September 20, 2021

Getting back to Great Smoky Mountain National Park always has mattered. A friend had taken me through the park many years ago; once you see it, the haunted beauty of the place never leaves. A cousin planned one of those long talked about, always postponed family reunions near Bryson City, N.C. We showed up. The Smokies, 522,000 acres, are next door. So for a half-day we made it back to the park, Sandy, the grandsons, and me. Once there, we got to Clingman’s Dome.

Bryson City is one of those places that, like many others called “city,” is a small town. It’s tucked into the rugged deep-green northwest corner of the state next to GSMNP. Sixty miles or more away from Bryson City, in any direction, the mountains rise into clouds. You can’t say “maybe next time.” You have to go.

The Smokies aren’t the Rockies, they don’t show the sharp, soaring, snow-capped peaks that make great postcards and calendar photos. But these ancient eastern mountains bring the crowd.  The National Park Service reports that in 2020 12.1 million people visited Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The second-most popular park, Yellowstone, had 3.8 million visitors. It’s true that GSMNP is an easier drive for more Americans than Yellowstone or Zion (3.6 million) or the Grand Canyon (2.9 million).

The Smokies cast a magic, elusive spell. It could be a sense of the connection of these mountains and forests with the country’s history, as the pathway over 200 years for settlers across the Appalachians and dangerous, bloody Cherokee country, to Tennessee and beyond. There’s that, but also something about the hold of the deep wilderness, in its rough delicate beauty, on our humanity.  In its way it is a fearsome place. The wide Smokies forest, dense enough in stretches to darken the earth below the canopy, is crisscrossed by rough pathways blocked by sharp rock formations and near-impassable blowdowns.

We drove the 20 miles from Cherokee, the honky-tonk place just outside the park, to the Newfound Gap turnoff to the seven-mile-long Clingman Road. The two-lane road winds sharply higher into mist. The shrouded green intensity unfolds at every turn and every break in the forest, the mist envelopes the car. I poked along, gripping the wheel, Sandy stared directly ahead. The boys enjoyed it.

The road ends at a small parking space. You can get a share of the view without actually making the steep half-mile climb to the summit, at 6,643 feet third-highest in the East; Mount Mitchell and Mount Craig, near Asheville, are a few feet higher. I read that Thomas Lanier Clingman was a Confederate general who explored these parts in the 1850s. The Cherokees called the place Kuwahi, “mulberry place.” The information stands provide some history in English andTsalagi, the inscrutable Cherokee language.

We looked at the path into the clouds and started hiking, a few fast steps, then slower, then slower still. Around the first turn was another, then another. We paused, gasping, but the boys marched forward. Successful climbers, smiling but exhausted, strode rapidly down past us. “Almost there,” somebody yelled. “You’re close to halfway,” another called. I looked left at the edge, thick with firs that concealed a nearly sheer precipice into the abyss. No railing, no warning signs. Stay right, where a few narrow paths opened into impenetrable forest. We pushed on.

The path turned gradually to the right and seemed to level off, then rose further and turned again into forest on both sides. To the left we saw the gash in the wooded wall, an opening to the Appalachian Trail, which nearly bisects the mountain.

I detoured into a narrow rock-carpeted cavern in the forest and saw the white rectangular blazes on trees that show the way on the AT’s 2,140-mile length from Maine’s Baxter State Park to Georgia’s Springer Mountain 200 miles south. I could make out the descending route to the north, which seemed to drop almost vertically. The blazed path dropped just as steeply to the south, the hiker’s reward for making it this far.

The mature firs around me blocked nearly all daylight, I peered into the wafting mist. The trail and the huge rocks told stories. For a moment I took them in. Then I stepped back up to the established path. Sandy and the boys waited, wondering what happened.

We pressed on to the summit then up the catwalk that rises to the observation deck 45 feet above the treetops. We paused for a moment or two to take a photo. The summit was fully enshrouded, we saw nothing but the heights of the fir forest, fading into whiteness. Not a day for Clingman’s 100-mile vistas. Then the flight to earth.

