Rain rattled the tent last night and pinged on an overturned cook pot. The past few times we camped it stormed the first night and I felt panicky as I lay down to sleep, breathing deep to calm myself then feeling like I couldn’t get enough air, even though we were outside where there is all the air in the world. Generally I’m so tired and the outdoor sounds are so primal and repetitive – rain rattling, frogs croaking, thunder rumbling – that drowsiness trumps anxiety and I fall asleep before a true panic attack sets in.
This morning everything is damp. The thin nylon of my sticky sleeping bag clings to my skin; strands of hair cling to my neck. My camp sandals – a pair of Crocs and a pair of Rainbows – are cold and clammy. Outside the world drips. The poison ivy leaves that surround our campsite glisten with rain and their mocking oils. The charred wood in the fire pit shines a glossy black.
I used the backpacking stove by myself this morning. It was already assembled, but still. I used my notes from last night to boil water for oatmeal and coffee while B___ finally got a chance to sleep in. He lounged in the tent while I shooed a daddy long legs off the stove, pumped the fuel, lit the burner, listened to the hiss of a Whisperlite stove in the stillness of the campground morning.
It’s weird wearing glasses on a camping trip. They seem like an indoor thing not an outdoor one. They make me feel vulnerable to the elements – they get raindrops on them and get caught on my sweatshirt as I pull it over my head. When I take them off I hurt. My eyes work hard to focus and they blur and feel like I need to rub them to make them see the world crisply, but rubbing them does not help. My head begins to ache inside, behind my eyes, and at my temples, and so I put the glasses back on again.
The kids caught fireflies in the field across from our campsite last night. I sat under the trees in a nylon camp chair and watched them in the distance, reaching up with hands poised to cup around a lightning bug, like they were preparing to catch a kickball coming down from the sky. Or leaning down, knees bent, crouched and sneaking up on fireflies in the grass. The fireflies lit and darkened all around the grassy edges under the trees where the evening deepened sooner. Our children’s laughter drifted across the field to me till we heard thunder and called bed time.
In the quiet morning, my pen scratching paper while the campground sleeps, the sun not high enough yet to pierce the fog, all of us alive and the world gently dripping, the panic of the first night has gone.
View of river gorge from Towers overlook, Breaks Interstate Park, Virginia.
Sunlight shines
on evergreens browning. River
rushes on below.
This entry for the Between photo challenge is in honor of my husband’s favorite tree, the eastern hemlock, which is suffering widespread death in the Appalachians due to an exotic insect, the Hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA). Where 20 years ago we ran our hands over hemlocks’ feathery branches on every Appalachian hike, all the hemlocks we see now are brittle and brown, denuded of their soft needles, or if they do still have leaves, they are encrusted with the egg sacs of the insects that are killing them (the skeletal trees in the foreground of the picture are hemlocks). If you have hemlocks on your property, please see this Nature Conservancy article for information on how to treat the infestation.
I just realized I posted my first Butterfly Mind entry two years ago today. We lived in Minnesota at the time and I was supposed to be packing up the house to prepare for our cross-country move. Instead I started a blog. Since then I’ve published more than 250 posts and am still loving every minute of it. Thank you, readers, for making it so much fun to be here. Here’s that debut entry.
Posting a photograph last Friday of where I walk when I listen to my podcasts reminded me of a piece I wrote soon after our family moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. Nearly two years later, we still love it here; I think that means we have a chance at durable happiness. Please enjoy this post from the very early days of Butterfly Mind (October 18, 2012).
“RESEARCH OFFERS HOPE FOR THOSE SEEKING DURABLE BOOST IN HAPPINESS.” That’s the title of an article I clipped from the paper this summer. I don’t think I’ve ever clipped a newspaper article, but I saved this one. Because in this piece, I learned the secret of people who are able to sustain happiness after an exciting life change (being newly married, or, say, taking the perfect job): that, even beyond the initial excitement of their good news, rather than letting the novelty wear off and searching for something newer and better, these happy folks continue, on a daily basis, to appreciate the positive differences the change has made in their lives.
