For as far back as I can remember I’ve dreamed about mountains and here’s the, perhaps, odd admission–thinking about the mountains felt a little like falling in love. I’d look at the ridgelines of hills and imagine myself in silhouette up there.
I could feel the texture and temperature of a rock without touching it and had the urge to make the first few moves up its face–all from the tinted window of the Dodge caravan of my childhood.
From down in Atlanta, every part of North Carolina seemed like a dream to escape into, but especially the mountains around Boone, which all the magazines described as a mecca for the religiously adventurous and which I pictured always shrouded in mist without ever having visited.
Nearly every morning now I drive from Deep Gap, often through a foggy mist, along the Blue Ridge Parkway and I see things each morning people drive hours on a weekend to see. I’d still drive hours too if I had to in order to watch the leaves change, to see the clouds lingering below the tops of the hills of the Yadkin Valley, to glimpse the outline of the amphibolites or of Grandfather Mountain.
I admit though that I sometimes have to remind myself that I’m living in the place I dreamed of when I was younger and not to get lost in the day to day so much that I become like those people I couldn’t understand in the first couple of years living here.
Those people who don’t look up. Who haven’t set foot on a trail in years. Who might have forgotten about the magic of the High Country. Treating it like a roommate instead of a lover. But anyway. I digress.
The Bright Stars on a Lost Night
I remember we were somewhere out near Vilas or Cove Creek at a basketball game, and on the way home we lost cell reception, GPS, the gas was running out in the van, and we were lost. So we pulled off. For some reason we stepped out of the vehicle.
I remember the quiet out there. And the dark. We’d not seen dark like that in years, so I looked up and my wife looked up and we saw the stars brighter than ever in the cold along those roads.
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My wife who rarely notices things like stars and even more rarely bothers to stop and look up at them–she remembers that night. She still mentions it from time to time out of the blue. “Remember that night we got lost?” “We got lost one night and I’ve never seen stars that bright.”
There are many story-worthy moments every day, probably. If we stop, step out of whatever is carrying us along, and look up–or simply look, period–many such moments would probably present themselves and we would be telling the story somewhere ages and ages hence–with or without the sigh.
Waking Up In Boone
Boone is of course not just Boone. When I read about this place before visiting, this temperate rainforest in the middle of the Blue Ridge mountains, Boone was the epicenter of the region and includes everything you might still consider the High Country–and maybe some things you might not..
And waking up here doesn’t simply mean tthat you rented an Air BnB and now, having woken up, have to figure out what to do with your days in the mountains.
While you’re here, it means waking up to the beauty of the world and yourself inside of it. You wake up here and you stay awake, aware, alive long after you leave. It actually is a little like being in love, I guess.
*Cue Subaru commercial.*