Crossing the parking lot I overheard a couple of middle-aged-looking gents groaning. “I made it halfway,” one said. “I got three-quarters up,” said the other. I didn’t smile, it was a hard way. Still, I’m guessing that many, maybe most who attempt it make it to the top.

The climb gave us a bracing start to our weekend in Bryson City, a place that without the mountains would not be on our list of places to see. The Smokies visitors are everywhere, filling the tent, cabin, and RV campsites that once were rocky pastures. You can climb aboard the Smoky Mountain Express and sit for a scenic ride, no risk of breaking a sweat. Tube rental places along Deep Creek Road spoil the environs with flashy marquees advertising tame, tourist-type tube rides on the Tuckasegee River. You can get into the national park at the Deep Creek entrance at the far end of town, where the lot is filled with cars of visitors from many states getting their tubing adventure.

A few miles from the commercial shlock is the real Bryson City, the place where local year-rounders farm, run small businesses and souvenir shops, or drive to other towns to earn a living. They occupy the cramped hollows and short stretches of flatland where single-level clapboard houses and mobile homes are perched, the front porches piled high with toolboxes, auto parts, and other dreck. That’s the non-tourist city. Yet those folks each day get to raise their eyes to those majestic green peaks that hide behind that dancing Smokies mist. A complicated place, with a touch of heaven.             

September 11, 2021

We all have our “where were you” stories. We repeat them at this time every year. I planned to go to the Pentagon for an afternoon meeting on 9/11. When I saw the news about 9:30 AM I settled in front of the TV. Sandy called, the kids called, a niece called. Like millions, I watched the news nonstop for the next three days.

A week later, people with Pentagon building passes were permitted access. I went inside. The South Parking wing was sealed off with plastic sheeting, but the acrid smell of burnt sheet rock and metal singed the skin.

That same week the financial markets reopened in New York. I took an Amtrak to visit a friend at his Wall Street office. From northern New Jersey, miles from Manhattan, I could see from the train windows the thin dark column of smoke rising from the Twin Towers site. Downtown streets still were closed to traffic, but pedestrians could get through. Police officers were everywhere.

It had rained the night of 9/11, the millions of tons of concrete dust and pulverized glass and metal had congealed and coated the streets, sidewalks, buildings, and windows. From a distance of a few blocks I saw the ghastly tangle of girders pointing crookedly at the sky, construction equipment pushing and lifting chunks of concrete, the hard-hatted rescue personnel at work. As at the Pentagon, the smell of burnt building material was overwhelming.

Because the subway wasn’t operating I had to walk a couple of dozen blocks back to Penn Station. I passed Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village (where I was born many years earlier), which was initially used as a triage center for victims. Hundreds of photos of missing persons had been taped to the sides of the building by people seeking news about missing relatives. They crowded forward to study the photos, some still were posting them. Some were in tears. I caught a late train back to Washington.

On September 14, President Bush had visited the Twin Towers site. Surrounded by cheering rescue workers, he yelled into a bullhorn, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon.”

That was America’s September 2001, and the first day of a twenty-years-long search for vengeance. Within weeks CIA and Special Forces operatives deployed to Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two weeks ago America departed. 

One evening last week the sunset in this corner of South Carolina cast a wide arc of pale orange, rimmed by black clouds.  Darkness is rushing in, soon bringing autumn chill. We walked around the block. We didn’t say much. I looked up, the dark sky summoned for me once again the 9/11 memories, now two decades past.

Tomorrow we start Year 21. Time after all is relentless. What will it mean? To the families of the victims very little, because for them time stands still. Their loved ones are lost now as they were lost on 9/12/01. Bodies were found in the debris of the Towers and the Pentagon in following days, but the reality of massive loss of life was recognized by the evening of 9/11. Two hundred sixty-five victims were aboard the four planes.

All of us, from those who were young, teenagers, even pre-teens at the time and everyone older, know what happened that day. Many don’t understand why. The 9-11 Commission Report, released in 2004, offered extensive analysis of the chronic social dislocations of the Middle East: poverty, violence, and religious extremism, which, it ventures to say, gave birth to hatred of the West, principally the United States, and the incubation of Muslim terror movements.

