Perspective

There’s this mountain.

I’ve loved it most of my life. Massive and solitary, it seems to rise up out of the desert floor, looking like a battleship. I think they should have named it Battleship Mountain or maybe  . . . no, that’d be the perfect name for it. Instead, somebody gave it the moniker Superstition Mountains, or to the fit hikers who traverse its many hidden trails, it’s simply called the Supes.

There are legends surrounding this iconic mountain with its mysterious sounding name, mostly dealing with a gold miner named Jacob Waltz who reportedly found the mother lode back in them thar hills near Apache Junction, Arizona, in the late 1800’s, but never disclosed the location to anyone. After he died in 1891, the hunt was on and, over the years, it’s been reported that many people died under mysterious circumstances in their quest for the gold there. Probably should have stuck to qualifying for the Olympics—it’s safer.

You might recognize this range if you saw it in an Arizona calendar. In some photos, the front of this igneous formation seems to slope up and backward like a ship’s bow, while the rest of the mountain, naturally higher than its bow, leans back like a cruiser powering its way across a dry desert floor—like a ghost ship on the horizon. Every once in a while, when the snow level drops to two thousand feet or less, the entire length of this mountain turns white, and the clouds that hover above it look like white smoke as they roll back away from this rock ship’s stacks. That’s my favorite view of the Supes—when nature goes overboard with the props that enhance its battleship illusion.

How’s that for a solid perspective? But even though I live southwest of this mountain where the profile I see everyday is the one I just described, the Superstitions aren’t one dimensional. They are multi-dimensional. I’ve viewed this wilderness area from the sky, from the north, from its base, and from a few other locations I’m incapable of explaining because I basically have little to no sense of direction. But trust me when I say that my favorite perspective of the Supes is still only one side of them.

There are other sides. And if you were to drive me blindfolded to one of those other sides without telling me where we were headed, then ask me to identify what mountain I now faced, I don’t think I could do it. Because that range is not a battleship. It only looks like one from where I live. Which, as I said, is the side I prefer to admire.

But what if someone lives north of the Supes and never once sees what I see from my perspective? Whose view is the right one? Is there a right one? Or maybe it takes each of us, looking at as many sides as possible, to really discover what makes up this unique mountain.

I can be very passionate about my point of view. I’ll bet you are about yours, too. It can be challenging to put my views on hold long enough to listen well to the perspective of someone else, but it’s worth it. I don’t have to change your point of view. You don’t need to change mine, either. Maybe I’ll drive around and explore the north side of the issue sometime and, if the time is right, I may even find that I like that view better. But even if I don’t, it’s becoming clear to me that there are good reasons we all have our points of view. Right now, I simply live on the south side of the Superstitions, which explains why I think it looks like a battleship. And there are good reasons why someone else may describe it as a cluster of rugged pillars. Or the open mouth of a dinosaur. It all depends on where they’re standing now and where they’ve stood before. There’s no reason for me to feel threatened by another point of view. We’re just telling one another what we see and how we perceive things from that position.

I have friends who are fond of saying that my perspective is a hundred per cent accurate all the time. They also say theirs is accurate a hundred per cent of the time. Which I thought was confusing until I considered this mountain. But now, I think I get it. The point isn’t for me to win you over to my side, or you to win me to yours. The point is for us to listen well, comprehend someone else’s point of view, and above all, respect the place where we each stand.

That’s what I think, anyway. It’s just my perspective from this side of the mountain.