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I am not really surly, I am just withdrawn because I don’t really understand them very easily.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.

A Day In North Carolina

An oil change in Burnsville at brother-in-law Bob’s favorite mechanic. 

We walked 45 minutes across town to a brew pub for a hamburger lunch. Good beer too. Rusty drank his water and slept. 

I wanted ice cream for dessert. I’m not sure why but I hadn’t had any for a while. 

Strawberry and praline in a waffle cone. Hit the spot. 

Perhaps Layne being away with her sister had something to do with the splurge. 

Bob has lived here half a century so it was not surprising  he met an acquaintance. What surprised me was the shouted conversation across the street! Rusty ignored them and the Coca Cola invitation and put his nose in the gutter. 

Naturally Bob knows the artist who painted the mural and he had done entertaining stories of the mountain woman’s eccentricities. If you move here you are either eccentric or rich. A bit like Key West. 

House prices are high and going up as the rich incomers get irritated at having to live with eccentrics who were charming when they came on vacation.  A bit like Key West! 

Yancey County used to be dry but even the eccentrics got behind the vote to liberate the demon alcohol from imprisonment by the Baptists. Bob says that vote opened up Burnsville to a spate of tourism not seen before. 

Of course success breeds…rising prices. Trying to figure this stuff out will give you a glorious headache. 

Bob said he was in the small engine shop the morning of 9-11, and he and the owner watched the second airplane hit the tower. That prompted the shop owner to suggest this meant war. I asked Bob if he got his lawnmower running and he thought about it for a bit and said he couldn’t actually remember why he was in the shop. 

As we meandered across Burnsville Bob looked lustfully at twisted pieces of wood. He grumbled about the high prices. Well I said you’ve got lots of wood around your house, try a trade. He didn’t bite. 

We picked up GANNET2 with clean engine oil and a filter -$72 to do the work- and drove the half hour back to Bob’s rural community at Celo. Happily the speed limit on Highway 80 has been reduced from 55 to 45 mph. This is the only road in North America that had a speed limit I could not keep up with. Now I feel less inadequate though with GANNET2, 45 is a bit of a stretch. 

Before we harvested some vegetables we checked the poem of the week posted in front of the community vegetable patch. I’d never thought of a dead car battery as sleeping beauty before so I learned a new metaphor. 

It was a lovely sunny afternoon to wander the communal vegetable patch. 

The great thing about Rusty is he can look after himself. A stranger to me, not to Bob, came walking down the road and Rusty looked at her. She crossed the road as she chatted with Bob and petted Rusty. “I have to pet a dog that won’t run into the street even for a pet.”  Good boy. 

Bob takes the chilis and puts them on the gas burner and chars them and as odd as it sounds they are delicious. And not spicy. He collects them in an old fashioned wicker basket in keeping with his 19th century aesthetic. 

They are planning on buying a used Chevy Bolt like the one their son has. I looked askance at the suggestion. Bob said I was underestimating him when I suggested neither he or his wife would keep it together to keep the car charged properly so absentminded are they. I have no doubt they will strand themselves all over Western North Carolina in the years to come. No doubt knowing their luck it will be in front of homes of friends they haven’t seen for years…much conviviality will ensue. 

An unarmed survivalist prowling the bounty of North Carolina. Unarmed only in the broadest sense, that basket has some pretty lethal edges. 

The pepper harvest: 

Bob’s little helper hard at it as usual: 

Psst! Wanna a winter squash? Jeez Bob I said, thanks for the offer but I’d displace half my wardrobe to store that in the van. I see squash on the menu in the next night or two. 

Some really pretty details punctuate the deer fence.  

Dinner was pasta with sauce made from home grown vegetables, including squash, red wine from France and conversation. 

Damn he said. I wanted to read and now you’ve poured me more wine. Easy fix I said and decanted his glass into mine. 

We went heavy on the sauce, I washed the pan while Bob loaded the dishwasher. Survival never looked so comfortable. 

Bob the academic built the house with some community  help. Their eldest son was born in the kitchen. Geeta his doctor wife worked at the health clinic bringing medical care to an unserved corner of Appalachia. When my wife came to visit from California she brought Mexican food to drop some diversity into their food shopping. Things have changed over time obviously but the old timers haven’t. 

Layne came home later after a long day in Asheville with her sister. Asheville has ethnic food in abundance of course. We’ve plugged in to a power cord and our space heater is worth its weight in gold. 50 degree damp nights do that. I was listening to Rusty snore as I read in my driving seat reversed to face my desk, the recliner I always craved in a house.   

At the end of the week we move on and leave the transplanted mountain folk to their gentle, hilltop soap opera. As Celo turns.