Good Question

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
--Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, Mountain Interval, 1920

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.
--Jerry Seinfeld

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“I don’t know how you do it,” says a friend from a big city. She’s referring to the whole deal: living five miles up a dirt road, off-grid, no phone. On a mountaintop, a good hour’s drive from a full-service grocery store. “How do you do it?” asks a man whose ancestors settled the ridge above Camp Allegheny more than 200 years ago. He cocks his head and looks at me, a twinkle in his eye. Unlike my city friend, he has a pretty good idea how, at least from a practical standpoint. But much like her, and more to the point, he can’t quite fathom why.

Why would anybody choose to be here? And more importantly, why have I?

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As the weather warmed last Sunday, I decided to give poor, patient Cosmo a break from my festival preparations and take a drive to check-out the ice on Shaver’s Fork and then continue over Cheat Mountain to Huttonsville, in Randolph County, where I get an always-reliable cell phone signal. I pulled over just past Cheat Bridge and took Cosmo on a slow roam along the still-frozen, snow-laden river’s edge. At one point, I knelt and put my ear near the ground. I heard sounds much like the un-rosined-bow whine of frozen tree boughs scraping together in an Allegheny wind. The sounds of cracking ice. And beneath that, the bass drum rumble of moving water. The promise of Spring.

The sounds told me a point of no return had been passed. Yes, it would be icy cold again…but not for 30 days straight. Yes, it would snow again…but the snow would not stay on the ground for long. The frozen Earth was moving toward melt.

For about an hour, Cosmo and I rambled along the riverbank. Animal tracks traced back and forth across the snow-covered water. Deer, squirrel, raccoon, and many indefinable others had made the river their short-cut.

There was no wind last Sunday along the Shaver’s Fork near Cheat Bridge. I heard the chicka-dee-dee-dee of a single bird. In an hour’s time, two vehicles passed on U.S. 250.

The snow-crunch of my boots and Cosmo’s happy panting was nothing short of symphonic.

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Huttonsville is 30 miles from my door.

I thought about this on the way back over Cheat Mountain. The fact that “normal” for me is driving 60 miles for a cell-phone signal. Trust me, I know every pay phone in Pocahontas County from Marlinton to Dunmore to Durbin. Fact is, most of the time they don’t work. And, frankly, most of the time I don’t care. Because most of the time, I don’t “Do Phone."

But some business simply cannot be accomplished any other way. And sometimes, on infrequent occasion, I just need to hear a particular person’s voice. Email only translates so far. And, perhaps, only up to the point at which diminishing returns accrue.

As I ascended Cheat Mountain and looked out over the Allegheny plateau, I thought about the fact that certain of my friends and relatives still cannot quite grasp the logistical fact that I live someplace where a landline is not possible and cell-phone service is not available. Reliance on pay phones, in America? East of the Mississippi? Nah.

In a world where everyone is constantly on the phone, constantly texting, constantly in communication with everyone else…the very idea of being someplace within the continental U.S. where such communication is impossible is, frankly, unimaginable.

Surely, I must be joking, or exaggerating, or just not trying hard enough.

Nope.

Last Sunday afternoon, February 13, I passed precisely no vehicles, not one, on my 30-mile return from Huttonsville to Brightside. Three deer crossed the road in the middle of the curve just before Durbin. A red-tailed hawk lifted off at Spencer’s Ridge and sailed down the center of the Pike almost all the way to the Brightside gate, before peeling off to the West toward Arbovale.

When I got out of the car to open the gate, I stopped. At this most-windy of imaginable places, nothing stirred. The only discernible sound was that of the car engine fan.

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When I say I’m off-grid, I actually think that’s cheating.

Although I don’t have utilities, or television, or telephone, I do have intermittent internet, which has made me dependent on the most grid-like of grids! And without internet, pitiful though it is, I wonder how I would survive here. I’m not saying I couldn’t survive, I’m just wondering how I would adapt.

OK, I’ll come right out and admit that I become rather cranky when I can’t get an NPR radio signal. Proof positive that I’m a communications addict, pure and simple.

My son, Jake, rolls his eyes. "So 19th century."

But then again, he doesn't live here full time.

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Why do I?

Simplest answer: Because I want to be here.

Because, corny as it may sound, I consider it a privilege.

I want to witness this place--all of it--this silence, beauty, and deathly harshness, this unforgiving yet bountiful landscape. This place that demands full attention, always, and punishes anything less. Oh yes. This place will keep you on your toes.

And I want to be kept on my toes.

No, it ain't easy! It ain't no Disney World vacation. No Hallmark card fade-to-mist.

Living in Nature isn't an escape from Life.

No, quite to the contrary, it's Life in-your-face, pure and unfiltered.

What else could be better, given the short time we've got to get it?

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If a landscape is destroyed and no one is around as witness, does it matter?

Ahhh, this has been the question of the week.

To be honest, I do think of my presence here as a kind of place-holder. I don't live here "for the greater good," but I do believe my living here, my bearing witness, matters.

In the vast "nowhere" of rural Appalachia that corporate interests, in boardrooms as near as Charleston or New York or as far away as Bejing, might decide to drill or mine or otherwise exploit, I exist. I am real. I have, out of whole cloth, created something that did not exist before. Most important is the fact of my being here. I am witness.

As corporate interests keep "putting up parking-lots" in one form or another, increased is the value of those who not only remember, but hew to preserving paradise before paving. There is an intrinsic value in those who don't just talk the talk, but live it, day by day. Come what may.

I am one of these people.

The road less traveled is less traveled because it is a hard road. This doesn't mean the view from the road isn't worth every difficult mile.

