March 31, 2024

A week ago, on Palm Sunday, the priest read from the Gospel of Mark.  Holy Week services beckoned at the start of the Triduum, the evening of Holy Thursday through Easter, the day Christians commemorate and reaffirm the truth of their faith.   

This year, Holy Week came with prescriptions for benzonatate, azithromycin, doxycycline, and methylprednisolone for the lungs, then polymyxin B sulfate for the eyes. A second 30-day supply of erdafintinib, trade name Balversa, arrived.

The week followed the Moscow terror attack then the Baltimore ship-bridge collision. Yet the past two weeks brought rousing adventures:  a trek to Black Rock Mountain, propped up by strong, passionate friends, then the Alabama-Tennessee trip with the grandsons, reported here last week.

Holy Week builds to Christ’s resurrection from his awful death on the cross. It is there, offered in all the Gospels, which invite sublime, mysterious joy, but also understanding: joy emerges from pain and darkness.

A week ago, on a chilly, overcast morning, we drove to an Urgent Care. The nurse practitioner unfurled her stethoscope and listened. She detected my heart murmur but found the lungs clear.

“Try Flonase,” she said. We have tubes of it lying around the house. Then the conjunctivitis “pinkeye” attacked, sealing the eyes shut overnight. We ran from the house to pick up the polymyxin drops.

On Tuesday we read of the heroism of the pilot of the cargo ship careening towards Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge who at 1:30 AM sent a Mayday to officers on both ends the bridge. Withing minutes they shut down bridge traffic, saving lives.

The 2,700-foot trek up Black Rock Mountain in North Carolina’s Plott Balsam Mountains came in mid-month. It was my fourth Black Rock junket. The horn sounded, starting the race. More than 160 runners launched up the first climb. I lurched forward, coughing. Elise and Todd, good-hearted fast people, stayed close up the rocky switchbacks.

The trail unfolded before us. They sprinted for one- or two-hundred-yard patches, stretching their powerful legs. Beyond the treetops the valley below glowed in pale-blue haze. After three miles of fireroad we found the quarter-mile single-track trail to the summit. Elise flew up, Todd hung back with me. I climbed, in ten- or twenty-yard stretches, reaching for logs, branches, roots.

Flashes of blue sky appeared. The trail leveled off, the red marker flags led us under the final granite overhangs that took us down then up to more climbing, descending, scrambling to the massive boulder at the summit. We crawled up and stretched, and blinked in glorious sunlight at the panorama from the peaked roof of western North Carolina.

We maneuvered down, pulled by gravity, around and over the twisted roots, rocks, fallen logs. At the fireroad, the volunteers waiting with their ATVs gave us a cheerful wave. We turned south for the wild three-mile near-3,000-foot descent. I found my pace and stride. We flew down, the forest falling away behind us. We hit the intersection with the approach trail, then saw the flash of parked vehicles through the trees at the finish.

The Triduum arrived Thursday in bright sunshine, as Spring transformed nature. We stood for the start of the Mass of the Last Supper, the commemoration of Christ’s last miracle, the first Eucharist, the arrest, the scourging, the midnight interrogation. We stood for the agony that presaged the nightmares of two millennia and those still to come.

The choir intoned Psalm 116: “How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me? The cup of salvation I will raise; I call on the name of the Lord.” The lector read from Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, 23-26, when Christ offered the bread and wine: “This is my body, this is my blood, do this in remembrance of me.”

The lines are the perennial remembrance and reassurance of faith. John’s Gospel then tells the penetrating story of Christ kneeling to wash his apostles’ feet, saying, “what I am doing you will not understand now, but you will understand later.” The priest reenacted this solemn task, kneeling, in his white vestments, to wash the bare feet of twelve young men on the altar. He kissed their feet.

The priest spoke and raised the cup. We prayed for the victims of the present moment, those newest in our minds and in the headlines, all the terror attacks, all the victims we know, those we don’t know, those still with us, others who have departed. The Mass ended in silence, the Eucharist carried to a nearby place, remaining for hundreds who stayed to pray. The solemnity of the night lingered.

