Pushing our desire to connect in a more immersive way, we have chosen to explore the paradox of moving away to get closer...to be more removed in hopes of experiencing a stronger connection.
Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time. ~Stephen Wright
If we could choose our first memory, I perhaps would choose my first steps, the moment I first walked. What would it be like to remember what it was that drew us from our cautious crawling or being carried in protective arms to the desire to stand, step and move forward...to take that first risk. What innate inspiration pushes us to perambulate, pulls us forward to learn the dance of a double pendulum? Our earliest expression of independence...we are not really taught to walk...for the most part we learn to walk on our own.
First steps seems like a good enough place for a story to begin. For me many of these first steps were taken while visiting my grandparents’ home in North Alabama. As a child, it seemed a magical place - filled with wonder, mysteries, and exploration. Anchored against a small mountainside, an old white, wood frame farm house, wide porch spreading it’s length, white washed stone steps dropping down to a sloping yard ending at a shelf of chert, red clay and pine saplings dropping some ten feet to a road, and a narrow line of trees and the edge of a lake. The house at one time sat deep below the mirrored glass surface of the lake. It was moved from its original foundation in the nineteen thirties as the result of the construction of the Guntersville Dam, a project of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Tennessee Valley Authority and part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program. The dam was part of an initiative to create a continuous navigation channel the entire length of the Tennessee River, and required the purchase of over 110,000 acres of land (over 24,000 acres of which were forested and had to be cleared), 90 miles of road, fourteen cemeteries, and over 1,100 families that had to be relocated ...including my grandparents. I have seen photographs of the house when it was in its original location and have heard stories of my grandparents preparing meals and renting rooms to the workers clearing the land and constructing the dam..trying to survive the depression era in the rural south.
But, for me as a child, it was my Elysium. Being pulled from place to place by my father’s tenure in the military...from the northeast to the southeast to the southwest and abroad to the Mediterranean; this was the place that through my childhood to which we would always return. This old farm house and the land it perched upon bore the closest semblance to “home” I knew. It held the deepest sense of familiarity, the most stories and the longest history.
It smelled of old wood, air dried laundry, and propane heaters on which sat water filled coffee cans to humidify the room. There was the faint left-over chemical smells on my Aunt Florence from her beauty shop in town, the citric and tannic aroma of the SeaBreeze tonic that my aunt and grandmother thought cured most all ailments and always the smell of every traditional southern food imaginable... most grown in the garden, harvested from the field, caught in the lake or slaughtered from the barn, pens, or coops...recipes supplemented with the occasional government provided “commodities.” They were poor...but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know because the world there was enough...it provided me with what I needed - entertainment, stimulation, and education. I didn’t need fabricated stimuli... I was too busy being in what was around me to notice what they didn’t have...or what I didn’t have.
I loved being there in that old house. I loved the root cellar you could walk right into out the back door, the large moss covered drum just off the back porch filled by the constant flowing sweetest cool spring water I have ever tasted, the musty crawl space under the front porch filled with dusty tools, and black widow spiders. I can hear the pedal pump organ abandoned in the living room, the sound of my grandmother snapping peas, the rhythmic moan of the front porch swing, the familiar creak of the third step just before reaching the upstairs rooms and the sounds of oscillating fans singing you to sleep on feather mattresses beneath iron headboards under open windows in the humid Alabama summers.
The house was a museum...filled with anthropological artifacts, historical objects and works of art. The cheap framed print of an embarrassingly handsome Jesus bathed in exaggerated chiaroscuro light, landscape prints of far away places, old family photographs next to embarrassing grade school pictures. There was a massive claw-footed dining room table, victorian print upholstered chairs, handsome antiques and cheesy souvenirs from Rock City. And then there was the behemoth hulk of a massive mirrored hutch moored to the wall like a great abandoned ship....”arranged” like a giant Joseph Cornell assemblage...a calamitous clutter of every sort of trinket, photograph, vessel, bric-a-brac, odd objects, junk and treasures...sitting like a holy alter in homage to the “great southern gothic” and to every Flannery O’Conner story I have ever read!
