland.

The play includes a ghostly crew of Dutch sailors, bank robbers, a real estate agent and the principal character, Van Van Dorn, the summit’s owner, who is counseled by the Indian Tamanend, representing the spirit of the mountain. They climb High Tor and swap emotions, real and other-worldly, and as the play ends with a potential sale, Tamanend utters, “There’s nothing built … that will not make good ruins.” The die is cast that specific “progress” also will end some day.

I read “High Tor” as a young man not sure of my own footing or destiny. As with others – most of us – I had to climb a mountain, even symbolically though for me it was “High Tor,” driven by the play and by the South Mountain Road artists’ area that had long been an interest.

I hiked the back path to the summit over and over, perhaps 30 times. Occasionally, as if subconsciously advertising High Tor’s lure, I might induce a friend to come along. Once, my then girlfriend and I got lost in the dark because I foolishly tried to guide her down late. Before that happened, she had moved to her own spot atop High Tor and was lost in thought herself.

As with most of us tackling whatever “mountain,” there was no big revelation for me, no shout on the summit, but as time went on, the right career appeared – in newspapering. I had a chance, and I took it, climbing aboard a challenging but proper ride, rarely returning to High Tor for there was no need. Whatever had jelled on the visits seeped into my unconscious and has driven my career, my life. Moments like that come to many of us.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, in his last speech the night before he was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, said, “I’ve been to the mountaintop. …” He had found his reason for being. While you cannot compare his life and mission to the average individual seeking direction, you can note the analogy.

We all have to climb some sort of mountain.

The writer is a retired newspaperman, guntherart12@gmail.com

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