We stayed warm, gulped our medicine, daubed our eyes with the drops, swallowed tylenol to sleep. In the morning we watched the dawn of Good Friday, the pale blue sky promising warmth, Spring’s arrival.

The Triduum moved forward through the aftermath of tragedy, the search for the missing in Baltimore, the missile attacks in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, the nightmare political news, the lacerating, relentless cruelty of cancer.

Then memories returned, distant and recent, of good-heartedness of children, kindnesses of old friends, grateful moments with new friends in the warm sunlight at Black Rock, the joy of the grandsons in Chattanooga. Then the Triduum, and Resurrection.    

March 25, 2024

The route from Atlanta to Huntsville breaks from I-75 north at Adairsville, Ga., and follows S.R. 140 northwest. It takes various designations as it zigzags through Amuchee, Summerville, and Cloudland before climbing rugged country and entering Sweet Home Alabama. We stepped on it and flew across that depressed, ramshackle corner of the Crimson Tide State.

South of Adairsville, though, we detoured from the interstate onto a winding rural road to see giant Lake Alatoona, a picturesque 12,000-acre reservoir that provides hydroelectric power, drinking water, and flood control to a three-county area near Cartersville. The area was the site of a minor Civil War engagement in October 1864 that accounts for a circle of stone war monuments near the water. We looked around, saw no one else, then left.

Crossing into Alabama, we saw signs for DeSoto State Park, where Sandy and I spent a sweet campout weekend in October 1978, still on our honeymoon, more or less. But we never went back.

Eventually the route crosses the broad Tennessee River, which circles down from the Land of the Lakes in the northwest corner of Tennessee into Alabama, then meanders northeast through Chattanooga and then Knoxville.

We turned onto U.S. 72 and passed through Scottsboro, site of the notorious “Scottsboro Boys” case, in which nine Black teenagers were accused falsely of raping two white women in 1931. They were quickly convicted and sentenced to death, but the Supreme Court overturned the convictions. Still, the young men spent years in prison. A Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center opened in the city in 2010.

The mission was a roadtrip with the grandsons to the U.S. Space Center in Huntsville, a must stop for anyone, any age. The Center shows off with appropriate hoopla and grandeur the history of the U.S space program, its amazing machines and brilliant people. We walked past a Saturn V rocket, one of only three remaining of 13 originally built for the Apollo project, and flown between 1967 and 1973. We gawked in wonder at this triumph of engineering ingenuity created by the thousands of Americans who supported the work.

Huntsville itself wasn’t worth an extra day. Downtown appeared as a collection of sandstone municipal buildings mixed with some block-style apartment and condo structures, and a few streets of antebellum-type homes. The city center was mostly deserted, as if the locals shared our opinion. We walked a bit just to say we did, visited an antique hardware store and, to treat the boys, an ice cream parlor.

Wednesday was Chattanooga day, barely a two-hour drive. The route returned us to U.S.72 for a straight shot northeast across monotonous flatland into Tennessee and onto I-24. The mountains emerge on all sides and the Tennessee River reappears at Nickajack Lake.

Chattanooga was the big city to Sandy’s childhood hometown in Franklin County, 60 miles west. She looked for work there briefly after college before ending up in Nashville, where we met all those years ago. Not likely I would have visited Chattanooga. Life works out the way it does.

The mighty Tennessee curls around the city in the shadow of 2,400-foot-high Lookout Mountain, site of the three engagements of the Chattanooga Campaign in November 1863. Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg had decisively defeated the Yanks at Chickamauga in September. Bragg commanded his forces from atop Lookout Mountain and nearby Missionary Ridge. He cornered Union forces in Chattanooga.

In October Lincoln named Gen. Ulysses S. Grant commander of all western Union forces. His first move was to fire the Union general who lost at Chickamauga. His second was to bring in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

In three November fights, the Battle of Orchard Knob, the Battle of Lookout Mountain, which Union Gen. Montgomery Meigs called the “battle above the clouds” or “hell in the heavens,” and the Battle of Missionary Ridge, the Union forces routed the rebels and sent them retreating south.

