mountains

Last Saturday I hiked the Pacolet River Heritage Preserve off Goldmine Road with my friend Erik Reece. Like me, Erik's a poet and an environmental writer, and I wanted to show him something of my nearby wilderness while he was in town.

When I bought my mountain place in western North Carolina I was looking for this purest form of retreat. I wanted to put as many one lane bridges between me and the nearest Wal-Mart as possible. But I also knew it was the Southeast, and there would always be neighbors, echoing sounds from across the ridge. They may not be close by, but they would be presences offering waves as we passed on the driveway lined with rhododendron. I didn't even care if I had indoor plumbing or well water. I wasn't trying to make visits comfortable for my city friends used to vacation cottages. I wasn't looking for the rural life. I wasn't sniffing out some 1990s version of what Horace Kephart, in that 1905 classic Our Southern Highlanders, called "the back of beyond." I was looking for a place more like Thoreau's Walden, or Annie Dillard's Tinker Creek, a place whose natural history has been compromised by human history.