Copyright 2022
Joe Baker, Boiling Springs PA
Note: The etymology of the word Shenandoah seems murky. The best guess is a derivation from the Oneida language that denotes “deer” or maybe “spruce”. In the Depression, National Park promoters seem to have cooked up an alternate Algonkian derivation as “Daughter (or Child) of the stars.”
It’s probably bullshit, but I like the way it sounds…
Lewis Mountain
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man… nobility is being superior to your former self.” Ernest Hemingway
I have been coming here since I was about 17 years old, and on Thursday I’ll be 66. You’d think that 49 years would be long enough to understand a place, but that’s not true. Like most every old fart with any sense at all, the older I get, the more obvious and deeply felt my ignorance. It would seem we are all here to learn.
I drove the three hours south to this formerly segregated ridge-top campground in Shenandoah National Park to hike and fish with my dear old friend Shel Browder. Forty years ago, Shel and I did much of the Appalachian Trail together, and this durable friendship is one of the best and most important things I derived from spending six months living out of a backpack.
I also arrive in a whirlwind of change. I will have my left knee replaced in late November. Last year about this time, a surgeon explained to me that to be eligible for the surgery, I would have to lose 50 pounds. I have lost about 100 pounds. I have walked miles 6 days a week, I spent hours in a gym doing pushups, and I have not eaten very much. This is the fourth time in my life I’ve gained and lost more than 100 pounds. It will be the last time. My appearance is not the only thing that’s changed.
I arrived at the tiny cabin we rented in late afternoon, about an hour ahead of Shel, so I hung out on the porch fooling with a mandolin and considering what constitutes a healthy life. I come to no conclusions, beyond the fact that it begins between the ears. Somewhere along the journey to 50 pounds it occurred to me that getting there would be the easy part. Staying there would require a harder journey. The yo-yos of huge gains and losses of weight are a manifestation of cycles of depression and anger. A hard and clear-eyed look within would be the only way to break the cycle, and that would take courage I’ve never mustered before, nor even considered possible. In small ways, in fits and starts, with the help and support of my loved ones, the courage I needed began to appear. It became more important to be a better man, and to leave my sorrow behind me, than it did to prepare for a surgery. When my mind crossed that line, the weight loss just followed as blossoms follow spring. Maybe it was the nearness of the hereafter, maybe it was the kindness of the people who care for me, maybe it was simply enlightenment born of age and experience, I’m not sure I’ll ever know, but my heart turned. My devils did not disappear. Nobody’s devils ever disappear. I just know them for who they are, and I understand them. They are still part of me, but they may no longer claim my body or my mind.
Those belong to me. I am a free man.
Presently Shel shows up. We go through our forty-year-old greeting ritual and catch up on news of family and friends. The older we get the more hard news gets blended with the good. That said, age brings appreciation for simply being here. I’ve already lived a decade longer than my father did and given my lengthy list of bad habits, regrettable choices, and risky behaviors, simply sitting here and enjoying the mountain air seems miraculous.
We take a short walk up to a rocky outcrop on the summit of Lewis Mountain, enjoy the view, and hobble down to the cabin again. Shel’s hip is to be replaced a week before my knee, so that we have two functional legs between us. But we make do.
We get a fire going in the wood stove of the cabin, heat up dinner, and enjoy cocktails. There is a surprising amount of single malt whiskey in our goods and chattels, as well as a guitar, a mandolin, and a fiddle. So, we make a little noise, laugh at old stories, grouse about politics, and carry on a conversation we started in 1981. It will end when one of us croaks. Hopefully that won’t be anytime soon. I am never more comfortable than when I am among old friends and family in the mountains, watching the leaves change color and the sun descend. As I get older, I try to notice that more and savor it.
The Mill Prong
“Homo Sapiens have not yet failed. Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands.” Greta Thunberg
The next morning, we load up light packs, and hump a couple miles down into a hollow on the east side of the Blue Ridge. When we first went hiking together, this would have taken us maybe a half hour, now it takes twice that hobbling along on our ruined and arthritic joints. The slow pace does allow for close observation and is in some ways both blessing and affliction.
