Two Medicine is a less visited part o f Glacier National Park, partly because it off the main highway through the park, the Going to the Sun Road. I’ve also read because people see it as a less dramatic. I can’t agree. There is a special feeling here and sometimes almost magical clouds.
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We first visited this part of the park in 2000 and back then it inspired this prose poem:
Acceptance
Pre-History
Inevitably, glacier comes to mountain. Moving and wearing. Mountain aches to hold onto her edges. Many are lost. Remnants grow rounded. Small stones fall, forming an anklet at her base. Glacier moves past.
Glacier’s last day is like sand wiped out of her eye. She opens her top to the sun and her edges to the wind. Wind is kind compared to persistent ice. She feels a heat of anger for lost edges until she catches her reflection in a pool of water. She is beautiful.
She looks for the glacier, sees that the pool is tears into which glacier has dissolved.
Post-History
Mountain is unmoving and accepting: seven thousand feet of rock that’s survived the glacial curve. She stands and you’ll not go through. The rock accepts bear, human, rain. We’re always passing over, but she, the earth’s protrusion, remains.
Goats climb her humps. Wind sounds in her ridges. Snow gathers in her empty pockets.
She will wear away. Not that you’ll notice. Her wearing takes the length of years strung between planets. In the end, every bit of her will rest at the bottom of a lake.
Or perhaps, the oceans will rise again to hold her.
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On our visit two weeks ago, John was inspired to make a cairn:
Unstoppable Wholeness 