Up Moses Creek: Because it’s here
Hooded Warblers are one of the songbirds you might see and hear in the spring woods of Western North Carolina. Tim Carstens photo
When April rains fall on Moses Creek and wake the dormant winter roots, and when the warm sun, following, fills the woods with wildflowers, bird songs and budding leaves, and suddenly the whole valley is on its way to spring’s green apogee, travelers from North Carolina and other states fly to Kathmandu, Nepal, where, breathing oxygen from tanks on their backs, and with their minds partly crazed with cold, they try to climb Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, “Because it’s there.” For mountain climbers, our spring coincides with the best of Everest’s bad seasons to attempt its frozen summit.
“Because it’s there” is, of course, what the famous alpinist George Mallory said in 1923 when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, 29,032 feet high. And Mallory died there in the attempt — a fact confirmed 75 years later when his mummified body was discovered on a rocky slope below the peak.
I think about those Everest climbers this morning while standing here on a ridge above our house with Moses Creek valley spread out around me in the good-smelling prime of spring, how they are probably queued up on an icy spine at the bottleneck called the Hillary Step waiting in a long line of aspirants to climb higher. They’ve gone through weeks of preparation to get there. They’ve spent thousands for equipment, permits, insurance, flights, outfitters and Sherpa guides. Everest, they say, is on their “bucket list.” And if successful, they will stand on that almost airless summit in exhausted exultation. For some it might be an attempt to climb high above a life that’s begun to feel flat. If so, it’s got to be a quick high, because other hopefuls are struggling up to take their turns, while still others are already heading back down the perilous spine through “the Death Zone,” where most fatalities happen. As they go, they pass “Rainbow Valley,” called that because it’s dotted with the brightly colored snowsuits on the corpses of many of the 340 climbers who, over the years, have passed there in another way and had to be left. All are praying inside their masks that Everest does not flip in a heartbeat from the moment’s clear sky to what’s common there even in spring — a howling white-out.
Then I thank my lucky stars for the Everest we have here up Moses Creek, a nameless ridge near our house. It can be summited with a hiking stick and a hat. The trail rises 500 feet in elevation, and if walked daily in April and May, the ascents add up to 30,000 — that other mountain’s equivalent in feet. And warblers are singing along the way.
This isn’t to say there’s no adversity here on our backyard Everest. The trail can be slick after a rain. In winter, sharp winds can make your eyes stream. I’ve been chased back down in summer by lightning or yellow jackets. Otherwise, what a view!
That other Everest is surrounded by spectacular peaks with names like Lhotse, Nuptse and Makalu. Now stand here while slowly turning 360 and, behold! — there’s Snaggy Bald and Fern Mountain, Doubletop, Piney Ridge and Hooper Knob, the legendary Gunstock, sky-piercing Hornyhead Mountain, 4,318 feet high, and Polly Middleton Gap. If my mind and mood see right together, “as my two eyes make one in sight,” to draw on Robert Frost, it’s a prospect as beautiful and never-ending as can be taken in from Qomolangma.
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I’ve read that some Everest summiteers have a spiritual experience up there. I won’t argue with that. They stand next to others who have their iPhones raised to take a selfie. What better place than on a peak with the initials “ME!” But if spirit is by definition everywhere at all times, if it’s anything at all, it goes to say that a meeting of our little with that big is as likely to happen here in the Appalachians as there on that Himalayan peak. Here, at least, there will be no hallucinations due to O2 deprivation.
If man is “the standing miracle,” as Thoreau writes in his journal one May morning in 1851, then surely a person does not have to stand at 29,032 feet to make the grade.
If Socrates speaks true when he says that he heard an inner voice as he was about to wade across the little Ilissos River near Athens one day 2,400 years ago, a voice that stopped him in his tracks and filled him “with a heaven-sent madness far superior to manmade sanity” — this from a man who was one of the sanest who’s ever lived — and who then says that all at once he found himself “standing on the back of the world” looking to the celestial region, where he saw the chariots of the gods ascending toward the sun-like “being that truly is,” immeasurably radiant and good, then surely a glimpse of that blessed and blessing light might be granted here this spring up Moses Creek, or up whatever creek or cove or ridge or road in Western North Carolina you live on.
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County. “Up Moses Creek” comes out the second week of each month.)
