Many years ago, as an enthusiast for day-hikes in real wilderness, I had lived in various places\u2013but always the proverbial stone\u2019s-throw from the Appalachian Trail, which stretches over 2000 miles from Georgia to Maine.\u00a0 Had I been young, I might have fervently embraced the thru-hiker\u2019s quest\u2013to complete the whole journey.\u00a0 But, well into middle-age, my intention was a more modest one: daily walking, in forest surroundings\u2013not unlike Thoreau\u2019s simple credo in his own essay \u201cWalking.\u201d<\/p>\n
An anthropologist by training (Ph.D., Columbia), I found my interests (largely psychoanalytic) disparaged in the then-ideologically confused climate of academic rivalries.\u00a0 I wrote two books, but to my surprise found teaching more satisfying.\u00a0 As an adjunct at several universities, I was free to teach in my own way\u2013without the usual harassment of departmental committees, departmental factionalism, and the customary low-profile cowering that precedes the award of tenure.\u00a0 As an unexpected benefit (since adjuncts receive no material<\/em> benefit-coverage), I found my intellectual horizons continually broadening and deepening as I volunteered to teach classical sociological theory, sociology of religion, \u201csocial problems,\u201d and interdisciplnary Core courses which\u00a0 included Plato, Montaigne, Huxley, Kafka, Camus, Buber, and Annie Dillard\u2013just to name a few.<\/p>\n But my enthusiasm was eventually worn down by the ridiculously low-wages (nowadays well-documented by innumerable good books, as well as successful union representation).\u00a0 Living in New Jersey was expensive.\u00a0 I taught at least 15 courses per year, and was \u201clucky\u201d to make $30,000.\u00a0 I decided to move to the northwest corner of the state, the New Jersey Highlands, where my beloved Appalachian Trail stretched across ridges from the Delaware Water Gap to a cliff offering a panoramic vista of the 10-mile long Greenwood Lake (the \u201cGrand View\u201d).\u00a0 (Standing at that spot the day after 9\/11, I saw giant plumes of smoke drifting upward from a pile of debris.)\u00a0 So, up on the Bearfort Ridge (where bears were a not uncommon sight), surrounded on all sides by forest and ascending trails, 100 yards from the AT, I rented a small, non-insulated house (where I nonetheless survived the snowbound winter).\u00a0 Wildlife encounters were frequent and fascinating: not only bears, but foxes, turkeys, porcupines, and timber rattlers.<\/p>\n I greeted every day with a quick climb up a ridge trail, which ascended even further to a remote lake which overlooked many towns and distant highways.\u00a0 Not unlike Thoreau, I found a sufficient variety of trails, some rarely frequented, to make my afternoon treks full of the unexpected.\u00a0 In those days, physically well-conditioned, I often felt a peace-of-mind and sense of freedom on those hikes which I now find sadly elusive.<\/p>\n True, on most days, I was still teaching\u2013traveling congested interstates to my courses, which were becoming more frustrating and less satisfying.<\/p>\n After 15-plus years of \u201cearning my living\u201d in this manner, I had come to a reckoning.\u00a0 I resolved to resign, leave New Jersey, and try a year of \u201cconscientious non-participation\u201d from the mindless consumerism and vulgar careerism I despised.\u00a0 A year for open-air, daily expeditions, mostly on different sections of the AT, was what I envisaged.\u00a0 I had $10,000 to work with.\u00a0 Could I live for a year on that?<\/p>\n Selling off my few sticks of furniture and packing my voluminous supply of books and CDs, I headed South.\u00a0 My destination? Damascus, Virginia, little more than a hamlet of 900 folks, nestled in the southwest edge of the state, on the southern flank of the Blue Ridge.\u00a0 \u201cTrail-town USA\u201d, former thru-hikers had chosen this pleasant little town as an annual meeting-place, a couple of days to renew acquaintances and share reminiscences.\u00a0 The town itself is little more than a short main street, occupied by small businesses and small churches (as well as a few bungalows reinvented as \u201cB-and-Bs\u201d for the hikers).\u00a0 I rented a tiny house where, stepping outside every morning, I could cross the rickety Beaver Dam bridge and instantly find myself climbing the steep, winding trail of Holston Mountain, which led to a gently ascending ridge which followed the AT all the way to the Tennessee state-line (about 4 and \u00bd miles).\u00a0 Resting on a log and eating apples, I reveled in the peaceful silence, mountain breezes, and distant views of cows grazing languidly across vast open pastures.<\/p>\n Hikers descending from Tennessee into the town found that the AT followed the main street, where they could stop to eat as well as buy any needed gear at the trail-goods store.