Chapter Three

I made us each a large breakfast burrito, and we ate them while driving back up to the top of the pass where the forest service road crossed at the state line. I remembered the section to the left being much flatter than what we had walked the night before. But I couldn’t recall how far I had been down that road in the past. I was thinking we could ride about five miles out, along the rim of the gorge, and then five miles back. Maybe we could find one of the overlooks I had always heard about. I had decided that I wasn’t going to think about the river anymore. It was making me sick.
Mary had a nice Cannondale. I think it might have been more expensive than my entire bus, but I wasn’t judging. There were places where the morning fog still hung on the rim below us, but most of it was burning off and very warm sunshine beamed down where it could through the new growth of leaves. All the fresh April green still had that yellow to it, that gold that Frost writes about. I always felt that need to hold things back, grasping. The gold never lasts long enough.
Our tires cut through the fine gravel like mills, equal parts swish and grind. I can’t make these moments last, but in these moments, I never really know if the effort makes the experience seem longer or shorter. Grasping. I just try to be as present as possible. And then it is gone. Like trying to hold water in my hands. To me, Mary was somehow perfectly without judgment. She was better than me. A better person. I think she just had a purity that many of us don’t have. I imagined her having a pretty charmed life, and deserving every bit of it. Fortune. There was an innocence to her, but also a nobility, and a compassion that sprang up very naturally…very authentically. It wasn’t willed. It was her – I mean, compassion was her very nature. And I was entirely grateful for those moments with her.
“How long have you been giving these adventures?” she asked.
“I told you. Twenty years.”
“I mean taking women on these sexy adventures?” she clarified.
“Duh. Twenty years,” I shot back. I never understood how people could exercise and talk at the same time. She let out an excited squeal. It was kinda like a bird screeching.
“Whatever!” she laughed. “I know you were married for a long time.” Man, that overlook had to be around here somewhere. We looked at each other for as long as two people could safely lock eyes while riding bicycles on a mountain ridge. She was giving me that expectant look again. It was more than a look that said simply, “I’m waiting…” It was very fetching. There was something in it that I am sure was tied to some dim, ancient mystery of magically unlocking secret stone doors in mountainsides. The ridge here was still very wide. It runs along the rim of the gorge, but there are very few places to see the view. I knew we would come across an overlook eventually, but I had only heard about it from others. I had spent all these years on this river on the inside, looking up and out, but I never had the perspective of being outside and above her, looking down and in. “Do you know that I’ve been trying to figure out a way to see you for seven months?” she asked. “Seven months! You’re like a tumbleweed. Or a wall.”
“We’re together now,” I replied. “And anyway, it’s been over eight months, Mary.”
We found the first overlook about an hour into our ride. It would be a good spot to turn around. There wasn’t a lot to see at first, just sections between trees, and we had to move around the entire place to take in each part of the view. I discovered a narrow, steep foot path that started below a large rock and ran diagonally, disappearing into the trees below. We walked down to it, hoping for the best. It didn’t go far, but turned straight down, becoming dangerously steep and stopping at the top of a small rock outcropping. It was a sketchy climb down, but worth it. “Wow!” I said, “It’s better than I could have hoped for!” Really, the view was spectacular. We were suspended at the top, and inside, of a breathtaking 3,000 feet deep sculpture…living art.
“Holy Hell!” Mary said. There was a lot to take in. It seemed to drop off a 100 feet or much more all around every edge of this tiny rock, making us feel heady, and we had to steady each other as we crowded into the center, barely large enough to hold both of us. I think Mary was invoking her inner cat, gripping me with her nails.
“Let’s try to sit down,” I laughed, equal parts giddy, terrified, and entertained. Mary was funny. She obviously didn’t like heights any more than I did. The young Sun was maturing, rising higher into the clear, blue sky. Its light spilled over the ridge tops and was filling in the deep gorge below where the Nolichucky River, a thin brown ribbon, raged in another world. The last of the river fog, so thick this morning, was now nothing more than a few random puffs. Each ascended slowly in its own time, moving ethereally up the highest regions of the gorge. They rolled through and across the tree tops, gently pushed up and out by the warming air below. As they reached the elevation where we sat, they succumbed to the sun, brightened, and melted into clear nothingness. We were perched near the very top of a turn in the gorge, with a wide and distant view of this section of the world, where the earth’s skin wrinkled like giant smile lines; light, steep ridges, and deep dark valleys, all running in parallel meanders. I swear, I could almost hear the river below. Maybe it was a choir of angels. Or the bees.
