Southverve

(Below is the final blog about the hike to Brushy Mountain in June)

We keep going.  The hike always becomes this – keep going no matter how tired until you reach the top of something.  On this day, it started with the four hour drive from Cincy to the trailhead in the Smokies and up.  Already there have been two haunting moments – the flight down the mountain my son talked about and slipping behind the loud rush of Grotto Falls. 

Now the path winds up the mountain until we reach Trillium Gap and a sign splits toward Mount LeConte or Brushy.  We always take Brushy Mountain trail.  The path here is basically a creek bed, a tiny rill of mud with moss on either side.  The air is thick with humidity because of last night’s rain, and if not for the elevation, the humidity would be unbearable.  

In the last stretch, the rhododendrons lean over, some still blooming pink in late June.  We try to walk on the moss banks and avoid the mud rill as much as possible.  The moss is incredibly spongy, and at any moment, you think the ground will give way. 

Then the canopy opens, and we are at the crest, surrounded by laurel with tiny white-pink blooms, just beyond, the peaks of other mountains.  The trail winds around and we lose each other – Dylan is somewhere up ahead with his sketchbook, and Jana behind us taking pictures.  

Along the white blooms are bees and sandfleas.  I go to an outcropping and yell, “Here.”  Just that one word.  It hurts the back of my throat as the echo becomes distorted, vanishes.  No one answers back.  But still I breathe easier, having made it again to the top of Brushy Mountain.  

In the distance are the blue fanned ridges of three mountains; to my right a mountain with a gray cloud perched on top, and below, a long line of stick trees that have lost all there needles.  Why that side of the mountain while other places flourish?  It is like this in all of us.  As pieces of us die – old skin, simple cells, the cutting away of memory – other pieces of us live on, thrive, recover, exist. 

I look down and think about what my son said of flight, the kind he wanted, a flight that does not end us along the endless branches of trees, but instead carries us and carries us.  

“Here,” I yell a second time as if one sound can lift the world and me with it.  Even the dead branches.  But where to?  Where is this lifting going?  There is no other place.  We’re at the top.  And yet yelling the word reaffirms and grounds, the same as it releases and lets go.  Freedom is that contradiction.  Always.  My wife tells me my thinking is too binary.  But to yell at this spot on this mountain that holds me and let’s me go, becomes something more, as if all the world is suddenly uncontainable and yet shouldered by mountains with a loneliness that gnaws inside us, freeing and as vast as our own sound carrying across the sky.