The Yanks already had defeated the Confederates at Gettysburg, breaking the back of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The war’s outcome already was in sight. The Union victory at Chattanooga forced the rebels to retreat south, opening the way for Sherman’s March to the Sea.

The boys and I rode the mile-long incline railway to the top of the mountain and walked the three blocks of fashionable East Brow Road to Point Park, a National Park site, which overlooks the city and the river. I didn’t have a pass, but the ranger smiled and waved me in.

The park is set off by the New York Peace Memorial and circumvented by a walking path along  the dizzying view of the city, anchored by Confederate cannon that in November 1863 commanded the Point.

We browsed through the visitor center, which displays a massive ceiling-high painting, “Battle Above the Clouds,” by artist James Walker, commissioned by Union Gen. Joseph Hooker, who is shown astride his white steed in the center of the canvas.

It was chilly atop the mountain, as I guess it must have been on those cold November nights in 1863 when Confederate soldiers stood guard there, training their artillery down on the city. Ironically, when the attack came the aimpoints of the rebels’ guns could not be depressed sharply enough to target the Yankee troops as they moved close to the side of the mountain.

We averted our eyes as the incline railway car headed back down the mountain, all of Chattanooga before us.

We did get to Ruby Falls, the underground waterfall discovered in 1928 by a local man named Leo Lambert. The Southern Railway had sealed an opening to a cave on Lookout Mountain. Lambert thought he could open the cave for tourism, but accidently discovered a new tunnel that led to a natural underground waterfall. He blasted a ten-story elevator shaft through the mountain rock, widened the tunnel, and named the place Ruby Falls after his wife. It’s now advertised on billboards around the South.

We rode the elevator to the tunnel and walked the half-mile to the falls. The dimly lit passageway, requiring folks taller than 5’7’’ to duck, shows the bizarre rock sculpting of millions of years of wandering mineral water. Suddenly it opens to a wide chamber where the falls dumps a constant stream spectacularly from the peak of the hundred-foot-high cavern.  We stared, amazed and a bit nervous, then turned back into the tunnel, relieved to find the elevator.

March 18, 2024

The birthday album glowed with photos of me with friends from the Crossfit group, which uses the tongue-in-cheek name, “Beast Mode.” It offers poignant shots of the group posed at holiday gatherings and other special moments, all of us smiling. It includes a few of me attempting to exercise, no smile in sight.

It features some family photos, Sandy and me, and of grandsons Noah and Patrick. The album includes a couple of nice shots of me with a friend, the album’s developer, a creative young woman, Elise, after some running or exercise event. The photos show her brilliant smile, me with a dazed expression, trying to hold back exhaustion. 

She built the album around an Old Testament verse: “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” (Isaiah 40:31). The accompanying page features a panoramic photo of Alaska’s snow-covered Mount Denali towering over surrounding forest.

I looked again through the collection of photos. I reread the citation. I don’t recall, after the Beast Mode workouts, ever “soaring on wings like eagles.” I definitely do feel weary and faint, which is putting it mildly. I’m usually slumped on a bench catching my breath.

How is this passage, eloquent and consoling, relevant to the BM team’s demanding routines of heaving barbells, stroking on rowing machines, climbing rope, jumping on boxes—and pullups, pushups, situps, sprints, wall walking?  

We all know exercise is better for you than sprawling on a sofa wielding the remote or tapping on your cellphone. And for those present in the Beast Mode gym, the endorphin addiction has taken hold to one degree or another: if its hurts, it will feel good later. You stagger out of the gym, get a shower and a good meal, and you recover, more or less. You feel better.

“Staying active” is the first rule in the senior citizen’s health-care manual. Most YMCAs offer “Silver Sneakers” or other exercise classes for oldsters. The nation is enduring a pickleball craze. Who plays? Mostly old people. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” my oncologist says.

Elise, in assembling the album, examined probably dozens of photos, I didn’t ask. She couldn’t help noticing that while working out and afterward I’m panting and cross-eyed, and never wearing a sunny, cheerful smile. Yet I was present. I was at Beast Mode. I was a witness to the mystery. I could have chosen instead to stroll on a treadmill wearing earbuds, zoned out on pop-40 music.