\u00a0 Then continuing, they would quickly climb a rickety, wooden staircase back into the forest\u2013many relentless in their quest to make it all the way to the end-point at Mt. Katahdin, Maine. On very hot days, I would drive up the adjacent steep, winding highway of what is known as the Mt. Rogers Recreation Area (Jefferson National Forest), said to include some 400 miles of hiking trails.\u00a0 It was not only much cooler up at 4500\u2019, but the mountain top was a \u201cbald\u201d — a vast, sprawling grassland where wild ponies of unknown origins were sometimes sighted.<\/p>\n After several months, I decided to move some 50 miles northeast, where the Roanoke area converged with some of the most scenic stretches of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Appalachia.\u00a0 I rented the top floor of a long-defunct college building, drafty but solid granite.\u00a0 In the 1970s, a young Annie Dillard, recent grad of nearby Hollins College and something of a nature-poet, effectively captured moments of wondrous observation, often on the micro-level of the local creek.\u00a0 Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek<\/em> (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, and, teaching a literature course for many years, it was a book I regularly assigned.\u00a0 Now here I was, serendipitously, looking down at the gently flowing Tinker Creek from my third-floor window.\u00a0 (It constituted the boundary of the backyard.)\u00a0 Looking straight ahead, I could see the sprawling Tinker Mountain\u2013since Dillard\u2019s time, defaced by cell towers\u2013which is really an AT ridge trail linking the Blue Ridge with the Alleghenies some 20 miles away.\u00a0 (Macafee Knob, a flat-rock overlook of the valley below, was the spot where Redford and Nolte ate lunch in the movie Walk in the Woods<\/em>, based on Bill Bryson\u2019s humorous if somewhat sophomoric book.)\u00a0 I tried to find the approximate spot where Dillard had lived in those days\u2013some small house, in the backwoods between Hollins and Daleville\u2013but found the general locale now heavily suburbanized with houses.<\/p>\n On some days, driving down the abandoned US 11 (replaced by the interstate), I would venture onto gravel or dirt side roads, some of which went nowhere and some of which ended in tiny settlements of simple shanties, collapsed barns, and decaying 1940s roadsters which no one had bothered to remove.\u00a0 Other times, studying old ordnance maps, I would try to pinpoint remote, forgotten trailheads which, with some strenuous climbing, might lead to the top of the Blue Ridge (generally 3000\u2019 to 4000\u2019 elevation).\u00a0 Instead, I ended up driving the roadway which led up to the Parkway\u2013which, on weekdays, was empty of car traffic.\u00a0 The AT followed alongside for dozens of miles, affording pleasant day-hikes with 360-degree panoramas of checkerboard farmland stretching into the far distance below.<\/p>\n My year had ended.\u00a0 Thoreau, visiting Concord and his mother for a fresh-cooked meal almost daily, did not noticeably suffer loneliness.\u00a0 But his Walden, <\/em>inspirational and exhortatory, remains surprisingly relevant in its critique of unnecessary \u201cbusiness\u201d and the consequent loss of a pantheistic (eco-psychological) sensibility.\u00a0 In my own way, I had tried to live an open-air life, exuberantly affirming the free play of nature in the wild.\u00a0 I sought escape, not only from a crass, exploitative system of daily \u201cspiritual pollution\u201d (especially the media), but from my own self-obsessed \u201cproblems.\u201d\u00a0 My delightful, ever-varied observations of wildlife in the Appalachian mountains and forest constituted, I believe, a consciousness transcending the daily detritus of human folly and deluded desperation.<\/p>The post The Primal Sanity of Nature<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many years ago, as an enthusiast for day-hikes in real wilderness, I had lived in various places\u2013but always the proverbial stone\u2019s-throw from the Appalachian Trail, which stretches over 2000 miles from Georgia to Maine.\u00a0 Had I been young, I might have fervently embraced the thru-hiker\u2019s quest\u2013to complete the whole journey.\u00a0 But, well into middle-age, my [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post The Primal Sanity of Nature<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50221,770,50225,4490,660],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711603"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/281"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":711604,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711603\/revisions\/711604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}