Ridge, Cove

Finding the southern Appalachians

My assistant on our backcountry trail crew in Shoshone National Forest was a guy from Georgia we’ll call Ralph. We lived together in Sinks Canyon, the gateway to the Wind River Range outside Lander, in a government cabin beneath tall cliffs on the Popo Agie River. Like many western valleys, the south-facing wall of the canyon was dry and treeless, littered with huge tawny boulders and the occasional juniper. The shadier side was preposterously greener, blanketed in dense Douglas fir and aspen, but even those verdant slopes were a slight disappointment to me and Ralph. As we learned that season in Shoshone, both of us yearned for a deeper green.

Ralph and I were Appalachians—not culturally, exactly, but ecologically. We’d both grown up back east, and we’d gotten our first taste of the wilderness in the leafy forests of the Appalachian Mountains. Although we’d spent seasons building trails in the West before we met in Lander, something about Wyoming quickly magnified our affection for home. Not long after we moved in, I went to the bookshop in town and bought an old secondhand photography book about the Appalachian Trail. Ralph and I would thumb the book at our coffee table and feast our eyes on the dreamy film shots of deciduous canopies, rhododendrons, and infinite shades of green. We had two other roommates in the cabin, and they mostly stared at the photos with puzzled expressions. They were Southwestern and Midwestern—fulfilled and satisfied by the arid, sunny Rockies. They must have pitied us. Secretly, we pitied them.

In Shoshone, Ralph and I patrolled seldom-visited trails in the Winds and the remote Absaroka Mountains on the outskirts of Yellowstone. We saw glaciers, turquoise rivers, and deer carcasses buried by grizzly bears; we camped in golden meadows beneath snowy, blue peaks and cooled our feet among legendary trout in the streams. But at night, we talked about home. The western woods were too quiet, we thought, and we missed cicadas and katydids. Aspen groves brought talk of the swish of our eastern leaf litter. It wasn’t that we didn’t appreciate the beauty of the Shoshone. We were almost constantly in awe of it, and during the frequent brutal lows of trail work were often consoled by its majesty. But I was never able to fall in love with it. That September, Ralph and I both declined offers to come back to Shoshone the next season. We returned to Georgia and Vermont, the places we loved most.

The years after passed quickly, and in unexpected ways. Ralph settled in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I moved to Burlington, and that winter we talked on the phone and remembered the Shoshone with nearly as much affection as the eastern forest before. That year something pulled Ralph back west again, and he took a job on the Snoqualmie National Forest in the Washington Cascades as I signed on to a crew in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The season after that, I felt the pull myself. As luck had it, I took Ralph’s old job on the Snoqualmie district as he moved back to Chattanooga.

Then, in Washington, I got Long Covid. I moved home to Connecticut and wondered if I would ever get to explore the mountains again. Slowly, I recovered well enough to walk in the woods of my tame, suburban hometown. I learned to look more closely for wildness in new, smaller places, leaf litter, understory, decaying logs. Not wilderness, but the essential elements of it.

Ralph and I spoke that winter and remembered plans we’d once made in the Shoshone backcountry. We wanted to introduce each other to the places we’d described over those western campfires, the staggeringly different but intimately related forests of the north and southeast. I was still slowly getting better, and we decided on a weekend in the spring for me to visit Tennessee. I let Ralph know that I wouldn’t be able to do any real hiking, but Ralph didn’t mind. We could find a free campsite on a creek and relax, and he assured me we could enjoy the essentials.

---

I wasn’t well enough to make the drive until midsummer, but I finally hit the road to Chattanooga on a Friday morning in late June. After crossing the Hudson Highlands, the interstate ran south through a valley that had many names. The Lehigh Valley; the Lebanon Valley; the Cumberland Valley; the Hagerstown Valley; the Shenandoah Valley; the Roanoke Valley, near Tinker Creek; the New River Valley; the Holston Valley; and finally, as the sun began to set, the Tennessee. This was the Great Appalachian Valley, which separates the highest peaks in the range—the Greens and Whites, the Blue Ridge, the Smokies—from the peculiar walls of the ridge-and-valley province, all the way from Burlington to Chattanooga. Twelve hours later, I hit kudzu. Mountains stood in the east as the sun went down.

