Writings

When I was nine years old, I went to summer camp for the first time. I went to the Burgundy Center for Wildlife Studies in Capon Bridge, West Virginia. I knew the place; I went with friends; I was only there for a week, and I still got homesick – I got horribly homesick. I have vivid memories of waking up in the middle of the night and crying because I missed home, mom, dad, and my dog George so much. In between my bouts of childhood misery I was actually having a wonderful time. I was outside learning about insects and birds and wildflowers; I was searching for fossils in shale pits, taking walks through the woods, singing songs by open fires, and having stories read to me as I fell asleep. I was making new friends. It was on the night we went to sleep out on top of the Bald, the camp’s mountain, that I had my most trying experience. I was getting all ready to go and grabbed my teddy bear, Dody (pronounced Dotty), to take with me. When I brought him to the meeting circle along with my sleeping bag, one of the counselors told me that it would be better if I left him behind: better not to risk losing him or forgetting to bring him down the next morning. Forever the lawyers’ daughter I debated with the counselor until diplomacy seemed futile and I just began to cry. I could not imagine any justification for ripping away my most beloved stuffed animal. Finally, the counselor realized that any child brought to tears at the thought of not having her teddy bear for one night was unlikely to forget the animal the next morning. Relieved, I tucked Dody into my backpack. We soon set off to climb an old dirt road, Bald Road, which took us to the mountaintop in a little over a mile. At the end of the road, we were greeted by a campfire and a welcoming breeze.

After eating marshmallows by the fire, I curled into a gossipy circle with the other girls. We watched the sun set seated atop our sleeping bags in the open field, the sky fading above the ridgeline horizon from a lilac blue down to a fire-bent orange. We could see the sunset clearly from the Bald, officially known to mapmakers as Cooper Mountain, because there are no trees on the top of the relatively flat hill. It isn’t naturally treeless like the tops of mountains you know out West, in fact there are very few mountains in all of the eastern United States that have tree lines. I wouldn’t have it any other way; much of Appalachia’s beauty stems from the unbroken green of its forests. On top of the Bald there are no trees because the Cooper family, who used to own the camp’s property, and after whom the mountain is named, logged that ridge top and kept it clear by grazing cattle. The camp maintains the Bald as such because it provides such a wonderful destination for hikers with a marvelous view of the surrounding hills, hollows, and mountain communities. That night was the first time I watched the sunset behind those indigo mountains, and it is still my favorite place to see the rising of the night. When it grew dark my friends and I lay on our backs with our heads close together looking up into the night. There are more stars in my memory’s image of that night than I have seen since. The sky was curved into a bowl with a woven web of starlight. Everywhere I looked shown with glitter and the longer I looked, the more stars seemed to appear. At nine years old I didn’t know the constellations as I do now, but I could appreciate patterns in the sky and was able, in my gawking silence, to determine that the stars were in fact moving, or rather that the Earth was moving beneath them. I was cozy in my sleeping bag with the cool damp air brushing against my cheeks, bringing the mixed scents of grasses, wildflowers, and wood smoke. That was the first night of my life I spent outdoors, sleeping in the open. I wanted to tell you about my first Bald overnight because it is as near as I can get to pinpointing the moment when I woke up to the person I would eventually become. It was the first time that I wasn’t afraid of anything, because everything in that night was right; it is my earliest memory of having my entire consciousness consumed by beauty. Now, I live from day to day searching for those moments. When you, too, start looking for them be assured that moments aren’t always at sunset, or sunrise; they aren’t even always found in landscapes. Often they are stumbled upon in the smell and shape of a single flower, the curves and texture of a stone in a river, or the color and movement of light in a friend’s eyes. I am drawn to places and people that brim over with the promise of consumptive moments. In all but the last two years of my life most of these instances have come as visceral responses to time spent in the crippled wilds of the East. But these last two years have exposed my self and my senses to a new brand of beauty, the kind that is bred only in the American West. It’s the flavor of these new moments that have brought me to the page and to you who I do not yet know. I am writing to you because I have come to a decision that will affect every aspect in the course of your life. I am writing because, if this decision sticks, you deserve an explanation. It is perhaps eight or ten years before you will have taken your first breath or have been acknowledged as an about-to-be person. I’m halfway through college; I have no plans for marriage. This July I am in the woods of eastern Kentucky, but I am fixing to leave Appalachia for good.

I saw a Question Mark along Buckhorn Creek today. I was lying on my back against a sandstone boulder and at first could not determine what it was. The orange, brown, and laced gray of its wings twisted and turned frantically above the gliding water, stopping for fractions of a second on the outstretched hands of umbrella magnolias, beech trees, and hemlocks. Finally the butterfly landed just long enough for me to identify it by the silver crescent question mark on the underside of its wing. I was there upstream today because I needed time to reflect with the sound of tripping water. I learned the art of being alone here in the Appalachian Mountains, how to go out into the living by myself. It’s best if I’m not within sight of another person or anything built by human hands. Best to be far enough away that I might speak without the risk of being overheard, choose instead to listen. That’s why I went to the creek today – to find my silence and from there to find my voice. To discover why I am writing this letter to you, why it feels more like a necessity than a choice. Why does an unborn Western child need to know about Appalachia? Why should sycamores matter to you? Or pipevine swallowtails, or red maples and tulip poplars in October? Why? Because, I cannot bear the thought of losing them. Because they cannot be replaced by cottonwoods, or Milbert’s tortoiseshells, or evergreens. Because I will not let my child think that they might be replaced. If I don’t recall them for you, who will?

