Camping in the New River Gorge

I have a few theories about the Appalachians. Well, they're more than theories. They are things I know to be true. I can feel them. 

One is that bluegrass music comes up from the Earth here. 

Another is that they hold many mysteries. With the Rockies for instance, you can see the stark ruggedness of its cliffs. In many places, everything is right up front and out there. Bald and naked. But the Appalachians, that's a different story. Around the forested bend, in the foggy hollow... are secrets, whispers of all sorts of lives lived: passions, treacheries, all of the shenanigans folks around here got into during their flash-in-a pan lives, their quick shot at life between the cradle and the grave.

The Appalachians were 29,000 feet once, higher than the Himalayas. Thank god there was no one around to hike up there and leave their trash all along the way. Her roads are littered enough today with Gatorade bottles, Bud Lite and MacDonald's wrappers, to name a few. But 29,000 years ago when she rose, there was barely any life on land yet. All of our biodiversity was within the oceans. And they were teeming with life. We hadn't yet crawled out. And so the mountains were just lonely and beautiful.

 Today, her hills generally range between two and five thousand feet. Dramatic, but gracious. The New River Gorge is generous with its dramatic vistas.  Too, the river that forced its way through these hills still races through the gorge with all of its vigor. May you age as gracefully. Whitewaters like these make it an adventurers' paradise for river rafters.

I wanted to camp in the gorge where I could maybe swim and definitely hear the water rushing by as I fell asleep. And I wanted to hike. I love the trails I've taken here. The rim trail is pretty easy, which is good because you could easily lose yourself (and your balance) gazing past the many shades of green in the forest, hundreds, maybe thousands of tall and broad pines among the deciduous, all of those in full leaf now and absolutely stuffing the tall banks, up and down both sides of the river, around the huge horseshoe bend and spilling out from hidden hollows. You take in all of this as you are looking down, way down into the river because you have to. The draw is magnetic. 

Back to the rim trail in the Park. It's easy, mostly on soft peat with pine needles. Not to say there aren't big ol' roots ready to trip you up. It's a lightweight workout really, except the steep staircase at the end, or half way point of this more or less 'in-and-out' trail. It's good to feel your chest pounding and your thighs burning. It's like you weren't just lazy again today.

Just a note on 'in-and-out' trails. It's taken me a long time, but now I'm ready to admit that I don't see everything there is to see the first trip through. This is especially true when there is a lot to see. Which there usually is. Plus I've had to accept the truth that I've become completely turned around on trails when I've stopped, say to take a picture or take a side trail and returned and not realized that I'd turned around until I found myself standing in dismay to find that I am at the trailhead where I'd begun. Maybe it's just that niggling pissiness one feels when having to backtrack and repeat, that feeling of having wasted time which played a part in my displeasure with 'in-and-out' trails. I just want to repeat that I'm over it. They're great. 

There's another trail up there I like a lot. There's a lookout, a boardwalk and a set of steps, I think the placard said 152 steps. I really should look this up and correctly tell you the name of the trail and be absolutely certain that other flight of stairs was at the end of the rim trail and not another one, but half the enjoyment of vacationing is not knowing what's coming up, so just explore. Anyway, instead of taking the boardwalk out to the lookout, take a trail on your left (or if you're coming back on your right). It's called something like Dangerous Trail or maybe Steep Cliff Trail, but it's not that terrifying. You do have to keep your wits about you at all times, but you can stop and marvel at the Mountain Laurel Bush growing high on a ledge vertically above you seventy feet or so, just don't misstep.

Luckily, I found a site at Army Base campground. The campgrounds in New River are all primitive and first-come first-serve, so I was stoked to get a site and it fit my requirement of hearing the river as I was falling asleep. After being there a few days, it began to feel like I was part of a community. Typical National Park campground rules allow folks to stay for fourteen consecutive days and no more than 28 in a calendar year. Most people stay only short times, a night or three. I think with so many people using Starlink now, two out of ten sites occupied at Army Base had their panels out, remote workers will be hunkering down for a bit longer. The irony is that many of the national parks are touting their 'dark sky' status, the premise being that our night skies should be protected from light pollution. Our night skies. It saddens me that our children and our children's children will not know the pristine beauty of a night sky without man's machines blinking by every second, and experience the grandeur of the universe I used to feel. Star watching, once a dreamy, usually solitary endeavor, has become similar to viewing a natural wonder among a crowd of tourists complaining to everyone within hearing range and yelling at their children. The experience is no longer wondrous, but mundane. We cannot look deep into the universe and realize our size. We are outsized, up close and personal. How eerie and awful it was to see a Starlink train channeling through the sky last week. It twisted my gut. It felt like the first time I drove the highway next to the Hoover Dam. Something was wrong. I looked up to see that I was ensnared beneath a web of wires, within a massive electrical grid.. When I was eight years old, in 1964 there were 115 satellites orbiting the earth, not all that disruptive even to a star-gazer like me. Relatively anyway. Today there are nearly 11,000, a couple thousand of them not even functioning, just trash in the sky with no one accountable for any of the adverse consequences of their personal profit. Keep launching them, Mr. Plastic Face. You own the sky, right? Keep on purchasing the service, remote workers. I might. It would make things easier. And it’s inexpensive as the environmental costs are not included in the price. A free-for-all for the canny profiteers.  Nope, the highest good of all concerned is not a consideration. It's more about finding personal happiness which usually involves making money, so just do it. After all, life is short. Don't bother with the as-yet unborn. We've got out own problems. They'll deal with their. Besides, did I hear that right? Or was it just a sick joke, a comedic skit that the vision of seven generations hence is that we’ve abandoned earth to the trash heap and conquered Mars? Just a thought: wouldn’t it be simply amazing if most of our super wealthy were true benevolent visionaries? Earth could be pretty cool. I'm sitting in a library in a small town in Ontario, thanking Andrew Carnegie for his bequest. Canada too? Well, we do share the air. If you've ever taken the corridor between Detroit and Montreal, which is where I am, you will find that it is still quite putrid.

