Call me Joe the Barbarian but when I see the Hollywood people with their spiked hair, 10 million dollar weddings, their need to be bigger than life, their sweaters made from harpy eagle feathers woven with organic peat moss, a steal at $1,392.95, I want to grab my outdoor jacket, insulated jeans and head to the mountains. The Blue Ridge Parkway is 53 minutes from my house and I have an urge to go there, slog through snow covered woods and hike to the top of a mountain, take in the splendor and let my jangled soul find rest.
The urge hit me again recently as I was crossing the Catawba River on my way to Hickory listening to a man on the radio talk about a book he had written as a form of therapy. He talked about an unhappy childhood. As a result he became a transvestite, found he wasn’t satisfied so he had a sex-change operation which was a mistake and now he is back from a Malaysian lake where he went to seek inner peace but still has abandonment issues and blames his blue collar insensitive father. Right there, just as I crossed the bridge over the Catawba River on Interstate 40 I said out loud “Oh, grow up.”
Yes, I talk to myself sometimes and if you live long enough you too will have that privilege.
Therapy is by nature a whiny process---expensive whimpering, so I go the mountains and see what God is doing while everyone else gets the blues and takes decongestants.
Statesville is a wonderful city to live in with parks, beautiful homes, blueberry scones and HD TV and yet you can hop in your car and shortly find yourself in a silent snow covered mountain forest. Suddenly you are in Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” waiting for Yuri (Omar Sharif) and his mistress Larrisa (Julie Christie) to come riding together through the woods in a sleigh all starry eyed for each other. The moment you step into a winter forest you see the splendor yet sense the danger and you have a strong urge go in deeper.
You can blame your blue collar mother for this. She told you a million times never go in the winter woods alone, that the seemingly safe ice on a pond can break and you could fall in and be lost forever. So of course this enhances the experience and becomes something you must do. The danger is real, the snow is cold and the laws of physics apply to us all. We need moments of splendor as well as danger to remind us that we are not the center of the universe and that one should never travel without wearing clean underwear.
Some time ago I took a guest from Brazil to the mountains. He had never experienced snow and ice. We tramped through the woods as a light snow fell. He kept grabbing at snowflakes. We arrived at a frozen pond and I showed him how to step out on the ice. We both stood there and took in the silence, the majestic mountains and the millions of snowflakes falling all around us.
He was speechless, almost childlike, and looked at me with a wide grin, his eyes watered from the cold, his nose running and his ears were red. He wanted to tell me how wonderful this was but he couldn’t describe it. We later walked back to the cabin saying nothing, each feeling small yet complete.
You don’t have to go to Bora Bora to find inner peace. It’s right here, and it’s free.
My goodness!!! I wish I could have gone too. The mountains (and I was born in Iredell County which is not far from the mountains) are so beautiful and almost scary to me yet I feel a yearning for being in and amongst them. My parents were from Wilkes County where I often visited as a child. I do understand how peace can be found in the quietness and loneliness of the mountains.
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, as usual for your pieces, is well-written. My compliments!