I am painfully aware of the gravity of the decision to take my life away from these mountains. Aware that I may be letting go when I should have held on. The decision itself is not wrong, but I must make it thoughtfully. I am wary of regret. Do me this favor: take this letter to a window, look outside and tell me what you see. Are you in the city? Is there countryside out there? Trees? Mountains? Rivers? Concrete? Is it an arid desert or a lush forest? In which part of the great sprawling West have I landed you? Do you love your home? I hope there are trees, and mountains, and rivers, and great broad sweeps of bare volcanic rock. Most of all I hope that you feel a native in this world outside your window. I came here, and as a consequence have placed you here, because I needed to redefine my own sense of place; your decision to stay or go in the coming years is a testament to my own.

I want you to read this within the house, the landscape, in which I raised you. I hope that house and home and landscape are all the same. I came here to give you that synonymy for it is something I never quite had.

I spent my childhood in an urban atmosphere at 323 South Saint Asaph Street in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia. My two hundred year old townhouse is two stories high at the back and three stories high in front. I have lived on the right-hand side of the third floor at the top of the stairs since I was a toddler. My parents never seriously confronted me with the prospect of moving. Once, my father mentioned a house that was up for sale four blocks away and I broke down in tears at the thought of such an uprooting. I love my house, and I can even say I love Old Town, but there is nothing that is fully wild for miles and miles, and there is no true community, because everyday I pass strangers and walk on asphalt while dreaming of the mountains. Not long after I settled into the pink walls and slanted ceiling of my attic room I was brought to West Virginia for a weekend. I am not sure that the first time I set foot in Cooper’s Cove Wildlife Sanctuary at the age of three was the first time that I set foot in Appalachia, but it was the first time I set foot in my living, wild home. The Sanctuary is owned by my elementary school and each grade takes a three-day trip to Cooper’s Cove in the fall and spring. Every class does something different in the time they are there, but each teacher uses the wilderness campus as the primary educational resource. I made it up there as a toddler because my parents and I were accompanying my older sister Brigit on her first trip to the Cove. My only memory from that trip is of falling out of the bunk bed in the screen windowed dorms, but I’m awfully glad I have a memory from my first night there. During the summer months the Cove becomes the Burgundy Center for Wildlife Studies and it was to the Cove that I came as nine-year-old camper. West Virginia is quite possibly the best thing in my life. It was my experiences there that have brought me to my best self and endowed me with invaluable memories. The Appalachian Mountains have been the driving force in all of my most important choices, but it was also West Virginia that forced me to recognize the difference between the house where I live and the home that I love. I have never been able to stay in Appalachia for more than two and a half solid months. I call it home, but I’ve never had the time to really live there. In many ways I suppose I am little more than a tourist in these mountains, but I don’t need to own a plot of land here to know that I own this place. My recognition that there could be a difference between house and home was a long time in coming. The difference between the house and the home is the difference between comfort within a manmade structure and comfort within the landscape. A house can be infused with spirits as mine was, can gain a sentimental familiarity, but its placement in the biological community is more often than not a consequence of one man’s whim. Home may include a house, but it is much more than architecture; it is the consequence of four billion years of rocks, sun, water, wind, and life. Home is the physical ground on which I can stand and sense that my surroundings, living and nonliving, are no more than an extension of my own self. It is only at home that I am able to challenge my narrow understanding of what constitutes the individual, the boundaries of the self. When I step beyond my home I not only leave a ghost of myself within that place, but I take the spirit of it with me wherever I go. Home is in the expressions I use, in my perception of normal weather, in my assumptions about the movements of people and birds, in my expectations of trees and grasses. Home is where my most natural biases are defined. Discomfort will bring me nostalgia for home, because it is the only place where I am able to operate within the community unconsciously – where I know the rules without being able to explain them to an outsider. The size of your home can and will change with your mood, your company, your distance from the center of home, and the time you have spent away from it. At times home will be as large as an entire country and other times it will seem as small as your favorite chair. The concept of home is complicated because to a stranger my home is the place where I grew up, spent the formative years of my life, but for many people (myself included) home is not their birthplace or their parents’ house or even where they have lived the longest. You, yourself, know what home is whether or not you have words for it. Home is where your thoughts run when you’re tired and lonely. It is where you wish you were when your heart is broken, when a loved one dies, when the food is bad. Home is where you expect the landscape. It is tangible and immobile, familiar and dynamic. I have spent almost every summer of my life in Appalachia, it has become my wild life’s sanctuary – it is more my home than a house could ever be. I have been struggling for the past two years with my feelings for Appalachia because I have come to the West, and fallen in love with it. I do not want to forsake the East; I do not think myself superior for giving up all of this and going out West. I am not growing up and moving on from a childhood habit. These mountains are not a habit – they are a way of life. I want you to know that I love the East, but I cannot live out my dreams here. I want to show my thanks to these woods and slopes; to say goodbye, not “Goodbye, for we will never meet again,” but “Goodbye, it will never be this way again.” Like the last kiss with a lover you will meet time after time as a friend. I love these mountains as thickly as I have ever loved a man. The conquered frontier of the West is another world, but it is the only world you know unless I have taken you to my hills before now. You are a native of the West because after two years of being pulled by opposite coasts your mother has finally decided that her future is in the West, that she wants Western optimism more than Eastern skepticism. I think I owe it to you and to myself to explain why I am leaving. Beyond that, for this must be so much more than justification, I want to be sure that you have a feeling for my home, so that you will know a piece of my mind, so that you will understand my mannerisms by understanding the landscape in which they formed and solidified. I am a displaced person, but I want more than anything to become native.

