Hurricane & Poetry

Just about my all-time favorite camping spot for our Casita trailer was a place called Hurricane Campground in southwestern Virginia. This is the part of Virginia where its very highest mountains are located, several of which exceed 5,000 feet in elevation. Carole and I so liked this campground not just because of the local scenery, but also because it's relatively isolated and heavily forested, and nestled between a pair of mountain streams. On a scale of one to ten for pure beauty, it's way up the scale.

Often, when I go camping, I go with the intention of getting some work done on one or more of my writing projects. However, I've found that, save for a few exceptions, I rarely write when I'm in the mountains or on the coast. The plain fact of the matter is that I generally stay busier on these vacations than I do when I'm at home.

Hurricane Campground had one of the most important qualities for us. It was quiet. Quiet to the point of almost total silence. Only the nearby brook, the wind in the leaves, the occasional call of birds, or the trill of insects broke the quiet. In fact, these sounds were part of the silence and were soothing rather than distracting. We were about as happy as a couple can possibly be while in this place. The weather was largely overcast and it did rain, but not so much that it kept us from being comfortable. In addition, we were completely prepared for everything. We had every tool that we needed, every comfort that we wish for on these trips; and precious solitude.

As the years go by, about the only real writing I do on my sojourns into the wild places is poetry. In the days before I sold the movie rights to THE FLOCK, I always carried a couple of notebooks with me in which I would jot down idea and passages that occurred to me as I sat and mused. When I got the "found" money from the movie rights, I bought a nice laptop computer. But still I write rarely on these trips. More often than not these ideas or string of words that I do produce would form into poetry. I suppose I'm not a very good poet. I've never sold a poem and only became interested in the form very late in life. But I do write them, and for whatever reason, poems are about the only type of art I create when I'm in a campground or pausing to rest along a trail.

Another great thing about Hurricane Campground was that it was so close to so many other ares of unique beauty. On that trip we drove dozens of miles of soggy Forest Service roads and found little trails that took us to rocky peaks, isolated lakes, hidden waterfalls, spectacular colors painted by Nature throughout the wilderness. Carole and I found the time to sit together and talk without interruption and to be in love without the bother of the things that so often nag at us when work tugs at our lives. We built fires, and shared the cooking, and hiked the forests, and stood on lake shores, and found parks, and watched clouds drifting across high peaks, and discovered color and silence and peace.

I just don't write all that much when I go to the wild places my wife and I adore. However, the things we discover travel home with us. And these things find their ways into my work. A line of poetry, a chapter in a book, a page of script. Hurricane Campground perhaps did not coax this material out of me at the time, but it served as a fertile base for a later day.

Hurricane Campground; silence, solitude, beauty.

Every Kid's Rabbi

As I said in a couple of earlier posts, a few years ago, having the disposable income and the leisure time to pursue it, I began a silly nostalgia kick to assemble some of the comic books that influenced me when I was a kid. Unlike most kids, I was surrounded by jillions of comic books for most of my life, since my dad had hundreds of thousands of them due to his used book shops. I consumed the hell out of them when I was in grade school. By the time I was an adult, they were just a business to me. They had become a commodity that I bought and sold and rarely thought about as anything to savor.

But those days of racing up and down the east coast and out to San Diego once a year are long over. A couple of years ago I found myself wishing and able to buy up some of the four-color fantasies that had such an impact on my early years. I don't go out searching for these books in high grade to hold onto as a collectible. I grab them up when I can in lower condition so that I can read them with no guilt and no thought of "harming" an investment.

For the past several months I've tried to find a copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #25. This was one of my favorite single comics when I was a little boy. There's not much to it, really. On the surface, it's just a big fight between Ben Grimm (The Thing) and the Incredible Hulk. It held quite a fascination for me as a kid, and that amazing cover grabbed my attention and spurred my imagination. This was a classic comic written and illustrated by Jack Kirby, every kid's rabbi (although most of us didn't know it at the time).

The Battle of the Century!

