Removing the Veil

I have been reading Into The Wild again. I feel it is important for me to read about both John Waterman -- who was on the negative end on the spectrum of admirability and sensibility -- in Glenn Randall's Breaking Point, and Everett Reuss -- who wins the most respect and admiration of readers, relative to McCandless and especially to Waterman -- in Wallace Stegner's Mormon Country and W.L. Rusho's Everett Reuss: A Vagabond for Beauty. Now I put forth this information to drive me to do it. It is good practice to place your goals in writing. I also write so I can, in the both near and distant future, discover -- even if only in that present moment -- which literary diet yields the writing style that is most favorable in my sight, on top of the obvious purpose to relive past lives and the bring back the songs which reincarnate them. Of course, I also keep a journal of more personal histories, inspirations from scripture, testimony, and other writings inappropriate for public viewing. I enjoy the format of this Blogger and the concept of being able to look it up from any computer in the world and sharing it with friends, when occasion demands.

Now, in regards to the title of this post, I would like to not explain directly, but indirectly through a few round-about stories. One of these stories I have already posted. It is when I traveled to Sullivan's Island. I now include an excerpt from that post:

As I got into Sullivan's Island, I made no turns, I went straight down the road until it became grass. By this point, I don't remember there being any sound, just light and clouds and green. Biking the boardwalk over brush and bushes to where it ends in sand, I can only say it was surreal. It was the most beautiful thing in the world. It climaxed here, and the other-world beauty of it all held precariously as I bared my feet and walked into the water and continued my gaze at the clouds. 

Another story I relate is from today. I was listening to Alison Krauss + Union Station Live and listening to the first track of the second disc while I was driving this city backroad with simple tree and vine close to the left and department store to the right. It wasn't pretty at all, just ugly with vine-like overgrowth. I just remember at some point those trees and mild brush becoming sharp and filled with a life I haven't experienced in so long. Perhaps it was my eyes taking in more light or momentarily having better vision. Maybe a certain peal of Jerry's resophonic guitar struck me as with lightning a memory from the sunny highlands of carolina. The duration of this moment was less than one second, but it was not unlike when I looked up through the pine trees while taking on a root-covered winding bike trail near the Cooper River. Each needle of each pine tree shone in exquisite detail and deep blue and pure white mingled above. Even the dead needles on the ground luminesced.

Visions and Vagaries

I am haunted by these visions. These dreams, night after night. Having visions looking out into the inky darkness of night on the interstate. These dreams are of mountain and precarious mystery. Last night I dreamt I was traveling west on US-70 and then cutting onto I-40 west heading towards Asheville. I imagined it as much larger than it actually is. Before me was a dusk much like the one I saw last time up there, snow clouds hazed a deep red by the darkening day. I saw red and burgundy, only disrupted by the silhouette of buildings and mountainside, a sliver moon right on the sun's tail, but it is impossible to paint. I relapsed into this dream a few times while on I-26 tonight whilst staring out into the blank canvas of the ink sky. It was one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had. I then remember flashing past the city in a blaze of yellow squares of light, thinking "Oh, this city is the most beautiful city in the world!" It was the kind of beauty that threatens to destroy you, incinerating you with its light. Many of us have these dreams, and they allure us. For me, those dreams are strong enough to drive me to the life of a vagabond, whether it be for a few weeks at at time or for a day. Perhaps I am just more resistant to the tie-downs of every-day life. I can often leave it in a heartbeat, without a second thought. I had a thought of simply walking around SC for a limitless amount of time. Walking. Making simple camps in pine forests. No matter where you are, the vastness and weightless feeling makes it worth a while.

Reliving and Caney Fork River

I finally got back on my bicycle and rode through the country, as I desired. I did not lose my job, and the ride through the country wasn't towards Orangeburg. It was in a wildly-named town called Pontiac. After thinking of riding my bicycle down Mt. Mitchell and the colors and the airbuzz, I got on that bike and I rode against gust and cold, the upward slopes returning my mind to when my leg muscles were strong and my body was in peak condition and mood. It was a reincarnation of my memories during those three weeks. I passed lakes, curving and climbing. It was wonderful. Riding back home into the twilight was poetically similar to leaving North for Orangeburg with the dusk to my back. Even my body blasting heat off my skin -- not shivering even in twenty-mile-an-hour near-freezing wind on my wet back, after riding a good distance -- reminded me of my mountain bicycling as I sat down near a I-77 exit and eating my bagel with peanut butter. I remember all of my meals during that time, for about the only time I rested was to eat or sleep. In my memory, thats all I ate while in the mountains, along with a few health-bar samples I got at LEAF. Also, a week ago when I bicycled in Strawberry, heading up the bridge over the train tracks, I pretended to be heading down a mountain hill. I passed by a barn and just pretended to be a hundred miles away. I like the dry mountain. I need to be camping in the mountains, where streams and sunshine abound. I love the song Bright Sunny South, sung by Dan Tyminski. I feel the same way the lyricist (whoever it is. It is a traditional song. A great one) does about living in the southern hills:

From it's cool shady forests to its deep flowing streams 

Ever fond in my mem'ry and sweet in my dreams

One of my favorite parts of the mountains are the streams. There's another song I want to tell. It is Fall Creek Falls, by Jim Vancleve. It speaks to me the magic of driving under the stars at night. It portrays an otherworldly kind of beauty, like the excitement of exploring the most beautiful and exotic kind of land imaginable (or unimaginable). The reverb they record it with gives the feeling of actually being on a mountainside and hearing the echoes of it off other hillsides. You feel the altitude. Its marvelous. Maybe thats what I'm missing: the altitude. You can really get high off altitude. I know I do. My most serene moments are above three-thousand feet above sea level.  

Geographically-Insipired Musical Location of the Day

I haven't done of these in a while. I haven't updated regularly in a while. I want to mark my restart of reliable updating with a renewal of Locations that speak the adventurous spirit with words. 

I had to do something beyond searching google maps to get find this location. The Caney Fork River branches off the Cumberland River, and cuts somewhat deep in the mountainside as it passes along I-40 and flows into Center Lake. It is rather small, but when you're running from the law, a bluegrass favorite topic, you want to lay low. The story of the song is one of a man who is working like a dog in North Carolina, travels across Tennessee to Jackson, as he had done many times before, sees his girl cheating on him, shoots them, and then runs back across the state to get back home, running from the sheriff. It is what I dream of: traveling from western North Carolina across Tennessee to the infinite plains. Balsam Range is a wonderful band out of Haywood County, very near Asheville and the starting point of my traveling life. I think like Kerouac, in how before the road seduced him into a life of movement and wonderment his life was completely different. 

How many times must I cross this Caney Fork River

Travelin' through the state of Tenessee

How many times must I cross this Caney Fork River

Before I know that I am home free

Before I know that I am home free

A Little About Me

I had to write my thoughts. I don't have much adventure to speak of. I started this blog with the intent of  only relating travel tales and vigorously weaving adventurous yarns. I saw a few things about myself that goes hand in hand with my insatiable desire to move.
I drove for thirteen hours today. I Got high off the phosphate, giddy driving, driving like I stole the car, driving with the deliberateness of a cop. The rain was refreshing. I was wet all day.
I got to thinking how I'm a child of the rainbow. People always think I'm a stoner. I smile too much. I laugh often and for no apparent reason many times. I have a short attention span. I have bad short-term memory. I blend right in to the music festival scene, yet I indulge in no drugs or sexual freedom. I have, as Krakauer states, an abiding distrust of conventional wisdom (for fun, I call it wisdumb). I don't take responsibility too well. I take it on when I have to or when the fruits of commitment are worthy of such commitment. I am short sighted, hence my judgment isn't always good. I cannot seem to plan well, especially while traveling. It always gets the better of me. My period of two weeks in the mountains was an exception. Hope you got to read this, because its probably the only direct look I'll give readers into my character

Pioneers: Stroud and McCandless

I have a few people that I want to bring to the forefront. They are both intriguing people who refuse to live vicariously, who refuse to only dream. One man is Chris McCandless. I discuss him extensively later on. Along with him, a similar character with more experience: Les Stroud (many know him from his show Survivorman). While Stroud is great in what he does. I feel that he only scratches the surface of a great adventure. He is certainly limited by the restraints he places on himself, after all. Luckily, the only way to truly experience living off the land is to do it oneself. What you see Stroud doing is a prototype, a starting point of a great struggle. Its as close as you get while remaining in "the safety of an armchair". I respect him because he shows the world what he does. He is careful and humble, which is unfortunately something that McCandless lacked (though these qualities certainly come with age. Stroud may very well have been a McCandless, but who, as Roman Dial states, was lucky enough to survive).

Once I read Wallace Stegner's Mormon Country, Thoreau's Kaatdn, and a few other books that have had excerpts from them emblazoned in the chapter pages of Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild, I will recommend them. For the time being, I can only recommend the excerpts from those books. Below is a re-posting regarding Chris McCandless.

Like Jon Krakauer, I, too, desire to set the record straight in regards to a man that wandered into the Alaskan wilderness and, after 113 days succeeding, dies and is found 19 days later. I have selected a few telling excerpts from the last chapter of the book, with emphasis in bold and clarification in brackets.

