We left the car at the trailhead. I carried a frame pack with our tent, sleeping bags, and stove. Slender Robin humped a day pack full of bread, bean soup, utensils, and marshmallows. He hunched forward under its weight. We headed over a ridge and back down toward a backcountry campsite that would be all ours tonight, a spot by the side of a stream that had once been all the planet I needed.
Fall’s extravagance ran through the Southern Appalachians. Rhododendrons plunged down ravines and crowded up rises in thickets that made Robin claustrophobic. Above that manic shrub layer rose a canopy of hickories, hemlocks, and tulip poplars just as lush.
Robin stopped every hundred yards to sketch a patch of moss or swarming ant nest. That was fine by me. He found an eastern box turtle feeding on a mass of ocher-colored pulp. It stood defiant, neck stretched, as we bent near. Fleeing wasn’t an option. Only when Robin dropped to his knees alongside it did the creature retract. Robin traced the Martian cuneiform letters spelling out unreadable messages on the dome of the creature’s shell.
We climbed up into the cove hardwood along a CCC path laid by unemployed boys not much older than Robin, back in the days before communal enterprise became the enemy. I crushed the star-shaped leaf of a sweet gum, half August jade, half October brick, and told him to sniff. He shouted in surprise. The scratched husk of a hickory nut shocked him even more. I let him chew the tip of a burgundy leaf and taste how sourwood got its name.
Humus tainted the air. For more than a mile, the trail ascended as steeply as a set of stairs. Spectral shadows followed us as we passed through the shedding broadleaves. We rounded an outcrop of mossy boulders, and the world changed from damp cove hardwood into drier pine and oak. It was a mast year. Acorns piled up across the trail. With each step, we scattered them.
Rising from the leaf duff in a bowl-shaped opening off the path was the most elaborate mushroom I’d ever seen. It mounded up in a cream-colored hemisphere bigger than my two hands. A fluted ribbon of fungus rippled through itself to form a surface as convoluted as an Elizabethan ruff.
Whoa! Whaaat . . . ?
I had no answer.
Farther down the trail he almost stepped on a black and yellow millipede. The animal writhed into a ball in my hand. I fanned the air above it toward Robin’s nose.
Holy crow!
“What does it smell like?”
Like Mom!
I laughed. “Well, yes. Almond extract. Which Mom sometimes smelled like when she was baking.”
He pressed my palm to his nose, traveling. That is so wild.
“That’s the word for it.”
He wanted more, but I laid the creature back in a patch of sedge and we carried on down the trail. I didn’t tell my son that the delicious smell was a cyanide, toxic in large doses. I should have. Honesty was very important to him.
A MILE OF DESCENDING TRAIL DROPPED US into a clearing by a rocky stream. Patches of white cascade gave way to deeper, open pools. Mountain laurel and stands of mottled sycamore flanked both banks. The site was more beautiful than I remembered.
Our tent was an engineering marvel, lighter than a liter of water and not much larger than a roll of paper towels. Robin pitched it himself. He fitted the thin poles, bent them into the tent’s eyelets, snapped the fabric clips onto the tensed-up exoskeleton, and hey presto: our home for the night.
Do we need the fly?
“How lucky do you feel?”
He felt pretty lucky. I did, too. Six different kinds of forest all around us. Seventeen hundred flowering plants. More tree species than in all of Europe. Thirty kinds of salamander, for God’s sake. Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head.
Above us, a raven the size of an Oz winged monkey flew up into a white pine. “He’s here for the opening of Camp Byrne.”
We cheered, and the bird flew away. Then the two of us, after a stiff climb with packs on a day that had broken yet another all-time heat record by five degrees, opted for a swim.
A footbridge cut from a girthy tulip poplar crossed a chute in the cascades. Rocks on both sides were splattered with an action painting of lichen, moss, and algae. The creek was clear down to its stony bottom. We bushwhacked upstream and found a flat boulder. I steeled myself and eased into the rush. My doubtful son watched, wanting to believe.
The water shocked my chest and shoved me toward a tumble of rocks. What looked level from the shore was a whole rolling range of submerged micro-mountains. I plunged into the turbulence. My foot slid on a slick stone worn smooth by centuries of falling water. Then I remembered how to do this. I sat down in the torrent and let the chill river crash over me.