Turning bleak thoughts aside, paddling hard away from misanthropic tendencies, it is after all a new day, I befriended a few people in the campground while continuing to hide from the redneck, slipping out of eyesight each time he approached my site shirtless, beer can in hand and swaggering. In all fairness, he had to pass my site to get to the river, and I saw him go there once. I picked up a freshly tossed beer can right after he left the riverbank. The riverbank there was super cool. It looked like a set from Lord of the Rings, with whitish trees that arched low across a primeval expanse of large rocks, slippery with mud from the heavy rains we'd been having. I describe it as though its in the past because riverbanks change. Have I ever mentioned that I love the croaking of bullfrogs? I didn't hear any there, but it seemed like if there were sluggish mud pools around, maybe further up the bend, it would be an ideal home. 

I shied away from the beer belly guy as he'd arrived in a rusty pickup that broke down when got here, hauling in some old dirty broken down-trailer. Even the window shades were busted up. Almost immediately, he had visitors stopping by to ostensibly to help him with some repair project or for a quick intimate conversation. None of it looked good. Most people camping in national parks don't know a lot of local people, so this was a bit out of the ordinary, locals showing up in pickups with tools. Anyway, enough about this guy. 

My adjacent neighbors had a Starlink panel in front of their fortification where they remained holed up for the duration of my stay. People staying on the other side of me changed a couple times and each time we sniffed each other out (met) and let each other co-reside in peace. Oh, I almost forgot about the college lads camping for their first time. They were headed to the Badlands. Catchy name that draws a lot of people and of course there's their well-deserved reputation as being bad-ass beautiful. And the sweetheart who gave me a cupped hand full of fragrant mosquito repellant from his home in China. For a couple days, I chatted regularly with a fellow named Doug who spent the rest of his time reading fiction. I figured it was just God's joke that as soon as he left, another Doug arrived who would quickly become my friend. Keeping things easy for me. Maybe encouraging me to socialize. See, this is easy? 

Note about first Doug. Nice guy, though admittedly I dubbed him Soviet Spy guy from the get-go. He was wearing a faded red hoodie with Russian letters across the chest and did not acknowledge me when I greeted him. I didn't really care. I'd just come up from the sandy beach there which has a long coal seam running through it and another just coming into shore, so you had to step over the grittiness. I came up the bank onto a scene along the paved path where two guys, local buddies, were tossing knives into trees. They told me they came here a lot and did that. I was already feeling like an alien dropped here from outer space, so why would I care if some old guy couldn't even be bothered to grunt? In retrospect he was probably hard of hearing and maybe lost in thought because he wasn't the shithead I'd pegged him as. Anyway, the note about him is the weapon he chose to carry: A bright orange paintball gun with balls that are heavier than paint balls.

An animal dragged away half of my primary footwear, a hiking sandal while I slept. I'd scrubbed them with Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap and left them outside to dry overnight. Thankfully, I found my abducted shoe down a trail in the woods behind my site. It's got a few claw and bite marks, battle scars, but still functions as it should.

And there was Barry! Barry was awesome. He came strolling up the campground road from the direction of the river. I had no idea where his vehicle was, if he had one. He asked with all of the sincerity in his beautiful eyes, "Is this campground safe?" I must have looked confused. I mean there was the dicey guy with the trailer, but he'd only been there a day and other than him, it had been pretty peaceful. Barry said the Rangers told him that a band of squatters, a local opioid community, had taken over one of the campgrounds and they were refusing to leave. They were shady and they were going back and forth between the campgrounds. That might explain the Rangers' visits to the trailer guy. Barry was also headed out to the Badlands. He was riding a motorcycle, coming from his home in Baltimore. He was sewing National Park passes on his riding jacket. 

I smiled at his question. Baltimore was notorious for its crime for many years and still has its share of poverty, drugs and crime, and here he was coming from there into a small, lazy campground I had been finding pretty quiet and pleasant, and asking me whether it was safe. But he was so sincere. You just wanted to protect him from all harm, always. I hope to run into him again. He had the demeanor of an angel.

