As Above, So Below
“I’ll stay outside and help you keep the van tires on each side of the ditch,” Thomas said. We were perched at the top of a steep (Appalachian steep) muddy trail with a 3 foot deep ditch eroded out of the middle. If we slid either side of the van into the ditch in the middle, we would certainly be stuck in a very difficult place to get any help. We had already been through trail so uneven that the eggs stored on one side of the van fell out of the cabinet and struck the other side of the van. We had not intended to do anything remotely exciting this morning but thanks to my new fitness watch, I knew that I had a heart rate of 120 while sitting in the driver’s seat.
We had left town just the night before for a 3 day outing that we had put on the calendar months earlier. Lately, it seems like the only way to do something spontaneous is to put it on the calendar 3 months ahead of time. Paradoxically, it’s a good approach amidst the unceasing obligations and distractions of domestic and professional life. Seeing 3 empty days on my calendar keeps the possibility of adventure and novelty alive in what otherwise sometimes feels like a life of predestination. Our only plans consisted of taking hiking, biking, and snacking supplies and we did not even get around to discussing a specific destination until we had left the neighborhood. Living in western North Carolina makes it fairly easy to find pretty places in most any direction.
It had been a rough couple of weeks for both Thomas and I; with spouses out of town, random illnesses bouncing through the families, a bad bike wreck for me, and a slow recovery from a marathon for him. Most of our initial trip planning was mutually apologizing for our lack of motivation or energy. Our previous fall trip had been themed “Off the Map” and we joked that this trip would be “Off to Nap”. We ultimately decided to explore a section of forest we’d both been curious about between Cataloochee and the Smokies and picked a long gravel road that ran through the middle of an interesting nowhere.
When we arrived at out planned spot to stop and ride bikes, an unforecasted and inexplicable hailstorm started, which prompted us to drive a bit further before stopping again. We found a nice pull off sheltered by trees and reasonably level for hanging out in the van. Thomas napped through the rest of the storm while I wrote in my journal. My overall mindset was sorta dismal. Still in pain from the wreck, feeling overwhelmed by doctoring, homeschooling, and generally stuck in the giant slow eddy that is middle-aged parenting. The number of choices you have in life is inversely related to the amount of responsibility that you have taken on and I feel awfully darn responsible these days.
After some time napping, eating mint oreos, and being morosely self-absorbed, we headed out for a bike ride to explore the remainder of the gravel road and what was purported to be a stunning overlook of the Pigeon river valley along the way. For how remote it was, the road was in amazing condition as it wound slowly toward Mt Sterling and the fall color was stunning. I enjoy thinking about how, as trees turn off photosynthesis for the winter, you can see what pigments each tree has been using for food. Some trees eat red, some eat yellow. Contrary to most marketing ideas and logos, trees seem to hate the color green, as all of them reflect green while absorbing the other colors to use for making glucose from water and carbon dioxide. The shifting windy cloudy skies highlighted the colors and kept falling leaves swirling in the air for long periods if time.
Pigeon River from way up in the middle of nowhere
We stopped at the overlook and Thomas laid down on a rock to look straight down several hundred feet to the river. I admired the view from a few feet further back. Anytime I’ve had a bad accident or injury, I find that I am risk adverse for a few weeks. Being easily contented is a nice change of pace sometimes, honestly. Sometime being grateful to be intact is enough. We continued past the overlook around wide corners, in and out of the brightly colored forest, along the edge of the river valley. We got close to the intersection with a main road and decided to head back to the van and figure out a plan for the next day.
Camping, even fancy camping in a van with a heater and hand pump espresso maker, is such an automatic unwinding of daily stressors. Having nothing but nature surrounding you, falling into the cycle of dusk and dawn, taking time to focus on food and company; it all highlights the nonsense of daily schedules. It never seems to make sense to be working as hard as we do when the sources of joy are so simple. Beauty, friends, food, movement. It’s not a complicated recipe. We savored some blueberry habanero tempeh quesadillas with homemade Kim Chi. It felt like what vegetarians would eat if they were feeling naughty and rambunctious.
We woke up and spent some time drinking espresso and looking at maps. Full disclosure, I’m terrible with maps. I have a great sense of direction and generally get where I’m going but every time someone throws a page full of squiggly lines in front of me, I generally just nod, agree, and try to say something that sounds smart, like “Those western topo lines are no joke.” Fortunately, Thomas is like a map, compass, and nature encyclopedia all in one and I can focus on van hospitality services.
this ditch is wider than the van and very exciting to drive through
Based on how nice the road had been on our exploration the previous day, we assumed that the short half mile between what we had explored and the next main road would be the easiest way to get to Mt Sterling, where we planned to hike. We were very wrong about that. As we bounced up the road in the van we passed a bunch of bear hunters with their dogs, dog-tracking devices, and beat up trucks. Bear hunters and leaf peepers seem to emerge form their respective caves of weirdness at the same time each year. As we crested the ridge, the gravel road abruptly turned into a narrow twisting muddy trail with nowhere to turn around. The first few sketchy sections were tolerable in 4wd but the first real downhill looked terrifying.
