Just the Same

The Pacific Northwest is a city of vistas, proof of the good things that happen when water and mountains meet. 

Here on the other coast, a gentler, calmer, less dramatic form of beauty. My eyes adjust to it as they would a darkening room. 

I snap shots of one fetching curve of a favorite walk, note how trees and grasses frame a small pond. This is not the vast expanse of Puget Sound, the white-topped Olympic Mountains in the distance.  It's a more humble, everyday kind of beauty. But it's beauty, just the same. 

Craven Gap

"There are four reasons people come to Asheville," the ranger said. "Beer, bears, that big house down the road (the Biltmore) and the Blue Ridge Mountains."

The ranger didn't have much to say about the first three, but oh, could he talk about the last one. He seemed to know most everything about the Blue Ridge Parkway, which sections were closed (many of them), the detours and work-arounds, which trails to hike and the views you'll see from  them. 

This is the vista that greets you on the hike up from Craven Gap: mountains beyond mountains, purplish green in the foreground, smudges of blue in the distance. 

The Piedmont

Although you might not think it, there are hills around here, inclines that push walkers and cyclists into overdrive. These are not the hills of Seattle rising like cartoon mountains, making a hazard of rolling suitcases and winding the faint-hearted in just one block. These are more subtle gradients, but gradients just the same.

It dawned on me lately while walking up a steep rise that it's the piedmont at work. The land we inhabit here on the western edge of Fairfax County is just past the fall line of the Potomac. Virginia hunt country lies nearby. 

We live in the northern Piedmont region, literally at the foot of the mountains, those mountains being the Blue Ridge, which you can see rising like gray ghosts a quarter mile from here if the weather is clear. 

It's comforting to think, as I chug up a steep grade, that I'm not just out of shape ... I'm hiking the Piedmont.

Change of Heart

When driving west on Interstate 66 last Monday, I thought about how many times I made that drive, countless trips from Virginia to Kentucky — all the thoughts I had, the fears I was fighting.

In later years, the trips were often in response to a health crisis for Mom or Dad, so I sought distractions wherever I could find them. The scenery out my window was embroidered with worry. But when I looked to the mountains,  I found relief.

It was that way this week, too. All of which is to say how much a change of scene can mean a change of heart.

One-Day Getaway

A drive west today, out to the Blue Ridge Mountains, the great ridge that runs down the eastern spine of this country, out to where the sky meets the land.

It's been a while since I've been more than 20 miles away from home. Half a year, I think. And while it is true that one can travel widely without ever leaving home, at least for this wanderer, an occasional glimpse of the world beyond helps maintain sanity.

So a drive west it will be, out to the ridge I took pains to see yesterday on my walk. The Shenandoah — the shaggy old hills that mark the beginning of the rest of the country.

A Different Day

A week ago today I awoke in a tiny house in the Blue Ridge Mountains. On my to-do list: write, read, and savor the landscape. Not bad as to-do lists go.

Today's list is looking a lot more businesslike: Editing articles, writing headlines, having meetings. It's still not bad as to-do lists go, but it's significantly less creative than last week's occupations.

But how much depends on what we make of it? I write from my fifth-floor window seat (loosely construed, this term "window seat" — all it means is that my chair is pulled up close to the window) and the sun glints off the curved corner of the building next door. Leaves fly in the brisk wind, and they are gleaming too, as another day, a different day, begins.

Tethered

Last night I watched a movie called "Free Solo," a documentary that chronicled Alex Honnold's untethered ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite.  Using only his hands and feet — and most of all his brain (which apparently has a less-responsive amygdala than most), Honnold was able to climb up the sheer face of the 3,000-foot cliff. No ropes, no belts, buckles or belays. Just the man and the mountain.

By contrast, I recently ascended 400 feet in a balloon to see the temples of Angkor Wat. It couldn't have been safer. The balloon was tethered to the ground and the passengers were encased in wire mesh. I was still weak in the knees.

And last night, I was weak-kneed again. It didn't even help that I knew the guy survived. There's something primitive about it, something hard-wired in us to recoil when we see another human being clinging precariously to a sheer rock face. 

No doubt about it, the untethered experience makes for great cinema — but when it comes to my own ascents, I'll take them tethered every time. 

I Walk Therefore I Am

The best books are not only satisfying in and of themselves but they also lead us to other great reads. Such is the case with The Old Ways, which I finished last night.

Edward Thomas, the British poet and nature writer who died in World War I, and Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain, are two authors now on my must-read list, courtesy of Robert McFarlane.

"A mountain has an inside," Shepherd wrote, describing the caves and cavities of her native Cairngorms, which she explored throughout her long life. Her prepositions are notable, McFarlane writes. She went not just up but "into the mountains searching not for the great outdoors but instead for profound 'interiors,' deep 'recesses'."

It's landscape as self-scape, not in a shallow way but in the most original of human ways, realizing that earth is our home and in nature we discover our best and truest selves.

Here's McFarlane on Shepherd:

'On the mountain,' she remarks in the closing sentences of The Living Mountain, 'I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy ... I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. That is the final grace accorded from the mountain.' This was her version of Descartes's cogito: I walk therefore I am. She celebrated the metaphysical rhythm of the pedestrian, the iamb of the 'I am,' the beat of the placed and lifted foot.

Mountain Views

This morning is blustery and cold. I look out the French doors into the backyard, with its dusting of snow, its wind-bent boughs.

It's a familiar view, a treasured view. But for some reason this morning I notice how the bare tree branches across the street come together to resemble a peak. If I didn't know better, if I looked quickly, I could be staring at a mountain.

So now I'm dreaming of mountains I've seen — and the views they've given me.

Blue Ridge

We live an hour from the Blue Ridge, but there are places near here, places so near I can walk to them, that give me a tantalizing glimpse.

A smudged line in the distance. A bank of green in the foreground.

So pleasing to the eye, this mixture of green and blue, of meadow and mountain, of the up-close and the faraway.

Picture Postcard

I am a sucker for the post card shot. The off-center, the too-close, the out-of-kilter — these do nothing for me.

When it comes to landscapes, I have a middle-brow sense of composition. Give me blue skies, puffy clouds (see yesterday's post), a road winding in the distance, fir trees in the foreground, and I'm happy. Even if there's a bit of blurring (because, say, the picture was taken out of a car window at 50 miles an hour).

This is a photograph of Glacier National Park, snapped on a vacation there  a few years ago. It made me catch my breath then. It still does.

On a Clear Day

There is a slight rise on one of my walking routes that allows for a tolerable if faraway view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. If the weather is clear and the humidity is low, those old hills rise ahead of me with promise and mystery.

They are puny when compared with the Rockies or Sierras or even with themselves if I were 3o miles west. But I treasure them just the same because they hold out to me a life beyond this one. When I see them as I did yesterday on my walk, I understand why tired, hungry people followed wagons more than two thousand miles across this land. It is the frontier. It is beguiling. It is, and always will be, a second chance.