The Turtle Trail

August 12, 2024

The Turtle Trail meanders for a little more than a mile. When your situation demands a walk, the humble Turtle Trail, at Paris Mountain State Park in Greenville, is one place. It’s not the only place, but good enough.

The trail branches off the Mountain Creek Trail, which extends just shy of two miles from the lake near the park visitor’s center. It winds quickly into semi-swampland. A slow-moving creek gurgles alongside, amidst cattails and lily pads. Thick fronds of underbrush hang low over the ripples created by dragonflies. You wonder, do turtles swim there? 

The stands of oaks and maples, and some sycamores are impenetrable. Although this is the Upstate, where the Blue Ridge descends from North Carolina, there’s still a hint of Low Country wetland. The air is heavy and pungent.

It’s a gentle place decked out in deep vernal green. The forest closes in quickly, enforcing silence. The four of us stepped forward, small steps, careful steps around the rocks and roots that snake across the trail, polished by the feet of thousands. The surface rises slowly then descends and turns sharply with the rolling terrain of Upstate.

We had no grand purpose. The Turtle transit was not a retreat into wilderness, not a heartsick plunge into trackless country. We saw no hikers shouldering giant packs. No breathtaking mountain vistas lay before us.

It was time to go back to that quiet place. We all sensed something beyond ourselves. It was not about the Turtle Trail, or about any trail or any place. It seemed, a day or two later, a hint of welcome, much-needed isolation, momentary and fleeting, at this point in this year of stethoscopes and procedures, on a walk into the unknown. Which is where we all are going. Nothing changes.

Nothing changes, which is the whole point of the Turtle Trail. The sameness reassures and inspires. I thought of the countless analogies to the forest as cathedral, or chapel, where a perception of serenity and peace may lift the visitor to another realm of consciousness—contemplation of the Almighty, maybe, something sublime, beyond the world’s grittiness.

The imagination may build on all that to the thoughts and images created by Wordsworth in Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey:

Wordsworth, England’s greatest Romantic poet, wrote Tintern Abbey in 1798, a hard time in Europe. In Paris he fell in love with a French woman, then witnessed the atrocities of the revolution. Yet his spirits rose to compose Tintern Abbey and other verse that place him in his unique domain as a passionate explorer of the beauty and mystery of nature. The poem is five stanzas, 160 lines, but only 19 or 20 sentences. He could not contain himself.

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

… The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

Wordsworth never showed any disloyalty to the Church of England. He studied the Bible and graduated from St. John’s College, Cambridge. His brother Christopher became master of Trinity College. His oldest son John became a vicar.

Yet Tintern Abbey contains no reference to the Christian God or any god or church. Wordsworth found an intense, deeply felt lesson in walking the meadows, the fields, the forests. It’s a lesson of passion and then joy, at discovering his own truth in the sweetness of the natural world. 

He wrote at a time of vast suffering of the poor working people of England and the threat of war with France. But those tragedies subside, if only briefly—for the time it takes to read his lines and to walk the humble Turtle Trail, a wisp of a place almost no one outside this town has ever visited or heard about.

The point of our coming was to catch a break, to slow the grind of scheduling and planning and everything else. The heavy air, the silence, the dapples of green can become in the nervous imagination a bulwark against chaos, subtle hints at the power of faith and acceptance of the strength it brings.

Four years after Tintern Abbey Wordsworth completed Ode on the Intimations of Immortality: Recollections from Early Childhood, a haunting reminiscence that merges with reflections on man, God, redemption. Ode is another wistful self-examination, although a far different setting from Tintern.

The Romantic era is now ancient history. Outside English graduate-studies classes, Wordsworth’s lyrical sentences would clang oddly off modern ears, laughed at, even. Our public figures mock and slander each other, the disease spreads everywhere.

Thoughts and impressions come to us as we walk the Turtle Trail, although not likely from lines of Wordsworth. But we may find something like the message of Tintern Abbey here, and the same everywhere in wilderness, where the braces of full-growth trees are columns to the sky, and the paths wind through and under thick canopy.