 |
|
Our short encounter with the Great Smoky Mountain National Park was just about over. Retracing our steps reversed the sands of time to our departure, to the end of here. The trees that surrounded us watched as we made our way past them, back to the vehicle that awaited us to take us far away from them. A chance meeting that would only take place twice in my life was coming around full circle, a journey completed upon itself. This is what it felt like as we made our way back on the trail that had taken us to the stream which refreshed us. Reloaded with fresh water from the oxbows that bent their way through the mountains, we were ready to go, the only souvenir from this time here being the water that we carried. There was the option of our staying here in the park. We could probably find a place here somewhere seeing that we had paid our way. The ticket we had entitled us to go back and forth for the next week to this park. We were welcome to stay. Which, to some extent made the quick exit all the more hard for me. It was easy to feel home here, feel a sort of comfort that made movement an anathema, inertia a friend. For in the meantime, in this short encounter, it was like meeting a new part of myself. This place of quiet held a lesson of wholeness. Why, it was hard to tell. Maybe it was because we were the only human presence in a place full of other life. Maybe there was some deep spiritual connection that couldn't be described in a self-help manual. But it was there, and in that moment it was as though time didn't exist. It would be easy to let go of all the plans we had and pretend that time didn't matter. But for us, time did matter. This was not the kind of trip that rambled forward into the unknown with no destination in the temporal world of the fourth dimension. If time really had no meaning, then we could stay here. Then if we got lost on our way back to our temporary home and sat in these woods as they moved into their own mysterious shadow, it would be less a big deal. Water and warmth were not a downfall here, as we had some warmer clothes with us. One night, no big deal, part of the adventure. Just allowing things to take place no matter what happened, that would be no big deal. There were three things that conspired against this dream of rambling without a cause. For one, there was the goal of reaching the West Coast, the goal of traversing the Pacific from San Diego to Seattle. People were expecting us in Washington within two weeks or so. And there was the underlying reality tying all of that together, the fact that we had to accomplish all of these goals within a month's time. We were only in the first week, but we were still on the Eastern Time Zone. California, Washington, Montana, Wyoming awaited us, distant trajectories that seemed too far away to contemplate. It was like we were on a journey to the Andromeda Galaxy and had barely flown past Pluto. Yet that was where we were headed to, that distant country known as the West. This sojourn to the Great Smoky Mountains was just shore leave on the way to explore the wider world beyond the Mississippi. A shame, really: to consider one of the great expanses of nature set aside to be nothing more than a pitstop, something to just check off the list of things that had been seen. It was as though by reducing it to such a temporary stop, there was some minimizing of it, like it was reduced to an activity on a to-do list like doing dishes or cleaning the garage. I noticed this as I walked back by my newfound friends, and I felt a sense of having betrayed them with this hit-and-run mentality. Unfortunately, nothing could be done about this semi-rushed state unless I amended my travel plans. I could say, the heck with the West Cost. If we get there, fine, if we don't, also fine. I could also bid au revoir to the whole scheduled life I had back in New York, with a job that needed me to be there at a certain time and needed me to be a certain person. I could make either decision and remain here, stuck in the timelessness of an evolution that moved slower than e-mail, fax, telephone, or even horse and carriage. As a human, I thought I had moved time, but standing here, I was reminded that I had not. I could stay with that lesson permanently, becoming a child of the forest like Jodie Foster's character Nell, sharing the Smoky Mountains with whatever creative spirit created the character. I could forget about all of it, use the mountains as a place to ooh and ahh over for now, get hung up over dinner plans and squabble with my husband like the caricature of the family road trip given over to sniping at one another, where the experience had been so subsumed it was just a distraction that had to be gotten over with to say that there had been a family road trip before you got back to real life. Or, somehow, while keeping in mind the importance of the so called "real life", keeping the memory of this stillness with me, letting it be my teacher as I went upon my set path. What would the lesson be to me? It was hard to know at the moment. To some extent, it felt like insisting on some epiphany was counterintuitive to allowing the moment to speak to me. Trying to come away with something definitive made it feel as though I was the one trying to tell myself some insight, regaling myself with self-important truths while insisting that nature had revealed some higher revelation. When in reality, the best thing I could do is allow the moment to silence myself so that I in my soul was as silent as the surroundings that I encountered for one last time. Maybe that was the lesson, that to really hear, I needed to stop telling myself what was true and let the chatter die away. Instead, let the moment speak in its own largeness, to reveal the reality that the world was larger than the limited scope by which I chose to define it. I held that truth on some level I knew without thinking as I made my way back to the van with my family, the West Coast beckoning in the near distance. |