I've finally landed that extra-special issue of Fantastic Four, and it's as much fun as I recalled. Kirby is in top form as an illustrator and storyteller. Surface tale aside, Jack Kirby was teaching moral lessons to us in illustrated form. He was laying down the Law in such a way that every kid on Earth could understand the difference between right and wrong. There wasn't a lot of "good" and "evil" in the mix, because Kirby handed us some gray areas, and that was what made his comic books so special. The battle in this issue doesn't last as long as I'd always recalled it, but the basic message of courage is still there. I don't have any trouble at all remembering why Ben Grimm (the Thing) is my all-time favorite comic book character, and why Jack Kirby remains my favorite of the comic book creators of my fantastic youth.

Wot a slugfest!

Maybe You Can

One of my favorite movie quotes was from a bad Stephen King movie I saw years ago. About a car that killt people. During the film, a particular character, commenting on a crappy car a kid is trying to restore says: "You can't polish a turd." Vulgar, yes. But effective. I always liked that quote.

Late last year I heard about a book put out by Fantagraphics compiling the known published works of a man some consider to be one of the worst comic artists to have ever lived. That's one hell of a reputation to live up to, but this guy is definitely in the running. Apparently, his work was so twisted and so simplistic that he was considered extraordinary on that level. As if he were a kind of comic book equivalent of Ed Wood.


Out of curiosity, I ordered a copy of I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS!, which is the collected works of Fletcher Hanks, with an illustrated afterword by editor Paul Karasik.

The principal contents of the book are fifteen stories by Fletcher Hanks (sometimes under one of his pseudonyms) which constitute, I suppose, his known output. The stories are, indeed, exceedingly crude and bloodlessly violent, but extremely twisted for all of the lack of crimson and gore. They mainly feature his two best known creations Stardust (kind of like God if He were blonde and had a tiny baby head), and Fantomah (kind of like God if She were blonde and could turn her face into a blazing skull). Both of these characters watch from on high while evil men plot to carry out stupid and bizarre schemes that result in the deaths of many people. Afterwards, the hero dispenses with the bad guys in truly vengeful ways. There's not much to compare it with in comics with the exception of Michael Fleischer's scripts in the early 1970s on the DC comic The Spectre (but crude rather than nuanced).

Indeed, these stories are spectacularly bad, but are a vision that I suppose was worth preserving in this oversized trade paperback edition. As unsophisticated and weird as the main features are, the most bizarre and pointless of the stories contained in the volume is one called "Big Red McLane, King of the North Woods". It features a huge redheaded man mountain who works as a lumberjack who goes around beating the shit out of lesser, but more evil lumberjacks from a competing company. It's exceptional in its pointlessness. I can imagine the creator of such a work committing suicide.

However, Fletcher Hanks apparently never did commit suicide after his brief sojourn in the Golden Age of comic books (all of these stories appeared in the early 40s when crap like that could find a home). He lived into the 1970s and froze to death as a homeless drunk on a park bench in New York City. This is revealed in the best part of the collection, a sixteen page tale written and illustrated by the editor of the book. This is great comics journalism as Karasik locates Fletcher Hanks' son (and namesake) and gets the truth on what a lowdown bastard the senior Fletcher Hanks really was.

I highly recommend I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS! It had a strange fascination for me. I read it twice and it'll find a permanent home in my library of comics. I guess the guy in that Stephen King movie was wrong, though. Apparently you really can polish a turd.

Only Once

People have almost forgotten that it used to snow in the South. When I was a kid growing up in the Atlanta area, it was not unusual to see two or three solid snowfalls every winter. Really good ones. I went through two sleds between the ages of seven and twelve. I wore them out. I vividly recall hitting a granite wall with one in the fifth grade and snapping the steel frame. Those were the days.

Now it almost never snows in Atlanta. When it does, it's a big item on the national news. "It Fucking Snowed in Atlanta!" As if this was something that's not supposed to happen.

These days I live just outside Charlotte North Carolina. It also used to snow a lot here. Not anymore. This past year, my family and I saw snow only once, and that was on a November camping trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We were sitting at 5,300 feet above sea level when a snowstorm passed over the high peaks. It was fun. It was also the single time I saw frozen precipitation at all in 2007. That was it.

My son, Andy, on November 11, 2007. Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

This is yet another reason I've been so busy over the past few years visiting wild places. Between industrial-driven climate change, and urban sprawl, and habitat destruction, and the rising acidity of oceans and lakes, I want to see all of this stuff before it's dead and gone. As Richard Leakey (and others) have warned, we're witnessing the greatest extinction of life on this planet in many tens of millions of years. The sad thing is that this one was not brought on by a natural disaster. This one was calculated.

