| Hattiesburg, MS |
After a pretty solid 8+ miles up to Charles Bunion the day before, I figured I’d take it a little easier today and sought out something with a more moderate amount of effort required.
The hike in the Smokies certainly wasn’t the hardest one I’ve done, but it was my first mountain hike in several months and my legs seemingly take longer to acclimate, than my heart does.
Without much in the way of a pre-ordained agenda, I depended on my digital friend, Google Maps, to point me in the right direction.
You see, one of the huge advantages of this road trip is the unstructured quality of it.
Figuring out my next destination often involves pulling up Google Maps, looking for a splotch of green denoting a park / forest of some sort – that is located in the general direction I plan on going – then pulling up AllTrails to pick out a trail – and ultimately, setting off.
If only real life were that easy, eh?
After consulting my scribes, I settled on a modest looking hike through the Talladega National Forest. A place I’d never been, in a state I’d never been.
And off I went.
The majority of the drive was off the beaten path on two lane rural roads. A form of driving I vastly prefer to the usual highways and interstates.
Though it takes a little longer to get from point A to point B, the scenery is so much more interesting and the driving, much more engaging. Though you best pay very close attention to your task at hand…
You see, there’s a bit of white-knuckled’ness to many of these roads. Twisting, turning, up, down, blind curves and the like. And the speed limits are set at an almost comically high number which instance, was 55mph. I enjoy it – but I get it why this type of driving scares the hell out of some folks.
The landscapes of the back woods of Northeastern Alabama were pretty. Some cows, some homes and some farms, most of which were fallow for the season, and others, as is often the case in today’s rural America, were long past their prime.
I’ve read some very interesting articles recently on the ‘decline’ of parts of rural America, and been able to superficially observe some of these challenges in my travels this year.
I’ve probably got a broader journal entry in me on the topic, but off the top, I would submit that for all our gains in the ‘best economy ever’ (sic), there’s an awful lot of the country that isn’t sharing in those gains and plenty of people out there are barely hanging on.
A not insignificant portion of rural America tops that list.
As most new cars do, the RAV4 comes equipped with a large, centrally placed display, and your phone syncs up using Apple CarPlay.
It’s a great safety feature and allows you to better keep your eyes on the road, where they belong. On shorter drives, having the map up is better than on longer ones, where the miles and time to destination countdowns seem interminable sometimes.
At the outset of this drive, the mileage and hours didn’t seem to sync up – in that it seemed like it was quoting a time that was too long for the distance. And that allowed me to guess (correctly it turns out) that I was in store for some off pavement driving.
Many of these trips into the forest involve some sort of off-road driving, whether that be gravel, dirt, of some combination in between. Some are these roads are better than others and these specific ones were fine. But they did give me a chance to test out the difference between a car purposed for such things and my last one, the Veloster, which was clearly not.
The RAV4 is an awful lot better than the Veloster. (Duh)
After a few quiet miles I came to the trailhead, at the Pine Glen campground. A neat place, with towering pines that had been rather rudely littering the forest floor with their needles for a very long time. In effectively using their height to their advantage, they’d also done a very nice job of boxing out literally every other form of vegetation.
And thus, except for us occasional human intruders, they had the place all to themselves.
As evidenced by the fact that there were only two cars parked there, the trees had a nice quiet offseason for themselves. My car made three and off the trail I went.
The trail was more or less what I expected it to be.
It loosely followed along a meandering creek and the pleasant sound of the flowing water did a nice job of punctuating what otherwise was a dead quiet forest.
Dead quiet that was except for the far off gun shots from the nearby shooting range.
I’ve been in quite a few of these types of forests and never driven past a shooting range as I did today on the way in. But there’s a first time for everything and as this particular range was a few miles off, the sounds weren’t all that distracting.
Note: Of all the differences I have noticed between red and blue states, guns and the passion for them, has got to be awful high on that list.
All in all the first three miles or so of this hike was exactly what I needed it to be. Good exercise, but rather simple, and quite honestly, rather boring.
Which was fine by me, as being alone with your thoughts in a still and (reasonably) quiet forest is good for ones soul.
So I walked for a while and eventually came to a clearing that led to two small lakes. A pleasant surprise because, for some reason, they weren’t on my map, and so I guess you could say they literally appeared out of nowhere.
The trail rounded the lakes and thus, so did I and eventually I started thinking about where I should turn back.
This was an ‘out and back’ trail, so that meant every step forward added one step back and on this day I had no intentions of filling out the 15 mile total trek.
According to the map, there was a split coming up in bit, so I figured I’d head up there, see what was to be seen and then start back to the car.
I got to the split and there wasn’t really anything new scenery-wise – but there were some curious pink plates stapled to some of the trees, with arrows that pointed towards the top of a small hill. So naturally, I was curious.
I know that curiosity killed the cat, but as I’m not a cat, I played along and followed the arrows through a tightly packed grove of new growth pines.
There had clearly been a major fire in this forest some time ago as evidenced by the charred trunks of the larger trees in town.
But Mother Nature’s spirit of renewal is surpassed by no other and as a testament to that shining spirit, this specific hill was absolutely loaded with a gorgeous gathering of those aforementioned pine trees. They smelled good and looked even better and as I crawled among them, I really was curious as to what I’d find at the top.
The answer was, as best I could discern…the top of a hill.
(Anticlimactic, I know)
I guess we’ll never know why someone drew arrows on pink plates and then went to the effort of stapling them on trees in the middle of nowhere. And in the end I doubt you care all that much.
Once up there I sat down on a small fallen tree and decided to do something I should be doing more often. Meditate.
There’s a lot of things I‘d like to be better at, and that is certainly up there. I’ve tried, but as I usually have the attention span of a squirrel, I really struggle with it.
But in this time and place…
I sat on the log, closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
A stiff breeze had kicked up and I let it wash over me. I listened to the wind and I listened to the forest. Distracting thoughts came in and I kicked them out like a father would his daughter’s first boyfriend.
And I sat and breathed, and sat and breathed and after about 15 minutes or so, I honestly felt better. I really did.
And then the sun attempted to jam itself though the clouds on a day that had been otherwise totally overcast. I kid you not.
I am in no way shape or form a spiritual guy, but the totality of that few minutes sure as hell felt like a ‘spiritual’ experience.
I walked down and ultimately back towards my car and I honestly felt as though I was leaving something negative behind me at the top of that hill.
Maybe I did…
The Long Road 