Kind of like how every time I drive out of our neighborhood and see Appalachians in front of me, I think, “Wow! I can’t believe we live here!”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this article since we made our move to Blacksburg because it tells our story – “When Jim Gubbins finally got the job he’d been working toward for 12 years, he was a very happy man.” Every day, my husband and I marvel at our good fortune, that all of our work actually paid off in they way we were hoping it would, and in a place so spectacular. But what really caught my attention, especially since, like my husband, this Gubbins character is a professor, is that after three years in his tenure-track position, Gubbins is even happier than when he first landed his dream job. All because he is satisfied with what he has, because he is not looking for something better. Because he marvels at his good fortune. After three years, he still savors the changes his job has offered him in all aspects of his life – the friendships he’s cultivated in his workplace, the perks of being at a smaller university, the opportunity to share knowledge. The amazing place he lives.
That last part – the amazing place he lives – resonates deeply with me, and makes me think we might have a shot at this durable happiness thing. My husband and I moved around a lot before settling in Blacksburg, no place ever feeling like quite the right fit, no place feeling like home. A friend likened us to Goldilocks, as we started in Florida (too hot), then moved to Minnesota (too cold), and are finally settling down in Virginia (just right). But it’s not just the climate that fits. Every time I see hemlocks and white pines, or we hike with our kids on the Appalachian Trail, or I smell the scent of mountains – a crisp mix of dry leaves, warm granite, damp earth, and high, clean air – every time I hear a Southern drawl, or my manager at work says “cotton-pickin’,” I delight in our good luck. I can’t believe we live here.
Sometimes I hesitate to get too attached, or I try to rein in my happiness, because I’m so used to having to uproot, to not get too close. Or I think the novelty will wear off at some point. The mountains will surely become so everyday, such a normal part of the landscape, that I won’t even notice them anymore.
This article, though, it’s urging me to risk it – to get attached, to get real close, to notice the mountains (like broccolli forests in summer, glittering gemstones in fall), to breathe the Appalachian air. It reminds me to savor these gifts. Having already hiked six different trails in six weeks – with waterfalls and babbling brooks, views of Allegheny ridges and the New River Valley, with boulders, hemlocks and white pines, deciduous trees ablaze in citrine, garnet, and yellow sapphire – and countless choices for new hikes, all within 30 minutes of home, the outlook is good that even in a few years we will still be in awe that we get to live here. Because we haven’t even unpacked our camping gear yet.
But the most exciting bit of encouragement that our happiness will endure comes from folks who have lived here a while. On a late-summer day in the courtyard at our kids’ school, when the sky was a crystalline blue, and the sun was warm, but not too warm, on my face, and another time, on a damp autumn morning, when fog rolled over the gentle green domes of the Appalachian mountains, I said to my companion of the day, “Every day, I look around me, or I smell the air, and I think, I can’t believe we live here.”
And my friends – two separate women, unknown to each other and on separate occasions – said quietly to me, both smiling in the same conspiratorial way, “You know, I’ve lived here for 14 years, and I still feel that same way.”
Appalachian Trail sign at McAfee Knob parking lot, Blacksburg, VA
Portraiture is possibly my favorite form of photography. Faces show character in every laugh line, every weathered wrinkle, in tan lines left by always-worn sunglasses, in the trickle of sweat through trail dust. In the scraggly beards of men who have walked the woods for weeks.
On our drive through Catawba valley, my husband said, “It’s getting close to peak thru-hiker season.” We were headed to Sawtooth Ridge, a portion of the Appalachian Trail between McAfee Knob and Dragon’s Tooth, near our home in Blacksburg, Virginia.
“It is?” I asked, my wheels turning. I had just checked my email and seen a photography challenge regarding culture, and I thought, oooh, maybe I can cover AT culture. Shoot portraits of rugged hikers.
“Yeah, if they left Springer Mountain [Georgia] on March 1, they’d start getting here near the end of April and in May.”
A local friend of ours said she gives away her chocolate snacks when she encounters thru-hikers on the trail. I thought of when my husband was thru-hiking, back when we were boyfriend and girlfriend, and how he would put an entire stick of butter in his ramen noodles at night. “I wish I would have brought more food,” I said.
In the McAfee Knob parking lot, I fingered my camera as large groups of day-hikers clustered around car trunks and tailgates, stuffing water bottles in daypacks, eating pre-hike sandwiches from Subway, mixing formula in bottles for the baby a dad would carry on his back. I wasn’t brave enough to ask to take their pictures. On the trail, I told myself. I’ll ask hikers on the trail.
We headed south while the crowds headed north towards McAfee Knob. For twenty minutes, we saw no-one. No day hikers. No thru-hikers. The only evidence of humans we found, besides the trail, was a “Home Sweet Home” sign nailed above a squirrel hole. “Kids! Look at this!” I crouched down and snapped shots.
