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Parking It
The Shenandoah National Park is open 24 hours so if you go through the booth at the Thornton Gap entrance and the ranger says, after welcoming you--the park is closing at 5 p.m., then you know something is up. It was snowing a little bit so Lorina and I presumed that to be the reason for the early closing. I said, oh we plan on being gone by then, even though 5 p.m. was only two hours away and that really doesn’t amount to much of a hike. We were getting a late start. People do hike at night but usually under full moons any time after the leaves have fallen. Under new moon, early park closing, and snow, it would be considered bad form to be hiking in the evening hours.
Lorina couldn’t think of the trail name until the last minute and then it turned out to be Stony Man. It was Sunday and therefore not as good, generally speaking, as midweek hiking, because during the week you run much less the risk of running into that most dangerous and sometimes frightful park animal, hah, the human being. But this was one of the first days of let’s put on long johns sort of weather and being the second week of December, most people probably are trying to stimulate the US economy with Christmas shopping. We only saw two other cars in the park, none in the Stony Man parking lot.
One of the more interesting bits of trivia regarding the Shenandoah Park is that the range, which goes under different names (Appalachian, etc.) to confuse people, was once, like before man walked the earth, much bigger, sharper, jagged, and taller than it is now and there is suggested the similarity between either the Rockies or the Swiss Alps. For me why this is a particularly gratifying piece of trivia is because the range is considerably less spectacular in the tall jagged sense but so much more pleasing in the round, green with flowing streams and waterfalls sense, even as it provides the ancient evidence of shear granite cliffs (for rock climbers, and geology buffs) of an age which is purported to be some of the oldest on the planet earth. So, what I’m saying is, whatever bit of slow moving apocalypse occurred here, implies a brighter future. I am not here advocating the use of atomic bombs in the Rockies and the Alps, for those who require instant gratification. That would not be a satisfactory shortcut.
We are hiking up the mountain a ways and the cold air hurts the lungs a little but the path is not so steep as to be painfully annoying. It is snowing soft sleet pellets and the trail is lightly dusted white. Lorina shows me the first four story cliff face and I can see how it might be climbable, even for a moderately athletic person, but I don’t even like roller coasters or other similarly safe thrills, so I don’t think I would climb this. I’m not sure I would be able to shake the memory of a casual friend of mine who a few years ago fell four stories during a rock climb. Even though, really, he doesn’t have hardly a glimmer of perceptible limp at this writing. I don’t mind listening to Lorina’s instruction though because people often change their minds and so should I ever find myself three stories up a four story climb, I would like to have as much knowledge about the sport as possible.
We walk on, the trail is pretty much level at this point, and Lorina suggests we turn around because my truck is rear wheel drive and way too light in that rear. The drive down the mountain, with no other traffic to melt the snow, would soon be, or could soon be, treacherous. I agree we should turn around, but let’s walk just a couple hundred yards more. So we do that, and then pause. The snow/sleet is not falling anymore. Lorina nods up the hill and says, wanna hike off trail for awhile? I say yes and she leads the way up and I just follow, in most cases, the same indentations left by her boots in the rich, rocky soil, occasionally having to grab onto a tree trunk or a chunk of granite cropping to pull myself up. After the trail proper has become a memory I ask if she is pretty sure about bisecting the trail again by this off trail methodology. She is sure.
I feel pretty good and it’s not windy and I have a lighter and there is lots of dry wood on the ground. I like it here. I could live here for one night. Probably wouldn’t sleep much and I didn’t bring any snacks and the park ranger would wag her finger at us if she ever got a chance but people get lost, it happens all the time.
We were lost for awhile but as a follower I felt less the mild panic than did Lorina, who had to deal not only with finding the path but with that distraction of emotion related to diminishing certainty. She’d been reading my mind for about a week so instead of talking I just thought, its ok Lorina, we can sleep here, it’s cozy. I’m glad we didn’t have to though. We changed directions once and I thought of that Blair Witch movie, lost in the woods going in circles and all, but in the end there was a white streak ahead of us. Instead of yelling out, there’s the trail, I just kept walking because the streak didn’t look that different from the dusting of snow along a foreground streak caused by snow on a fallen log. Shortly, Lorina said, there it is, and reaching it ahead of me got down on her hands and knees and kissed the sugar coated earth. I said I bet that is only partly in humor and she said goddamn right. Not being lost is only to be properly appreciated after being pretty well lost on a potentially snowy night. Although, back on the trail, the happiness related to comfort and certainty is somewhat tinged by a sense of melancholy which is connected to the memory of that ecstatic freedom of being truly lost and disconnected from all things familiar. I hope to get back out there before driving down to New Orleans on Friday.