Ralph’s house was across the river from downtown Chatt, as he called it. I passed over the Chickamauga dam impounding the enormous dusky reflection of the Tennessee. Ralph lived in a neighborhood of long one-story houses eclipsed by spacious front porches. Ralph was waiting for me in the backyard, smoking a cigarette and holding a cat on a leash.

Ralph and I greeted each other with a hug, and then we made introductions. “This is Rocco,” said Ralph. “He’s blind.” Rocco had lost his eyes as a street cat, but he walked up slowly and rubbed his face against my leg before lying back down on the grass. Ralph wore skinny ripped-off jean shorts and a black t-shirt, and he had the strong, wiry build of a seasoned trail worker. He looked much the same as he had in Wyoming, with the exception of a long, half-blond mullet spilling out of his baseball cap and a tattoo of a katydid on his arm.

“It’s crazy seeing you with short hair,” he said. His patient drawl, I thought, had gotten a little thicker down South. A tree on the edge of the yard oscillated with deafening hums of cicadas.

Night was falling, but the humidity felt like a weighted pack. Chattanooga and most of the southeast were about to roast under a heat dome all weekend, which we hoped would be more bearable in the mountains. Fireflies blinked over the yard as we sat at his picnic table and discussed the plan.

Back in the Southeastern Conservation Corps, Ralph had worked out of a campsite on the Cherokee National Forest at a place called Citico Creek. He said on the phone during my drive that it was one of the prettiest places he’d ever seen—a clear, bucolic mountain stream deep in the mountains, with endless swimming holes and lots of free car campsites. My own research before the trip had failed to uncover it. And it had another distinction: it was the endemic home to a species of fish, the Citico darter, that was known to live in only two other streams in the southern Appalachians.

“But then in the 50s, managers poisoned one of those creeks and extirpated the darters,” said Ralph. “They were competing with stocked rainbow trout. But they’re still in the Citico. I’m bringing my goggles and snorkel. You’re welcome to borrow them too.”

Ralph’s girlfriend, Rosie, would also be joining. They’d begun dating after Wyoming, just before he took the job in Washington. I’d only seen pictures on Instagram, but between those and our phone calls I’d heard and seen only good things, and I was excited to meet her. Other than meeting Rosie, there was the sense between us that not much else was new—the result of our phone calls and social media, for one, but also that Shoshone still tended to feel like yesterday. It felt good to be back, headed for the mountains.

Under a wooden ramada at the end of the driveway sat Ralph’s white van. I was especially glad to see the van. He’d had it back in Wyoming, and by then had already lived a few seasons in the cozy, uniquely rustic vanlife apartment he’d built in it. Over the years he’d also fixed or replaced most of its mechanical parts himself. I wasn’t sure how old it was, but guessed sometime in the 2000s. Ralph had once sneered at the five- and six-figure custom-built vans that abounded in Lander. “Those people do not need to live in vans,” he said.

Since Rosie had to work on Sunday, we decided to take both our cars to the campsite and part ways from there. As we drove to the city to spend the night at Rosie’s, my ‘14 Subaru strained to keep up with the van. I tried to get a sense of abbreviated Chattanooga under the streetlights as we crossed long, dark avenues of industrial warehouses, strip malls, chain drive-throughs and blocks of small southern homes. Most of the homes looked poor, with occasional new construction like the boxy outdoor-chic homes in similarly gentrifying towns.

Rosie’s house stood out from the others on her block, beginning at the yard. A riot of wildflowers burst from the sidewalk and into every corner of the square lot, and in the middle was a massive, gnarled oak tree. The little house had colorful trimmings and decorations that looked joyous yet casual, like the home of a kindly, eclectic hermit. Ralph let us in through the heavy front door, and Rosie greeted us in the living room. She was short, with short brown hair, and wore a cropped t-shirt and shorts revealing tattoos across her arms and legs. She hugged Ralph and said hello to me with a wide, unreserved smile. Her voice was a lighter, brighter version of Ralph’s drawl.

