Boulders Access

Some years ago quite a bit of acreage was added to Crowders Mountain State Park. This is generally the place I go when I can't find the time to head to the real mountains in the western side of the state. Instead I'll take a 30-minute drive south and hit the monadnocks we call Crowders Mountain and Kings Pinnalce.

However, the fact that the park is so close to a large urban area means that it has a tendency to be crowded, even on weekdays. For me, the park is a hit or miss opportunity. I rarely see much in the way of wildlife there (outside of turkey vultures), so I don't visit it for wildlife photography. What I do head there for is to see some unbroken forest patches and to have some vertical relief to hike. One of the peaks (Kings Pinnacle) can give give you almost one thousand feet of climb from base to summit. Alas, I tend to have to share the peak with scores of other people--sometimes hundreds--so I rarely get the chance to find any solitude there.

Today, though, I decided to finally visit what is called the 'Boulders Access' area of the park. I'm not sure how long that section has been opened, but for me it was a new experience. I got out my map of the park and found out how to get there from I-85 and drove over. I figured, from my experiences with the main part of the park, that I'd be hiking with a couple of dozen other people moving up and down the trails. To my surprise, the entire parking lot was empty when I arrived. In addition, during the 2.5 hours that I spent hiking the Ridgeline Trail and scrambling around on the boulders for which the area is named, I didn't see anyone else. I didn't hear anyone else. At one point I heard a couple of dogs barking from 300 feet below on the Piedmont farmland, but not a sign of another person.

One more thing that I liked about this part of Crowders is that it's far enough away from I-85 that I couldn't hear the drone and roar of that superhighway. There were times when all I could hear was the wind in the trees and songbirds singing away. That was also very cool.

While I had no plans to do any rock scrambling, a couple of the giant boulders had routes that were easy enough that I could resist the temptation to climb them. I was very, very careful, though. I'll be 62 years old in four days, so I know my years of tossing my body to risk should be far behind me. Especially considering how isolated I was with no other hikers on the trail. But I did it and had a good time. Too much caution makes a man into a coward, I reckon.

The big-ass boulder right across from one of the big-ass boulders I climbed.

The office and rest room. The offices were closed, but the rest rooms were open. The big parking lot was utterly empty except for my truck.

After some rock scrambling I took a break for lunch and to re-hydrate.

The view from atop one of the really big boulders. If you embiggen this photo you will see a low blue line on the horizon--some of the real mountains far to the west of us.

I climbed up there, and then I had to climb down.

Culture

When I was younger I was a constantly angry fellow. I was in many fights. Too many to recount or even recall. I was punched in the nose enough times that my nasal passages are damaged. I suppose that this is not unusual, as I was born and raised in the United States of America which--let's all admit it--thrives on a culture that is not only violent, but displays it at a level that I can only describe as hyper-violent.

Looking back on the books that I have read as a young adult, the comics I consumed as a child, and the movies and TV shows I watched I can only conclude that this nation eats the idea of violence as if it is food. It is, apparently, a sustenance with which the USA cannot otherwise exist.

When I was younger I not only had no problem absorbing this nihilistic garbage, I actually enjoyed it. The more self-righteous monstrosity displayed on the page or screen, the better I seemed to accept the vile message. The system does this. It has been created and perfected and honed to such a fine edge that it now just flows along, working almost like the legendary perpetual motion machine dispensing gore and perceived justice.

But now I am an old man. I can no longer stomach this poisonous shit. I first noticed this one day when I was working on a new novel and arrived at a point where I had to pen a scene of violence that I had plotted but had yet to write. As the moment came nearer in my daily routine of working, my progress slowed. I almost got to the point of writer's block but eventually the scene had to be written.

And I couldn't do it. I sat there and stared at the  computer screen and just by Jove could not proceed. And it was not because I was faced with some kind of psychic block that prevented me from going on. It was just that I at last could not stomach the thought of one more instance of bloodletting. Not on the page. Not on a screen. Not even by thought. And certainly not created by me.

I was done with it.

Since that time I find it very difficult--and sometimes impossible--to watch a movie or television show that is awash in that trash. And this, of course, makes it hard for me to watch much in the way of pop culture. Even most of the so-called "adult" comic books produced in these modern times are corrupted so heavily with violence that they almost make me want to puke when I see them. Books swim in it. Movies and TV series have rivers of blood and mountains of corpses. They display long moments of adoring torture as if we're supposed to enjoy it.

You can have it all. I don't want to see it or read another jot of it.

And it all has a purpose, of course. Of that I have absolutely no doubt. Raise a child on it and they are far more accepting of whatever message of violence and political propaganda you wish to feed them until they are of age and capable of striking out in misguided vengeance. Just point the way to the "bad guy" and the idea becomes reality.

Western culture, at long last, is so vile and poisonous that even I--a man raised in it and inured to it--have had my fill. Yes, I read it growing up. I watched it. I even wrote it. But now my disgust of it all is overwhelming and you folk who still need it have my undying pity and contempt.

Curious Places: Part One.

The USA is a really big country. Fourth largest on Earth by land area. (Behind only Russia, Canada, and China in case you want to know). As such, it has a ridiculously varied topography with just crazy amounts of beautiful and unique landscapes.

