MontivagantA bastardization of this jewel has taken place, and the once illustrious meaning has been succeeded by the mundane. Like lignatile, we have simply replaced the one material involved with another and while the old switcharoo involved some sleight of hand (and a bit of slight of hand) what we're left with is a lot less fun. The natural hills and mountains, like the lignatile wood of the past, have been uprooted! Imagine, uprooting a mountain! Well, sadly, we have, and worse: we've blasted through them too, and the veins we drill through their faces and into their solid torsos are done for the specific purpose of motorway transport. Oh those poor, huge rocks - being drilled and demolished just so we can weave our network of highways and nighways. Rather than slinging the road onto the mountain's side, we with our machines pierce and poke, bury and burrow into and through the thing, until the thing is left with open gashes that resemble bullet holes.
Our largest residents, the mountains and hills, penetrated with out drills and prodded with our bulldozers, bit by bit their innards removed and dumped or perhaps piled and stored for some sad misuse a decade down the road. What of the pleasure of the drive? Yes, they are blasting through the sturdy rocks along California's coast and creating a tunnel clear through what used to be Devil's Slide just past Pacifica along Highway 1. It is no news, and it is probably for the best - the road as it is now gets blown out by debris and rockslides annually, and it seems that with every bad storm the entire ordeal disintegrates into the ocean. For those that read signs and symbols much in the same way others read weather forecasts and horrorscopes, this should seem like a headline printed in bloodred ink writ in a massive font across the front page: God Don't Like It! And he don't! If every time we erect the thing it gets knocked over by nature, how many times must we muster the strength, clean the debris and start anew? Maybe I'm a defeatist by nature, though; if it were my road, I'd have given up on building it after the first light rains of the year wettened it and made it a bit slick.
Montivagant. It is a strange word! Without our hills and without our mountains, we have lost our link to this delicious adjective that describes the action of "Wandering over hills and mountains." Yes, wandering and not hiking, walking, imagining or any other verbs. The distinction is a perfect one: wandering is a world apart from any other type of movement because of its inherent lack of purpose. We hardly ever even wander anymore, let alone over a mountain! But the word does live on, bastardized as it is: vagrant. Isn't that in there, somewhere? Vagrant, montivagant. Wandering, but sort of badly so. It's the aimlessness that's become less savory, less of a thing to savor, and the loss is infinite.