I am writing this letter to acknowledge the dirt under my nails, to commit the home soil to memory before it erodes. To show how my love for this place, aches, pulses, and pours out of me. If I trap my origin within these words I will not be so terrified of losing it. I am worried that as a Western child you will not love this place because you will not know it, and it will only be crazy old mom who holds fast to her hillbilly recollections of the Eastern landscape. I fear that you will not respect your mother’s origins because it is hard to respect what you do not know, and I will have lost my place and my heart in the same foolish release.

The atmosphere of the West is so different from that of the East that I am intimidated by the task of conveying this world to you. How can I explain that rain and wind and light and sky are unknown to you? How can I tell you of hills that never become a vista to look upon, but surround like walls? How will you imagine forests without edge besides that which has been cleared? How can I show four true, tangible seasons? I want you to know limestone when you first see it, and shale, and chert. I want you to recognize birch trees, maples, oaks, tulip poplars, sycamores, and magnolias. I want you to feel the oceans layering the bedrock and then to feel them pushed and folded by the mere evidence of a road outcropping. I want you to see the butterflies and hear the birds of my teenage summers through my conjuring alone. For magic is the best I can do; I can tell stories, share slices of memory, but I cannot make them your mountains, as they are mine. This is nothing less than secondhand gold, my dear.

Appalachia is worth more than gold to me, and part of my motivation to write has come from my frustration with the Westerner’s common conceit over the quality of his landscape in comparison to the East. As an Easterner I learned quickly that it is ill advised to refer to the Appalachian Belt as “mountains.” The Westerner will be quick to turn on you with a wry expression, “Don’t you mean hills?” The Westerner does not believe that the East is capable of mountains, or rugged independence, or indeed capable of wilderness. The East lacks none of these capacities, but they are of a flavor unknown to the Westerner. Like the first taste of a foreign cuisine, the value of the meal is more often a reflection on the receptivity of the diner than it is on the quality of the food. The first course in this foreign experiment is within the trees. I have never thought of these woods as a jungle, but in contrast to the woods you must know, they are tropical. Allow yourself the Western forest: take your mind to pines, spruces, and firs. Can you see the floor of the forest, how it is open, damp, and dark? Now come with me to an Eastern slope where you can barely walk for all that grows below. The trees branches do not stand in your way for they are high overhead creating a canopy that light streams through. There are other plants on the floor of the forest; they are a dozen shades of green with a hundred shapes of leaf. They come in every size and more of them than you suspect are liable to harm you. There is poison ivy with its three unevenly lobed leaflets climbing out from the dry debris or dipping down from fuzzy vines that grow tight against the trunks of trees. There is stinging nettle, seemingly innocuous, broad-leafed and unforgiving. There are thickets of thorns: wineberry, barberry, and in sunnier spots multi-flora rose. These last three are invasives and aliens to these woods, but in they are a forceful presence. There are other plants on the floor of the forest too, one that won’t harm you, but are lovely to look, sometimes to eat: wood sorrel, Eupatorium, wild violets, pussy toes, rattlesnake plantain, Indian pipe. It is not only the vegetation that is dense, these temperate climbs are consumed with life. The air is thick with moisture and heat and the scent of chlorophyll. The smells of the woods stick to your skin and you stick to everything else, including your own body. I hardly know where to begin to tell you about the insects. They so invade your life that at night when you crawl into your air-dampened sheets to fall asleep, you can feel them crawl all over you. In the fall, when I return from the mountains, it takes me at least a month to be certain that all of the tiny feet I feel scuttling across my skin are in my imagination. In the middle of the summer, you’re not imagining them. Every inch of ground is packed with organisms. No space is wasted. If you lie in the grass your body becomes a part of the landscape for the arthropods: beetles, inch worms, spiders, ants. You will be swarmed by sweat bees, sponged by flies, and licked by butterflies. Sometimes I wallow in this explosion of species, and other times I wish that the ground were simply ground, a place to rest my body, nothing more and nothing less. Slickrock in a still desert. Taste a Western forest, the cool crispness of it all – can you taste this and then replace it with an air that is as thick as sun-baked mud? Imagine a rainy winter’s day at home, a day when you have forgotten your raincoat and come in to an overheated building, imagine that humid air all about you.

