November 27, 2020

Hiking has been oddly connected to music this season. A few days ago I heard the Taize “Within our darkest night” as I walked. Later on the same hike it had turned into Ravel’s setting of Rilke poems that I sang in college. Today, briefly, on the steep road between the Bent Creek gatehouse and Owl Creek, it was “O Jesus I Have Promised.” Because of the situation, they all become more or less marches. I needed today’s hike grievously, apparently, for I felt hugely better afterward. The roads were full of people looking for something to do in a long holiday weekend with the sky clear and the temperature at 70. Brevard Road coming north was bumper to bumper–maybe there was a hold up on 26. But I found a place to park at the entrance to the arboretum and set out on the upward grade of the Hard Times. A couple things need to be said. One is that I was going at a good rate, uphill, long even strides, without being the least short of breath. I keep remarking on this because the degree to which I let a curable affliction afflict me continues to amaze. I am wondrous slow, but that’s OK. I have achieved, I say with some wonder, the biblical three score and ten. I turned when I came to the fence and the gate. I could have gone farther but one of the effects of a diet rich in root vegetables, as I have been having for the last week, makes it prudent never to be too far from modern plumbing. I actually looked around for a place in case the event could not be staved off, but the winter woods are open, everything visible, for acres on every side. Coming down the light was softer, somehow, and understanding my remaining energy made it possible for me to linger and peer into the forest. At the top of a deep, beautiful wooded valley a profound, random emotion came over me. I thought of my mother. Forty-five years after her death, I missed her again. I stood at the roadside and wept, grateful that few were venturing that high. I wondered if I would see her in the life to come, and then I wondered if she wanted to see me. Did I make her proud in any way? Did she love me? Kindness and forbearance may have seemed enough like love. I have no one to ask. I have no memory that can guide me firmly. I wept deeply, bitterly, thinking of her. I am of a mythopoeic frame of mind, so what happened next is explained by that, I suppose. I saw her. She came to me out of the forest and took my hand. I had not been thinking of her at all until her image clove my heart, so the unexpected encounter meant that she had been thinking of me. I blessed the merciful spirit of the place. In one thing at least I have been answered.