We understand now that in twenty years in Afghanistan the United States changed nothing. In the final week, in the chaos of Kabul, 13 servicemen and women and nearly 200 Afghanis were murdered by a suicide bomber. This is the world we live in today. 

But once again, time is relentless. Garrett Graff, who wrote The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, points out that a generation of Americans now is growing up who don’t remember what America was like before 9/11. But then we saw the same distancing from history after the Cold War, after Vietnam, after the Sixties, after Korea. And so on. The generations that lived through those lacerating traumas carry them forward for the balance of their lives. Their children and grandchildren may listen respectfully. But whether they do or not, they move forward.

The children are looking at the world they will live in, the world that will be theirs to create, after the oldtimers are gone. And we oldsters know that’s how all of history unfolds. We recoil at the horror, the tragedy. Then we confront it. We build the proper memorials and honor the victims—we honor them always, privately in our prayers, and publicly in their time. For the victims of the Towers, the Pentagon, the four aircraft, that is September 11.

The three major memorial sites have been completed. The memorial in the field in Stonycreek Township in western Pennsylvania honors the victims, some call them the warriors, of United Flight 93, which had been turned from its course to San Francisco to hit either the White House or the Capitol. The aircraft was crashed there by the hijacker-pilot as a group of passengers fought back and, according to the Commission, may have killed at least one of the four hijackers. After the crash Vice President Cheney is reported to have said one memorable thing: “I think an act of heroism took place on that plane.”

We can be sure of that. That heroism is to be honored once again on September 11, 2022. We can be sure also that 9/11/01 will lose its raw edge, which is as it should be. The children of the last two decades will move forward and, we hope, learn the right lessons: meet tragedy with dignity, not vengeance, prudence, not warmongering. The nightmare of 9/11, which became the nightmare of Afghanistan, still haunts us. Time to learn.

September 6, 2021

We are shaped by our memories, we all know it. And the 50-mile-long Massanutten range, two north-south fingers of high rock about 75 miles due west of Washington, D.C., has been for years a haunting presence for us. It was Labor Day weekend so it was time for the Ring, the annual muscle-wrenching slog on the 71-mile Massanutten Trail over the rocks through a lush wonderland called Fort Valley. I still shiver when I think of those freezing February nights on the trail along the eastern Massanutten ridge. I thought of all the reasons for not driving the 470 miles to show up. Then we climbed in the van and headed north.

Typically the trip means a mountain route, I-85 to Charlotte then I-77 to I-81 up the spine of Virginia.  But I-26 through Asheville and Tennessee now is a better choice. Just north of Asheville the interstate passes Mount Mitchell, highest point in the East at 6,600 feet. The Blue Ridge begins to bend into the majestic eastern ridge of the Great Smokies before Erwin, Tenn. Breathtaking country. Some eight hours of interstate through rolling Virginia pastureland and the blue-green Shenandoahs brings you to Signal Knob.

The Massanutten ends abruptly midway between Strasburg and Front Royal. The northernmost point is Signal Knob, a sheer outcropping that towers above the junction of Warren and Shenandoah Counties. The Massanutten Trail winds from a campground called Elizabeth Furnace in long switchbacks four miles to the summit across ancient shale and granite. From there, the climber can look out 60 or so miles west and north over the rich textured green of rural Northern Virginia and West Virginia.

We arrived Thursday to visit Virginia friends Mike and Pat, who settled some years ago at their farmhouse along the Shenandoah River, just below Signal Knob. On Friday Sandy and Pat drove to Mount Jackson to visit an ailing friend. Mike and I got out early and headed for the mountains to hike the Buzzard Rocks trail, which winds up to a perch lined with jagged shards of granite above Fort Valley Road. The trail is marked by white blazes, which lead to places that summon recollections of days and nights in those woods, when the trees were bare and the wind howled. We pressed upward over the granite until we could see across Fort Valley to Signal Knob, in its silent solemnity.