Squirrel hole on Appalachian Trail
“Do you think a squirrel made that?” Our son asked.
“Or maybe fairies?” said our daughter.
I wondered about whoever had made this miniature sign, who had brought a screwdriver onto the trail to attach it to this little spot. A local day hiker? A Virginia Tech student? Whoever it was, they made me smile with this little surprise in the woods.
We rounded a bend and met a young man and his dog headed north on the trail. The man carried a full pack, with a pair of dusty gray Crocs tied on the side. His hands were red and raw as he gave his dog a treat for sitting obediently as our kids approached.
“Hey, how’s it going?” we said.
Hiker and his dog on the Appalachian Trail
“Good, good. I just picked this guy up in Pearisburg,” and he pointed at his dog. “I’m trying to train him.” The black and white mottled dog carried his own saddlebag pack and was calm and sweet as he sniffed my hand. His nose was speckled pink and black. The man gave him another treat.
“Well, y’all have a good day!” And he continued north as we continued south. I’m not sure if he was hiking from Georgia to Maine, or if he was just out for a weekend backpacking trip. I did not ask his story, and I did not take his picture, except from the back.
The next hikers we encountered were obviously thru-hikers. My husband and kids and I sat on fallen trees in a clearing, munching trail mix and baby carrots, when two women powered through the glade. They carried full packs, wore quick-dry nylon hiking pants in olive green and pewter grey, and their strides were long and purposeful. I wondered where they were from, when they had started, how many miles they were doing that day. Had they mailed boxes to themselves, filled with fresh food supplies, and cash, and lightweight spring clothing? Were they in a hurry to get to a post office and bury their faces in fresh tee-shirts? Clean socks? They said a quick “Hello,” which we returned, and then they were gone. I did not photograph them, or ask them their story. “The next one,” I told myself. “I’ll talk to the next one.”
On our way back to the car, we passed a scruffy young man smoking a cigarette on a slab of rock by the side of the trail. He sat atop a bulging backpack, stuffed full like a giant army-green sausage. He was backpacking, not day hiking. Carrying cigarettes and wearing New Balance sneakers, he didn’t fit the profile for a thru-hiker, but he could have been. I’m sure he had a story. He was lounging, I could have easily asked for his portrait. But he wore headphones, and I didn’t want to intrude, so I hiked by with a nod and a smile.
By the time we arrived at our car, where five dusty, bearded, twenty-something men lay draped over their backpacks, or sat on them as chairs, or propped their backs against them in the white gravel parking lot, I knew that I would not talk to these hikers either, nor photograph their faces. I am fascinated by journalists – by their grit, by their ability to shove in and get the story, by their speed in turning stories out – but I realized on the trail that that is not the stuff I’m made of.
Instead of shooting photographs of “the next one,” or of those prone hikers reclining not 20 yards from our car, I knew I’d bring their images home in my mind, and l’d write their portraits with words. I’d hole up at home, in retreat like many hikers seek, contemplating solitude, and the Appalachian Trail, and a culture that includes power-hikers, dog-rescuers, smokers, families of four, and those who would nail a tiny sign over a tiny hole, in the wilderness, for smiles they’ll never see, but that they’ll know, quietly.
White daisy-like wildflowers on the Appalachian Trail, VA
Appalachian trail, Sawtooth Ridge near Blacksburg, VA
Pink mountain azaleas in bloom on Appalachian Trail in April, Sawtooth Ridge, VA
Tiny green succlents on Appalachian Trail in spring, Sawtooth Ridge, VA near Blacksburg
View from rock outcrop on Sawtooth Ridge hike near McAfee knob, VA on Appalachian Trail in April
Pink mountain azalea buds on Sawtooth Ridge on Appalachian Trail, VA
Tiny blue feather on Appalachian Trail in April, Sawtooth Ridge, VA
Fern unfurling in spring on Appalachian Trail, Sawtooth Ridge, VA
Lichen covered log and white wildflowers on Appalachian Trail in April, Sawtooth Ridge, VA
(R) Repost – I am away, chaperoning the fourth grade trip to Jamestown, VA. I’ll be on a bus with, corralling, and sleeping in cabins with 60 ten-year olds for 48 straight hours, and am prohibited from drinking alcohol during that time. I know you’re jealous. Anyway, I was rummaging through my archives and saw this post from a year ago today and I thought I’d repost it to herald thru-hiking season in Virginia.
Butterfly Mind 