“Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.”
—Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains

Sometimes a person catches your eye no different from a flock of bright yellow goldfinches, a breathtaking landscape, or hallucinatory sunset. 65 year-old Marcelle intrigued me. She was older, colorful, stylish, and steadily hiking up the mountain with the aid of a single crutch. My simple hello to her was rewarded with a spirited response tinged with a patois accent. There it was: a door opens when a dialogue begins, and a mysterious, ethereal threshold is crossed into knowing another person. Marcelle, originally from Haiti and a onetime resident of Philadelphia, was visiting from Boston, and it was her first time climbing Stone Mountain. Diabetes and arthritis weren’t stopping her, no way, uh-uh. Her son and a daughter, who lives in Lithonia, GA, were waiting for her at the top and cheered as she emerged victorious. For all of life’s peaks and valleys, the mountains beyond mountains of obstacles yet to surmount—Dye mon, gen mon, as the Haitian proverb goes—I constantly witness how climbing at least this one mountain fortifies so many for the journey ahead.