We have been meeting here to fish and hike for decades, so we have seen things change. Places that were healthy young forests have become overgrown with stilt grass, Japanese Honeysuckle, kudzu, and other invasives. A lot of the old hemlocks have succumbed to Wooly Adelgids and other pests, and they stand naked and skeletal in the bright light of what used to be shady glens. The deer, once so plentiful in this park as to be a nuisance, are dying of chronic wasting disease (CWD). The bears have mange.
Our generation did this. We all had a hand in it. There was data in the 1980’s indicating that the climate was changing and that the ecological communities around us were changing too. We whistled through the graveyard of our own Eden, and kept burning hydrocarbons, importing pests, wasting land and soil, and putting off difficult choices. We shit in our own nest. We are now reaping the painful harvest of our profligacy, and that dark harvest will be visited on our grandchildren. It’s not something to be proud of.
The passing of those decades has also brought what might be construed as wisdom. The years taught us to see past the ugliness and to understand that change is and has always been the norm, not the exception. I relearned this lesson streamside. Shortly after stringing up a flyrod, I began to work my way up the stream bank, hung up my boot on something, and damn near fell into the icy water. When I looked to see what I’d tripped on, I found it was a rusted piece of a hog wire fence.
In the 30’s, when this place became a national park, this was a farm. Livestock grazed in an open meadow here. The hog wire kept somebody’s pigs out of a cornfield or an apple orchard. Probably the latter, because there are still a few scraggly apple trees scattered here and there in the woods. The folks that farmed up here, Scots-Irish and German hillbillies, had been here since the 18th century, and thought they always would be. Their ancestors displaced native people who’d been here for millennia. They never saw change coming either.
The federal government took many farms by eminent domain to establish the park. The farmers were paid fair market value in the 30’s, which wasn’t much. They moved to the surrounding small towns and scraped by. They and their descendants found work in the park as maintenance staff or trail or road crews. They watched their homes get pulled down or rot into the ground, their fields turn to woods, their fences, this fence, disappear beneath the lush green of Appalachia. Their world vanished, as ours is now.
But just upstream of the hogwire, my small dry fly disappears in a blip at the base of a tiny cascade, and I catch and quickly release a small brook trout. The trout’s ancestors were here before the native people. Maybe the changing climate will drive them into oblivion, maybe not, but for now, they persist as they have since the Pleistocene. As we shoulder our packs to hike out, I reflect that persistence is all any of us have any right to hope for.
White Oak Canyon
“When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine
that all the world will be in love with night…” Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
The next morning, Shel’s 76th birthday, we drove out of the park to the east side and re-entered at the mouth of White Oak Canyon. A big front had blown in, and we knew the water would be cold and the fishing slow. But the canyon is lovely and doesn’t get fished that much, and while catching fish is sort of the point, it’s not the only reason to go fishing. At a footbridge over White Oak Run, we split up, Shel heading upstream from the bridge and me walking downstream a couple hundred yards to fish back to the bridge. Once again, I’m struck by the irony that while one rarely goes fishing alone, the actual angling is usually a solitary pursuit.
I am presented with a marvelous, delicious set of small plunge pools, runs, and riffles; very trouty looking water. But the sudden drop in temperature has shut the fish down more or less completely. I have been fishing small Appalachian trout rivers my whole adult life, and while I make no claim to profound expertise, I do know what works. I put the right flies in the right places many times, but have no fish, nor even any strikes, to show for it. As I methodically pick my way along the boulders and back toward the bridge, my decrepit knee fails me, and for a second time in two days, I damn near pitch myself face first into the creek. It’s a close enough call to shake me up quite a bit, and I scramble up the bank to the bridge, take a seat, calm my nerves a spell, and wait for Shel.