In the morning Sandy and I were there for the start of the Ring. Before dawn the sky showed pale blue, the coming day promised to be mild and bright. The veteran race managers called to the 44 runners, waved “Go,” and pointed into the dark forest at the orange-blazed Massanutten Trail. The volunteers cheered, the runners were gone. Three hours and 25 miles farther down the course we were at the first aid station, called Camp Roosevelt, a once-busy place built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps to provide work for unemployed Valley men, now a quiet campground.

The first competitors flowed slowly in. They ate, drank, collected themselves, and headed toward aid station 2, nine miles further on. A half-dozen said no. They thought about those hours on the ridge and the hard miles ahead and stepped down from the trail.

Those who persevered moved toward places with obscure names: Crisman Hollow, Moreland Gap, Edinburg, Woodstock Tower, Powell’s Fort. The finish, back to Signal Knob, still is a long way off. The trail, pocked with knife-sharp rocks, pulled them in afternoon heat through a swampy stretch called Duncan Hollow toward another stiff climb and the course halfway point.

I peered into the green darkness. Nothing had changed in the five years since I finished the course, the first of three finishes. I looked at the ground, the hard granite surface seemed to look back at me as it seemed to those five years ago, then four, then three, when I finished twice more, both times covering the course when it’s run in reverse as the “Reverse Ring” held in February. The 2018 finish was a thirty-minute time improvement followed by three days in the hospital with a strange, scary condition called rhabdomyolysis that stresses the kidneys. Afterward we thought: not a happy tradeoff.

The sun gleamed through the trees as the runners at the back of the field trotted off from Camp Roo. We volunteers puttered a bit, studied the runners’ recorded times, and talked about last year’s race and next year’s, the events ahead for this eccentric subculture of athletes. For some of them, a race called Grindstone, set in central Virginia mountains, is penciled in for mid-September. Grindstone is a different beast, it starts at 6:00 PM.

We won’t be around for that. The Ring gives us our dose of mountain mystery along with the bracing air and pure, crystal-clear spring water. Old friends showed up, still in Virginia, still climbing those wild peaks, working on their trail-running boasting rights, their fitness; some working through a mission central to their lives.

These hard mountains, for those who return here, may provide a sort of spiritual anchor, they have a way of stirring the mind, heart, and soul. Maybe the silence has something to do with it—that and the immense, intimidating distances, the loneliness of deep forest tempered by awareness of the serene presence of the Lord. It’s the Ring. It’s 71 miles. It’s the Massanutten Mountains:  forest, rocks, thickets, streams, zigzaging, disappearing trails, and those empowering, panoramic vistas. Then memories come, and remain.

August 30, 2021

Lake Hartwell, which straddles the Georgia-South Carolina line, shimmered in the 90F Southern sun. I felt the perspiration flow as I fumbled with the spinning reel and rod Sandy had given me as a wedding present 43 years ago to the day, August 26. It was our anniversary. I was standing at the end of the fishing pier at Lake Hartwell State Park. She was back at our cabin, enjoying the air conditioning. I tried a few casts toward the Georgia side.

We thought we’d do something different for the big day. She had found the “camper’s cabin” on the state parks website. South Carolina state parks typically rent cabins for three nights to a week. Only at Lake Hartwell were the cabins available for two nights, all we wanted. The camper’s cabin is four walls, two windows, and a roof. It does have an air-conditioning unit, but no kitchen or bathroom—you use a community bathroom 100 yards up the road and cook on a charcoal grill or bring your own equipment. The only lighting is a bare bulb mounted in the ceiling. We didn’t think of bringing a lamp.

We made the trip eventful: we drove the previous day to Whitewater Falls, the highest waterfall east of the Mississippi. Our daughter Marie drove up separately with the grandsons. The falls, off U.S. 130 just across the state line in North Carolina, truly are spectacular. From an observation platform they appear to cascade from a rocky ridge to a deep gorge, throwing off a graceful, ghostly spray. Marie is homeschooling the boys because the state has blocked school boards from protecting schoolkids by requiring masks. She had them bring their sketchbooks. They sat on the platform and sketched.

