Bad Fork

 

April 9, 2021

Something in atmosphere last night opened the heavens up, and God and I had our most titanic quarrel in a long time. Of course, it was completely one-sided, and that but added to the fury.

    . . . 

Ann canceled rehearsal, so I rose and drove to Bad Fork, where the Parkway crosses the Hard Times Road at a graffitied and reverberating bridge. I’d been there many times, and nearly always turned south from the bridge. This time turned north, and found the MTS trail a few yards beyond, a piece of it I don’t remember walking before. Mature stands of trees, and the most shapely hemlocks imaginable. I saw no bird but a pileated, only once so much as raised the binoculars to my face, but the bird symphony coursed all around me. I stood in a rhododendron grove and listened to a thrush claim it as his own. The hill was covered in mountain laurel and rhododendron, and must be all a pink and orange flame at blooming time. The psychomachia of the night before colored the journey. I felt drained, colorless, flattened– not unhappy, but without the vertical dimension I discover most of my thoughts have. I’d driven God away. Who could blame him? What a barrage! I savored it, wondering if atheists or wholly secular people feel that way all the time. A small trail led off westward, leading to a smooth spot where someone had built a cairn of stones. I added a piece of lichened bark to the cairn, and explored my thoughts. Was I sorry? I was not. I had said exactly what I meant, exactly what seems to me, lacking testimony from the other side, true. What had been said had been said. 

That hike was the first this year to be achieved without meeting a single person– though the cairn and shoe prints in the mud attested that the world was not unpeopled. When I got back to the bridge I heard voices, two hikers edging the hill southward, talking in the loud voices visitors to the wild cannot seem to contain. I waited for them on my side of the road. Turns out they were a couple from Maine, and were hiking through to the Outer Banks. This amazed me. I was tired going a little way down MTS and coming back again. They knew Exeter, and we reminisced about the Loaf and Ladle, now, alas, departed.  They were cheerful, and happy to be in each other’s company. 

Wrote an essay featuring Sweetboi and Denise.