Mitchell and Pisgah

August 3, 2010

B’s last day as my housekeeper. Did replace him, at a lower price, but, still, an era ends.

Denny and DJ and I piled in the Prius and drove to Mount Mitchell yesterday afternoon. The gift shops and the yapping families and the homey little restaurant make one forget how wild and beautiful the place is. Mist wrapped the world in mystery while we were there, but when it parted for a moment, the sun blazed on us with such ferocity it seemed we were near to it indeed. The roadsides were a constant fluttering of butterflies–which, now that I think of it, so is my front yard. I don’t remember their being so many or so large. Why I have gone so long without a major day hike I can’t explain, except to say, “painting. . . writing. . gardening . . . “ Miles of jewelweed and Jerusalem artichoke. Great envy of the ferns in hidden places under the trees. . .

Denny’s being here has put Hiram in my mind with some firmness. I remembered the absurd (though, ultimately beneficial) reason I had gone there in the first place. My father was in one of his moods, and had ruined my chances (so I thought in my ferocious youth) at my first couple of choices by refusing to fill out the financial aid forms. When the recruiter came from Hiram, I seized on it as 1) not Akron U and 2) named after Hiram Abiff, and I thought that concept would entangle my father, who had been an active Mason when I was younger. Whatever got him, the forms were filled out, and there I went. Went onto Youtube and entered “Hiram” and found what I supposed to be an official college recruiting video. It showed a bunch of oafy kids playing games in their dorm rooms, and the message–the entire and singular message–was that if you come to Hiram you can have fun with your friends in the dorms. I mean, that was IT. No mention of classes, of possible majors, of intellectual challenge. Camp Hiram, where the fecklessness of the 11th grade cane be extended indefinitely. I suppose as an alumnus I should have been more watchful, but, in the end, what could I have done? Tom Chema is willing to annihilate Hiram in order to have the right score sheet for his last chance at State politics. You can’t ask for whatever appointment he has his eyes on by saying, “I helped make our youth wise and good,” though you can by saying, “the deficit did not grow by a penny while I was President.” People who do thing for reasons other than the doing of them are the bane of all history. Dante forgot their Circle, but I will add one.

Denny said that not one member of the administration attended Wil Hoffman’s funeral.

Evening: The mountains got into my blood, and without at first intending to, I found myself this morning on the slopes of Mount Pisgah, and I began to climb. The day was like yesterday, blue, clear, mottled with the rolling mist of the high places. I’d been absent from Pisgah almost as long as I had been from Mitchell, and it was well to reconnect with two old friends in as many days. All I remembered of the path was the rockiness of it, the way you have to pay attention or you’ll fall or twist your ankle. Once I was among the trees I was a changed man, or a man who had exchanged his eyes for organs that were part sense and part memory. Summer overflowed in voluptuous variety. Giant butterflies fluttered over white and golden flowers. Enumeration was absurd. At one point in my life I could name all the plants around me, but the same things do not grow on the Blue Ridge as do in the river valleys of Ohio, and, in any case, the abundance was beyond any remembrance, beyond any previous experience. Every few steps there was a tiny, discreet Eden, a hollow log with realms inside it, or a cove where a stone rolled away, now filled with pebbles and a pool and a waterfall coursing down a stick, a paradise of ferns and salamanders. Put your hand inside and feel the mini-ecosystem with a temperature ten degrees cooler than the air you breathe. But what I am trying to revive, these hours later, was who I was on the side of the mountain. I entered again the first life I remember as mine, the life that woke in me when I first walked in the forest, a wild spirit, not separate from the world at all, but able to hear the touch of the feet of spirits on the upthrust rocks. One thinks of Wordsworth, for he had some of this right, but not all of it. For me the wild thing knowing not what it was, but wildly and intuitively alive, never passed away. It hides in the doing of the life I sank into, but when I return to the forest, he is there, waiting. I am the same spirit whom the wild things know, and I do not undervalue that blessing, though I have tried without success to spread it into the life I chose among men. For one hour climbing the stone path under the trees I was as happy I have ever been, as happy as I remember being day after day when I was alone in the wildwood, thinking that was how all of life would be. I was pure. I was wild. There was no thought that was not a sensation, no sensation that was not a thought. Every step, every breath is a prayer– is two prayers really. The first is Thank you. The second is I do not understand.