The house sits in my memory like a sacred temple. But, it was outside where most of my time was spent. It was the woods and the land that sparked my imagination, filled me with awe and inspired me...roaming across the slow, undulating slopes that extended from the base of the mountain where some great hand had reached out and dug through the earth with it’s fingers spread wide leaving furrows and knolls covered in Pine, Oaks, Maple, Poplar, SweetGum, Hackberry, Dogwood and more. Where rock formations could transform from geologic wonder into the hull of a ship or the fortress of a king. Where you could be a pirate, a spy, an Indian, a soldier, a pioneer, an explorer...anything. Where you could take your first steps and learn to walk in these foothills of the Appalachian mountains.
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It was an arduous ascent across the face of a different mountain in a different mountain range. Even with the piercing sun and a wedgwood blue sky, at this altitude the air was cool and thin. This was our second fourteener and though Mt. Beirdstadt at 14,060 ft. is rated as a class 1 or 2 climb (an “easier” climb) - it is as one guidebook states,“still a fourteener, and all fourteeners are hard!”
Our trek began at dawn greeted at the trailhead by a couple of moose clearly not nearly as amused by our presence as we were theirs. Setting out early to avoid any risk of afternoon thunderstorms on the summit, we crossed a high serene marsh at the base of the peak and began making our way up the trail. The trail became the slow unrolling of a tapestry stitched to illustrate a grand vista...the higher we climbed the more the tapestry opened to unveil a larger and wider view.
It was a well defined track at times smooth other times rough and rocky... but always, always...up. After a couple of hours, the trail’s definition dissolved dispersing across a sheet of loose slippery, imbricated scree before ending at a large boulder field. The boulder field was the last obstacle before the summit, a pyramid of large rubbled rock and boulders extending some four hundred yards further up to the peak. This is where Anne grew excited. Not just because we were now close to the peak, no something deeper, more primal...child like! I could see it in her face and I knew what she was thinking... “finally... some shit I can climb!!!”
We love exploring the Rocky Mountains, but like me, Anne spent much of her youth exploring the woods and mountains of the lower Appalachians. Growing up in the Piedmont of North Carolina, the plateau region located between the coastal plain and the Appalachian mountains, she spent days with her family exploring both the beaches and the mountains...but it was the mountains she preferred. Family trips to the hills for picnics and walks in the woods...the deep lush forests, sinuous streams and countless waterfalls. She loved these mountains. When her father, a firefighter, took a second job, delivering supplies to small stores throughout the region, Anne would often tag along... for companionship, time together and to take in the hills. She loved the small mountain communities, the main streets with their stoic old buildings, homespun store fronts and quaint restaurants... West Jefferson, Sparta, Banner Elk, Wilkesboro and more all nestled between the mountains that enchanted her, the mountains where she loved to walk and where she reveled in taking the trails and paths that would lead out to large rock formations she could climb...Hanging Rock, Grandfather Mountain, Pilot Mountain, Chimney Rock, Blowing Rock and more.
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The Appalachians... these are the mountains most familiar to us, the valleys and forests to which we feel connected...the mountains where we have the most history. Anne and I learned to walk, hike and backpack in the Appalachians. We grew up exploring their wonders and captivated by their mystery. Our first steps to travel and explore began here. Now with a year and a half of nomadic travel behind us and inside us, we recognize our desire to do something more, something with perhaps a different way of seeing, connecting and learning. Desire and Connection play and replay in our thoughts and in our motivation to travel and explore. Gliding through the bends of a ribbon curved road enveloped in autumn’s palette, you want every curve to simply be the prelude to the next....you desire the road to continue on and on, show you more and more, and take you deeper and deeper.
Pushing our desire to connect in a more immersive way, we have chosen to explore the paradox of moving away to get closer...to be more removed in hopes of experiencing a stronger connection. And so we have chosen to make a shift...a change in how we travel to experience in a way that could move us deeper into a place and allow it to move deeper into us... growing our connection, our conversation, our relationship...creating a purer communion. And so for now we have determined to return to a place where many things began for us, to step away from our “road trip” way of exploring and to seek the sublime in steps... walking... walking a long trail, making the woods our home for awhile...walking where we took our first steps...walking the trail through the Appalachians.