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A review of
Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging
Joshua Doležal
Paperback: U of Iowa Press, 2014
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Reviewed by Sam Edgin
It may be the case that the highest praise a book can earn within the confines of a sentence is this: “I read it in one sitting.” Six words, seven syllables, and wrapped within them the praise equivalent to mountains of gold. A book that was read in a single sitting, a book that breathed deep and swelled its breast to engulf a person until it was done with them, is special kind of book. Most people know the pull of such a thing, and they chase after it.
So when I say that I read Joshua Doležal’s Down from the Mountaintop in its entirety on a sunny Monday morning, I mean it as high praise. Doležal weaves his words with sincerity, managing to convey genuine emotion in his reflections. He has an uncanny knack for detail, and constantly leaves simple beauty shimmering behind our eyes. Images like him and his father playing catch in their uneven and violently sloped front yard, his mother reading to him and his sister on a blanket beneath a tree and the swing of his mattock as he works trails in the mountains in summer heat stick with the reader. His prose is masterful, and turns the story of his relatively ordinary life into a beautiful adventure.
Doležal leads us through his religiously inundated childhood atop a mountain in Troy, Montana and into a rooted, fulfilled life in the plains of Idaho. In between the mountain and the plain, he tackles life as any other boy-soon-to-become-man, defining and redefining his faith or identity as places and events exert their power over him. It is a stunning picture of a journey through a life spent searching. His childhood of devotion morphs into teenage years of fervency, and when college and newfound independence crumble his identity, as it does for so many others, we watch as he moves from jobs firefighting in Canada, teaching in Argentina, and maintaining trails in the Rocky Mountains. Somewhere along the way he loses the faith of his parents after his sister escapes an abusive husband. He earns a Master’s degree and works toward a doctorate. He grows fond of hiking, and intersperses teaching jobs with jobs that have him walking and maintaining trails throughout the lofty peaks of the mountains that always remind him of where he came from, the childhood in a house perched on a mountainside in Montana.
It is on these mountaintops that he realizes that his life has been one of endless searching for more high points, one in which each decision is made in hopes of finding and securing that thing that he was meant for. For each climb and summit, there is always a path back down, away from the thrill of the peak. As his youthful self realizes this within the pages of the book, we begin to realize why he has given us these glimpses of his life. We track back through what we’ve read and realize all the little points where he was straining for his personal mountaintops. In doing this we parallel our lives with his, seeing our ups and downs and where we threw everything into that thing we thought was “it”. It’s an introspective and humbling experience as he works us into seeing in ourselves that which he is beginning to see in the pages of the book.
While most of Down from the Mountaintop dwells on a journey of searching, the theme that Doležal pushes through to us is the sleepy thrill of belonging. The mountaintops that he pursued for so long are necessarily transient; they would not have their inherent majesty if did not have to, at some point, be ascended and descended. After graduate school, Doležal settles into a teaching position in Iowa and we watch as he finds a place in the sweeping plains that stretch out like the mountains stretch upward.
He gardens, the soil another metaphor for his new rootedness, as it builds in layers from the deep rock to the fertile topsoil. His home, his job, and his hobbies form a routine that works him farther into the place around him and he begins to feel like he really belongs. He meets a girl. Their courtship is bizarrely paralleled with a looming jury duty responsibility. Somehow this works, and the final moments of the book are all the more moving because of it. Doležal’s prose in especially magnificent in the last few pages of the book. The joy he finds in truly belonging somewhere pushes out from the page like the kicks of a child in the womb. And we, friends with gentle hands upon the evidence of healthy new life, feel that joy too.
Belonging has the obscene power to blow us about like leaves before a gusting wind. We can – and probably will – massively shift our lives based on how much we feel a place is where we belong, much as Doležal did again and again throughout his memoir. That place – the place where we find home staring back wherever we look – often seems to be right around the corner but always out of reach. Doležal knows this, but he wants his life to show that every once in a while, when we’re not looking and just for a short moment everything is strangely just how it should be, we realize that our lives have molded us into a person who can, and does, belong. Joshua Doležal’s Down from the Mountaintop may tell the story of how one man found the place where he is supposed to be, but it make sure to show us how much a life lived well leads us to that place, and without the journey, that place would never have existed.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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