I am not a winter person, but I love summer, even the heat. As the weather warms up and Spring approaches, I get cabin fever and start to day dream about being able to walk outside without a coat, swim in a river, and sleep outside over night. I day dream about camping, about being in the woods--hearing the birds, starting a fire, sleeping in a tent.
This was a very strange summer since it meant moving to Iowa at the end of July and fearing the winters there. To overcome the fears of both moving and winter, or repress the fears really, I started looking at where to camp in Iowa next summer. The Mississippi River, which I grew up next to, has opportunities and Missouri is not too far away, which means Mark Twain’s hometown and the Mark Twain National Forest, are not too far away. These would be good place to camp. Iowa also has some native mounds, and though we cannot camp near them, there are towns nearby and state parks nearby. But, my love is close. The West.
I am 24 hours away driving time from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I am under 14 hours from the Black Hills, under 13 to Boulder and the Rocky Mountain National Forest, under 11 hours to the Buffalo National Forest in the Boston Mountains of Arkansas, and under 10 hours to the head waters of the Mississippi in Minnesota. These are all good.
But, before I left the Appalachian Mountains, I had to say goodbye to them.
I grew up in Southern Illinois, which I call the flat tundra (and now I am in Iowa, which has more claim to be tundra like!). It is flat. I knew flat all my life. When we made trips into Missouri, I loved the rocks and bluffs. When we moved to Arkansas, I was in them. I fell in love with the landscape. Northwest Arkansas has the Ozark Mountains and they are beautiful. They were my backyard until I went to graduate school. After graduate school, I got to move to West Virginia from flat Oklahoma (where I got my Ph.D.) I was excited. It was hilly there. The hills in West Virginia were taller because the valleys were deeper than in Arkansas, and every day I woke up in West Virginia, I did not ache for the hills of Arkansas, as I did in every other flat place I lived in. I was still in hills and that was comforting. I could wake up in the morning and see the fog in the valley where the river ran. All of this I knew and loved.
Those who live in hills probably know this experience I have every Fall if I am not waking up every morning in the midst of the hills. These perfect days exist in the hills every Fall just when the leaves think they might change. When I wake up on such a day, not only is the air crisp, but the light is also perfect, and I can see everything clearly, even a blade of grass from the second story of a house. It is not hazy. The humidity is low and the temperature is perfect—not hot, not cold. It smells like trees and grass and when I look out I see sun on hills and trees and the light seems clear. The light falls through the leaves of the trees. These are the days when the ache to get out there and hike to the top of a hill takes my breath away. I know I will be able to see everything clearly and that not many of these days will come my way. I always remember the blue skies and the green hills from these days.
And when I wake up some Fall and I am in some city or some place that is flat, my mind goes right to waking up in the hills of Arkansas and to that memory of perfection. It takes my breath away in memory too, but it is a kind of grief and need to get back home.
I did not have this experience in West Virigina. I did miss home and my Ozark, Boston, and Ouachita Mountains, but not as much as I did in flat places. In West Virginia, I was in a version of them--an older version, a used to be wilder version, and still a wonderful version of them. Black bears still lived near me even if I had lost the bobcats and mountain lions. In West Virginia I was reminded how much I love trees, even the oaks I am allergic to. That reminder will be valuable because Iowa City is slightly hilly and has lot of trees where I live. They are keeping me happy and I think they will continue to make it easy to live in a kind of a flat place again.
The Appalachian Mountains dominate West Virginia. The whole state is them. This is not entirely true in Arkansas, which also has flat places in it, and whose best camping places are in the hills. All of West Virginia has camping opprotunities and 99% is beautiful and breath taking. I cannot say I find the mines and effects of mining beautiful or the strip malls that strip the mountain bald and flat, but the National and State parks are a treasure. We had camped in some amazing places and I wanted to spend all summer camping in the state, but too many practical things, like work and packing, got in the way. So, we planned a trip in early July with one of our favorite people to camp with. Unfortunately, Cari's husband could not make it, so I cannot say that before we left West Virginia, we got to camp with our favorite couple to camp with. However, we got to camp with one of them before we left. (And, we will camp with both of them soon, hopefully next summer in Colorado.)
Ernani picked Senaca Rocks. We loaded Cari’s car with camping necessities including her beautiful beagle, Sam, and we were on our way to Seneca Campgrounds where we pitched our tents in awful heat and with an amazing view of the Rocks themselves.
Seneca is an exposed rock face that is weathering away and a place rock climbers love to climb. It is rare to have so much exposed, treeless (or almost treeless) rock in West Virginia for natural reasons. It is a striking contrast to see bare rock in the midst of so many trees. The campsite was cleared away so that we could see the rocks. They rose up to the east and the sun rose from directly behind them the next morning.
Since it was a clearing we camped in, we were not in a grove of trees that shaded us or surrounded by wet, cool rocks, as we might normally have at a West Virginia campsite. We were on top of a cleared hill in the direct line of the sun's sight. It was horribly hot as we pitched the tents. We had noticed how the grass and trees looked browner and more thirsty than usual. This July was hotter than we remembered it ever being and we had had less rain than ever before. In West Virginia it rains all the time, almost every day or every other. There is water everywhere. Both Cari and I, coming from West of the Mississippi where a drought is the norm, noticed immediately how different the vegetation looked this year in West Virginia and how like home it seemed.
We were miserable with sweat, so we peeled on our swimsuits, smoothed on the sunscreen, and headed to the swimming hole some kind lady at the parks visitor center had confirmed the internet was right about, it did exist.
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