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Among the letters lambasting McCandless, virtually all those I received mentioned his misidentification of the caribou as proof that he didn't know the first thing about surviving in the back-country. What the angry letter-writers didn't know, however, was that the ungulate McCandless shot was exactly what he'd said it was. Contrary to what I reported in Outside, the animal was a moose, as a close examination of the beast's remains now indicated and several of McCandless's photographs of the kill later confirmed beyond all doubt. The boy made some mistakes on the Stampede Trail, but confusing a caribou with a moose wasn't among them.

Roman [Dial], thirty-two, inquisitive and outspoken, has a doctorate in biology from Stanford and an abiding distrust in conventional wisdom. He spent his adolescence in the same Washington, D.C., suburbs as McCandless and found them every bit as stifling. He first came to Alaska as a nine-year-old, to visit a trio of uncles who mined coal at Usibelli, a big strip-mine operation a few miles east of Healy, and immediately fell in love with everything about the North. Over the years that followed, he returned repeatedly to the forty-ninth state. In 1977, after graduating from high school as a sixteen-year-old at the top of his class, he moved to Fairbanks and made Alaska his permanent home.
These days Roman teaches at Alaska Pacific University, in Anchorage, and enjoys statewide renown for a long, brash string of backcountry escapades: He has -- among other feats -- traveled the entire 1,000-mile length of the Brooks Range by foot and paddle, skied 250 miles across the Artic National Wildlife Refuge in subzero winter cold. traversed the 700-mile crest of the Alaska Range, and pioneered more than thirty first ascents of northern peaks and crags. And Roman doesn't see a great deal of difference between his own widely respected deeds and McCandless's adventure, except that McCandless had the misfortune to perish.

I bring up McCandless's hubris and the dumb mistakes he made -- the two or three readily avoidable blunders that ended up costing him his life. "Sure, he screwed up," Roman answers, "but I admire what he was trying to do. Living completely off the land like that, month after month, is incredibly difficult. I've never done it. And I'd bet you that very few, if any, of the people who call McCandless incompetent have ever done it either, not for more than a week or two. Living in the interior bush for an extended period of [a few months], subsisting on nothing except what you hunt and gather -- most people have no idea how hard that actually is. And McCandless almost pulled it off [and would have, were it not for a freak accident involving a toxin from a mold that is known to grow on a perfectly-benign seed of an artic plant].

"I guess I just can't help identifying with this guy," Roman allows as he pokes the coals with a stick. "I hate to admit it, but not so many years ago it could easily have been me in the same kind of predicament. When I first started coming to Alaska, I think I was probably a lot like McCandless: just as green, just as eager, and I'm sure there are plenty of other Alaskans who had a lot in common with McCandless when they first got here, too, including many of his critics [(many that sent letters to the author of the Outside magazine, Jon Krakauer, viciously-disparaging McCandless)]. Which is maybe why they're so hard on him. Maybe McCandless reminds them [those in Fairbanks and other parts of Alaska who were the main source of the harshest letters regarding Chris] a little too much of their former selves .

Roman's observation underscores how difficult it is to for those of us preoccupied with the humdrum concerns of adulthood to recall how forcefully we were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth . As Everett Ruess's father mused years after his twenty-year-old son vanished in the desert, "The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent. I think we all poorly understood Everett"

One of his [Chris McCandless] last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaska sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. His face is horribly emaciated, almost skeletal. But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours -- because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down -- it's not apparent from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.

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His pure ascetic nature and compassion (though his neglectment of his family was completely unacceptable, sending them into a "morass of anger, misunderstanding, and sorrow" [Krakauer, Into The Wild] regardless of whether or not the father hid a second marriage from him and the rest of the family) are something we can all be inspired by. I personally am enamored of Alex Supertramp. If anybody would like to talk to me about him and/or the book (or any of my other literary favorites, as listed on my facebook info section, for that matter), I would be more than delighted.

I have seen no extensive literature concerning Les Stroud, though I most certainly will contribute my meager portion the more I learn about him. I now post a few quotes from his shows and interviews.

In the adventure known as life, there are those who live it vicarously and enjoy the ride from the safety of an armchair, and that's good. There are those who have a few chances to realize incredible and life-changing experiences, and though they don't repeat them, they carry with them a growth and personal philosophy for the rest of their lives. And there are those, for whom a taste is never enough, for whom the lust for adventure is nearly insatiable, and if you add to that the overwhelming desire to create and share, then you get where I was at. For the end of one adventure only signifies the beginning of another.     

I would like to relate all of this to the little experience I've had. The pine forests of the Carolinas are probably a tame as one can get. I wish I could experience more. For now, that is not an option. It is for now a quest for beauty and not really a test of my constitution.