Doughton State Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina 13.10.93: Aster and Fall Leaves

On Blue Ridge Parkway, staying the night at a lodge in Doughton State Park. The leaves not at their peak, but still resplendent, especially at higher elevations. I’ve not seen aster in bloom near Belmont, but it’s blooming all along the roadsides in the mountains. The picture on the opposite page is my inexpert attempt to capture an impression of it.

Doughton State Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina 13.10.94: Webs of Rain, Calling Crows

Writing this in the mountains, at Bluff’s Lodge in Doughton State Park, off the Blue Ridge Parkway, where Steve and I drove yesterday afternoon. We’ll stay till Sunday morning.

Outside, fine misty rain driving in luminous webs across the hilltops. A crow calling in the distance, but hidden by the rain, which is at times so dense one can see only shadows of shrubbery through it.

I love such mystic landscapes. They speak to some need deep in my soul for cold, for rain, for high places and cozy fires. Perhaps I am at heart the Celt who grew fond of those fringes of Northern Europe to which he was pushed by waves of dispossession.

All this sounds so blithe and bonny. But I’m not—not in my heart of hearts. Far from it.

Glendale Springs, North Carolina, Blue Ridge Parkway 8.8.92: Mist and Green

It’s a mist-shrouded day. Literally so—we’re at H.’s cabin near Glendale Springs off the Blue Ridge Parkway, and all drippy, almost cold, so green the green hurts, with wreaths of mist over all, wisps, whirls. I came in from a walk today to find each hair extruding from the combed mass of the whole beaded by tiny beads of water—the gray ones as though frosted.

And we sad and discontent with each other's company.

Doughton State Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina 7.-8.8.1994: Lambent World, Plaited Hills

At Bluffs Lodge, Doughton State Park, where Steve and I spent time last fall. Just had to get away. A harrowing day, about which I won’t write, as it’s late in the evening.

Morning now, Doughton Park. Thinking of that passage in Thoreau I love so, as I watch the hills, mist silently capturing trees on their crests: how all the world flows, in creation, so that the lapsed world becomes lambent. The hills of the Blue Ridge, as they dwindle to dale and fold here at its northern North Carolina boundary, say this to me so powerfully, with their glad unfolding as they lie plaited over the earth.

This beauty. I respond to it. So do many others. That tells me there must be something in some landscapes that speaks insistently to the human heart, to some types of human hearts.

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Nature: it used to have such healing strength for me. Where has that strength gone? As I read Mary Oliver, I sense that at least part of the answer lies in the extent to which I’ve permitted myself to live only in the rational, professional, ultimately self-obsessed, brain. My sympathy for mute creatures diminishes as a result, in direct proportion to this extent.

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Freedom: have I bought what little freedom I have at too great cost? More and more, I feel like a character in an Edith Wharton novel, who has tried to kick over the traces, made a bit of freedom for herself, but doesn’t know what on earth to do with it now, such a strange creature she has become to all the world else. Or like what’s her name in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.

But I like that sense of being true to what most deeply impels me, compels me, inside. Fulminate as he will, the Pope can’t convince me that this is not conscience, this impulsion to truth, freedom, love. Perhaps my problem is that I’m too conscious . . . . .

Doughton State Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina 19.8.95: Loping Doe, Night-Rising Mist

On the Blue Ridge, at Doughton State Park. Steve and I arrived here yesterday. I’m now sitting on a porch overlooking a field where I watched a deer slowly lope along a stand of trees yesterday, after the first rain we’ve seen in ages.

The land lies pretty. The field’s full of dried grass, with clumps of trees I can’t see at a distance—some apparently laurel, because the clumps are wide and round, rather than high. As the field slopes down, a twisted sole pine and another small tree, then a large thicket of trees where the field meets the descent of a hill, and where a stream must run, because I saw mist rising in this low land as night fell.

It was there, in a bend the field makes as it goes past the thicket around the stream, that I saw the doe run last evening.

Something about the lay of this land—sloping field, overgrown bottom land, the wind-bare hilltop behind it all, with its patches of purple-lichened rock and brown sedge—is profoundly restful for me. It’s just so right: everything works together, does what it’s supposed to do. There’s a harmony in which the land itself seems to delight.

Doughton State Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina 1.11.1996: Luminous Hills, Rested Souls

At Doughton State Park, Blue Ridge Parkway. We’ve not been here quite this late in the fall. I quite like it now. The soft muted colors after the leaves have fallen are restful and healing. They seem to reach right into my soul, in an immediate way.

I don’t know quite how to put the point. It’s as if my soul’s alive in a new way to what previously it could receive only in a mediated way, through thought, reading, reflection, mental processing.

That feels good.

If only one could get beyond oneself, to the soul beneath, or to things as they are, and not as one wishes them to be or thinks they are.

To wit: the scenes before me—I wish I could describe them as they are, as I see (and feel) them now. The sky’s slate gray with heavy low clouds of even darker gray. The slate’s everywhere relieved by bands of lighter gray shading to blue and white.

The hills underneath have that luminous blue quality that earned them their name—luminous from within, as if the soft light they exude comes from deep inside their earthen hearts. Stubble of bare trees—dark and light, intricate chiaroscuro—crowns them.

Closer up, one sees fields, undulant green or spiky red sedge grass. Rock outcroppings mirror the sky both in their color, with its striations like the sky’s, and literally, since they have pools of water reflecting the skies.

Three white-tailed deer we startled in the grass as we walked bounded off, one against the sky on a hilltop, the very embodiment of lithe, graceful abandon.

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Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life: “The genius [of a place] lies deep within, and as Richard Onians suggests in his extraordinary book on Roman ideas about the soul, it can’t be uncovered by conscious thought or explained by literal fact. It requires from us trust in our less rational ways of knowing and in whatever practices of magic we feel comfortable with and capable of performing” (p. 81).