“I’m so glad I get to finally meet the person from Ralph’s stories!” she said.

Rosie was from the Deep South, like Ralphj, but had found her way to Chatt working in outdoor education. We spent the night drinking, telling stories and making confessions about the common side effects of glamorous outdoor work: mental illness; isolation; exploitative pay and working conditions; the dangerous glimmer of our “cool” jobs. I learned Rosie had a chronic condition that made her budget her activity much like I did, and we swapped tales of useless doctors. Once she went hiking with Ralph and couldn’t reach the top of the mountain, so Ralph put her on his back and carried her to the summit. Then, he carried her all the way back down. We stayed up longer than planned; Ralph whipped us up a delicious late dinner. “That’s my man,” said Rosie, beaming. She was bringing goggles to explore the creek too.

“By the way, you’re welcome to borrow them if you want,” she said.

---

In the morning we had coffee on the front porch. The oak tree, I noticed, had a deep gouge in one side that could fit a bear. Ralph said it had two trunks once, and when the rotten one looked finally ready to fall on Rosie’s house, he climbed up with a hand saw and pulled it down. Ralph and Rosie were kindred spirits in their effortless cheer for DIY. The thrifted antiques in her living room stood beneath varieties of framed art the two of them had made. Ralph showed me a weed whacker on the porch that he’d found broken in a heap at work and then fixed up a few weeks ago. Rosie named the wildflowers she’d planted along the sidewalk and around the old tree.

The early heat forced us not to linger. We took the interstate through the sprawl around the city, then turned east on a quiet county road. In the foothills we entered a region of small farms and woodlots, endless configurations of field, forest and stream. The homes and the ubiquitous porches appeared to date from another century, and though they were visibly poor they appeared well-tended, lacking only money. Trump flags abounded. In the hollows and ravines between the hills there were shady streams filled with dead leaves and ferns.

At a fork we turned on a gravel road and entered Cherokee National Forest. The only sign was a small brown placard with the Forest Service road number. But in an instant, there was no sense that anything stood around us but woods. All I could see was the road, the next curve, and the chaos of forested slopes descending from every direction. There were ridges above us, and deep ravines below, but where they began and ended was a mystery, which grew deeper and less conceivable as the road traced the fractal of the mountain. It was a jungle less of vegetation than terrain. Ridge, then cove, ridge, cove. The winding road at last reached a col in the ridge and plummeted downhill into a new valley, and we emerged at a sunny creek. The mountain slopes met the water at impossible angles, steeper, I thought, than even the walls of the North Cascades. Above, I recognized the light in the canopy—something I had been missing for a long time. A green unlike any other, less a color than a natural substance all its own. The green ran willfully over the slopes and across the branches, dancing over the water and rushing upward towards the invisible peaks. It was perfect, endless, Appalachian green.

This was Citico Creek. We followed the road upstream, passing hikers, anglers, and a group of riders on horses who waved and disappeared into the woods. I parked behind the Ralph and Rosie in a pull-out, and Ralph poked his head from the van to give directions.

“The best sites are up a ways, after the two developed campsites,” he said. “We’ll just drive past those and look for a good site until we get to the fork.”

The creek was filled with fly fishers casting in the pools, each one achingly beautiful. Waterfalls descended steps of rock that looked perfectly cut and artfully arranged, and each bank was lined completely with bursts of rhododendrons in bloom. The road itself was bustling. Large pickups hauling larger campers passed us at every blind turn. Soon we reached the fork, but had found no vacant campsites. We pulled over again.

On the map, Ralph showed us that one fork led up to the Cherohala Skyway, the scenic road over the mountains into North Carolina. There was a large recreation area near the junction with a lake, and if we found no campsites on the way, we could take a break at the water and come back to check the other road.