I've got to hand it to Doug 2.0. I really do. With a casual hello, he brought me out of my head and into the sphere of his loving tribe. He called out to me as I was strolling by. Turns out he 'd been bringing his family to the gorge for years and he knew the river there well. He quickly put me at ease about swimming there. I am over the wrist surgeries, but they did create a timidness in me to risk shattering them while they were still healing, and I began to have doubts about situations which had never before caused pause, like swimming in a fast current over sharp rocks. Hearing the easy way he spoke of the currents made me realize that I was hanging on to parameters that were no longer necessary. Turns out, not surprisingly right? that this Doug is an amazing father. He made me wish I'd watched him before I raised my kids. So, the demographics of my new buddies were thus. He had his three kids with him, great kids, a lad (wise, calm, sweet, great communicator, a true Tom Sawyer) somewhere between 12 and 15, a sprightly darling daughter, also loquacious... and she dances! and a six year old son who was pretty much slaying dragons or casting wizard spells the whole time I saw him. At first, Doug was the sole parent with six kids, the other three being of the same sexes and ages as his, one of those confusing moments of introduction where you're not putting the pieces together... was it three sets of twins? They all looked so different, yet shared a certain tribal energy... and you know how introductions go, you're trying to put on your most polite act, but nonetheless I just started laughing and burst out, hoping he wasn't a child predator with six kidnapped children, "They're all yours?" Well, soon afterward the father of three of the kids, Doug's best friend from forever, arrived. What luck they had kids the same age and gender. They operated as one. At one point it became necessary for the elders to rally them in for a team huddle. Doug was a Steeler. The kids took in what they were saying and acknowledged it, swearing their subscription to the rules. It was a sight to see. I don't think I've ever been in a huddle. Honest, eager faces, but serious and intelligent. 

Barry would have got a kick out of the entertainment the new arrivals provided. Right after he took to the open road, another suspect trailer pulled in next to the redneck guy. It wasn't clear if they knew each other. But there was something a bit off about this group too. Apart from the fluorescent suit the father wore. Was he a highway construction worker? You got the feeling they were all cross-eyed. Even the woman shuffling about. Neon orange guy and and his man-child drove an electric bike around and around and around the campground loop. Our own circle de soleil! 

The man-child was the size of all six children standing on each other's shoulders and appeared older than any of them. His wish to join the children playing caused a bit of concern.

And then came the rainstorm. What a scene. The campsite was a mishmash of comforts: chaise lounges, chips, steak, sharp sticks with sticky marshmallows, sodas, jackets, room somehow for nine of us under the two bright blue canopy tarps which were quickly puddling and sinking with heavy water from the downpour. Too, it was rising from below. We stood in water as the meadow quickly flooded. And of course it was cold and sharp and pelting in sideways. A weather alert sounded from their radio. The men and older boys stayed on it, spilling water from the canopies. They moved the tarps so there was no longer a space between them. The other dad, Scott kept a fire going in the fire pit during all of this. The older boys and I went down to check on the river rising. In my heart, I have always been an eleven-year old boy, so I was pretty pleased with my luck. We came back to the same scene we left. The fathers were rummaging through piles of things to find the right coats for the younger kids. Of course, all of the requisite activity created yet more happy disorganization. Efforts to keep anything remotely dry had proven largely ineffectual and were effectively abandoned. But that's the fun of camping, isn't it? Facing disasters with joy? Then, as if following some biological cue, the fathers herded their chilled, soaked children into their cozy nests in their respective dry tents and put them to sleep, and that's the last I saw of them. 

I've written so much now that the festival feels a footnote. It was a delightful footnote though. I especially value the people who make the effort to don costumes and the ones who stand on big boxes erected there to entertain the crowd, some dancing with LED hula hoops, some juggling. They embellish the festive vibe. It was a loving, happy crowd enjoying the music. Each band had its devotees and new ones recruited. Heavy rains made it quite a mess however. One had to navigate deep, slippery mud getting to the music and wake to pee by first stepping in a puddle of water that became deeper, spongier or muddier depending upon where you were picking your path in the dark night between cars and vans with open doors and passed out partiers hanging out. A day of river rafting followed by drinking and dancing tuckers a body out I reckon. I shared a bus seat to the music at the saloon midway down the hill with a young man who was a fire dancer and told me he loved water parks, all water parks and everything about them. I've never been drawn to them myself and never heard anyone intrigued by them before. The saloon faced a water park and that's where he was heading determinedly. Of course I went over to view it, but all I saw were garish plastic behemoths with plastic knobs for grabbing and people who were trying to climb, falling off of. It didn't call out my name. But I liked that. It made that guy seem more curious and quirky to me, and I like that sort of surprise. Something new to contemplate. I should have looked to see what hew as enjoying and how it brought him glee, but the music started and I respond to a band starting up like a zombie called in to its master. I did see him fire dancing. He's had formal dance training and was lovely to watch. 

Is there a way to bridge America's divisiveness?