The mystery really is nothing less than discovering the secret of life. But we seldom stop to make the connection between confronting challenge, hardship, pain, and understanding our place in the world, which we know is filled with challenge, hardship, pain. Even if not grasping the mystery fully, we have at least a sense of what it means.  

Elise understands the purpose of all that pain. She, like the others, accepts it, learns from it, and uses it to push forward with life. We discover that hardship and pain steels us. The challenge of Beast Mode only begins in the gym. The acceptance of it, the summoning of the fortitude to persevere, begins in the heart.

The Isaiah passage, line 31, is the last line of the chapter. Earlier, line 28: “… The Lord is the eternal God, creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint and grow weary … he gives strength to the fainting, for the weak he makes vigor abound.”

Elise created a theme. She includes, next to a photo of me on a forest trail, a sentence the Oxford and Cambridge scholar C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to an American poet, Mary Willis Sherburne, who he never met, in June 1963: “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” The line is in one of the last of more than 100 letters Lewis wrote to Sherburne, beginning in 1950.

The album is a gift to me, but it offers a message that rises beyond the smiling faces of people going through exercises that summon for me nervous memories of Marine Corps training. The message is offered in the photos, the words of Isaiah, the words of Lewis: a message of faith that carries us forward, beyond the busyness of careers and family, where most of the Beast Mode team are, to the twilight of life.

So we stumble out of the gym at the end of each session, gasping for breath, some of us asking what in heck is this all about, why are we doing this. Then we go on.

C.S. Lewis died just five months after he wrote that line to Sherburne. And so we go on, moving forward in the faith to which Elise is leading us as she reveals, in her photo selection and arrangement, the truth found in Isaiah and Lewis. We face challenges, hardship, pain. Only then, understanding.

March 11, 2024

Sometimes the senior stuff seems to pile up, questions and doubt cloud the days. Nothing new about it here, or for anyone else in this fix. The prescription vials collect on the kitchen counter, coming with the barrage of ambiguous guidance, speculation, paperwork.

We break through all that: no looking inward, no cosmic wondering what it means or where we’re going. We have this place, still strangely alien, a place we still are learning. We have the children, near and far, and others who welcomed us as we settled here, and have shown us love and given us strength.

Strength means step forward, always, which means go to the mountains. In Virginia they were 90 minutes away, here only a half-hour. That’s why they call it Upstate. You steer up U.S. 25 then S.C. 11 and you’re there. Why go? Because the mountains, in their dark, intense, magical way, make life rich, make us stronger.

The Appalachians, call them the Blue Ridge from western Virginia and on south, are forest and rocks. Rocks everywhere, boulders, cliff overhangs, jagged edges that can tear flesh. In North Carolina, on a straight shot from Asheville, the mountains stretch west. Near Waynesville they grow into massive hulks and become the Great Smokies. They also turn into South Carolina, where they start to peter out near the little town of Pickens and Table Rock Mountain.

Table Rock, at about 3,100 feet isn’t impressive by Blue Ridge measurements. And the trail, marked with red tree markers or blazes, is only three and a half miles, which sounds like not so much. It starts near Carrick Creek, which rushes down from some uncertain point high and west. The trail then curls up rough ground and flights of rock stairs. For a short stretch, a couple of hundred feet, it levels then cuts back among massive boulders and twisted foot-thick roots.

Above, the view is of the sheer surface of the approach to the summit. The trail narrows through the piles of boulders, allowing one person to sidestep through at risk of snapping an ankle. The panoramic view, fifty or more miles of the deep-green country starts to emerge. A shelter stands near the precipice just past the midway point. Rest here then push on, or quit.

From the shelter the trail is level for a hundred feet then circumvents a house-size rock. It faces the ridge and twists upward again. A stretch of discarded orange environmental mesh lies along the east side of the trail, a sign of a brief pause in the climb, a spot called Panther Gap.

