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By Root 1208 0

found myself in a misty drizzle pondering the cragged head of Pan Gu, the Taoist deity who, very thoughtfully, took it upon himself to separate the earth from the sky. This was no snap-of-the fingers event. Indeed, in comparison to Pan Gu’s travails, creating the world in a mere seven days seems slothful in the extreme. It took Pan Gu 18,000 years to sufficiently separate the earth from the sky so that life could commence, and since he was awfully tired when at last he finished—you can hardly blame him—he settled down for a rest. His eyes became the sun and the moon, and his limbs became four of China’s most sacred mountains—Hua Shan in Shanxi, Song Shan in Henan, Heng Shan in Hunan, and because this is China and everything is just a little more complicated than it needs to be, another mountain called Heng Shan in Shanxi. Tai Shan, as the head of Pan Gu, is the most revered mountain of them all.

The Buddhists, too, have a soft spot for Tai Shan, and ever since the second century B.C., people have bedecked the mountain with temples and calligraphy. There is even a staircase that winds up to the very summit of Tai Shan, nearly 6,000 feet up in the clouds. Altogether, there are 6,660 steps of stone leading up the old Imperial route. Confucius, who lived in nearby Qufu, had climbed Tai Shan and famously declared The world is small. Mao, too, had somehow managed to waddle up to the peak, and after viewing the first rays of dawn, he proclaimed, The East is red. So deep!

Over the centuries, seventy-two emperors had stood upon Tai Shan. Indeed, the mountain was so important in Chinese cosmology that a new emperor was expected to hightail it pronto to Tai Shan to receive a special heavenly blessing. Intriguingly, only five of them went on to climb to the summit. A failed attempt was regarded as a divine rebuke. So why risk it?

And, as I was very pleased to learn, Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for the Canadian rock band Rush, had also apparently climbed Tai Shan. In the early 1980s, Rush was the pride of the Canadian rock world. Admittedly, this was a very small world, composed, really, of Rush and the twiddly-winks from Vancouver, the band Loverboy. Nevertheless, for a certain thirteen-year-old boy in Toronto, Rush was the be-all-and-end-all of his rock world, leading, in time, to his joining the Official Rush Fan Club, which sent him buttons that he proudly wore on his parka, while he tried to conceal the intense jealousy he felt for the boy in his class who claimed to have singer Geddy Lee’s mother on his paper route. Oh yes, this thirteen-year-old was a serious fan. He had all their records and he played them every day on his record player, a record player that was never sullied by the likes of Journey, the fakers.

And then, in 1983, Rush released the atrocity of an album that was Signals. What is this? cried the thirteen-year-old boy, who had stood in line for hours at the record store with money he had earned delivering newspapers by sled so that he could be among the very first in the whole of Canada to have the new, oh-so-eagerly awaited Rush record. He listened to this album on his record player. And he felt betrayed. He could not believe his ears. But it was true. It was unmistakable. Undeniable. There were synthesizers. Et tu, Rush, the boy said, swelling with bitterness. Have you, too, gone to the dark side? And he felt so lost that he drifted, aimlessly and alone, for two whole months, eight bleak and cruel weeks, until, from somewhere in the darkness, he was found by Bono, who raised him up and made him whole.

But eventually, this thirteen-year-old boy grew up to be a man, a man who one day found himself in a chintzy hotel in Tai’an, sitting in a smoky Business Center, idly wondering what a censored Google search would reveal about the mountain known as Tai Shan, when he discovered that in 1987—and by 1987, the year of Big Audio Dynamite, he was so over Rush—Rush had recorded a song called Tai Shan, and suddenly the memories flooded back and he was lost in a bittersweet reverie.

I stood at the top of the