STONE MOUNTAIN — On top of the mountain, near the end of the longest day of the year, a man was doing pushups. He said it was the 43rd consecutive day he had climbed Stone Mountain, which meant he had done it several times in the rain.
On the rainy days he did not carry kettlebells, because that would have been too slippery. But Friday was a clear day, and the mountainside was dry, and this allowed him to carry 40 pounds’ worth of kettlebells along the trail about a mile from the base to the summit.
Kelechi Emeonye was 33, and he lived in Marietta. He was a hip-hop artist who sometimes used the moniker Kelechief. He and two friends had climbed the granite slopes on Friday without knowing it was the longest day of the year. They stood in the twilight, looking to the west, and agreed that this was a particularly good sunset.
“The colors,” said Isaiah Ramirez, 24, who enjoys drawing and painting. “Always the colors. And just how the orange turns into the blue seamlessly. I always think about, ‘How would you paint that?’”
Credit: Thomas Lake
Credit: Thomas Lake
The friends joined perhaps 50 other people who had come to the summit to see the colors in the twilight at the front edge of summer. Down near the horizon, about 15 miles to the west, the Atlanta skyline was a blue-gray silhouette running along the top of Peachtree Ridge. Downtown to Midtown to Buckhead to the King and Queen towers of Sandy Springs.
The sun was setting in the northwest, between Buckhead and Sandy Springs, near the hazy outline of Kennesaw Mountain. Two people were playing a song and singing along with it. The artist was Twenty One Pilots. The song was “House of Gold.”
The singers were Tamara Hamilton, 56, and Jim Ennis, 52.
“This is our third date,” she said.
The first date had been at Rev Coffee in Smyrna.
The second date had involved kayaks somewhere near Lake Allatoona.
On the third date, they were singing, “Will you buy me a house of gold?”
Credit: Thomas Lake
Credit: Thomas Lake
It was strange how time worked. How one night could seem to last forever, and how a lifetime could pass in the blink of an eye. The mountain was very old and it had seen an incalculable number of sunsets and some astronomical multitude of people just passing through. Some of those people had left their mark.
There was J.R. Thompson, who apparently chiseled his name into the granite in 1938.
There was Mike Gibson, who seemed to have done the same in 1968.
Credit: Thomas Lake
Credit: Thomas Lake
And somewhere along the walk-up trail, someone had cut a heart-shaped outline into the stone. Inside the heart were two names: Maryann and Greg. There was a date: Dec. 18, 1979. This carving indicated their love had begun on that date. There was a hyphen, and then a sideways eight. The symbol for infinity. Maryann and Greg wanted us to know that their love would last forever.
“There she goes,” said Emeonye, the man reveling in his youth, as the fiery wheel slipped beneath the horizon. It was all so majestic. Someone started clapping, and then someone else joined in. The applause continued.
“Clap it up for God,” said his friend Faris Mousa, 34, a Muslim who sometimes prays on the mountain.
Credit: Thomas Lake
Credit: Thomas Lake
It was almost 9 p.m., the afterglow still bright, the day cooler now but unwilling to end quite yet. Down in the forest on the mountainside, the fireflies would soon be flashing. Summer was beginning, but summer break was rapidly dwindling. The first day of public school in Atlanta was only 42 days away.
The third date was proceeding nicely.
“Look at all those colors,” Ennis said.
“This is why you stay,” Hamilton said.
The summer stretched out ahead of them like an open road. He was looking forward to seeing Red River Gorge in July. She was planning to see the Dave Matthews Band next week. Roughly half her life ago, the band released an album called “Crash.” On that album is a song called “Two Step.” In that song are these lyrics:
Celebrate we will,
‘Cause life is short but sweet for certain
Credit: Thomas Lake
Credit: Thomas Lake
One could imagine Maryann and Greg on the mountainside on that day in December 1979. One of the shortest days of the year. Cold, too, with a low that morning in the 20s. But Maryann and Greg would have been warm with the feeling of new love. A feeling so powerful they wanted the mountain itself to feel it. Did one hold a hammer, the other a chisel? They thought their love would last forever. Who knew where they were now, what 45 years had done to them. No way to be sure they were still in love, or that either was still alive.
There were crickets on the mountain, and mourning doves. Some days you caught a glimpse of a deer. Now the city lights were beginning to twinkle. The mountain had been here when those towers rose and it would still be here when they fell. The young men would climb this mountain again. They might still be climbing it when they were old.
“The colors are so beautiful,” Ennis said, on a third date that could lead to a fourth, in the sixth decade of his life, in the twilight that went on and on.
Credit: Monica Jones
Credit: Monica Jones
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