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Solitude done right
Clouds hang low in the mountains visible from the Browning Knob area. Holly Kays photo
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Solitude done right
Clear streams in the Middle Prong Wilderness are home to a variety of salamanders species. Holly Kays photo
It was a gray and muggy Wednesday afternoon, and I was going hiking.
Just me and the dog, a spur-of-the-moment thing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken off like this on a weekday, but in the summer of 2020, my sense of time was beyond muddled. It was a soupy pot of uncertainty, all the neat little boxes I’d built to compartmentalize my time and ensure maximum productivity collapsed into nothing. I no longer knew how to order my days, how to decide when it was time to stop working, start cooking or begin exercising. I spent an inordinate amount of time rattling around the house, directionless, feeling like there was something productive I should be doing but having no idea what that might be.
So on this particular Wednesday afternoon, I forced myself to put on shoes, throw a water bottle and raincoat in a daypack, and leave the house. Rain threatened the entire time as I jumped on the highway and drove up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, taking my pick of spots in the usually packed trailhead lot.
The trail I’d chosen was only semi-official, a rugged route that ended up at the place a Cessna pilot crash-landed in 1983. The pup and I raced along the trail, lungs heaving and paws swiftly earning a coat of mud courtesy of a forest floor that had spent the summer constantly washed in rain. Often, I prefer a slower hiking pace, an amble that allows me to contemplate the songs of the birds and turn over a rock or two in search of salamanders, but today I was moving, on a mission to pump enough blood through my body to beat back the stress that had been plaguing me all summer.
It worked. As I progressed along the trail, a radiant joy overtook my anxiety. I felt alive again, purposeful, able to see past the pandemic fog enough to appreciate the fresh scent of wet fir trees, the quiet strength of the roots and trunks I grasped for stability, the endless eminence of the hazy mountain waves visible through intermittent breaks in the trees. I took a selfie at the trail’s end, sporting the largest grin I’d worn in a while, but my joy had nothing to do with reaching the destination. It was about this place, these mountains, this experience of being back in a world made up of real matter, away from the universe of virtual meetings and work-from-home rituals I’d been inhabiting for months. Up here, life felt normal again.
After that, I stole every opportunity I could to get away for solo adventures in my favorite beautiful places. I ambled the green-shrouded riverside trail to a pair of waterfalls outside Cullowhee. I submerged myself in the Middle Prong Wilderness, pulling salamanders from pristine creeks and half-losing myself in a thriving meadow of summer natives grown higher than my head. I wandered the Art Loeb Trail, drinking in the wide-open views and procrastinating on the inevitable decision to turn around and go home.
Beauty does something for me, as does solitude. On the trail, my legs and eyes occupied by the demands of the journey and the unfolding sights around me, my mind can wander. I can ask myself how I’m doing, how I’m feeling, what I’m fearing from the changing world below, and I can answer myself, relying on the physical exertion to siphon off any anxiety the conversation produces. I can pray, the repetitive movement of my body keeping my mind on track, the beauty around me infusing a posture of gratitude.
In summer 2020, particularly, the trail was a respite from the unnatural solitude permeating life down below, a reminder of the life-giving, even joyful, nature of solitude done right.
But the pandemic had also stolen a just-as-necessary ingredient to life—community done right. I live in a small town, the kind of place where, when you go out for dinner or a drink downtown, you’re almost guaranteed to run into someone you know from somewhere, to strike up some conversation or another you weren’t planning to have when you left your house.
I missed that.
Until the September day when my path ended at a family farm about four radio songs away from my home in the North Carolina mountains. Saturdays during the growing season, the staff bake gourmet pizzas in an outdoor oven and serve them to whoever wants to come hang out for a couple hours in their mountain-ringed meadow.
I sat under the shade of a Norway spruce with my husband and a couple of good friends we had barely seen since quarantine hit. We opened a bottle of wine and sipped it slowly while we waited for our pizza to come out. I looked around, seeing strangers smile for the first time in months, the now-ubiquitous mask made unnecessary by the spacious outdoor dining room and copious sunshine. Above me rose the mountains, the same ridges I’d explored solo just weeks earlier.
I smiled. Solitude is wonderful, but it pairs best with community.