Any Occasion Will Do

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
--From “Solitude,” Chapter Five, Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

This morning dawned a fuzzy cotton ball white. The hours since have passed as an artist’s study in progressively blurred vision. Now mid-afternoon, the air itself has taken on a gray cast, as if all the lichen-laden bark of the forest has bled into it, just as watercolor gray on a too-wet brush bleeds across a page of bright white paper.

Looking out the window in front of my desk, I have the ridiculous urge to dab at it with a piece of Kleenex as I would at overly watery brushstrokes. Quick! Before everything runs together and the whole design is lost.

As the fog thickens, the limbs of nearby trees are increasingly disembodied. Branches seem to float, detached from their supporters. Tree tops are cut off from their trunks. I wonder: if it were up to me to bring the fast-fading scene back to life, could I draw it true? The twist and bend of every finger-like twig. The improbable angle and reach of each branch. Sapsucker holes and lichen dressing. The lone oak leaf hanging on by a proverbial thread.

Even as I watch them fade from my window-framed view, I struggle to recall the red maple, sugar maple, red oak, shagbark hickory, black locust, and black birch stretched down the ridge toward the old logging road we call Wiley Way. If the ash-colored air erased the trees as the shake of an Etch-A-Sketch obliterates a drawing, would I be able to recreate them as they were just moments before?

And so it begins, again: The Existential Angst of Allegheny Winter. Where else, but perhaps Alaska, would your mind tell you that you might possibly be required to recreate the landscape from memory?

Just another form of distraction? Harmless entertainment? Like, uh, going to the mall or to the movies or out to dinner? Sort of, yes, but different. A distraction is, indeed, a beguilement, an amusement, something that draws the mind away from what’s important. The difference here is that, when the view out every window is versions of opaque ashy-white, the mind takes its diversionary tactics very seriously.

I rummage in the bookshelves and pull out Walden.

I read it all the way through about a year and a half ago—the first time since highschool—and with much greater enjoyment. I remember especially the chapter on Solitude, which seems, in my memory, to speak to something I’m feeling, though I can’t quite get a handle on what that is.

Holding the book and staring out the window into the increasingly thick gray-white gloom, I feel argumentative. I want Henry David right here, right now. You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do, Mr. Thoreau.

Alas, he’s not available.

Suffice it to say I’m feeling rejected and dejected, alone and betrayed when I turn to Chapter Five. Thoreau insists otherwise. And what he says makes so much damn sense. Quickly I begin to pull a through-line.

The creative force that animates the trees out there—hidden from my sight within the fog—that force animates me. Yes, me. The creative force is everywhere and thus nowhere in particular. It is sense and sense rendered moot, much the way white light is color rendered colorless.

To focus on particular places, views, seasons or sets of sensory inputs as the necessary precondition, or the “occasion,” as Thoreau put it, for “coming to life” is, well, guaranteed to cause us to spend most of our time in a state of purgatory. Not dead, no. But not exactly alive either.

The bitter-sweet air beneath a copse of evergreens, the morning song of towhees, the visual perfection of a late July garden, new snow under a cloudless sky, even the winter-dark outlines of familiar trees through an office window, these smells and sounds and sights are delightful and delicious.

But if Thoreau had Cajun roots, he may well have called these occasions lagniappes of spirit.

Charming little gifts from the Creator. Seductive and beguiling. The spiritual equivalent of flower bouquets and four-star meals. They reveal certain things about the relationship, to be sure, but not what’s most important. Not what endures.

Essentially, as Thoreau wrote, such “outlying and transient circumstances” are a distraction. And distractions, Thoreau implies throughout Walden, can become awfully addicting. To the point that we come to believe we can’t live without them, that, in fact, if forced to choose, we’d rather have our distractions from life than life itself. (And this, mind you, in 1845 or thereabout.)

Lagniappes are nice. What’s not to like about a beautiful day? (Or any other diversion.) But, as Thoreau makes so clear, beautiful days mask more than they reveal both about the Creator and about ourselves. Bottom line: if the relationship hinges on special occasions, on sensory treats, perhaps it’s not that much of a relationship.

In Chapter Five of Walden, Thoreau quotes Confucius:
"How vast and profound is the influence of the subtle powers of Heaven and of Earth! We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them."

The “subtle powers of Heaven and of Earth,” are, in my interpretation of this passage, the Creator’s Energy, imbued into and thus become an inalienable part of Everything.

I believe this, I do. Especially when it’s easy. When the air is sweet and the sky is clear and faith would seem to demand nothing whatsoever from me. When I kneel in the warm Summer earth of the garden, I am part of Everything and Oneness is not a matter of faith so much as a matter of fact.

During an Allegheny Mountain mid-winter, the situation is quite a bit different. From weather-mandated physical separation, a spiritual alienation easily follows. How quickly I forget to remember we are One. How quickly I fall under the influence of thought-phantoms of separation.

The snow falls, the wind blows, the fog persists. And as each day unfolds, I feel myself more distracted by the absence of the lagniappes upon which I’d grown so dependent. The Creator would seem to have stopped wooing me entirely.

But, of course, such a statement presupposes that all “occasions” of connection with the Creator’s Energy must occur out there, on days when the view through the window is crystal clear. Such a statement assumes that the sight of wind-wizened twigs on the end of a lichen-draped branch imparts more Spirit than the sight of my own work-roughened fingers at the kitchen sink or the keyboard.

After re-reading Walden, I’m quite certain that Thoreau (and perhaps Confucius as well) would tell me I’m mistaken in this. They’d tell me, instead, that the bones of my hands are the trees, and my skin the forest floor. They'd insist that I am, myself, no less cause for wonderment than any other creation. On any occasion. The workman does not leave his work, regardless of the weather.

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