Missing the Mountains

The Highest Points on the Blue Ridge Parkway

It’s Pride Month. Let me share a quote from a poem by a very masculine and straight man, that I’ve been thinking about a lot, as I’ve been reading Stephanie McCarter’s new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

Gods laugh at the fiction of gender. 

—Jim Harrison, “The Theory and Practice of Rivers”

If a mountain is a god, must it be male or female or both or neither? Nature is my temple; I prefer the Greek idea of gods, where you respect them and stay the hell out of their way. I made a small prayer the other day, which nature answered. Someone shared a photo of an Indigo Bunting, and I decided I needed to see one. I would use eBird to find likely places, and go looking, on Sunday (the day this is published.) On Friday, I took the day off for my birthday, and drove to a mountain bike park in Delaware that I’d heard about. And what greeted me from the field next to the parking lot? An Indigo Bunting. On the trail, another watched me approach while perched on a bird house. I didn’t have my good camera on me—the trails are too rugged to risk that—and they flew away before I could snap a pic with my phone, but their deep blue imprinted on my brain.¹

The Blue Ridge Parkway is sort of a Canterbury pilgrim’s road for automobiles to see the mountains of the eastern United States. As you venture south and west through North Carolina on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the mountains push higher into the sky, until you’re over a mile above sea level. That’s pretty high up there, for the continent east of the Mississippi River. I live on the coastal plain of the peninsula of New Jersey, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay. The highest point here is Apple Pie Hill, a mere two hundred feet above sea level, and the surrounding forests are so flat that on a clear day, if you climb the fire tower atop that hill, you can see Atlantic City on the coast, and Philadelphia to your west.

Elevation signs for Devil's Courthouse, Richland Balsam, and Craggy Dome

What I mean is, mountains impress me, even small ones.² Mount Tammany in northern New Jersey may be a pimple compared to Pike’s Peak³, but it’s still a mountain in my eyes. Craggy Dome, Richland Balsam, and the Devil’s Courthouse are twice as tall, and while they may pale in comparison to the Rockies or the four peaks of Mount Denali, it felt exhilarating to be up there. It’s easy to understand why they are personified by people with a spiritual relationship to nature.

I just like this tree.

Driving up to Wiseman’s View was wonderful, but seeing Table Rock made me want to hike up there. I’ll have do that on my next visit. We didn’t do more hiking on trip after Crabtree Falls, but one of the beauties of the Parkway is that it makes so many gorgeous views accessible to everyone. One of the first milestones in mountain country is Waterrock Knob, which is exactly 5820 feet tall. That makes sense if you’re like me, and have a habit of transposing numbers. A mile is 5280 feet, and for that you can blame the English. Having Irish heritage, I blame them for a lot of things, but taking a perfectly normal Roman mile of 1000 paces and deciding that a mile ought to be eight furlongs—and don’t get me started on them—is the height (or length) of arrogance, for which they are known. A furlong is “the length of the furrow a team of oxen could plow in a day.” Don’t ask me who decided this, and which oxen were considered standard. It’s what you get when you’re ruled by a bunch of useless twats who are paid with stolen riches, which is also why Americans are still using Daylight Savings Time, and why the Romans decided a foot was a good unit of measurement in the first place.

Laurel Knob overlook and rolling hills; Devil's Courthouse close-up; Waterrock Knob

Despite the jazzy name of the Devil’s Courthouse, and the colossal height of Richland Balsam⁴, Craggy Dome was my favorite. There’s a small visitor’s center near the peak, and you really feel like you are on a mountain, even if it’s only just over a mile high. Getting up there takes time, and unlike parts of the Parkway, you feel the climb. And the view is delightful.

The Dome is Craggy, and the Dome with a Subaru for size. There's a banana in the Subaru.

After we reached the end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which sadly does not have a “You are now Leaving” sign to match all the “Entering” ones, we headed toward the Great Smokies and went looking for the trains used for the wreck scene in The Fugitive starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. We found it, and before heading home, I drove Tennessee 129, known as “The Tail of the Dragon,” which has 318 curves in 11 miles, and we stopped at Natural Bridge in Virginia. I’ll wrap up this trip next week, because I have a backlog of stuff to write about:

Carnivorous sundews; Cleaning up trash in the Pine Barrens with a Subaru trail riding group; and looking for the ruins of a munitions plant that built the firebombs that destroyed Tokyo in World War II. I’ll get to those in the coming weeks. By the time you read this, I’ll be celebrating another revolution around the Sun. If you’d like to give me a gift, tell me your favorite mountain the comments.

Mine? For now, it’s Table Rock in Linnville Gorge:

1. My grandmother gave me the Reader’s Digest Guide to North American Wildlife, and I read it over and over, marking which animals I wanted to see. Blue birds were my favorite. I’ve seen Eastern Bluebirds and Indigo Buntings; Steller’s Jays are next on my list.

2. Yes, all Tetons are Grand to me.

3. Apologies to Martin Scorcese. One of Tommy DeVito’s last lines is, “Pike’s Peak was a pimple then, wasn’t it?”

4. I’ve typed “Robert Balsam” three times and had to correct it. I don’t know who he is, maybe a brother of actor Martin Balsam, but his name’s stuck in my head. Talk about personification of mountains…