Sorta Secret Falls, NC
Once, in a conversation with friends about the typical symbols (⚤) for male and female, we got to discussing the difference between paths and cycles, lines and circles, and arrows and boomerangs. We were sitting in a van, and bourbon was freely available, so there were fiercely defended opinions that no one recalls. With birthdays and anniversaries, I always used to think about how I had travelled another circle around the sun. Last year, a friend reminded me that the sun is also circling the center of the galaxy which is also moving. So we are really traveling in spirals nested in spirals. Spirals are what you get when you are traveling a line and circle at the same time and spirals are a pleasantly decorative blend of the two energies. I’d rather climb a spiral staircase than walk in a circle or climb a rope. Although sometimes my path through life feels more like a birthday balloon that someone failed to tie off properly.
Lighthouse stairs at Hunting Island
June is our most celebratory month. Stella and I have birthdays, as do 4 of my close fiends. There’s the solstice, our anniversary, and the Mermaid Festival in Marshall, NC. It’s good that the days are long and our livers are strong. And while you’d think all this celebrating would keep us agreeable, Tiffany and I also manage to reliably have a good argument in June. I was going through some of my old blog sites before booting this one up and realized that perhaps the most consistent way that Tiffany and I celebrate our anniversary is by attempting to verbally remodel each other’s sense of self. And while I consider myself a competent wordsmith, trading barbs with a psychiatrist can be about as smart as playing corn hole with hand grenades. Maybe an anniversary argument is like renegotiating the terms of a contract. In a long marriage, everyone deserves a raise and more paid vacation for sure.
16 years of figuring out if 2 out of 2 doctors agree on anything
Oddly most arguments begin with me being casually insensitive or intensely oversensitive. My degree of emotional engagement seems to have about as many different setting as a firehose. Tiffany is then quick to analyze my failings as a predictable and recurrent catalogue of avoidable mistakes and correctable cognitive deficiencies that we have discussed many times before. The longevity of a good marriage makes some shortcuts possible. Most arguments are reruns and we are very comfortable fast forwarding through the parts we’ve seen too many times. And we will generally both agree, even in the middle of a cobra vs mongoose kinda dustup, that we would much rather go have fun than argue. But this means getting out of the house.
On the way to the Mermaid Festival
The Mermaid festival in Marshall centers around a parade that is pleasantly tiny. As we walked by the parade staging area after playing in the river with a bunch of other mer-monkeys, one of the organizers called out, “Hey if you wanna be in the parade, it’s time to get in line.” The mermaid theme is vague loosely adhered to. There are pirates, fairies, and old guys in random sequined things, or mer-mudgeons, as I like to call them. I think the thing I enjoy most is the completely nondenominational aspect of the festival. Marshall is a small riverside North Carolina town with a tiny but active downtown with maybe more than one stoplight. There’s a bridge from downtown to an island with access to the river. The small size of the town and it’s proximity to Asheville, means that there’s a nice mix of gun-polishers and crystal-sniffers both and everyone seems to agree that mermaids are something worth drinking a beer about.
There’s a lot to be said about mermaid symbolism and energy. I’m not the one to say it. Stay away from them if you can. And if you can’t, I’ll buy you a drink if you ever make it back to shore.
On our way to Sorta Secret Falls
Between Tiff spending a week in Colorado for a Psychedelic Medicine conference and me spending two weeks in Indiana for my mother’s surgery, we were’t able to celebrate the solstice together but made up for it with a family outing to the Sorta Secret lake. My neighbor, Thomas, is happy to spend hours looking at maps or bushwhacking through steep lonely places to seek out western North Carolina’s hidden treasures, of which there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply. He’s the one that turned us onto Sorta Secret lake. It’s a tiny lake with insanely large waterfalls pouring into it and some good, but unofficial, trails that lead to them.
Tiffany and I had mostly digested our June argument by this point, but we managed to keep finding leftovers in the matrimonial fridge that neither of us wanted to eat or throw away. This is where our mutual preference for fun over emotional validation generally serves us well. It’s just really difficult to stay upset in adventurous beautiful places. Often, the experience of natural beauty pulls me so mandatorily into the present that it creates a divide between the future and the past. I firmly believe that we regularly need these types of “before and after” experiences in our lives. They are certainly what help me to turn the page and see what the next chapter is all about.
We recently bought a guidebook to western North Carolina’s waterfalls. Although I think we have done a good job exploring, there were so many amazing falls in the book that we had not seen. And then we keep finding falls that aren’t even in that book. I am convinced that North Carolina may have the most miles of vertically traveling water on earth. The amount of water falling through air at any given moment here has to be greater than the average rainfall per year in most places.
Larger waterfalls often create strong gusting winds at their base and taking pictures can make them seem artificially tranquil. Standing at the base of these falls, the roaring static and gusting wind gives your sense direct access to the “aliveness” of the place. Water is often credited for having patience with regard to wearing away stone, but it’s nice to see that even water can get a little testy when it’s in a hurry.
June ended with a little bit of relief. The birthdays attended to, the anniversary squabble survived, my mother’s surgery completed without complications. Maybe the advantage of seeing our passage through time as a spiral is that it does blend the circular and linear so well. Certainly we find ourselves returning to places we have been before, which can be a curse or a blessing. But also, with each revolution, we find ourselves slightly further down the line. These cycles of anniversaries and birthdays are a form of returning but also a way of measuring progress; seeing what remains, what has been lost, and what might be possible along the next cycle. Either that or we’re just trapped in fate’s clothes dryer hoping for an even number of socks when its over.
And this guy. Nothing but trouble.