Forest Trails

I like walking the woods around my sister in law’s place in Western North Carolina. They view me as an eccentric curmudgeon who’s rough edges are smoothed by time spent in nature with my dog, so to tame my surliness they take me for walks. 

I am not really surly, I am just withdrawn because I don’t really understand them very easily. They find my sense of humor grotesque so if I comment on passing ironies I end up sounding like Mencken with a burr up my butt. 

It’s Monty Python meets the Quakers and they shake off my insouciance in the face of global disaster by taking me for a walk to burn off the negative vibes. Works for me. 

They do live in some fairly astonishing countryside. Their “intentional community” owns 1100 acres of astonishing forests outside Asheville and the place is crisscrossed with trails. My wife’s sister Geeta has walked them all so we don’t usually get lost. However finding the correct trail poses the occasional challenge. 

The hillsides are covered in rhododendrons which blot out sight lines and sunlight. The magic is sometimes turned into nightmare as all paths look the same. Geeta told me a story of a friend who took her two year old son for a brief afternoon walk (40 years ago) and accidentally spent the night on a frosty trail keeping the borrowed infant warm by wrapping him in leaves. Jacob seems remarkably unaffected by the trauma while his mother is positively cheerful about the story using it as an Awful Warning to be home before dark. These woods are not to be trifled with. 

Occasional sign posts add to the confusion. “By pass”? There is a hermit type it turns out who doesn’t appreciate the communal nature of people walking past his home and they built a trail around his fierce dogs. You Have Been Warned. 

Clearly if I want to take a two hour, four mile walk and do it alone I stand an excellent chance of turning it into an ordeal. Besides, after half a century of residence they too need motivation to get out in familiar woods. “That’s why we like visitors,” Geeta said to me so when I said I wanted to re-visit the chimney she and Bob took me at my word. 

The chimney sits in a meadow on the top of a ridge by a pond that was tended by old Elpenore. Obviously. 

For Geeta and Bob this is a sentimental spot as they spent their first night at their new home in the mountains camping in this meadow. She was a freshly qualified physician and he was a starry eyed counter culture dreamer and they had found a community based on those very principles that drove youngsters to rebel in the 1970s.

Give them credit: he set to and built their home while she got a job taking care of the underserved and largely ignored mountain  community in desperate need of modern medicine. Because there was a health clinic in Celo that exists and flourishes to this day. Geeta is now the grand old dame of the clinic, the emeritus eminence grise but half a century ago she was hired by the redoubtable Elpenore as a wet-behind-the-ears medical novice.

I have to think Elpenore’s parents were high when they named their son but he was born in Germany so I suppose one has to allow for cultural quirks. Elpenore was the youngest of Odysseus’s crew who got drunk and fell off Circe’s roof and broke his neck symbolizing apparently, the cretinous behavior of young men everywhere. How that inspires the naming of your offspring I couldn’t say. Perhaps it affected him as Geeta described her former boss in the most eccentric of terms. Elpenore’s isolated homestead is enjoyed these days as a family vacation retreat: 

The board of directors of the health center hired Elpenore on his terms as a strictly 9 to 5 doctor, no after hours call outs no weekends and no night shifts. He wanted to tend his plants and have time to study botany and  not have to devote all the live long hours to curing people. Fair enough they said and looked for a compliant assistant for the good doctor. Apparently he ran through scads of them before Geeta showed up bright eyed and bushy tailed and eccentric as all get out herself. They got along famously. 

Bob recalls that Elpenore wanted to recreate Bavaria in Celo by planting pine trees everywhere. I love pine trees and every time Geeta takes me out to Elpenore’s chimney I check out the pine avenue next to the pond. Apparently Elpenore also loved to build roads and Bob hates roads and cars and so on and so forth. The 19th century with a writing desk and a modest private income would have suited Bob perfectly. I love roads and driving.  

“Do you mind if I get nude?” A stranger with a basket on his arm popped out of the bushes and dropped the question. We three stared intently at our feet and shook our heads and muttered comforting phrases like “ no, not at all,” “ feel free” while I’m thinking privately “What the Actual Fuck is going on here?” It was a Monty Python moment come to life: “Your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries” hung in the air as I mentally shook my fist at this intrusion into my serene meadow moment. 

I stared in the spirit of unabashed nuttery  that infects these mountains and watched the man throw off his woolen cap, step out of underwear that looked like substantial bicycle shorts, who then promptly jumped into the pond. “He’s not going to last,” Bob said confidently as I stared at the spectacle in wonderment. Should I be swimming too? Hell no was the answer as the erstwhile polar bear sounded off in agony from the muddy October waters and skipped rapidly back to dry land. 