Panther Gap is a turn. The trail levels then climbs, levels out, climbs again across fallen trees, more roots and boulders. The rock mass gets thicker, the trail disappears. But the red blazes are there. The climber faces a sheer rock wall. The intoxicating view of nearby peaks explodes in every direction. Foot-size cuts in the rocks allow steps directly across the face of the wall.

The trail picks up above then levels, easy walking to a new turn, then suddenly becomes a tangle of pits and dips and trenches. It rises again to a second rock wall. Beyond that a turn pivots to a treeless precipice, facing south, back into woods to the ten-foot-square clearing marking the Table Rock summit.

The path winds down sharply to a rock plateau, the red blazes are painted on the surface. It pushes through underbrush to the broad granite patio that overlooks the reservoir, which shimmers in deep, clear blue. The North Carolina peaks create the green horizon to the northeast, towards Asheville. Here, draw breath and get a glimpse of the world God created, the reason people struggle to come to this place.

The descent back to Panther Gap is fast and treacherous. Gravity seems to pull the rocks downward. From the Gap the orange-blazed Ridge Trail winds up and across six climbs to 3,400-foot-high Pinnacle Peak, the state’s second-highest. Ridge is up, down, then rolls into the next climb. The fourth climb snakes through underbrush, an endless switchback. The last one wraps around Pinnacle then leads into the summit clearing. No spectacular vistas, just forest and silence.

From Pinnacle the trail leads only down, a dangerous quarter-mile headlong drop to an intersection with the Foothills Trail, which crosses wilderness for 76 miles to Oconee State Park, near the wild scenic Chattooga River, the S.C.-Georgia state line.

In that direction, northwest, Foothills makes a sudden right-angle turn. It drops down on sharp switchbacks, showing the north side of Pinnacle peak.

Sassafras Mountain is the next access point, the tourist attraction with lovely views of four states. Foothills from Pinnacle ascends through jungle-like forest, narrowing then broadening across a thundering creek, then rises and keeps rising to the summit.

The trail circles the Sassafras observation platform downward into a westerly whirlwind tumble to a lonely junction called Chimney Top, then continues for two miles down to a tiny off-the-highway place called Laurel Valley, the last westbound road access for 30 miles.

The other direction, east from Pinnacle, is the way home. From the Foothills junction the trail turns into culverts, across roots and rocks yet again, then levels again. Beyond a sudden, twisting drop, it opens to a narrow, rocky platform called Bald Knob at 2,800 feet. Beyond the ledge you see only the dazzling open sky and the hazy valley out to the horizon.

Navigating the rock means delicate balance, footfalls in the chiseled pits to a sharp turn. The trail plunges four miles back to civilization, the park nature center and Table Rock Lake, where parents bring their children to show them nature at its wildest and sweetest. Here Carrick Creek flows noisily over the rocks into pools shallow enough for wading. It’s a happy place, populated in good weather by couples, dogwalkers, families with young kids.

Exhaustion settles in along with faith, renewed in wild country, overcoming the shadows. We may travel farther. A fourth trail encircles the lake, a pretty stretch of cut-through that finishes at the boathouse. Then, a mile back towards the park gate, the trailhead for the Palmetto Trail climbs, then stretches away from the park into wilderness that is again deep, and silent.

March 4, 2024

We leaned over the railing of Greenville’s Falls Park Bridge and watched the brown Reedy River rush over the rocks. Canada geese waded in the shallows, but then the river is not especially deep anywhere. Rivers, strangely, have something to do with the state’s history, and its tragic legacy as the setting for the start of the Civil War.

On a scale of great to picayune, our Reedy River barely registers, it’s more of a stream. Below the city it descends into the state’s backwater country, which, like much of the rural South, has barely been touched by time.

Twenty-seven years ago a friend loaned us a vacation house on Kiawah Island, just south of Charleston. I drove with the kids down I-95 from Virginia, Sandy flew. Crossing the state line at Dillon, we stayed with the interstate to Florence and turned onto S.C. 52, then mostly two lanes through the Palmetto State’s deepest boondocks.

