The bare rock face staggered out of the dimming late winter light as I slid my hands along the rippling steering wheel of my mother's car. My mother's voice reading off the trivia card and the sound of “Sister Golden Hair” sunk into the seat cushion beyond my ears. The sounds plunged past me as we turned the curve and the backside of the mountain came into view.
I could see cars parked in the lot below us and the vastness of the dirt and gravel lot in between the splotches of trees. The sheer cliffs on the mountainside above had been worn down by years of rainfall. The wrinkles in the rock dripped down the mountain. Thousands of years had come to this, from the glaciers that had carved the landscape to small crowds gathered beneath the mountain, slush and gravel clinging to their shoes as their faces peered upward, impossibly locating the face that once reigned over these New Hampshire hills. I thought about pulling over.
*
He was the one thing we found to set us apart, our state's one certifiable claim to fame: the Old Man of the Mountain, a formation of rock hanging out the side of a mountain that one day someone decided looked like a face. The white blobs that surround route numbers on our highway signs are intended to reflect his shape. Our license plates proudly feature him in between the green numbers and letters. The state quarter displays his countenance with the “Old Man of the Mountain” etched into the metal underneath his face so those unfamiliar with New Hampshire's odd obsession with a mountainside man may have a slight chance at understanding. We have little else to boast about.
People forget New Hampshire, and then when they remember it, they realize they know nothing about it. Perhaps this is a marketing flaw. I read an article a few summers ago in the Boston Globe that said New Hampshire had no standout feature to offer, nothing to lure people in. New Hampshire tourism officials tried to counter the statement by saying we had the best of everything, but really, if we're being honest with ourselves, we have nothing to set us apart.
We have eighteen measly miles of coast. We have Mount Washington, which holds the world record for strongest recorded wind speed. Of course, strongest recorded wind speed isn't likely to bring throngs of vacationers trundling in, although we do also have bumper stickers that say “This car climbed Mt. Washington!” which I have always found to be unimpressive. Our first in the nation primary does bring in a fair amount of attention, but then it's mostly from politicians hoping to woo our voters who are nothing if not consistently unpredictable. We have no seat belt laws for those over the age of eighteen, so that's a big draw for the lamely reckless I suppose. Also, our tax free, highway-side state liquor stores are highly celebrated, but are hardly something to put on the state quarter. So we are the Granite State, and the Old Man was ours.
*
After a long day of skiing, my family would bundle into the car, shedding the winter coats and letting our eyes wander out the windows. Our car wound its way down the pass in Franconia Notch, the road twisting and turning between the trees on either side. After the van turned around another corner, we could see the Old Man's face jutting out the side of Cannon Mountain, his mouth slightly open as if in mid-speech, proclaiming some unheard statement to the surrounding hills. My brother and I would peer out the window in awe, our bodies worn out from skiing but our eyes still eagerly peeled for the geological feat that towered over us.
My parents would sometimes pull the car into the dirt lot beneath him. Our sneakers would pound out footprints in the wet ground as we gazed up at the Old Man. We would stand there for a few minutes, wondering at the implausibility of a man's face in a mountain. I always thought he bore a resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. I do not think Abraham Lincoln would be particularly flattered by that comparison, but as he has often been called the ugliest president, I will make no apologies for merely finding a trace of his looks in a giant rock face.
After our moments of reflection beneath the Old Man, we would climb back into the van and ready ourselves for the hours remaining on the drive home. I am not sure what we got from standing beneath him. We had seen him many times before, and honestly, there wasn't much to do in his shadow. Because we had nothing else, the Old Man was our symbol, and he became part of an odd sort of ritual. We wouldn't always stop beneath him, but he was always there, gazing out over the state. There was always a cluster of cars parked in that lot beneath his countenance, cameras flashing, families gazing, visitors to the state perhaps meeting him for the first time, perhaps wondering what the hell the fuss was all about, perhaps joining in our own genuflection. Whether or not it made any sense, there we were.
*
I was eating breakfast in the kitchen one morning when I was twelve, the dull sounds of the radio thumping out, when the words fell into the air. “Sad news for the Granite State today, the Old Man has fallen...” Years of water freezing and unfreezing in the cracks of the granite cliffs had reduced New Hampshire's symbol to a pile of rubble hundreds of feet below. I kept eating my breakfast, an odd stirring in the depths of my stomach.
In math class Monday afternoon, we fidgeted in our chairs as Mr. Witmer settled himself behind the table at the front of the room. He rubbed his hands through his sparse beard. He and his wife had gotten married on top of the Old Man, he told us. We let his voice fall into the silence that so rarely hung in the air of a sixth grade classroom.
*
There were options, sure, modes of recourse. Some people wanted to reconstruct him on the side of the mountain. Others spoke of a memorial at the base. We wanted something for the idolized symbol we were unwilling to let go, and after we got past the question of how to keep the Old Man in a reduced, ghostlike form, what would happen to all our state route signs? Would the Old Man's image remain? Our license plates? We couldn't very well change the state quarter, minted three years before his face took a nose dive off Cannon Mountain.
We kept him. There was nothing else for us to do but hang on to the memory of the cliffs that had inexplicably come to mean so much to a state.
*
I remember hearing once on the radio that it's natural for people to take odd shapes and turn them into some familiar form like an animal or the face of a person. The idea of seeing faces in random objects explained why I thought the weird blotch of stain in the molding in the corner of my bedroom looked like a woolly mammoth. It explained the person who thought she had found the Virgin Mary's face in her grilled cheese. It seemed to mean the Old Man was just another trick of the mind, just a stack of cliffs that seemed to be Abraham Lincoln rising out of the rock. It seemed to mean he was just an illusion. I was okay with a reasonable semi-scientific explanation that explained away Jesus burgers and Mary mold as merely natural assuagements of the obsessively faithful, but I was unwilling to admit that the Old Man of the Mountain was just another clump of rocks that we felt the need to find a face in.
*
I thought about pulling over. My mom was still finishing the trivia question about some 70's TV show I had never heard of beside me. I checked in the rear-view mirror. I could see my dad and my brother cramped up despite the short time we had been in the car, their legs skewed at odd angles among our ski gear. I drove the car past the dirt lot beneath the cliff where the Old Man used to be, but as the noises of the car washed over me, I looked up once more at the blank mountainside where the Old Man had once been, his lips slightly parted as if calling me home.
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