The road to the Skyway passed through several deep coves, which is the regional term for the spectacular ravines that define every slope of the southern Appalachians. Looking out over the downhill side, the view showed nearby treetops a hundred feet above their roots, nearly close enough for a brave person to jump into. The coves seemed to hardly notice the road; it looked like a few good storms and agency budget cuts would soon erase it with dead wood, the leaf litter, and more rhododendrons. I’d read that these coves were revered for the staggering biodiversity they sheltered, each with a distinct microclimate even beyond what elevation could provide. But the trees and rhododendrons grew so thick on the sheer slope that thought of exploring one looked ludicrous, even from a car.

There were no views at the lake, but the campground loop brought us unexpectedly to a small log-cabin general store. It was a welcome driving break. We browsed its t-shirts, hats, and outrageous specialty camp gear baiting the green first-timers, but ended up buying a few forgotten necessities ourselves too. We were there to take it easy, after all.

“Oh my god,” Rosie said from the back of the store. “They have Bug Juice!”

“Is it good?” I asked.

“Have you never had Bug Juice?" she said incredulously. “You need to try some. It’s like the taste of childhood. Or mine at least.”

Bug Juice was a dark purple concoction that came in a small plastic bottle with a pop-up squeeze cap. I tasted it thoughtfully. Suddenly recognition surged onto my tongue. “I lied, I’ve had this before,” I said. “These are Mondos.”

“What are Mondos?” said Rosie.

As I grabbed an extra bag of ice from the freezer outside, Ralph and Rosie went to inspect a small puddle in a ditch between the parking lot and the road. I found them both crouching over the water, gazing into the milky bluish pool beneath.

“Found one,” Ralph said. “Jamie, check this out.”

He slowly lifted a baseball-sized rock under the water. “Right there—just a small one,” he said. It was a salamander. It wiggled its body in what looked like very sluggish alarm. “It’s a juvenile,” he said, unsure of the species. All I could think of was how many times I’d gone looking for salamanders in my woods back home, combing every log and pile of bark I could find, never successful. Here was the icon of the southern Appalachians, a salamander, living in a parking lot ditch.

Rosie had found something too, and a foot or two away from the salamander showed me something I’d never seen before: a crayfish. It was a perfect, miniature lobster. A few minutes later we found two more even bigger than the first. Ralph ducked beneath the branches of a rhododendron shading the ditch, looked for a moment, and said, “Got leopard frogs.” Two of them sat in the water, watching us back. “Man I love herping,” Ralph said. Overhead in the pines, a wood pewee, a vireo and a hairy woodpecker competed for attention. Cars whooshed past on the road across the ditch, children yelled on the steps of the general store, and I returned to the crayfish to stare a little longer, enjoying the essentials.

---

Back down on the Citico, looking for campsites, we passed a gravel pull-out that at first looked unpromising. But after another pass up the crowded creek, it seemed like our only choice. A faint trail in the undergrowth led towards the river, and Ralph hopped out to inspect it. When he came back, he simply said, “Yup!”

The trail led across a bar jutting into the creek, and about twenty yards further we found a few clearings around two sturdy rock fire rings. The furthest clearing opened into the bend in the creek with broad, smooth cobblestones, and the water slowed into a deep, still pool. Beyond the curve of the river we could see the edge of the falls downstream, where the foliage behind it implied a precipitous drop. Upstream the creek fell into the pool over gentle rapids, or sheeted over clean rock slabs that sank into the clear, pebbly sand of the creek bed. The rocky banks were lined with flowering rhododendrons, and above was the green canopy wafting joyously in the sun.

At the sight of the water, it suddenly hit us how long we’d been in a car. I announced I was going to take a dip at once, and the others eagerly concurred. I noticed at that moment that the afternoon was still pleasingly cool; we’d beaten the heat dome here in the mountains after all. I’d been a little skeptical on my drive south, unsure of the foreign conversion rate of altitude and latitude. But even sitting in the sunlight on the banks was comfortable here, which boded well for a swim in the creek. While Ralph and Rosie went to change in the van, I slipped on my swim trunks behind my pitched tent and stepped from the sandbar onto the slick boulders of the creek. I felt the chill of the stream-cooled air, the steady yet persuasive current against my legs. I waded out up to my waist, took a breath, and plunged backwards into the cold.