“Told you so, Bob muttered greatly satisfied. Thank God I thought, fearful how this caper would have ended had Jeff called out “Come on in, it’s lovely.” Seeing my in laws nude would have been the cherry on a shit sundae. 

Jeff, it turns out is one of those bizarre forest residents who thrive on thinking aided by hands on practicality and are endowed with superhuman brains of the sort that might do crosswords in Classical Greek to pass the time or argue differential calculus equations for some lighthearted fun. Luckily for Bob and Geeta, his long time friends and  neighbors, he also loves to grow vegetables and had a wizard receipe for freezing bell peppers that he shared at some great length with his enthralled  listeners who peppered him with questions. 

You roast them on a flame with the skins on, cut out the seeds and pop them in a freezer bag. When needed pull them out and drop them into your sauce and bob’s your uncle.  I laid in the thick soft grass sunning myself like a Florida lizard as they talked animatedly. Jeff turned to me and asked the impossibly complex question I have to answer all the time and don’t know how. 

“Where are you from?” Erk! Key West? Keep it simple stupid I tell myself. I actually admitted to him I am a retired office worker roaming in a van. 

Jeff vanished in the hobbit style he had adopted when he appeared and I looked at Geeta. “People pop out everywhere,” I said. Oh yes she said you are never alone in the community even when you think you are miles away. Note to self: next time you get taken short in the woods and drop your pants without a care in the world, first take the time to have a good look round for unexpected neighbors. As the military like to say, time spent in reconnaissance is rarely wasted.

Jeff designed this bridge Geeta said as we left the idyllic meadow. I could have lingered but the rumbling need for lunch got Geeta hustling us like a sheepdog rounding up strays.  We should have brought a picnic Bob said sadly eying the lost opportunity for repose. He cheered up “I helped build this bridge,” he said. “Did you do the supervising?” I asked because I know Bob. “I did some work,” he said only slightly defensively. You can see why they  find me annoying. “It’s a very good bridge,” I said seeking amends. And it was too, the old one was more like a catapult, all soft and springy and ready to launch the unwary into orbit.

One of the more bizarre habits this community encourages is to walk through your neighbors’ yards. Homes are scattered throughout the forests along side gravel roads, at the end of footpaths or buried deep in the greenery. By community rules you can’t own the land but you can be voted into the community and either rent or buy an existing home or you can build a new one. All this by community member vote. Want to modify your home? A community vote may be needed. All by consensus. It’s a social structure that would obviously drive me mad. 

We passed by the Quaker meeting house on our way down. 

I was put in mind of standing in the great mosques of Istanbul a few years ago and being startled by the wall to wall carpeting.  I had never thought to carpet a church, never seen it done and I guess Quakers    haven’t either. I thought it was a rather good idea.

I envied the owner of this splendid couch and wondered why it wasn’t occupied. Geeta kept saying it used to be better and more beautiful before the pond beneath it dried out. I refrained from pointing out my feeling it was lovely and unusual just as it was. I wanted to sit in it and contemplate its elevated status.  

I soon found out why it wasn’t occupied, the occupant stepped out of her house her arms full of clothes  ready to join the laundry already on the line. She was unfazed to find people walking through her yard. She asked me where I was from and she spoke idyllically of her too brief sojourn in Pulborough West Sussex, a matter of twenty miles from the house I grew up in when not at Hogwarts or on summer vacations in Italy. She wants to go back to her idyllic England. I encouraged her to, as they need more optimists in England I told her. The light of true love burned in her eyes regardless of my pleasure at having escaped; I hope she gets her wish and is happy. 

In mid June we returned to Arizona and have driven continuously and I fear at a rather rapid clip since then. And we still have more than a thousand miles to go to get to Key West. Had we tried this stunt in Europe we would have come up against vast urbanization, narrow roads and restrictive rules about wild camping all scattered through a dozen languages and cultures. The US is a vast open playground for those that seek it. It will I hope be here when we get back from Argentina in a few years. 

Meanwhile we staggered back to the car, the stragglers of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and fell into the Prius which Bob proudly noted would take us home on electricity.

I got a nice surprise when Layne opened our mail forwarded by St Brendan’s Isle, our mail service in North (low hurricane impact) Florida. No more insurance companies pimping for their shareholders and denying me care to feed their bottom line.  For $250 a month I have my total health care coverage paid  automatically from my bank. I knew those years sitting at a desk would pay off. Finally I am free. 

And with the limited time left, I have to get on with it. Death is always ready to pounce I have discovered. Time to put some serious miles on GANNET2 and see that world up close that gave us corn, potatoes and tomatoes, some of my favorite foods. It will I trust be a hell of a  journey.