I don’t think you can understand the East unless you understand humidity. It is water that changes your life. And it is water that seems the primary difference between the East and the West. Water is responsible for both the shape of the mountains and the shape of the politics. You have undoubtedly seen in the course of your life what battles have grown from access to water. Out West water rights take hold of every cubic foot that flows through the creeks and rivers you have seen. East of the Cascade Crest in the high desert of the Northwest water determines where you live and how you live, but here in Appalachia water is what you pump out of your basement during heavy spring and fall rains. There is a running stream in almost every Appalachian hollow, and though the rivers that they join never reach the magical proportions of the Colorado or the Columbia, you can hardly drive for more than ten miles without crossing a bridge. Droughts and forest fires are not among the Easterner’s common fears. Easterners do not depend on the government to bring them irrigation water. This landscape, unlike much of the settled West, is capable of sustaining human life without federal interference. The people of Appalachia believe in the rugged independence of communities instead of individuals. The state motto of West Virginia is montani semper liberi, the mountain people are always free. The slogan was chosen during the Civil War when West Virginia struggled to maintain its isolation from the conflict. This isolationism is an important feature of Appalachian culture – it is a natural isolation maintained by the barriers of the landscape. Every ridge is a community’s border. The necessities of life can all be found in these finely divided mountains, and there is something pleasingly safe in that. But it is more than that; there is absolute security in these mountains. When I am far away and think of Appalachia I think of the comfort of these hills: the rotting logs, sun-warmed brooks, and smooth limestone, urging me to settle in, and rest a while. I think of all the friends these valleys and ridges have brought to me. I think of them as spirits who are as much a part of the mountains as the fossils and the trees. The shape of Appalachia has become the shape of my mind and my body: smooth, gentle curves, the occasional edge, and a solid, weathering core. Appalachia is my mind brimming over with hills and hollows, streams and country roads.

I have deep nostalgia for driving along those rural highways. On a true country road it is never necessary to roll up the windows. I will let the winds in no matter the time of year. In the summer the air is thinned by the movement, but is still drenched in the scents of wood and wildflower. Hell, cow dung and muddy creek bottoms stir up memories, too.

I love riding the dirt, gravel, and blacktop in outdated pickups and crummy school buses. Windows you can lean your head out of, where you can rest your arm, and send your hand to ride the waves of the air. The seat of your pants or the flesh of your thighs stuck to the ripped vinyl.

In the autumn and winter I am no less tempted to keep the windows down, to feel the biting wind against my nostrils and eyelids – to feel the air pulling back, tangling my thick, dry hair. I long for country days with the fantasy freedom of the road. A fantasy because the roads define your path, and they narrow the freedom of the mountains, but atop the asphalt at forty miles an hour with the wind sounding through the metal frame of the vehicle it is almost impossible to feel anything but thrilled within this instant of life. Stupid, isn’t it? How cars pull you into the immediacy of the day. I hear Paul Simon, Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, John Denver, Neil Young, Graham Parsons; they are all there with me, flowing over the rock rivers of these carved highways.

I remember those country roads as countless blazes of blue sky and green, green earth, of dust, and oh, if it seems too good to be true, the silver glint of mine tailings piled by the side of the road. I can recall the rides, but hardly ever their destinations – the trips were more than half for the drive, for the wind. For all those raucous moments there are a hundred others that I keep in the quiet memory of driving those roads when all of my passengers have fallen asleep, when it is just me, the wind, and the pavement. The stretches of the drive when I can feel a grateful peace that expands with every sleeper’s exhalation, that flows in ripples outward from the humming engine, as I crunch, glide, and wind through the landscape.

Everything in the East is close and tender. The horizon is built of hills that are round and soft like shoulders and thighs and knees. There is lowness to the sky; if you climbed to the crest of a ridge you might be able to reach it. The colors of these mountains are muted browns, mottled grays, smoky blues, and every variation of green.

All these are the treasures of the daytime in the Appalachians, but there is another dream to be found in the night mountains and I know them well, too. Last night I walked through the dark and felt the rest of the world come alive in my senses. It is touch that most gains from this new dark world. It is as a native Kentucky writer Wendell Berry says, “To know the dark you must go dark.” On the way up to the firetower here in Robinson Forest I determined the path by the softness of the ground beneath my feet. The harder it was the more likely it was to be the trail.

Because I went without a light I heard a barred owl, tree frogs, a symphony of insects; because I went without a light I saw phosphorescent fungus and a glow worm, and the black of the trees against the black of the sky and the white of the stars. Because I went without a light I learned the forest. I engaged it because I could not simply look at it.

You cannot hike at night in the West like you can hike out here. There are too many dangers – too many cliffs, too many animals, too much open space to get lost in. But the East is just tame enough for an entrance to the wild dark. The East forgives those who dare it.

When I was seventeen years old I led a night hike, a Nocturnal as they’re called at Burgundy, to the firetower atop Ben’s Knob. That summer I had taught myself to navigate by the moon and stars, and I knew the grounds of my camp intimately; the map of every ridge and valley was drawn across my mind.