Our next stop on the tour, my idea, was the Walhalla Fish Hatchery. Sandy went along without much enthusiasm, Marie declined. We drove south from the falls on 130 then headed west for a few miles to U.S. 107 for a while to rutted, pitted Fish Hatchery Road, which winds down a mountainside through thick forest. The hatchery sits along the rushing whitewater Chattooga River, which forms the border between South Carolina and Georgia.

We parked in an empty lot and followed a winding path to the hatchery gate. There it was, twelve concrete “raceways” in which swam hundreds of thousands of brook and rainbow trout, separated by size. We walked the full football-field length of the raceways, inspecting the trout as they darted through the narrow troughs.

The place was silent. A sign told us that the hatchery was staffed by a fisheries biologist, three technicians, and a part-time assistant. But we saw no one, we were alone. Employee lunchhour? A billboard described the hatchery’s work. The trout are separated by sex until they’re bred. The fingerlings are cultivated to nine to 12 inches. Some 500,000 fish are released in the state’s rivers and lakes each year.

Sandy showed polite interest as I stared down at the hordes of swimming fish, but I sensed this was not a pre-anniversary outing she would have chosen. Soon she stopped trying to hide her impatience. I got the hint. After I took a quick stroll to look at the rushing Chattooga, we headed back up the twisting mountain road.

Why in heck did I want to visit the hatchery? I had not caught a trout in a local stream since I was a teenager. Eleven years ago I took my son fishing in Canada’s Northwest Territory. We hauled in fifteen-pound lake trout and northern pike. That was then, this is now. But the fish hatchery is here, one of those places you—scratch that—I need to see. Probably only once.

The cabin was reasonably comfortable. On anniversary morning we hiked the park’s sole nature trail, one uphill mile, rocky and rooted, leaving us perspiring and panting. We needed insect repellent. We got in the van and headed out of the park then south on I-85 looking for a grocery store. Immediately we were in Georgia. The first exit took us out to the boondocks. We drove around aimlessly. I thought: this is how we’re spending our anniversary? The second exit was Livonia. We found a restaurant for an anniversary lunch, then headed into tiny, sunbaked Livonia and found a store. It then was in the 90s. We fled back to the park.

I moved to the other side of the pier, drew the rod back behind my head and cast again, maybe thirty feet. The lure plunked on the surface, I let out some slack, then reeled. The lure bounced along easily, no fish interest. The late August sun beat down on the lake, the heat radiated up from the surface.

I looked across the water to the distant Georgia shore, a dark silhouette in the afternoon glare. I could make out a couple of speedboats, just dots, moving along the shoreline. I looked down at the water, and back at the catwalk up through the woods. I felt no hint of a breeze, not a leaf swayed in the treetops. How hot was it?

I guessed it didn’t matter. We had chosen to be here for this quiet milestone. The heat had been the same on the wedding day, when the Tennessee sunlight collided with suffocating humidity, me in my suit, Sandy in her wedding dress, the guests all nicely fitted out, gasping as they stood waiting on the steps of St. Mary’s Church in downtown Nashville

I recalled the two of us talking, a night or two ago, about those who are no longer with us, parents, brothers, cousins, my former boss. The two priests who officiated are both long gone. And here we are in the northwest corner of South Carolina four decades and three years later, with four kids, some medical close calls, and many lessons about life behind us.

I smiled as I thought of the fish hatchery visit. Who does that on an anniversary trip? I paused with the rod. The line hung limply into the pale green water, undisturbed. I reeled in, wiped my forehead, removed the lure from the line, closed the tackle box, and drove back to the cabin. In the morning we headed for home and, we always like to believe, on to the next anniversary.

August 27, 2021

The Taliban have ridden into town with terrorists, who Thursday killed 10 Marines, two soldiers,  a Navy corpsman, and dozens of Afghans. We’re blasting the country’s foreign policy leadership of the past 20 years. Biden, Obama, and Bush have been condemned as dupes of their generals and diplomats.

In 1975 the end in Saigon was the same as the end is now in Kabul: Americans and their local-national allies, thousands of them, fighting and dying to get out. The world was very different then, that war was very different.