We were warned.

We had choices.

We took the worst possible route.

Somewhere on the Food Chain

People can be so stupid or unlucky. How stupid? Well, so stupid (or unfortunate) that they get mauled, squashed, eaten, or dismembered by animals.

Stupid Ukrainian.

Drunken Irishman.

Don't provoke the hippo.

Angry elephants.

Even when they saw the shark fin.

He got buffaloed.

Into the wolf pit.

Don't pass me by.

Not all lions live in Africa.

The lesson for me? Too many humans.

A Kashmiri man about to get his ass kicked by a Himalayan black bear.

Having nothing to do with this post, save that the blog is mine and I love Sir Ian McKellen.

A Kind of Snow

Some weeks ago my wife and I went camping near the Pisgah National Forest. We were in a campground that was gated and locked by 10:00 pm, and so we were denied one of our usual pleasures of camping. Namely, driving some of the Forest Service roads late into the night, looking for spots to stargaze and watching for wildlife as we cruise slowly along the dirt and gravel ways.

One afternoon we did take a drive toward a Forest Service road near a huge pluton called John Rock where a fish hatchery is located, along with a very nice visitors center. By the time we got there, it was dark. The sun had long since faded and set and we were unfortunately clock-watching so that we wouldn't linger too long and get locked out of our campsite.

The entrance to the Fish Hatchery and John Rock.

I wanted to show Carole the terminus of a trail I'd once hiked to the summit of John Rock, and so we turned into the parking lot of the fish hatchery and I took the truck through the large and empty parking lot to where the trailhead was located. I showed her the signage and told her of nice backpacking campsites located along the way, beside the trail and in the forests beside small streams and bubbling springs, and of the fantastic views from the treeless summit of John Rock. And then we turned in the huge parking lot and started back to the bridge that would take us back to the Forest Service road and then to NC 64 and our return drive to the campground.

That was when we noticed the air.

The twin beams of the truck's headlights cut through the moonless dark. All around us were billions of insects. Above us. Beside us. Beneath us. The air was packed with flying, flitting, hovering bugs. They were, quite literally, everywhere. There in that low spot where the river cut down into the earth, these insects were dancing, living, speaking to one and all.

"It's snowing life," I said to Carole.

Stairs!

I've encountered some impressive staircases in my visits to state parks and National Forest sites. Some of the most stunning efforts at staircase building have been in West Virginia. Sometimes I'm just completely amazed at the expense and feats of engineering that have gone into placing these stairs to make access easier to some of these peaks, gorges, and waterfalls.

Here are a few of them:

These stairs were actually under construction. When completed, they take you to the Holly River Falls, which you can see through the trees. A most spectacular waterfall. Located in Holly River State Park in West Virginia.

These were National Park stairs. To take you to an overlook in the New River Gorge in West Virginia.

These stairs are quite organic and were constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps and are located at the Backbone Rock Recreation Area in Tennessee.

These were probably the longest set of stairs I ever climbed. They're in the Tallulah Gorge State Park in Georgia and take you, of course, to the bottom of this spectacular canyon. This is merely one leg of many.


Again, another more organic set of stairs, this one located in Blackwater Canyon in West Virginia.

I like the way this staircase blends with the rock grotto in Beartown State Park, also in West Virginia.

One of the most amazing feats of engineering I've seen for National Forest staircases is at the Falls of Hill Creek in West Virginia. In addition to this very extensive set of staircases that take you past several impressive waterfalls, there is a tremendous metal staircase near the very end that must have been extremely difficult to install. Here it is:

This was something to see. It was bolted to the wall of the canyon so that you could gain access to the last of the waterfalls on Hill Creek.

Wilderness Etched by Man

When you're hiking the mountains of the South, quite often you will see some kind of man made structure on, or near the summits of many peaks. In some cases, you will come to an abandoned fire tower. I quite like these, as they didn't really do anything to harm the summit, and they served a good purpose. It's sad to see them slowly falling apart. Here in the eastern USA, the Forest Service seems content to just allow them to rot, and they don't treat them with any respect at all, not even as historical pieces of architecture.