Our group of eight set off up the hill as the night darkened and by the time we reached the lookout tower the woods were black as the inside of a coal mine and a thunderstorm had begun. There were neither stars nor moon and I knew that we needed to get off the mountain as soon as possible. The slopes of Ben’s Knob form almost a perfect cone; they are littered with sandstone and limestone rocks. In the light it is a challenge to pick your way through the boulders, snags, saplings, blueberry bushes, and moss slicks. In the dark I had no true sense of direction, only the sense to avoid falling. We stopped every few feet and reconsidered our descent. When we reached the bottom of the cone, and the ground began to level out, I searched for the start of the trail. I had the six campers stand in a cluster with my fellow counselor as I fanned out across the ridge looking for logs that lined the path. I could find them nowhere. I assumed that we had come down the cone on the same side which we had climbed and therefore believed that if I started down the ridge, my back to the cone and my left foot on the downslope, I would be heading southwest and hit camp within a mile. We set off down the hill in a diagonal path forever thinking that within the next hundred yards we would stumble into the stream that runs past the main lodge. We climbed and stumbled through waste high brambles of green brier, wineberries, and wingstem. We skirted around the trunks of trees and climbed over fallen logs. One tentative foot in front of the other through the soggy mulch. At one point I was certain we had made it back. I saw a few lights, I heard running water within the thick rain, but as we went closer the lights disappeared and the sound of the stream was always a step ahead. I remember constantly reassuring the campers. I got them to sing songs with me, sad songs from camp about moonshine and heartbreak and coal companies that dug up paradise. It’s always the sad songs that stick with me. I knew that we would reach something recognizable soon. That is both the beauty and the tragedy of the East. You can’t go far at all without meeting up with a manmade structure: a road, a fence, a building. We hiked for perhaps two miles down the back face of the mountain. On Nocturnals we are not supposed to use flashlights except in an emergency. They ruin your night vision and your vision of the night. The campers insisted that this uncertain descent was an emergency, and so every once in awhile I would take out the flashlight and look around for familiar sites. At one point I saw a forgotten barbed wire fence, and at another my flashlight shown onto ten foot high limestone cliffs which the eight of us had managed to slip and slide over unscathed. I neither recognized the terrain through which we tramped, nor determined after the fact where we had gone on the map. After an hour of hiking down from Ben’s Knob we broke into a cow field at the base of the ridge. The rain had stopped and just beyond the barbed wire fence of the pasture was Route 50. Once we climbed through the fence we took a right and headed east along the highway. A few stars appeared, and though the shoulder of the road seemed endless, I do not remember the hike as difficult at all. We walked for five miles along Route 50 into the early morning hours. My Firetower Nocturnal has become a part of the lore at Burgundy. Not exactly the sort of adventure I wanted to be remembered for, but there was something magical in it all the same. There was not one point in the hike when I was genuinely afraid of what might happen to us. I knew we would come to something eventually, and I knew that eventually could not be more than ten miles. The only thing I was really worried about was the campers’ fear. I didn’t want them to be afraid of the night because I had gotten them lost. I knew there was nothing to be afraid of. I remember worrying about the stories they would tell their parents about the counselor who misled them in the midnight woods. I knew I would be lovingly mocked when I got back to camp, but I focused on the moment, on staying calm, making good decisions, keeping the campers from worrying about a problem they could do nothing but walk to solve. In the last four miles of the hike the campers were more than okay, they were happy. They made jokes, talked about what a great story they would have when they got back; they felt lucky for getting to walk down the mountain highway in the middle of the night. It was an experience that few of us were ever likely to have again. It was a safe adventure, but an adventure nonetheless.

It was an adventure I could not repeat out West. There aren’t many mountains you can simply walk off the top of and end up back in civilization within a couple of miles. You walk into the night wilderness of Washington or Montana and you had better be prepared to stay. The risks increase with the topography.

Until I was fifteen years old the only part of Appalachia I really knew was the three hundred and fifty acres of my camp and the area around my lake house in nearby Garrett County, Maryland. Both seemed like gentle environments, sometimes all too dull. The first time I saw West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest I knew there could be more to the mountains.

When we stepped onto the trail on that cool July day, I immediately perceived the difference the two thousand foot elevation gain had made. The forest seemed more open at the head of the trail. The trees were thicker, the stones larger and more frequent. There were fewer invasives – no wineberries or wing stem, no stinging nettle or varieties of Eupatorium. The ground was open. The air there was cleaner too, crisper. The light came through like gold and dappled everything beneath the canopy. Less than a mile onto the moist trail we broke out of the woods into a field of blueberries and dogbane. The thick blue-green mountains washed across the horizon with deep dips into shadowed ravines. The scenery was so much more dramatic than at the Cove. There wasn’t that same sense of security. The landscape was imposing. I have been backpacking in Monongahela more than a half a dozen times now, and I still crave that first break into the open.

Monongahela is so very different from the other corners of Appalachia. The trails through most of the National Forest are lined with cages of rhododendron and mountain laurel. They seem like friendly thickets at first: the two closely related plants both have smooth bark and soft, shiny, leathery leaves, but the eight foot high plants grow in and around one another, their branches intertwining like an elderly couple’s fingers. It is rarely possible to push and squeeze through this shrubbery without losing either your composure or your dignity.

