Camping at Mile High

I can’t look away from the Marvelous-Changing-Day movie unfolding before my eyes. Camping at Mile High Campground satisfies my soul and inspires me to live as the mountains do, beautifully. Simply being with this spectacular beauty for three whole days– for the silent butterflies floating by, perhaps this is a lifetime– what a gift.  I begin the sojourn by blowing smoke to the seven directions (praying with tobacco) in the sacred manner taught by Keewaydinoquay. The first night, I awake to coyotes singing, and moonlight pouring in on me through thin tent walls. I am beauty’s witness and have no other purpose than to be so.

When rains falls softly next day, I stretch out my legs from the beach chair inside my tent and read a delicious middle grade novel. It’s about a girl who attempts to hold back her happiness and then her grief, a girl lost in the middle of a big family, just as I often was. At the story climax, I sense some old loose threads get woven back into my garment of wholeness. Glancing up from the book, I think of an old love, long on the other side. I wave to her through the wide-arched tent window, where I can see the dear rain descending on a diaphanous parade of peaks.

This place intoxicates me! So empty of human artifice, so brimming with life and grandeur. I turn to poetry, reading the North Carolina Poet Laureate, Shelby Stephenson, whom I shall have the pleasure of introducing next weekend at The 10th Annual Carolina Mountains Literary Festival. Though his life is as different from mine as a bear’s from a butterfly’s, I feel a kinship in the way he sees, records, and captures daily truths.  “…Turning your body loose to join the wise/home where you belong to everyone.” (The Hunger of Freedom, p. 59) “I wish I could… sink like the turtle into relevance/in the head of Cow Mire Branch.” (p. 70) Beauty hunters, we poets.  I work on a long poem called Of Bees and Mountains.

When the third day dawns clear, I tear myself from the campsite view to explore the Maggie Valley  area. I stop at a trailhead on Wolf Laurel Road, and my Elk Adventure begins! (To be continued. Subscribe to the blog for email notifications if you don’t want to miss it.)