With Thomas down the hill helping me keep the van tired aligned with the edges of the weird slanted ditch, we made it to the bottom with only one moment of precarious balance. At the bottom, I put the van in park and hopped out to celebrate, but as soon as I hopped out, the van started sliding down the hill in the slick mud and I had to hop back in to steer around some stumps and a random concrete slab. We did make it to the next road but had to stop and take a breather after the unexpected excitement.
One of the mixed blessings of being human is our sometimes useful faculty for anticipating the future. It lets us prepare for the unexpected and look forward to the future. It also predisposes us to planning for catastrophes that will likely never materialize and a great many of the anxieties that we all experience are a result of pointlessly anticipating the unknown. Therein lies the value of intermittently exposing yourself to healthy amounts of fear, I think. I’m not advocating jumping off cliffs in a flying squirrel suit or wearing only rainbow panties to a Trump rally, but a little bit of real fear now and again can help regulate what your brain worries about. Being a little scared of something that is actually scary makes it easier for me to realize the low urgency of most of my daily concerns.
Mt Sterling fire tower stairs
After rehashing all of the ways our accidental off roading could have gone terribly wrong and checking the van for any bent or broken bits, we headed off to hike up Mt Sterling and wander around in the woods. Atop Mt Sterling is the highest elevation fire tower in the eastern United States at 5842 feet. Built in 1933, it no longer serves as a fire tower, and mainly functions as a reminder of why we have building codes these days. The steps are brittle with frequent loose bolts and very exposed sides. I’ve been up it a few times and always with a death grip on the hand rails and a heavy pucker in the nether regions. The views are amazing, however, and they had replaced the floor of the tower since my last visit which made any unexpected plummets a less likely occurrence.
view from the fire tower
Doctors, neighbors, Oreo lovers
At the base of the summit, another hiker recommended a different trail back to the road but with the ambiguous counsel that “It was a beautiful trail but I’d never want to walk it again. It’s like a rain forest in there, wet and muddy.” He was from California and we strongly suspected that his ideas of “wet and muddy” were not appropriately calibrated to western NC. Sure enough, the decent down “Long Bunk” trail was gorgeous and marginally spongy at worst in places. Leaves spiraled out of mature forest trees into wandering mossy creeks and Thomas found another good place for a nap.
uninspired gravestone at a lonely cemetery in the woods
After winding up our hike and making it back to the van, we drive through Waynesville for dinner and landed an empty spot at Sunburst campground for a fire and some more Oreos. Our plan was to connect with our friend George the next morning and set a shuttle for climbing a steep creek up to Black Balsam.
precious moldy moments
Thomas has some funny ideas about the word “trail” and uses it when most people would use the phrase “no trail at all”. I’m not sure if this is a product of his upbringing or just some syntactical glitch in his diction. But, over the years, I’ve learned to expect climbing over boulders in steep creeks, crawling on hand and knees through rhododendron groves, and trying not to cry about maybe never seeing my family again. This hike was no exception, but the relentless beauty was well worth the existential dread. Around every bend in the creek, we found new waterfalls and eddies swirling gently with fallen leaves. In the cool water, the freshly fallen leaves retained their colors and shimmered in the reflected light, looking almost eerily preserved. The hike was less than 3 miles but around 2500 feet of elevation over “challenging” terrain. It was the sort of thing that my father would classify as “character building” for sure. After hours of feeling lost to the world, it was amusing to pop out of nowhere onto a well travelled trail near a parking area full of fall tourists with their crocs, cameras, and instagram ambitions.
On the drive home along the blue ridge parkway, I felt re-energized for daily life. The antidote to feeling stuck, for me, is to occasionally abandon organized plans and rely on curiosity and cookies to get through the day. “Getting things done” is an unavoidable necessity of parenting, working, and making a house a home. But it’s not an accomplishment that brings a lot of joy at the end of the day, other than the brief dopamine kick of crossing something off my list. But, if it gets me the occasional unstructured, unplanned trip to a pretty place with someone I care about, then it makes a lot more sense. Beauty, fear, and cookies, in the right proportions yield gratitude.