Most of the trails through the deep, damp elevations are lined with large cobbles. The forest is pelted with so much precipitation that the rocks most often end up as stepping stones through the trail streams. Not all of the rocks have been placed for the greatest convenience of the burdened backpacker. They are set on odd angles, spread too far apart; they are deceptively slick. Monongahela taught me how to hike, taught me the importance of checking my footing, putting only a fraction of my weight down before giving the full load. The trails and stones are tutors of caution. I have had my share of falls, but I have been educated in balance and have brought my skier’s sensibilities to these snowless slopes, turning side to side as I descend.

My favorite bit of Monongo is Lion’s Head rock. In order to reach it you must climb upward for almost three miles from the nearest road, and wrap around behind the outcropping. For the last quarter mile the trail is an eight food wide bench in the side of an otherwise steep slope. It is covered with cannonball-sized rocks and begs for sprained ankles. The unnaturally placed stones and bench are simultaneously explained once you learn of the railroad that used to run straight through this corner of the woods. The trees around the trail are so thick now that you cannot see more than sixty feet into the forest, and there is no hint of the view that will come two hundred feet up, but I have trouble imagining what it might have been like to ride on a train through this wild place a hundred or more years ago with a full view of the valley. I wonder how the land has changed, and how much it is our perception of it that has changed, whether this terrain was seen as a threat or a beauty.

After the railroad bench there is a stretch of the trail sculpted out of dirt and roots, then an easily overlooked cairn which modestly marks the uphill turnoff for Lion’s Head. From the cairn it is a five minute walk into the Pine Grove where the trees have been planted in perfect rows just far enough apart to allow a hiker with a heavy load to pass between them. The grove lies just north of Lion’s Head for the convenience of overnighters. There are slate stone chairs and a fire pit at one end of the pines. All in all the Pine Grove is about a hundred yards long and fifteen yards across. The pines were planted there because someone in the Forest Service recognized that little will grow beneath the trees and their acidic duff makes for soft bedding. In this corner of Appalachia a little of the comfort of camping in coniferous climbs has been imported. Every time I arrive at this campsite I throw down my pack, grab my water bottle and GORP, and head out to see the view. Descending a little from the grove, I pick my way through stones, mountain laurel, and rhododendron, then pushing past one last stubborn branch I am out on it. I am overlooking a sea of trees and rock. Lion’s Head is located in the center of the Dolly Sods Wilderness where I have passed most of my Monongahela adventures. The huge, limestone outcropping looks out over the entire Wilderness area. It is perhaps three hundred yards in diameter, but it is not composed of one solid sheet of rock. There are crevices every few yards; some go down only a few inches, others are four feet wide with sixty foot drops. There are intricately weathered limestone crags strewn at the foot of the tabled overlook ranging in size from ten to thirty feet high. The area is packed with problems that call after the clever boulderer. Almost all of them can be solved with confidence and patience. I like to find the bits of Lion’s Head where yellow birches, with their finely branching growth, have broken through the rock; I like to pull off twigs and chew on them. Their taste is a mix between mint and root beer. The fluoride at my dentist’s is flavored with yellow birch. Every time the foam escapes onto my tongue I am drawn back to Lion’s Head.

Two years ago I met an older hiker on Lion’s Head; his name was Dave Matthews. He sat down with me and my companions on a sunny August afternoon and shared the secret of the birch with us, as well as some stories about winter travels through Monongahela in five feet of snow. He was wiry and tanned, smoking his own hand-rolled cigarettes. He was a Wilderness First Responder. Every year for the past two decades he has spent a week by himself on Lion’s Head. He made two trips in at the start of the week over seven miles of trail to carry up all of his belongings. He slept in his old army tent and lived off of oatmeal. If you ask me, I think he knew how to keep his head clear.

Time in the woods can be hard on the body, but it’s the best therapy I know – it’s a healing kind of hard. My friend Alex is one of my favorite companions in the woods. He is tall and lanky, with an almost black ponytail that falls in thin curls halfway down his back. He is a cynic and a grouch who cracks biting jokes with a smirk in his hazel eyes. He and I have hiked and camped together in Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. We are both anal, cautious, and punctual, and make for good trail partners. Alex is twenty five now; I have known him since he was sixteen and he hasn’t changed much. I find his constancy both comforting and worrisome. He is embedded like the mountains; set in his ways with neither the desire nor the faith necessary for change. I love him because he is my touchstone, but he is also the first one to tell me that all this environmentalism stuff just isn’t worth it. He runs off into the woods every chance he gets and mocks me for wanting to save them. These days I leave the environment out of my conversations with Alex. He’s moving to Maine in the fall, thinks he’ll sell used cars.

We drove past the strip jobs this morning as we do every day that we leave this place. Forest and more forest and sudden desert. A rubble desert.

“Is this Lost Mountain?” Jessica asked in the van today.

“No, that’s Rowdy Mountain.” Erik sighs, “At least it was.” Was Rowdy, but it’s lost, too.