The men who died Thursday and their brothers—Marines, soldiers, medics, civilians, came to Kabul to conduct an evacuation, but really they came for combat. No other word works. They are the newest heroes of Dunkirk. Who remembers?

From May 26 through June 4, 1940, when German divisions had trapped British and French troops against the English Channel near the port city of Dunkirk, the British Royal Navy and hundreds of private ships and boats evacuated roughly 215,000 British and 123,000 French troops in Operation Dynamo. Some 68,000 were rescued on May 31 alone, roughly 64,000 on June 1. About 75,000 French troops came out between June 2and June 4.

The dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London called the evacuation the “miracle at Dunkirk.” Books were written about it, movies were made, the last one in 2017.

The British people welcomed the troops home. Then they learned that some 68,000 British troops were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the six-week-long Battle of France. The British Expeditionary Force, or BEF, left behind 2,400 artillery pieces, 20,000 motorcycles, and 65,000 other vehicles in France, as well as hundreds of thousands of tons of stores, ammunition, and fuel. Six British destroyers and three French destroyers were sunk along with hundreds of small craft.

At that point Americans weren’t in the fight, but they heard—the world heard—about Dunkirk. But few knew that two British divisions returned to France to reconstitute the BEF, along with French troops who had been evacuated. Then the Brits’ high command bowed to the reality on the ground and withdrew the force by June 14, the same day the Germans entered Paris. The Germans took 35,000 French soldiers prisoner.

Ten days earlier, on June 4, Prime Minister Winston Churchill set the tone for England’s warfighting heart with his immortal “we shall fight on the beaches” speech to Parliament. The Royal Air Force then engaged the German Luftwaffe in an all-air battle that lasted from July to November, followed by the Blitz on England’s cities that killed more than 40,000 civilians through May 1941. Churchill had given the approaching fight for survival its name in his June 18 speech: “The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin.” He ended with “… if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘this was their finest hour.’”

The U.S. fought with its Western allies for the survival of democracy, of freedom, against forces of pure evil. For the war the West lined up with one outlier, the USSR, which months earlier had been in bed with the Nazis and when combat ended in August 1945 assumed Germany’s role in threatening the existence of the free world.

What’s different today? Nearly everything, starting with the world’s political alignments and the technology of war. More than that: the flawed judgment of U.S. political and military leaders over these last 20 years—the 9/11 anniversary is two weeks away—are the menu for nonstop agonizing. The menu is, more or less: the U.S. can’t impose democracy where it’s not wanted; we didn’t learn from the British or Soviet failures in Afghanistan; we should have killed bin Laden and got out; we should have known the Afghan army wouldn’t fight.

Instead, we now know it was an ugly, bloody, tragic failure from the start. The most experienced four-star Army and Marine Corps generals and their diplomatic colleagues kept sending those sunnyside-up briefings to the White House and Congress. In the end they were wrong, not just wrong, but monumentally wrong. Were they incompetent or just gullible, hearing from their subordinates what they wanted to hear? Who knows?

Who really understood the truth about Afghanistan? No one we knew, no one we trusted.

In France in spring 1940, the BEF and the French and Belgian armies were routed by the Germans. Like our generals in Afghanistan, the British commanders didn’t understand their enemy, who used tanks and bombers to outmaneuver them. The Brits could only throw their ships, trawlers, ferries, and small craft into rescuing every soldier they could squeeze aboard in two weeks, under constant air attack.

At home, the British cheered and supported their men as they came off the boats, not knowing what lay ahead. Those rescued soldiers weren’t safe for long, eventually they returned to combat, in North Africa, in Italy, again in France. Churchill knew, and he hammered home the truth: that the Germans were massing their bombers for a year-long assault on fortress England. The Brits stood up and supported their wartime leaders.

Right now the U.S.-led Kabul evacuation may get 150,000 out—a strong maybe—over three weeks, while facing suicide bombers and ragtag guerrilla-terror teams.  

Here in the U.S. we see some admirable folks welcoming the refugees, others turning their backs. The political recriminations will continue. The President will make a campaign promise, no more Afghanistan deployments. Maybe, maybe not. But Afghanistan will be remembered, in all its sadness.