Family

Into the Woods: Mount Jefferson

/ JRLonas / 1 Comment

A good walk in the woods, like a good book, always calls you back for another look. Much as I’m always looking for a new trail and a higher mountain, a short hike on a favorite trail feels as warm and familiar as an old sweater.

Whenever I have a chance to go home to the NC High Country, a hike is in order. Since my family moved to that part of the world in 1998 (and even though I’ve been a Chattanooga resident since 2006), there’s hardly a trail in the area that I haven’t hoofed at least once.

One that I come back to again and again, though, is the short (<2 mi.) loop across the summit of Mount Jefferson in Ashe County. This modest summit (4665′) cuts an imposing prominence above the surrounding farmland, and has been preserved as a small state park. It has a much more unassuming beauty than many more famous peaks in the area like Grandfather Mountain, but it is a special place when you look a bit closer.

The metamorphic rock (amphibolite) underlaying the mountain gives it a sharper profile than many of the more rounded sandstone & quartzite peaks nearby. The rock also weathers less readily, giving the outcrops a dark, jagged look. Ravens and falcons nest in the protected crags. The sheltered north face of the mountain is home to many interesting plants, including a small stand of Bigtooth aspen, which normally occur much farther north.

Perhaps the best blessing of Mount Jefferson, though is the ease of the path. A road leads nearly to the summit, and there are bathrooms (NB – though these are closed in winter. The kids, er, learned the hard way). The gentle climb makes it a great place for young legs to get out and see the mountaintop ecosystem without complaining or wearing out. A few days after Christmas, our whole family (my parents, my two sisters, Rachel, our three kids, and I) did the full loop without breaking a sweat.

If you’re ever in the area without a lot of time to see the high Appalachian environment, stop in and check this one out. In the winter, access is dependent on weather, spring & fall are lovely, and the summer breezes are a world-class heat-beater.

If you’ve got a little longer window, be sure to visit the wonderful little towns at the base of the mountain – Jefferson & West Jefferson. They’re well-provisioned with the requisite charm of shops, restaurants, and murals, not to mention a legit cheese factory.

Percy’s Love in the Ruins: A Dystopia for Our Time

/ JRLonas / 7 Comments

Note: This piece was originally written in September 2016, in the run-up to that year’s U.S. national election. In hindsight, I could have been…a little more perceptive about the difference between (and relative danger of) those two candidates, but work with me.

The 1970s have a curious aura, especially to those of us born in the early 1980s. Not quite far enough before our time to feel like “history,” Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, and all the associated malaise were so much a part of our parents’ formative experience that they taste to us rather of a half-remembered bad dream—especially given the relative peace and prosperity we enjoyed throughout childhood. Perhaps it is only natural, then, to associate that 70s vibe with our own grave misgivings about the present.

Facing as we do a national election between a habitual liar under investigation by the FBI (is anyone more Nixonian than Mrs. Clinton?) and a much-married misogynist, racist, and paragon of petty machismo, we see a strong political overlap between the two eras. The nausea goes much deeper too—into sex, race, religion, and society itself. All around, our souls give way, yet no solution presents itself. The exhaustion is palpable, even papered over as it continues to be by our blithe consumption and entertainment.

Into such troubled times, the prophets of old spoke even greater trouble. “On account of you, Zion will be plowed as a field, Jerusalem will become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the temple will become high places of a forest.”[1] This indicts us just as much as it happens to us. Perhaps the prophet we need to hear thunder today is the unlikeliest of anointed men—nearly three decades dead and always unassuming in his own time.

Walker Percy, Louisiana novelist and essayist, keenly felt the dislocation of man in the modern age, and set his face toward exploring and explaining that pain in nearly everything he wrote. In Percy’s own telling, a serious novelist (one as much concerned with plumbing the depths of existence as with telling a good story) is by nature a sort of prophet:

“Since true prophets, i.e., men called by God to communicate something urgent to other men, are currently in short supply, the novelist may perform a quasi-prophetic function. Like the prophet, his news is generally bad. Unlike the prophet, whose mouth has been purified by a burning coal, the novelist’s art is often bad, too…. Like the prophet, he may find himself in radical disagreement with his fellow countrymen. Unlike the prophet, he does not generally get killed. More often, he is ignored.”[2]

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Chocolate Memories

/ JRLonas / 3 Comments

To bring a solid thing to a rolling boil works
Unspoken magic atop the stove. Combining
Butter, sugar, cocoa, oats, vanilla, milk irks
Some with its simplicity, but births such shining
Chocolate gibbosity that even gourmands
Cannot help themselves from begging for a second.
No proper name for such delectability;
“Sludge” we called it, homage to its amorphous glands,
A foul word would disguise tasty heights, we reckoned.
Childhood on wax paper is pure gentility.

Cookies

Into the Woods: Home

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Carving out time for hiking, valued though it is, often takes quite the effort. Because of this, I am always very grateful for the Lookout Mountain segment of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. When you have 3 hours for a hike, 30 minutes (round trip) in the car and 2-and-a-half hours on trail is far preferable to driving a long way for a short walk.

In thick irony, all of the peaceful parkland around our city is only here because the violent deaths of several thousand men on these grounds in 1863. There is room for reflection there (of which more another time) which does not go unnoticed, but we locals love the battlefields for the 9,000+ acres of public land they afford. My kids are growing up with this heritage, and they already probably think it’s odd that you don’t have cannons all over the place where you live.

I’ve trod many a mile around this old mountain, handy as it is (much of it  within Chattanooga’s city limits). Trucks and trains rumble just beyond the park’s edge, and there are two fully functioning towns (Both conveniently named Lookout Mountain—one in Tennessee, one in Georgia) atop the plateau, but the trails quickly open to mature forest.

Yesterday, Rachel & the older two girls had a birthday party to attend, so I “volunteered” (read: begged) to watch the youngest and spare us the experience. It was nice out (this fall as been terribly warm), so we decided to head for the woods.

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Selfies are not my forté, but at least toddlers in backpacks are cute.

We parked over on the west side of the mountain off Wauhatchie Pike  (near the Chattanooga Nature Center), to go upslope via the Kiddie trail (named for someone, not made for kids)/Skyuka Springs Trail/Gum Springs Trail. Time (and the limited patience of strapped-in children) kept us from making it all the way to Sunset Rock, but we were headed in that general direction.

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Kiddie is not terribly scenic, just a steep access path into the rest of trail network. A number of downed trees (probably dating from a bad tornado outbreak a few years ago) left the canopy spotty enough that the lower trail is rather overgrown and weedy.

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Further up, there were still a few fall colors poking through, and plenty of the usual Cumberland Plateau scenery (boulders, oaks, streams, etc.).

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As an aside, this area always makes for some interesting plant finds (like the Japanese burning bush shown below). Homeowners on the brow of the mountain above must toss their yard waste over the cliffs, and enterprising seeds and shoots take root in the woods below. A lot of what you see growing down there does not “belong”.

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A few miles of foot-pounding does a body (and soul) good, but I’m not certain my passenger felt the same. She didn’t cry, though she did hold on to my shoulder for most of the ride; for her first time in the backpack, I suppose she thought she was “floating” behind my head and not entirely confident of her situation. It’s the price you pay for being my kid, I guess.

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