The sun now pulses into the soil, refracting off of loose rocks and the young growth of exotic plants where the mixed mesophytic forests of eastern Kentucky used to shade this mountain. Before the coal company was permitted to surface mine this site it promised to re-vegetate the land when the extraction was finished. This reclamation is probably up to government standards, but it may be even worse than if they’d left the naked rock to erode down the slopes. What good is stopping erosion if it is prevented by the introduction of a hundred invasive grasses and shrubs? This isn’t reclamation; nothing here will ever reclaim its former glory. When you decapitate these mountains and rip out their coal hearts they are gone, just gone, and no human hand can ever bring them back. The reclamation requirements are an embarrassment. When I look at the exotic species: clovers, autumn olives, crown vetch, and thistle, the muscles between my ribs grow tight with disgust and shame.

I suppose that these strip mines ought to motivate me to stay. I suppose that if I had my heart in the hero’s place I would come back to this irreparable landscape and join the steady, slow movement to stop this war on the mountains. But I cannot be that hero. I love these mountains, I do, I do, but I cannot be trapped by their tragedy. When you are in Appalachia you cannot see beyond it. Everywhere you look there are slopes of trees, narrow hollows, and muddy rivers. You settle down in them and cannot move. There is resignation to life as it stands. Accepting the world with all its faults can be noble at times, frequently pragmatic, but it can also smack of abdication. There are men in these hills who have worked their whole lives for the coal companies only to have their land bought out from under them to be mined. I went to a graveyard where their headstones were buried in the dust of the dragline.

It is not that they do not recognize the problem, or that they are incapable of standing up for themselves, but the colonialism of the coal companies has broken so many spirits. The progress to preserve these mountains is too slow, too slow.

I sat on the front porch swing of the C.B. Caudill Store last week in Blackey, Kentucky and watched coal truck after coal truck roar past my rusted seat. It is hard to ward off a demon who passes by your stoop more than twenty times a day. There seems never to be a day without the coal trucks, and I need desperately to have days without these forceful reminders of the devastation. I need days when nothing I touch has been touched by the coal industry. Days without blood on my hands.

This is what I’m talking about when I say I am ready to leave my Eastern skepticism behind. I am not claiming that skepticism is a trait monopolized by Easterners, but it is a pervasive aspect in all Eastern discourse, unlike the West which has been characterized by authority’s of greater influence than myself as the native home of hope. I relish that foolhardy Western optimism. I need the hope that the West offers because I have to believe that things will get better, that the environment will be healed, that we will learn to use renewable energy, that we will start to appreciate our forests for more than the value of their timber, that harm done to the country will be known to those in the city.

My friend Stuart taught me the constellations. He graduated last May with a degree in Astronomy from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Stuart and I share a similar voice; we are both the children of D.C. lawyers, raised and educated inside the Capitol Beltway. Stu’s dialect and perception of the world is so near to my own that when we talk I sometimes feel as if I were carrying on a conversation within the boundaries of my own mind. Two years before I left for college I asked Stu why he hadn’t pursued environmental studies. We were leaning against the kitchen counter at the Cove on a slow afternoon between camp sessions. I can still see him running his hand over his reddish brown beard, blue eyes darting across the wooden surface in thought, then leaning back and grabbing a hold of his curly dark ponytail with a smile, “I just couldn’t bear to be depressed for four years.”

For Stuart, Aldo Leopold’s words had come true, “The price of an ecological education is that you must live alone in a world of wounds.” So he gave up and looked to the stars. He could not forgive the facts of this world and so he removed himself from the logging, the mining, the pollution, and the reclaimed land of dams and levees. Now he watches the universe through a telescope. When I look at the night sky I think about him and wonder how much depression is a part of the environmental game, and how much of it might be overcome with a new perspective.

I wonder if Stu might have been different if he came out West as I have done, if he had been given the opportunity to see an environment that is salvageable, to see himself as a potential savior.

It was the bald-faced optimism, the pervading sense of calm that hit me when I moved out West. But it is an energetic calm; there is constant action. I was happy to speak with two Kentuckians in these last few weeks who are preparing for an energy conservation festival in Lexington. When the idea was mentioned I immediately thought of the Northwest Renewable Energy Festival that has been held on my college’s campus for the last few years. I asked Ben, the first intern I met, about the kinds of things that were going to be showcased at the festival; I asked if they were going to have things for sale, if they were going to push renewables. He seemed a little surprised by the question, “Um, well it’s an energy conservation festival, it’s not for renewables.” I asked if at least they were going to make it easy for those who attended the fair to purchase any equipment they might need to improve their energy efficiency, “Well, their contact information will be available,” he replied, “but really it’s just to get people thinking – you know get the ideas for conservation out into the community.” The festival wasn’t a bad idea at all, but it wasn’t enough of a good idea for me. There wasn’t anything concrete about the Lexington festival; there were no immediate plans to change the way people live their lives. Forever and always theoretical that is the East I grew up with, the one I am leaving for your sake as well as my own. This is only my own theory, based on nothing but personal experience, which I have found is the very best kind of evidence: East coasters are much more adept at abstract thinking than are West coasters, and in turn West coasters are much better at concrete thinking. It is that optimistic concreteness that makes change possible. No matter how rational you are, if all of your arguments come down to philosophical changes rather than practical changes in the manner of your everyday habits, they amount to nothing than a change in your manner of speaking – elevated discourse and a devastated landscape. If Westerners are in fact, as I believe, less competent in the realm of abstraction they make up for it through action.