He's overdue. I find myself growing anxious. My old friend’s hip is as ruined as my knee, and he’s a decade older than me. Anything could have happened. I begin to contemplate how I can go search for him with my diminished mobility, and how I might render assistance or go get help if he’s in real trouble. This engenders a brief fit of shame and regret. When we were young men, nobody would have had to worry about either of us getting lost or injured in the woods. In fact, if you were looking for people to send into a wild place to hunt for or assist an injured person, either one of us would have been a good choice. Just as I am about to start shouting for him, I see Shel carefully picking his way through the rocks back to the rendezvous point. He’s fine, just old, beat up, and slow.
It dawns on me quite clearly watching Shel from the bridge, that we’re both going to die. It doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen a lot of people very dear to me leave this world, and I accept that my time will come. The revelation comes not as a dreadful trumpeting harbinger, but in the sweet gurgle of the rushing little river at my feet. We are both of this place, of this lovely wild canyon, and we will remain so even after we are gone. It is in an odd way, deeply comforting.
But we ain’t dead yet. There are two enormous steaks waiting for us back at camp, and also whiskey. Hobbling along back to the trailhead parking lot, we race the autumn dusk toward the car and dinner, the leaves ablaze in gold and crimson. We are, in this moment, very much alive.
Hawksbill
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not the absence of fear.” Mark Twain
It got cold as hell overnight, into the low 20’s, and the fire in the little stove played out in the wee hours. My down bag did its job, but eventually an old man who survived prostate cancer is going to have to get up. Fortunately for me, Shel is a compulsively early riser, and by the time I summon up the nerve to unzip the bag, he has the stove running again.
Over coffee we consider our options. At these temperatures, the streams will all be profoundly asleep and the fishing very poor to nonexistent. So rather than choosing to descend into another hollow, we elect to climb. It’s a cold, spectacularly clear morning, and Hawksbill, the highest mountain in the park, beckons. Hawksbill’s summit rises over 4,000 feet, and there is a spectacular view from the top. By 9:00AM we are ascending the mile-long trail.
The trail is popular, and our arthritic joints apparently make this climb look a bit like the stations of the cross to the other hikers we encounter on the way up. We assure our fellow climbers that we’re fine and don’t need rescuing, and we tell a few of them that we’re both a month or so away from joint replacement surgery. Some of them tell us that they admire our courage (a few plainly think we’re nuts but are too nice to say anything).
I’m not sure either of us are all that brave. We are just determined to live life, to meet the world on its own terms, to see the sky and the earth below from a mountain peak. The reward outweighs the risk and the pain. So much of every life is like that. Career changes, uprootings, love, kids, conflicts: they all demand fortitude. Nothing is ever guaranteed, and failure can be painful or even fatal. But failure to muster the courage is an acceptance of a life not worth living.
As we near the summit, and the ridgetop opens up, it finally happens. Forty years ago, a week or two into my AT adventure I learned, as every hiker does, that if you want to take in the scenery, stop walking and take in the scenery. Otherwise, you keep your eyes down and watch for obstacles. Here, atop Hawksbill’s summit ridge, I forget the lesson, and suddenly crash to the ground. Shel and other hikers rush up to help me, but despite a cut up hand and knee, I’m laughing when I hit the ground. I don’t pop right up like I did when I was young, but I do get up. I’m secretly delighted to realize that despite my infirmities I’m still pretty Goddamned tough.
After assuring all concerned that I’m ok, we proceed on to the peak. The whole Blue Ridge and the distant Ridge and Valley mountains, the Allegheny Plateau, the Virginia Piedmont, the blue, blue heavens, all open up in all their autumn glory. We drink it as thirsty men consume water from a cold spring, and it is just as satisfying. Forty years ago, someone took a photo of us on a similar ridge a ways south of here, and we ask a bystander to take our picture now. Looking at them side by side, we are still recognizably us, just older and tattier, but still obviously in love with wild places.
It's time to hobble down to the trailhead, eat lunch, and drive home, but some of me will stay here. I can never really leave the mountains.
Barking
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