Ralph and Rosie returned and laughed at my head and neck floating above the water. I’d found a well-shaped boulder under the water to sit on, with the current at my back propping me up like a recliner.

The two of them donned their goggles and swam downstream to where the pool was widest. Ralph reached the middle of the pool first and lifted his head. “Can’t touch bottom here,” he said. Rosie swam up next to him and floated peacefully on her back.

I sat watching them. They swam together, parted, and returned, smiled, splashed each other, pointed out the life that swam beneath them, held each other in the current. Their love seemed perfectly at home in this paradise on the creek. While they continued inspecting the life underneath, I took a moment to close my eyes. I breathed slowly and deeply, and I focused on the sounds of water over stone. I let the nerves of my arms and legs settle into the cold, slip from my awareness into the creek, and drift. It was a practice I’d begun a few months before, as an experiment for the chronic pain the doctors couldn’t heal or relieve. Cold waters. I smelled the forest, the creek, the wild green and brown things alive in the waters. When I opened my eyes, Ralph and Rosie were swimming back to shore.

We sat on the bank eating blueberries and watermelon by a musclewood tree that stooped far and low over the creek. The pool enchanted me. Gratitude and something more welled up in my chest. I told them about something that had been on my mind lately that felt suddenly pertinent. A side-effect of my illness.

“I’ve been reading about the idea that separateness is an illusion,” I said. “How all life is one. It helped me accept things and deal with everything early on. I don’t know why. But I think it’s true.”

I expected silence, but Rosie said immediately, “Oh definitely. I think so too.”

“Same,” said Ralph.

Ralph said he had seen a 12-inch trout in the pool, and schools of what he was pretty sure were Citico darters.

---

As we dried off on the rocks, Rosie opened her bag and asked if I’d like a hit of her bong. Maybe later, I said. We took another swim in the creek. I explored the deeper pool, scrambled up a small ledge on the opposite bank and jumped in. I was back in my river chair, feeling the possible Citico darters gently nibbling my feet, when a figure appeared on the bank.

“How are you folks doing today,” said the ranger. He wore a neat broad-brimmed hat and a green bulletproof vest above his holsters. Two others in different uniforms stood behind him, but shared his demeanor.

We had occupied an unauthorized campsite, and furthermore, we had left paraphernalia in view on the rocks near the illegal tent. The law enforcement ranger and his counterparts from the state and county watched sternly as we carried our things to our vehicles. They took our identifications and said to sit tight. The ranger came back with a paper citation for me, the owner of the pitched tent, for prohibited occupation. Fortunately, it carried no fine. To me, the site had certainly appeared maintained for campers given its location, tent clearings and fire rings. I told the officers that our party had two former wilderness rangers who were willing and qualified to naturalize the illegal campsite if necessary. They made no reply. The real issue was the bong, which fell into a complicated crack between the split jurisdictions of their unit that required further deliberation. Luckily, Rosie had bought it from a legal dispensary in Tennessee.

“Here’s the thing,” the ranger said, “This is a federally controlled substance, and we are on federal land. But President Biden is my boss, and he pardoned everybody with a marijuana conviction. So, what do we do? Who fuckin’ knows.” In the end they let us go, and didn’t even take the bong.

I went back to retrieve my towel hanging from the musclewood tree and met a man with a fishing rod and wraparound sunglasses standing in the clearing. “All yours,” I said. “We saw some big trout in that pool.”

“Oh, I fished here this mornin’, there’s nothin’ in there,” he said. “I just came to see what was goin’ on.”

At the cars, the three of us considered our options—not many. Ralph pointed out a road that went up a tributary of the Citico and formed a loop. The road was rougher than the ones we’d seen so far, deep in the bottom of a gorge, and the creek smaller. We crept past many stunning waterfalls, but I could see its shallow pools getting smaller the higher we climbed.