The Northwest Renewable Energy Festival caught hold of me in October of my freshman year. Every single booth at the festival was focused on moving the world of energy away from the currently acceptable, conventional sources like coal, and natural gas, and oil. They were manned by individuals who were not satisfied with simply being less bad – they knew that it wasn’t enough to use less electricity that would still rip apart their mountains, their canyons, their wild places. They demanded something more because they thought it was possible to be better, something genuinely good. As an Easterner I had spent a lot of time thinking about genuinely good options, but I hadn’t thought that I myself was capable of bringing about these changes. I was wrong, but I didn’t know it until I moved into a community of people who were open-minded enough to consider new, unfamiliar possibilities. The landscape is in large part responsible for these varied approaches to change. The Easterners settled in to their land, stayed there, absorbed, and now reflect the myriad disasters that have taken place in their environment. In the East I am enveloped by history. In the West the reminders of the past are hidden, and without tradition change is more easily achieved.

I talked to Maggie, another intern, about the Kentucky Festival a week after speaking with Ben. She told me that one of her main responsibilities was calling up businesses and asking them to participate in the festival. She said that it was frustrating. “Why?” I asked. She danced around her words. People didn’t understand the festival. They didn’t see how it would benefit their business to participate. They didn’t understand the point of it. “Sometimes they just hang up on you.” She said shaking her head, “They assume you’re asking for money or something. Oh, I don’t know. They don’t want to listen. They have all these doubts; they’re so, you know . . .” She paused searching for the word. “Skeptical?” I volunteered. “Yeah, that’s it: skeptical.” In Washington State the technologies presented at the Northwest Renewable Energy Festival are not simply ideas for the future; they are a part of present day reality. No more than forty minutes from Whitman’s campus is the largest wind farm in the country. Here in the West, the demand for renewable energy is rising. There are still some who say that the wind turbines and solar panels are an eyesore. These people have never lived next to a strip mine or an oil field, and they will never turn off the lights. To me the turbines are beautiful. They are striking, stretching across the beige grasslands of the Horse Heaven Hills, rolling low against a broad horizon. Highway 12 runs in the valley beside these hills, down to the shores of the Columbia and magnificent Wallula Gap. The dune-like contours of the hills roll west across the sky and fall without warning into red rock cliff faces painted in layered streaks of rust, brown and deep gray, chiseled into jointed columns which add texture to the colorful scenery. Beneath these solid, volcanic layers is the deep blue, dam-widened expanse of the River. The view is not perfect, but there is evidence of compromise between civilization and the wild. The Columbia River has been humbled by its many dams, but the McNary Wildlife Refuge, made possible by the McNary Dam, provides habitat for hundreds of migratory water birds. The Refuge wasn’t planted with invasives like the strip mines, and the birds that come to it are not threatened by the wind turbines because members of the Audubon Society and wildlife biologists contributed to the design of the wind farm. The strongest winds run through Wallula Gap and just along the edges of the cliffs, but these areas have been left open to provide a flyway for the birds.

In Walla Walla I can run a four mile loop from the front porch of my solar-powered house to the edge of the wheat fields in the Palouse Hills. As my feet pound into the meter-thick silt I look out to the snowcapped Blue Mountains, the golden bunch grass of the Horse Heaven Hills, and the high desert that stretches out to the curve of the earth. I am out of the prisoning Eastern mountains, and I can no longer reach the sky, but my mind is finally free to roll out over the open terrain. The pervading hope of the Western mindscape gave me the strength to get involved in native plantings and stream restoration, to compose petitions for the purchase of wind powered electricity and pure recycled paper, and finally to refuse my parents’ offer of a car. I’m proudly bike-bound for the next two years. The cowboy mentality, rugged individualism, infuses all of my little habits with the potential for change. While the naiveté of Westerners empowers them, it can also blind. Westerners are eager to confront their environment, to conquer it and save it, to challenge themselves and the status quo. But they aren’t always ready for the long fight. The West does not have a wealth of sedimentary rocks to hold its history in stone. There is enough open space for Westerners to forget about all the damage that has already been done. There’s little evidence of the generations that have passed before, and without ghosts it’s hard to take a sober eye to the future. I suppose I have written this letter so that you might have a few ghosts, measured optimism.

I am just beginning to expect the landscape out West. I still resent the winter rains. I crave warm, thunderous downpours that shake the walls of buildings and flood the roads in an Appalachian June. Rains that threaten with flashes of lightning. The thin January rains of southeastern Washington last from morning till night and coat the world in pale gray. They warn of nothing, they don’t even require a raincoat, and so I wear a down vest and my cowboy hat when I walk beside the forever green fir trees. Small droplets tap, tap, tapping as they fall on the soft felt. But I will learn the place with time. For now, beneath the dark brown brim of my Western hat I am, at last, an Easterner untouched by rain.