“I think we’re near Rich Mountain,” I said softly, not wanting to dull the magic of the moment. “That means that we are about 4,600 feet above sea level here. The river is at 1,600 feet. They say that this is the deepest gorge in the southeast.”
“Are you lying?” she joked.
“No,” I giggled – it’s kinda a giggle – “that’s what they say.” I like it when you can just be quiet with a person, and feel that they are at peace. I had been suspicious of an idea in the past, but in these moments was becoming convinced. Every relationship seems like a conversation, and some are long. Many are short. Some have breaks in them but eventually pick up where they left off. In some strange ones a lot of information is conveyed in a very short amount of time. Those conversations can take years to digest. Maybe much longer. But each relationship was seeming to be a different conversation, as I had a different dialog with each person. Mary and I had a conversation that didn’t need to be rushed, and so we weren’t missing many of those little details by talking through the stillness of our connecting. We both saw the bald eagle at the same time. We saw the shadows in the distance shift and turn, and we saw the lighting change with them, a great silent show playing out before us as the sun slowly burnt across the zodiac. We felt the air warming, and could hear the ground around us drying and popping open with new life. I know of an old sage that once said that a flower lives when the Self perceives it, but I am beginning to feel that it is us that begin to live…ever deeper…for everything we can sit with. I sat with Mary for a very long time there.
“This is your first time up here?” her voice broke. I had drifted into a different realm. Mary took off her sunglasses and turned towards me more.
“Yes.” I was looking past her because I was avoiding her in this quiet. I could feel where she was coming from. But that wasn’t fair, putting her off. She was beginning to wrestle with her vulnerability. “Yes, this is my first time up here. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen this river like this. It’s amazing. My soul is down there.”
“You’ve said that. And your heart is on Grandfather Mountain.” The challenge was building up in her voice, and I knew that at any moment she was going to pin me down. I honored her feelings.
“It isn’t at all like you may fear.” I looked at her, and her eyes were waiting for me. “It takes the shine off of things when you think they’ve been shared so much, doesn’t it?”
“It feels crowded,” she replied, looking deep into me. Sober. Searching.
“Yes, crowded…I know that feeling.” I traced figure eights on her knee. “But it isn’t crowded here. I’m not crowded. You can hold your head up around me.”
“I shouldn’t let it go this far,” she said.
“You can’t stop the heart. I understand where you’re coming from, but you can’t stop it. You can’t start it. You can only deny it. We can deny for the next two weeks, or we can live for the next two weeks. Either way, ‘it’ will keep doing whatever ‘it’ does. To each of us. You know? Together or apart.”
“Why?” she asked, but she wasn’t asking what one might think she was asking. I was only willing to dance around the subject of why I was single. I had been rubbing a smooth splinter of granite between my finger and thumb. I thought for a moment and then threw it off into the space in front of us, to fall into a different world far below.
“I like tumbleweeds,” I said, smiling at her. “They are like dreams to me, blown around in space by the winds of the mind.”
“But they’re dead,” Mary said.
“Yeah. Sorta. On the outside. But they are alive inside, they just don’t have a root anymore. Dreams can sorta die too. But as they tumble along, harrowed by the winds, they break and break and break. And at each place they break, seeds from inside of them come out. You know? I like that. Someday in the future, when the conditions are right, little roots grow where the seeds, or spores fell. Sometimes in unlikely places, but that.” I raised a finger and I waved it towards the sky, “…that is the wind’s doing. If the new root can get good footing, a tumbleweed will grow again. The landscape is full of life that just hasn’t grown yet. Dreams need anchors to come true.”
“What happened?” she asked quietly, but I wasn’t going to answer that and so her words hung there. Spring’s fickle breeze blew lightly all across our skin. Parts delightful, and parts too cool. She whispered, “Are you lying?”
“No,” I said so softly into her ear as I kissed it and then pulled away. She had a stone in her hand now. She smiled at me, and in time, threw it into that space too.