A few miles later, the road left the steep-sided gorge and levelled out into a vast grove. We turned away from the creek, putting a stretch of woods between us and the water. An old pickup truck with a pop-up camper appeared in the trees, and an old long-bearded man sat alone at the fire ring beside it. We waved as we passed. The campsite next door was vacant.

The van and the Subaru wobbled mightily over some thick roots at the entrance, but the site looked good. Our fire ring was across the stretch of woods, right on the creek, with ample tent space on all sides. An opening on the creek through the ubiquitous rhododendron showed a little flume trickling over a sparkling slab into a small, pretty pool. A brown placard with a number on it announced our site was authorized.

“Shit,” I said as I pulled out my tent. Years ago I’d cut out the elastic in my tent poles, holding it together, when the string got loose and unruly. But now one of the crucial plastic inserts near the top of the arch was missing. “Think I dropped it when I packed up back there.”

“Think I’ve got some P-cord,” Ralph said. He rummaged in the van and pulled out a mass of dirty white string. “Sorry it’s covered in engine oil though.” He tossed it to me. “You can keep it.”

“Well, you survived the grizzlies when that WD-40 exploded on your sleeping bag.”

“Dude that sucked. It was hard to breathe.”

We told Rosie how we’d met a local Wyoming fisherman at a bar who tipped us off about coating his lures in WD, which we carried in our saw kits to clean the blades. It’s got fish oil in it, he told us. Not technically legal. But it attracts Muskie. And bears, we assumed, though we never did meet a grizzly that season. I rigged up my tent to a clothesline on a couple trees and pinned the corners down as best I could. “I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a black bear,” I said.

---

The trees in our new campsite were magnificent, and it seemed like each one was a different species. On a quick survey around the site I noted white pine, eastern hemlock, American beech, black birch, yellow birch, white oak, red maple, sugar maple, sycamore, sweetgum, musclewood (that is, American hornbeam), the towering tulip tree, and more hickories than I could identify. Or perhaps it was the Carolina shagbark. And Carolina hemlock. I was prepared coming south to feel, for once, out of my depth in the tree department; I read something before the trip that the southern Appalachians have more tree species than all of Europe. In contrast, when Ralph and I logged out trails in the Winds and the Absarokas, we cut hundreds of fallen trees, but rarely more than three or four species. Coming back east after that season made Yellowstone look like a desert, which is how New England now looked to me. Here there were several trees around my tent I could only guess at—magnolia? —and a few more on the hill across the creek. The lush understory was even more daunting. I took comfort in a familiar patch of vaccinium near the pines.

One of the great surprises I’d found on the trip was seeing my familiar northern hardwood trees looking so comfortable and at home in these distant, strange mountains. Most ridges I’d managed to glimpse from the road had a few tall crowns of eastern white pine breaching the canopy like fireworks. Hemlocks shaded the streams in the ravines just as they did up north, and I had to do a few double-takes at the sugar maple. Did it get cold enough in these mountains for the sap to run? I wondered.

Sometimes on evening hikes in the White Mountains, heading towards the trail truck, I’d imagine a forest that I knew could only exist in my dreams, where the birches and spruce were joined by fantastic trees and plants beyond counting all throughout the well-known eastern landscape, where beasts not known since ancient epics and medieval sagas dwelled, a forest of myths and gods. It was only a slight stretch to imagine that forest here.

“It just feels homey, somehow, to me,” said Ralph as we sat by the creek. “That’s the best way I can describe it. Like, you don’t need to hike up the mountain to get it—but that’s fine too. But you can just sit somewhere and enjoy it.”

Upstream from the flume below our fire pit was another pool. It was about ten yards long, six or seven feet wide, almost perfectly rectangular, with a little waterfall upstream. On the bank, a flat rock ledge stuck up a few inches above the water, and jutting out below that was another flat ledge underwater, like the seat in a jacuzzi. You couldn’t build a more perfect pool.