We chugged along the near-empty road, ever southeast, into vernal Low Country forestland through poverty-stricken pockets of the Deep South. Isolated collections of ramshackle clapboard cabins appeared then fell away behind us, along with occasional one-pump gas stations and general stores. Skinny kids loitered here and there or sat on front steps, staring as we passed.

This went on for hours. Our old Buick Skylark wasn’t air conditioned, we sweated as the Spanish moss seemed to close in amidst the stretches of neglect and want, the raw reality of rural South Carolina.

Eventually we crossed the Santee River, the state’s second-longest, and passed giant Lake Moultrie. We skirted massive Francis Marion National Forest. All signs of even primitive civilization fell away. Then suddenly we were on I-26, back in the twentieth century.

The memory of that trek through the South’s underside now registers as unreal as we watch the Reedy flow through hip, prosperous downtown Greenville.

Two years ago we took the usual interstate route, I-385, I-26, I-95 to Hilton Head for a weekend. We left the highway at U.S. 278 and headed east for 20 miles on the well-traveled vacation/tourist route that eventually crosses Mackey Creek to the island. For that short distance the remoteness presses in, woods and bleak outcroppings of Southern bareness and poverty, until the vacation rental signs show up. Nothing much had changed.

The 60-mile-long Reedy becomes a metaphor for what we see, go-go new prosperity against the dark backwoods past. From the southern end of the Blue Ridge it approaches Greenville. Close to town it follows the Swamp Rabbit Trail, a walking and bike path past Furman University and the suburban settlement of Traveler’s Rest. It passes the hulks of long-closed textile mills.

The river is still mildly polluted from decades of industrial runoff. The city has posted signs warning against wading, but kids do it anyway. Still, it offers tourists a nice view from the riverwalk in the middle of town, the highlight of Falls Park. People lounge on benches along the bank, served by a couple of bars. A patch of greenery further along is fine for picnics and, in summer, the town’s Shakespeare festival.

South of the city it passes through Congaree Nature Preserve, a pretty patch of woodland. The city created the Preserve to get some use from the land ruined by toxic chemicals and metals from the river that prevented residential development. Eventually it joins the Saluda River, which widens into Lake Greenwood in Laurens County.

The Reedy becomes part of a network of dozens of minor-league rivers. The Edisto, North Edisto, Sampit, and Salkenhatchie drain the southern tier of the state. Most of the others, including the Black, Broad, and Congaree, are tributaries of the Santee or the Pee Dee Rivers.

The rivers flow uniformly southeast, from the Upstate corner that abuts Georgia and North Carolina through the Midlands and Columbia to the Low Country and its gold coast, Myrtle Beach, Charleston, Hilton Head.

South Carolina, apart from its Upstate share of the Blue Ridge, is a water-soaked state. The rivers are fed by hundreds of tributaries, known and unknown, that maintain the damp soil that was critical for the antebellum Low Country plantation crops, rice, cotton, indigo, planted, worked, and harvested by slaves.

The state’s slave economy created vast wealth for the slaveowners. Slaves built the lovely homes of Charleston and environs, which have become tourist attractions. Imprints of their fingerprints, including children’s fingerprints, can be found on the bricks.

In June 2018 Charleston issued a resolution of apology for its role in the slave trade signed by Mayor John Tecklenberg: “Recognizing, denouncing and apologizing on behalf of the city of Charleston for its role in regulating, supporting, and fostering slavery and the resulting atrocities inflicted by the institution of slavery … “

The resolution goes on to acknowledge that 40 percent of enslaved Africans arrived at the Port of Charleston and that hundreds of thousands of African Americans today can trace their ancestry to Africans who arrived in Charleston. It continues: “notwithstanding the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, institutionalized discrimination continued in many parts of the country … through Jim Crow laws.”

The document pledges that the mayor and city council will work to end discrimination in schools, businesses, and institutions doing business with the city. So there’s that.

We may believe it’s a long intellectual leap to connect our tourist-attraction hometown river with the state’s natural flow of groundwater, rich cash crops, slavery, and war. But two hundred years ago, and less, that’s the way it was in South Carolina. That’s why the rebels attacked at Fort Sumter in 1861. And why, in 2018, Charleston apologized.