The Mount Sterling Fire Lookout in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Another type of structure often encountered are stairways and fences. The stairways are to allow easier access to summit features and to waterfalls. These are okay in some places and don't bother me. In fact, I've encountered a few such stairways and fences that are quite pleasing to look at. And the fences are there to keep the morons from dancing around the edges of cliffs and waterfalls and plunging to their deaths. Sometimes the fences work, and sometimes they don't.

Stairway beside Stone Mountain Falls in Stone Mountain State Park (NC).

One time I climbed a peak in West Virginia called Potato Knob. It's not a very high mountain, but the climb was quite tough. It was what is known as "Class III" climbing. Not dangerous, really, but pretty much straight up and hand over hand in places. When I reached the top I found a park bench! What the hell? I then realized that there was a much easier trail to the top and I assume that was the one used to haul in the lumber, hardware and tools.

Park bench on the summit of Potato Knob, West Virginia.

And in a few cases the man made stuff is bare bones. On the summit of Mount Craig, the second highest peak in the eastern USA, there are logs placed to keep hikers from venturing onto sensitive sub-alpine plant habitats. These seem to be doing the job and I've rarely encountered hikers straying off the path to trample the fragile plant communities.

Trail logs on Mount Craig, North Carolina.

At any rate, here are some of the things I encountered when I climbed mountains in late 2004:

One of the cooler towers I've visited, on Moore's Knob in Hanging Rock State Park (NC). It was once a fire lookout but was altered into this fine viewing platform. A really neat place.

A fence to keep the morons from falling off the second highest cliff in the eastern USA on Whiteside Mountain near Highlands, NC.

The roof of the summit house on top of Sharp Top Mountain at the Peaks of Otter along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia.

The Icewater Springs Shelter along the Appalachian Trail just below the summit of Mount Kephart in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The parking lot and tower on the summit of Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the eastern USA. This tower no longer exists, having been replaced by the as-yet-unopened new tower. This was a cool tower of unusual design. I was sad to see it replaced. (This is a telephoto shot taken from Mount Craig.)

Sentimental

Call me a sentimental schmuck, but I find this video hearbreakingly sweet:

Crowders Mountain

Ridge hiking on Kings Pinnacle.

If you're stuck in the Charlotte area and you're really desperate for the mountains, you can always fall back on Crowders Mountain State Park. Sometimes referred to as "Crowded Mountain" due to the crowds one often finds at the summit, you can avoid the long lines if you go middle of the week, on days of questionable weather, or to the less popular, but more spectacular Kings Pinnacle.

Crowders Mountain, as seen from Kings Pinnacle (Yes, of course there are commercial towers on top--radio, microwave, etc.)

Crowders Mountain is a classic monadnock. (Go look it up.) It's composed of quartzite caprock that has resisted erosion (oops! Creationists cover your eyes) over millions of years. Because of this area of caprock, we are left with a line of high ridges that rise above the flatter Piedmont terrain in which it's set. These small peaks are quite visible along I-85 as you drive the miles from Gastonia to the South Carolina border.

Enjoy the views, stay away from the cliff edge.

Most of these ridges are quite small and have only a hundred feet or so of relief above the surrounding territory. But toward the very northern end of the feature, they rise as much as 900 feet high. Thus, they can honestly be called "mountains" by local standards. The two most striking of these peaks are Crowders Mountain itself, which is also the most massive of the peaks, and which sports quite an extensive section of sheer cliffs that are popular with experienced rock climbers and with local idiots, and Kings Pinnacle, which is about 100 feet higher and is accessible by a longer hike.

Alone!

The local idiots are almost always good for a laugh or three. They tend to dance along the cliff edge or attempt to downclimb for a better view, or to climb up to precarious locations to impress their friends. Quite often, these mischievous scamps fall and die in shattered heaps far below along the base of the escarpment that had, mere seconds before, so fascinated them. Another breed of idiot will often set off to climb the 500 vertical feet, or 600 vertical feet, or even 900 vertical feet completely unprepared for a physically tough outing. They'll take off wearing sneakers and jeans in the brutally hot southern sun with maybe a single bottle of Evian, or maybe no water at all! How funny these folk are when you encounter them on the summit, swaying in the heat, or collapsing to the earth from sun stroke! Sometimes they bring their dogs with them! Oh, how funny they all are. Hardly a summer goes by without at least one accident, or the occasional suicide?