We swam again, feeling nibbles on our feet, and watched Carolina chickadees and woodpeckers dart up and down the trees. After that we all took some time for ourselves. Ralph walked up the road to see where the creek went, and Rosie took a notebook to sit by the flume. I found a large boulder up near the cars under the tall pines. I had a book, binoculars, and my sketch pad, but after sitting a while I dug out my old logger boots from under the passenger’s seat, the ones I’d worn as a trail worker, and gave them a fresh coat of oil.

---

I found it interesting, when I got home, to learn about the ancient village called Citico. The first record of it, “Satapo,” comes from Spanish settlers who met the Cherokee there a century before the Pilgrims on a doomed expedition through the south. Ancient Citico was flooded by the Tellico dam. When America sent armies into the mountains of the Cherokee nation, a great chief named Dragging Canoe led the residents of a village named Tanasi away from the encroachers and built a new town on the great river in what is now Chattanooga—the river settlers once called the Cherokee. Strangely, both the east and west sides of the mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina, as far east as Asheville, all send their waters down past Chattanooga on the Tanasi.

Back in the Cherokee National Forest, Ralph returned from his walk and said he found something. He led us up the road to a large fallen tree. Bark and limbs layed in a mess all around the giant bole, and for a second I thought we were back on log-out, sizing up where to make the cut. Ralph lifted up a plate of bark. “You see it?” he said. A huge, shiny red creature stood frozen in the leaves, and it had black spots on its back. “I think it’s just called a red salamander,” Ralph said. “I’ve actually never found one.”

I got as close as I could to take a picture. Ralph gently returned its bark.

The light began to fade. Rosie collected sticks and logs for the firewood pile while Ralph built a nest of whittled shavings for kindling. Soon our fire was roaring, and we used the sticks Ralph whittled into points to roast hot dogs. Crickets and katydids chirped invisibly in the branches, and fireflies blinked all around us. I remember our conversation in brief flickers, like the dancing flames.

“I haven’t gone backpacking in a while,” said Ralph. “Trail work kind of took it out of me.”

I nodded. “Yeah it feels weird to say this, but I’m actually a bit grateful this thing forced me to take a break from it. I never realized how much I was motivated by this like, mountain man ethos. Like I constantly had to prove something.”

“The thing about backpacking,” Ralph said, lighting another cigarette, “is I stopped seeing the point. Like it’s fun to hike really far, but it feels boring to me when that’s all you’re doing. Most backpackers and hikers see the mountains as a big gym. I could spend all day just walking up a section of creek looking for critters.”

“I’ve met trail workers who can’t tell a spruce from a fir.”

“Right!” said Rosie. “I’d rather hunt for frogs and bugs. Thankfully Ralph likes bugs as much as I do. I love just swimming in the creeks with my goggles.”

“I need to get some goggles.”

We looked around at the fireflies, trying to guess their patterns and what if anything they were trying to say. A huge green katydid sat on my camping lantern, unfazed by the frantic white moths.

“I’m dying to see foxfire.”

“Oh Ralph, did you ever tell Rosie about the scary hitch story.”

“Oh my god yes! But wait Jamie I need to year your side now.”

“Ok. This is good because I made a policy to only tell it over campfires.”

I told them my side of what happened that night.

“Holy shit.”

“Honestly dude, hearing it from you again makes it feel even spookier to me now.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I have some theories. Ralph, what do you think?”

We fed more logs on the fire. Stars appeared between the trees.

“I think we need to move up north. I want to keep working outside but it’s getting unbearable here.”

“Yeah. Chattanooga is nice though. I mean it’s really progressive for down here. But shit is still scary. I mean me and my queer friends—Tennessee is so hostile to queer people and women in general. Like, we might be fucked.”

“Rent here is fucking ridiculous. I make more now than I ever have and I can’t see myself not needing roommates unless I suddenly get a drastically higher-paying job. Which, realistically, I won’t.”

“I don’t know what the answer is. I think things won’t go on like this forever. But they could get worse for a while before they get better.”

“My friend wrote something I think was true, talking about climate change. He said the world isn’t going to collapse on us in our lifetime, but he’ll have to watch the things he loves get steadily shittier and shittier until he dies.”

