Tomorrow morning, Deo volente, I plan a walk to the summit of the pass between Tukuhnikivats and Mount Tomaski. There is a little lake not far over the saddle, a tarn really, a mountain pond bordered in marsh marigold and yarrow, with water black and glassy as obsidian. Bottomless? Certainly. There are some old friends living there whom I haven’t seen for a long time.

Afterwards…back to Moab. Back to the juniper, the red sand and the fanatic rocks. Into September, the final month.

Appalachian Pictures

Coming Home

Going back to the Big Smokies always reminds me of coming home. There was the town set in the cup of the green hills. In the Alleghenies. A town of trees, two-story houses, red-brick hardware stores, church steeples, the clock tower on the county courthouse, and over all the thin blue haze—partly dust, partly smoke, but mostly moisture—that veils the Appalachian world most of the time. That diaphanous veil that conceals nothing. And beyond the town were the fields, the zigzag rail fences, the old gray barns and gaunt Gothic farmhouses, the webwork of winding roads, the sulfurous creeks and the black coal mines and—scattered everywhere—the woods.

The trees. Vegetation cradle of North America. All those trees transpiring patiently through the wet and exhilarating winds of spring, through the heavy, sultry, sullen summers into the smoky autumns. Through the seasons, years, millennia. Sensitive and sensible plants, with who knows what aspirations of their own.

Through town and into the hills, I’d follow a certain road for about ten miles until I came to a church and a graveyard on top of a tall hill. (I worked there once, tending that graveyard and the dead, firing the furnace in the church on winter Sunday mornings, me the sexton, best job I ever had, all that rich grass, all that meditation, all those ghosts that haunt the human mind, all that deep dark dank earth rich in calcium, all those lonely clouds with rosy bottoms drifting pensively on the horizon for a while after sundown, inviting questions, when it was time to go home.)

From Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains (1970)

Time to go home. From the top of the hill you can look down into a long emerald valley where a slow stream meanders back and forth, back and forth, in long lazy loops like somebody’s intestines strewn casually over the ground, through overgrazed pastures in which cows drift along the contours of the slope as slowly as clouds. All facing in the same direction. Beyond the end of that particular valley, not in it, in the mostly woods and submarginal cornfields that lay beyond, was my home.

You go down into that valley, an easy, pleasant sort of walk, past the little farms, barns, tile springhouses, pickup trucks, hayrakes and mowing machines, until you come to a big creek—that’s Crooked Creek, glowing with golden acids from the mines upstream—and across the creek and up a red-dog road under a railroad trestle through a tunnel in the woods. I call it a tunnel because the road there is so narrow and winding that the trees on either side interlace their branches overhead, forming a canopy that in winter, under the typical gray sky of winter in that country, looks like a network of fine, artistic cracks in a decaying plaster ceiling, and in spring and summer like an underwater vision of translucent algal green, and in the fall, naturally, like the scales of a fire dragon. From shady green to dying flame.