Idiots faw down, go "splat"!

My favorite of these mountains is King's Pinnacle. It's also the tallest of the mountains in this tiny range of summits. From the top, on a really clear day free of the effects of photochemical haze (courtesy of Modern Man, thanks very much), you can see the distant piss ant skyline of Charlotte to the north or, looking west, the looming Blue Wall of the Blue Ridge escarpment. Sometimes I climb to the top of Kings Pinnacle (I know a secret trail where you actually have to climb, hand over hand), and find myself alone there, free of the lowland idiots, with the small summit to myself, and dream of more distant lands, wilder places.

That'll do, Crowders.

On the summit of Kings Pinnacle with my three favorite hikers: Me, Myself, and I.

Sometimes, people are cool as hell!

Sick in the Woods

The Hiker Hell blog got me to thinking about some of my hiking and backpacking trips.

I do almost all of my backpacking trips and most of my day hiking trips alone. It's really tough for me to find companions when I go hiking, due to my weird work schedule. I've been momentarily lost a few times on my hikes, but you have to be a total moron to get really lost in the eastern USA. For the simple reason that you can find a road within a few miles by simply walking downhill or following a creek. The east is highly developed and there is always a road nearby with the only exceptions being places like the Okefenokeee Swamp, the Great Dismal Swamp, or the Everglades. Other than those, if you can't find your way to an inhabited place within a few hours, you shouldn't even be in the woods.

However, a couple of times I have gotten sick after I'd hiked well into the forest. The worst time was on January 17, 2005. For several years I was trying to locate a tree known as "The Sag Branch Poplar". It's the world's champion Tulip Poplar tree. I kept missing it or forgetting my GPS coordinates when I'd go to find it. Well, I drove up to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park very early on the morning of January 17, 2005 to find that damned tree.

Not only did I fail, I got monstrously sick.

Coyote tracks on a footbridge along the trail.

After I'd hiked about six miles into the Cataloochee area of the park, where the tree is located, I began to feel sick. The day was beautiful, the ground was covered in snow, and it was pretty damned cold (for the deep South). But I was prepared for the snow and cold, so that was no problem. However, as I climbed the mountains and took the trail looking for my grail-tree, I started to feel achy. Then a slight fever seemed to creep through my body, but I ignored it for a while because I figured it was just an effect of the cold.

I must add here that I was the only person in the Boogerman Grove that day. The ground was, as I said, covered in snow, and mine were the only footprints in it. I saw a few coyote tracks, but other than those canids and a few elk, nobody else seemed to be in the the forest there.

Around the area where I was supposed to leave the trail to go bushwhacking to locate the Sag Branch Poplar, I realized that I was far too sick to risk venturing off trail. My joints ached, my head and body were on fire, and I was just so totally ill that I had to keep stopping to rest. I tried to eat something, but I was too sick for that, too. And this was all about the point where I was farthest from my truck.

Slowly realizing just how sick I was, I began to make my way back to the truck. Very damned slowly. Every time I'd stop, I'd take some photographs of the cold, stark forest. This was probably the last time I was in that part of the park when the hemlock trees were more alive than dead. All of the hemlock groves in Cataloochee are completely dead, now. It's very sad. This was the last time I witnessed those enormous old evergreens in decent health. Unfortunately, I was far too sick to enjoy the experience very much.

After some hours, I made it back to my truck. No doubt about it, I was in a pretty bad state. I considered finding a hotel room and checking in, but I was afraid that I might get even sicker and be unable to drive all the way home the following morning. So I just started up the engine, pointed the truck toward Charlotte and drove home as quickly as I could while staying as safe as I could.

That night and the following couple of days I suffered through the flu. Why it waited until I was neck deep in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to cave in on me, I can't say. I'd felt great that morning and even as I hiked into the park. Although I must admit that the beauty of the snow from the night before, and the crisp air of the morning may very well have taken the edge off the bug, thus making me unaware of what was going on inside.

At any rate, it could have been far worse, and I do have some striking photographs from that day of sickness.

In retrospect, it was the last time I saw the grand old hemlocks of Cataloochee green and alive.