“True.”

“Personally, I am less of a doomer now than I used to be. I mean, I think the federal government might actually be collapsing, at least the parts for us. But if we can’t have a big government response people can still do a lot on their own. You can get people together to plant food trees and pull invasives. Garden. Forage. Start a commune or whatever.”

“But seriously though.”

“Yeah nobody’s coming to save us.”

“I think you guys would like Ken Layne’s radio show.”

“I do know that whenever I leave the southeast I regret it.”

“Yeah. It’s home.”

We kept on until the fire died. There were a few more moments that night when I forgot where I was, and that I wasn’t on a backcountry hitch on the trail crew with Ralph. We’d spent a long season building our friendship around campfires, and the fire was its home. With Rosie now here too, it felt like a hint of what more could be built around a campfire, beneath the trees, as we all outrun the heat.

I fell asleep in my tent without the rain fly, gazing at the dark shapes of the trees against the stars.

---

Ralph already had the fire going when I woke up, sending blue smoke into the canopy. The wild Appalachian green had resumed its race over the hills and valleys in the morning sun. I realized what I most wanted was an immediate morning swim in the pool. The water looked even clearer than before in the morning light, and the rocks in the creek bed shone like green jewels. I admired the tall rhododendrons and their pink-white flowers lining the banks, the moss that began nearly right at the water’s edge and crept over the rocks into the undergrowth. It was like a forest spirit had just passed through and raised green life with its footsteps. I let the waters flow over me.

Ralph and Rosie came up to the pool a few minutes later, hesitant. “I can’t just dunk in like that. I need to ease in,” said Ralph. But I insisted. They waded out into the pool until the water was at their waist, shoulders hunched and flinching. But then they held each other, counted down, and toppled in.

Later we walked the dry cobblestones and shallows of the creek upstream, looking for critters. Frogs leapt into the water as we walked by gently checking the stones, finding dozens of crayfish, salamanders, tadpoles, and countless aquatic bugs. Little schools of fish darted towards cover or meandered off distractedly in the pools and shallows. The creek felt as dazzling and rich with life as a tide pool in the oceanic forest. Huge, bright yellow butterflies fluttered in circles around us. “Tiger swallowtails,” Rosie said. On a rock beneath an enormous sycamore, a kaleidoscope of smaller, pale blue butterflies swarmed gorgeously on a long dry turd.

Entranced, I suddenly found myself thinking: Could I live here? The wonders all around us seemed too rare and precious, once seen, to leave behind. It got Richard Powers, after all. I wondered if I would head back north with some new regret, like Ralph and I found when we’d left Shoshone. But those anxieties were behind us now, like many other things. We’d gone west, returned, left again, and found the tether of home still tugging our boots. Now Ralph and Rosie were building a new home together. I hoped that despite my illness I could eventually do the same. But it was enough for now to recover that miraculous green.

Rosie had to get to work, so we packed up our things and doused the fire. The quickest way back, it turned out, was the Cherohala Skyway. I didn’t have anywhere to be but the road, so I followed them to find a good overlook where we could take a group picture before I turned north. We took the fork back up through the deep coves and the lake, and the dirt road stopped at the paved Cherohala. It wound over ridges and through passes in the deep, complex mountains, and every glimpse of the forest rushing by looked like a world of its own, some just like New England, others like a dream. The first viewpoint appeared on our left, looking south across a steep valley towards an unknown range of mountains. Rather than name the peaks, the sign at the overlook spoke about the forest. It said here was once a wilderness of marvelous trees in size and diversity found nowhere else on earth, until, eventually, logging and settlement cut it all down.

We kept driving, winding through the regrown forest, until the wide Tellico River came up on our right filled with people on boats and inflatables. A few minutes later we reached the town of Tellico Plains. Ralph called me from the van and laughed: “Sorry, thought there were more views.”

We pulled off together at a gas station and took our group selfie in front of the van at the pump. They waved as they drove off, taking a different way home.