Since my life has been a kind of race to see as much of this gorgeous nation as possible on the salary of a working class laborer, I have not seen as much of it as I want, but more of it than most people I know. However, there are strange little corners and out of the way geographical eddies that I want to see but have so far not been able. I figured I'd write about a few of these locations as my wife and I make currently vague, but increasingly more detailed plans to see them.

For some reason one of the spots I want to visit is foremost in my mind. The reason for this involves just reading about this geologically interesting spot, but also an image I saw that weirdly corresponded to a recurring dream I used to have as a young man. The dream was simple. I was at the foot of a huge granite dome of a mountain and just beginning a hike to the summit. The weather in the dream was always sunny and the mountain was always rather bare and imposing. My suspicion is that the dream was inspired by childhood visits to see Stone Mountain just outside Atlanta, but the real Stone Mountain never corresponded to the images in my dreams. However, one day in researching the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma I saw a photo of Quartz Mountain/Baldy Point...and damned if it did not look exactly like the mountain that had featured so prominently in my old recurring dream! (I haven't had a repeat of that dream in decades, in case you're wondering.)

Baldy Point (aka Quartz Mountain) the carbon copy of a mountain I used to see in my dreams. (Photo by Allen Ellis, from Summitpost.)

When Carole retires in two years we are likely going to sell our Casita travel trailer. We love that trailer, but we have discovered that on trips that exceed two weeks in length we begin to get a bit stir-crazy using it. A wonderful trailer, and I am not knocking it, but we realized that we will need a slightly bigger travel trailer when we do hit the roads for trips of one to two months, which we are going to take when Carole retires. So, one of our first trips west we are going to try to fit in a stay in at least a couple of locations at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. The place has some great camping and hiking opportunities, and I will definitely scramble to the summit of Baldy Point, aka Quartz Mountain.

If you're curious, just do an Internet search on the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma. It's a series of funky little granite summits, the highest of which break 2,000 feet above sea level. To me, they present a fascinating and impressively rugged terrain of peaks and canyons. It doesn't hurt that there is quite a variety of animals roaming the area, including elk, bison, longhorn cattle, prairie dogs, ringtails, coyotes, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and other critters. (They even tried unsuccessfully to reintroduce the pronghorn.)

At any rate, even if I'd never had those weirdly pleasant recurring dreams featuring what I figured was a mountain merely a product of my youthful imagination, I would still very much want to see these strange, out of place mountains. They remain very high on my bag-list of interesting locations.

My Bradbury Days, My Bradbury Month

It is June, the Bradbury month.

Most people think of October when they consider Ray Bradbury. Not I. June is the month that I discovered Ray Bradbury. School was out and it was Atlanta-hot outside where I played in the sun most of the day, running through the green forests of Decatur, the suburban town where we lived. There were creeks everywhere. Full of salamanders and leeches, turtles and snakes. The old Confederate village had long since covered the cotton fields with streets of homes, but the green land was still all around us, a patchwork of forested yards and greenways snaking along the banks of the creeks that led everywhere, from neighborhood to neighborhood, endless journeys and new sights. My days of running, chasing, pursuing all that is fun--my hours of Creme-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes.

June was the month--school gone and twelve weeks of vacation begun--when my mom had brought home a book to give to me: THE ILLUSTRATED MAN. So, through Alice Kurtz Smith, that book, that author, that voice found me. Before THE OCTOBER COUNTRY grabbed my breath, I already knew who Bradbury was because of my mother, and because of the lazy days of June.

June is Bradbury for me. It is the month of my birth. June is when I married Carole Henderson. That first month of summer is when my son came into the world. June is when I first put my feet to a long backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail, only seven years after I held THE ILLUSTRATED MAN in my eight-year-old hands, thus continuing my love of the green around us, of Mother Nature.

I have always thought of this month--this 30 days of warmth and sun, of golden light, of sweating skin, of dusty ground, of green stains on my denims as I cracked up on my Stingray bike careening down hills overgrown with tall grass; it is long day's adventures following creeks, catching crawdads, skipping stones, barreling into the neighborhood drug store to see if the latest issue of Star Spangled War Stories and the War that Time Forgot is on the shelf. June--hours from morning until night spent mainly out of doors, coming home only for lunch, maybe to read a short story or a Jack Kirby comic book, and then out again, chasing friends, riding bikes, wandering the blocks to see what is what.

Bradbury Month, I tell you.

Bright and warm. Sunny and damp with threatening rain, dark clouds, playgrounds. June is romance just a few years later. Sitting by a lake, holding my soon-to-be-wife. Later still, June is cradling my tiny son in my arms, never ceasing to lift him up and hold him just so until the day he no longer wants me to carry him around and then those later June days I just watch over him, and smile, my June boy.

The month of June. The days of Bradbury. The song that speaks long after that first encounter, that chilling, disturbing, amazing, June voice. My month. Bradbury days.

Mead Road, the street of my childhood, my Bradbury neighborhood, my Illustrated Days packed with color, and life, and love.

A Decatur forest. A Greentown place.

2010. Me, and Bradbury.