When I moved to West Virginia, I was excited about the hills. I had been working that summer with a group of Geologists in Tulsa. Within seconds of telling them I would be leaving them for West Virginia, they whipped out the geologic maps of the area and explained the geology of the area to me.
Hills again. I was excited.
I did not know that West Virginia and Arkansas share a history. The Appalachians are old, old. They are at least 460 million years old and were there when the continents were all together as Pangaea. They went through a lot of uplifting, folding, volcanic activity, and then erosion as the continents crashed into each other and the separated again over many, many years. At one point they were higher than the Himalayas and the rivers today cutting through the valleys are as old as the hills. They saw that height. (They probably never dreamed of coal barons blowing them down after experiencing all the damage the wind and rain unleashed on them and continues to unleash on them today. At least the wind and rain respect them by slowly letting them get used to the idea of wearing down. There is not a lot slow about being blown up.)
In Southern Arkansas, we have the Ouachita Mountains, which where once a part of the Appalachian chain, long ago, and then, they were separated by geologic history. They are cousins to the West Virginia mountains.
I should have known. I should have recognized it.
I loved waking up in Star City and heading down the hill to go to work seeing the layer of cloud resting on the Monongahela River. I loved walking through the woods and was mesmerized by the moss and ferns that grow wild in those wet hills. It rains and snows more often in West Virginia than in Arkansas, so the ferns do not exist on the forest floors of Arkansas. They cover the forests of West Virginia. I had gone from hills experiencing a drought to hills that did not know what a fire ban was. In fact the year we left West Virginia was the driest I have ever seen the place. And a burn ban was in effect. The brown and crunchy sound was uncommon in West Virginia until that summer. At it was down right weird experiencing that in West Virginia.
The same mysterious presence also existed in both places. The sense of being alone int he woods, of not being able to rely on your cell phone, of taking off down a dirt road and seeing something beautiful beyond the next turn, beautiful and unexpected. Those things existed in both sets of hills.
Both were difficult terrain too. In Arkansas I once encountered rugged weather; we camped on a mountain top and got caught in a thunderstorm in the Ouachitas. I felt exposed on that rock that night as the wind whipped the tent and pulled at the stakes. There was not a lot of soil to hold those stakes, so mainly we held the tent down with our suppose-to-be sleeping bodies.
It was also difficult to walk and hike in the Appalachians. It took effort. I had the same feelings of effort and ruggedness in the Ouachita Mountains when I hiked there. On the Appalachian Trail that meant an ingrown toenail. In Arkansas that meant sore muscles the day after a long backpacking trip, which made walking incredibly painful if I sat still for 10 minutes or more.
In Arkansas we met some women and her child burying something she kept telling us she had permission to bury. We did not inquire further. And I slept with my knife close that night. On the Appalachian Trail, we encountered nude male hikers on a narrow trail in broad daylight. We heard later it is a tradition on the Summer Solstice. Tradition or not, it seems dangerous to me.
The camping in West Virginia is excellent, as it is in Arkansas. West Virginia is covered in parks. Hiking was harder in the humidity and tougher in the rugged hilly hills of West Virginia for me, but the views, the ancient rivers, the rocks were all worth it. The history was interesting too. It is rare in the mid-west and west, particularly in the north, to find civil war battles, but not in the East. The signs in the east proclaim every battle of it. The Western signs proclaim a different war and a different slavery and removal of people. They mark The Trail of Tears, the Native history that makes up the history of the West. Native history exists in West Virginia, too, mainly because of the people who keep it up and in their memory, but you have to ask them to see it. It is not on their license plates like in Oklahoma.
Moving to Iowa meant saying goodbye to a period in my life when I lived primarily in the wooded hills, but I had been in flat lands before and knew my experience with hills and woods would be in me for years to come. The memories, as long as my mind stays relatively intact, mean that I can go back to them again and again, as I wish.
As studying literature has taught me, memory is tricky. We change it. Gloss it over with nostalgia. Look back in anger. Turn a moment into poetry, even a moment of death or irreversible change to our bodies and souls. Repress and forget. Re-imagine, re-cast it. Memory can bring us far from truth or reality. Memory is creation. And creation is magical. It can make us happy beyond belief. It can lead us to truth and reality, even when it is fiction. When that fails, what is left?
I will keep the woods of my imagination with me always, and hopefully forever. They are a part of me and I have been a part of them.
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