Bald camping, meteors, a dog who decides to be a pest, and blueberries
Awkward and anticlimatic. That's pretty much how that weekend went. Work hard, go someplace new on your own, try not to freak out about the new place or people or being on your own, and still things just play out really awkwardly anyways. Sounds about right for me. And so I ran away to the mountains where Ryder was a jerk and the sky was cloudy and obscured the meteor shower and my tripod lost its handle and I totally missed Shining Rock.
If you do a Google search for “Art Loeb Trail” you’ll find all sorts of blog posts by people who decided to go on a hike or a trail run in the wilderness and totally got their butts kicked. This blog post is no exception.
Morning broke clear and crisp. There was no shelter from the light on top of the bald, so as soon as the sun crested the eastern ridge and blazed full and harsh on our campsite I was awake. Despite the brightness, there was a bitter chill and I wrestled with my sleeping bag before finally unzipping myself from its warm cocoon and stumbling out of the tent.
As a little girl I used to run out to the old horse pasture in front of my parents’ house and gaze up at the stars. Johnston County wasn’t quite so built up back then: there wasn’t a mega Walmart with its theme park-sized parking lot a couple miles away, or a Game Stop wedged between chain restaurants, and there wasn’t a long row of gas stations at an unremarkable truck stop with some fast food annexes haphazardly built on. When I was little there was an abyssal night sky visible, and I could count meteors and satellites and name planets and stars, and feel humbled beneath the enormity of it all.
Sometimes a wild ache falls upon me and I find myself compelled to go, just go. Such was the case in late September when McCrae and I packed up our gear and our dog into the little Mazda hatchback and headed west to the Balsam Mountains near Asheville. One weekend after another had become booked up so that we were afraid our October schedules would be impossibly full and we would miss the fall foliage entirely unless we went immediately. We didn’t hesitate, and it was suddenly that easy to leave for a few days.
