Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

It's been a busy summer. Some things I've written about (jury duty and backpacking). Others I have not (boating on Lake Jocassee, kayaking in Charleston, and upcoming trips to St. Louis and back into the woods with the girls). However, we just returned from what we would probably consider our "official" vacation - six days in Mount Rogers National Recreation Area.

Situated between the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee and Shenandoah National Park in northwest Virginia, Mount Rogers is located in Virginia's George Washington and Jefferson National Forests. It was wonderful being surrounded by all those mountains. There was a time when I would much prefer the waves of the beach to the stillness of the mountains but it seems I have changed. Is there truth to that notion that we change every seven years?

We spent the week in a cabin we had rented from the Forest Service. Cheaply priced at $100 per night, it was located a half-mile off the road and surrounded by nothing but woods and mountains. There were no other houses, people, or roads to be seen or heard. The yard was enormous. The kids loved playing soccer, baseball, and whiffle ball in addition to climbing trees and chasing down lightning bugs. Growing up as a kid who was deathly scared of all wildlife, including bugs, I never could have guessed that I would become a grown man who spent so much time in nature. There it is again. Change.

Despite the daily war we waged against the endless army of ants in the kitchen, the cabin was perfect. There were four bedrooms (two upstairs and two downstairs), a spacious living room with a stone fireplace, and enough back issues of Appalachian Trailway News magazine to keep me busy during those much-coveted quiet moments.

But, by far, my favorite part of the cabin was the amazing view from the front porch. Just above the treeline you could make out the sharp  outline of Mount Ewing sitting in the distance. Depending on what part of the day you looked the mountain took on a different color. In the mornings it would be draped in fog and low-lying clouds. Look away, though, and you would be surprised to see it appear seemingly out of nowhere - a faint purple ridgeline almost blending perfectly into the sky. Later in the day it became clearer. Dark green. If you looked carefully enough you could make out each individual tree. And then as the sun began to set it took on a whole new color - black. The mountain changed, too.

Despite a good bit of rain we decided to drive up to Grayson Highlands State Park to do some hiking. When we first mentioned this trip to the Virginia mountains to the kids it was the Highlands we used to really rev up their enthusiasm. That's because the highlands are home to herds of wild ponies that roam freely along the path. When we first arrived at the park it was raining, windy, and chilly enough to make me regret having forgotten my jacket at home. The park ranger warned that the weather might make it unlikely to spot any ponies from the trail. Yet within the first few minutes of our walk they were there grazing on the grass. We made our way along the Rhododendrum Trail eventually picking up the Appalachian Trail which took us to some fun climbing rocks. Soon the rain really picked up and we had to cut our day short and head back to the van. As we walked along the rocky path, Ainsley, who just three years ago stated that when visiting the mountains her favorite part was coloring inside the condo and that she wished the mountain could be covered in carpet, asked about hiking the Appalachian trail.

"Why don't we hike it all?" she asked.

"Because it would take six months," I explained. "We have other important things we need to be doing as well. Like school."

"Then why don't we just hike it during our summer vacation for two months?" she asked.

Mom was quick to answer this one.

"Because I think I might enjoy a couple of days but a whole summer is a lot." she said.

I was amazed by Ainsley's inquiry about staying out in the woods for an extended period of time. She has always been the one that just went along with these trips despite a lack of enthusiasm for them. Like me when I was young, she does not care for bugs or any of the other things that rustle the tall grasses along the trail. It seemed that she too has changed.

The best way to get kids to enjoy being in the woods and walking on a hot day is to make certain there will be a couple of really good rivers or streams to splash in. We were mindful to hit a number of them over the course of the week. Some days we were prepared with swimsuits and other days we tried to plead with the kids to stay at least relatively dry. This of course lasted only five or ten minutes. Eventually someone would slip and fall on a green rock and go splashing into the water. What can you do then? Everyone "slips" on in and we allow Mother Nature to do her thing and dry everyone out naturally.
As structured as our lives are at home, probably with a few more rules than we really need, this trip allowed everyone to ease up a bit and just have fun no matter how messy it was. Rules can change, too.

 The only thing I can really say that I wish would have been different on our trip was all the rain. There were a few times when we were confined to the cabin because not everyone had the proper rain gear and clothing to go into the mountains on such a wet day. Temperatures have been known to drop drastically during such storms and hypothermia is a very real threat.

Even on the warm days the trails were very muddy. Further complicating this was the fact that many of the trails we hiked were also equestrian trails. We quickly found that horses really turn up the soil when they walk. This caused sections of the trails to become mud pits that would come up around your ankles if you weren't careful. And as you can imagine, the boys were not. But they weren't alone in the muck. Everyone's shoes and socks were filthy. We once came to a strong flowing stream that had to be forded. Ainsley and Tricia decided to turn back and explore another path that we had passed a few tenths of a mile back. Harper, Muluken, Ty, and I decided to give the stream a go. We pulled off our mud-caked shoes and ginger-footed our way across the jagged rocks. Ty dropped one of his socks into the stream and Harper slipped, splashing down right in the middle of her return trip across. Pulling our disgusting socks and shoes back on to our wet feet was not exactly comforting. I tried not to think about all the mud that would be accompanying us back in the van. I do tend to be a tad of a neat freak. However, I've been trying to change.

One of our final hikes was a rather short one to see an old iron ore furnace out in the middle of nowhere. Standing sixty feet tall and thirty feet wide, it was a massive stone structure that looked somewhat like a small replica of a Mayan temple. How exactly the furnace worked we couldn't find out but it was cool to look at. At the bottom was a small opening, maybe two feet tall at most. I talked Muluken into crawling in and seeing what was inside. "Are there snakes?" he asked. "Oh no," I assured him, trying to mask my uncertainty. Soon we were all crawling through the decades old mixture of soil and soot. Tricia was the last to crawl through. She wasn't too sure about crawling in but all the kids kept at her until she caved. Inside was a large cavern-like tunnel filled with sunlight pouring in through the chimney above. The construction, from rocks blasted from the mountain on which it stood, was amazing. Though we didn't fully understand what it was we were looking at it was still quite a marvel to see.

It was a great trip. Sitting alone out on the cabin porch that final morning, as everyone else lay asleep in their beds, I coulnd't help but think about how hard it was to move away from the city to live in Columbia. We missed the constant sounds of traffic and helicoptors. We missed old houses that were nearly built right on top of each other. We missed feeling like part of the masses. Yet this trip helped us to see another way we have changed. We no longer miss the city like we used to. In fact, all the things we thought we had lost we are noticing again. And they are all around us.

Trica and I were talking in the car today as we made our way to the pool. We were commenting on how odd it is that just a few years ago we longed so badly for city life but somewhere along the way we've come to long, instead, for country life. And that's a change I could never have seen coming.