His interest in the "Buttes" is no mere whimsey. As a boy of ten they captured his heart when his parents moved into the area. If Mt. Shasta is a spiritual haven for some, so, too, was (and is) the "world's smallest mountain range" for Heinrich. In 2008 he published an account of his growing-up years (available from used book sellers) which is now in Amazon Kindle format.
"The Tenderness Of Stone: A Memoir" (from Giri Marga Press) is stunningly beautiful prose. Its descriptions of the Middle Mountain penetrate the soul. "It is a time for telling secrets," Heinrich writes of his1960s life (and beyond), taking the reader "into a region of deep and tender intimacy and private tragedy."
"The Place in its totality," he remembers, "was imprinted on some hidden surface of my subconscious, so that I never ceased to feel the Buttes as part of my own body…. From that time on, with every step I took there, with every warm cave and wet, green canyon and serrated ridge or peak I explored, a sense of inexplicable mystery grew in me, even as the Mountain's voice endlessly whispered, 'Although your path is a mystery indeed, still the beginning and the ending of everything for you, is here.'"
One day in church he meets Avalee, her name "hauntingly beautiful to me still." She was 18, and "the two of us, tender, incredibly naïve and hardly more than children, were seduced by this enchanted mountain and its aura of fantasy and dream, into an utterly unlikely image of permanence, marriage and even babies."
She would chide Ira about his Mountain dreams. What's important is what's real, she'd say. But she loved the mountain, too, and was its gift--though not a permanent one.
Reality? In the midst of a tragedy one day in Marysville, the Mountain still presided over Heinrich's life, unutterably powerful yet unspeakably tender.
