Blood Mountain
On my last day in Georgia, I climbed Blood Mountain with my mother. The trailhead is just north of Dahlonega and part of the AT. Though I shouldn’t have been surprised, I was at how much the mountain reminded me of the Great Smokies – especially a canopy of rhododendrons near the top that was much like Brushy Mountain off Roaring Fork.
As we ascended, we came across a sour orange smell – I don’t know which plant it came from – but it was the same smell from my June hikes in the Smokies. Smell, I’ve discovered, is my strongest sense for memory and location. Every time I’m home at Swamp Hollow, it is the smell of pine straw and swamp-mud and, of course, cow manure that my kids hate and make awful faces at and say, “Gross” whenever we’re in a field of my father’s cows. But for me, it’s home, familiar.
It was a day of low clouds on Blood Mountain and half way up, the mist spread through the pine and oak branches like the cool mist that comes from exhaling in winter. My mother stopped for small purple flowers and red flowers she especially liked. I took pictures of the white light cutting through leaves, around the wet boles. And finally at the crest, the two of us sat on a sheet of rock and looked out into the mist.
I had been told by a friend that the view from here was amazing, but all there was to see was mist, the low clouds, a blur of whiteness. It made the immediate rock and trees more prominent, and I thought to myself, this place, this moment is all we have.
All week my mother talked of her belief in God and heaven, that place that exists only after death. And I talked about our moment here – this life, this earth, the people we love now.
Just beyond Blood Mountain was Slaughter Mountain and Springer and pathways to Desoto Falls and Neels Gap leading home. But what was beyond the mist did not matter. What mattered to me was that my mother and I were sitting on this rock, catching our breath after a long climb, a little dizzy, our legs and backs aching, resting. Soon we would head down and restart time in another direction. But before that moment and the moment after that, was this moment, all that we had and needed.