April 13th: Lisa Zerkle
Good morning, Holiday Inn Express, Charlottesville, VA! This is the third weekend in a row I’ve travelled—to LA, New York City, and now here. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. This much travel is unusual for me. But since I accepted the thoughtful invitation extended by my husband, Andy, (more on that in a minute), I’m eating a Chobani in the lobby listening to a man talk about his matches on Ancestry.com. A woman in the elevator had told her husband she promised the kids bagels from New Jersey. This inn is an East Coast way station.
In Charlotte we’ve had a true spring—cool weather, some rain. The forsythia, daffodils, and star flowers have finished blooming, while azaleas are in full flower. All the trees have electric green, new leaves that look so bright and tender they seem good enough to eat. Yesterday, we drove up I-77 to I-81 climbing the Blue Ridge escarpment. As we reached farther north and higher in elevation, spring rewound. No leaves here but the roadside was dotted by the dogwood’s white flowers and the redbuds’ lilac ones. Turkey vultures wheeled in vees on the updrafts.
Last week, Andy invited me to share two of his great loves—live music and hiking. In the past he’d asked if I wanted to join him in section hiking the Appalachian Trail. Those invitations usually went like this: wake up at four a.m., drive four-and-a-half hours, hike twelve miles, drive four-and-a-half hours back home. Nothing about that sounded fun to me. He’s been hiking in short spurts over the past few summers trying to log miles. In doing so, he’s hiked through Georgia, North Carolina, and part of Virginia, arriving at the one-third waypoint by last summer’s end. His recent invitation to me was more inspired: leave after lunch, have a nice dinner in Charlottesville, go to a concert, stay in a hotel, hike, and drive home? Deal. We’ve been married nearly 35 years. Marriage is one continuous negotiation.
I’ve made community a priority this year by saying yes to face-to-face encounters. Yes to dinner with friends, yes to book club, yes to protests, yes to AWP, yes to writing in coffee shops, yes to live music. Also yes to art, good novels, volunteering, and spending time in nature.
Charlottesville reminded me of North Carolina mountain towns —boutiques and restaurants frequented by people wearing fleece and jeans. At dinner last night, our waitress looked so much like one of my favorite poets, Jessica Jacobs, that I asked her if she ever reads poetry, always a tricky query, one that might be met with a blank stare. But she said she’s obsessed with Homie by Danez Smith, and that she’d already renewed it several times from the library. I recommended Jacobs to her so she could encounter her doppelgänger.
We check out of the Holiday Inn and make our way to the Long Mountain Wayside where our hike begins. It’s bright and sunny, but cool, especially with the frequent breeze. The car’s thermometer says 55 degrees. Andy checks the elevation on his Far Out app. We’re at about 2000 feet and will reach about 4000 at the peak. I’ve never been an athlete but I’m in decent shape. Before we were married, we hiked down the Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel trail and back up the South Kaibab trail in one day. To me, that was an epic undertaking. Andy’s phone pings as we start up this section of the AT. It’s a text from his brother who has just finished a rim-to-rim-to-rim run of the Grand Canyon, a feat he describes as “Type Two Plus” fun. As we crunch along the gravel and leaf fall on the trail, I ask if this is a real rating system or something his brother just made up. Turns out it’s a known scale created by Dr. Rainier Newberry, a geology professor at University of Alaska: Type One fun is fun, something you’d not hesitate to do again. Type Two challenges in the moment but is worth it in retrospect; like a marathon. Type Three “fun” is best not repeated. At the next switchback, the trail takes a steep pitch. I’m huffing and puffing while I wonder what kind of fun this will turn out to be. At first we can hear cars on the road below us, cows lowing at the farm near the trailhead, and the cawing of crows. Soon, though, the only sound is the wind and the occasional hammer of woodpecker.
Since my progress is slow, I have time to notice violets and dandelions blooming trailside. I think of the passage in Daniel Mason’s North Woods that describes the mix of material in ship ballasts that ferried dandelion seeds and others to the New World. Most of the deciduous trees are still denuded here. What looks like an apple or a cherry is in its pink. Redbuds are in bloom but not in leaf. And the understory is scattered with spring ephemerals. I plod upward trying to recall their names. Wild geranium, May apple, trillium, rue anemone, I think confidently. I don’t want to engage with my phone and I have SOS-only service anyway. Now it’s just a camera.
“What song do you have stuck in your head?” Andy asks, maybe to distract me from the exertion. It’s “Shout” by Tears for Fears for him. The song stuck in my head is from the concert we went to the night before, “New York" by St. Vincent. Annie Clark, who performs as St. Vincent, sang it while she crowd surfed; her body raised and passed hand to hand like an idol. I was trying to take a picture when Andy said “Put your phone down! We need you!” And there she was— legs crossed, arms tucked— singing. I held up her thigh, her back as she passed overhead, the heat of her body against my hands. Then the crowd turned her around and somehow she was standing right in front of me in a circle of people grinning stupidly as if a demigod had landed in their midst. She plucked the hat off the young woman next to me and put it on her own head. New York isn’t New York without you, love, she crooned to the woman before returning the hat and making her way back to the stage. “I’m never washing it,” I heard the woman say to her partner.
Later in the concert, St. Vincent asked the crowd, “Isn’t it a miracle we’re all here together?” She added, “We were all babies once and now we’re here.” Imagining a crowd as a group of babies is a tender gesture, a collective one that engenders empathy towards the group as a whole. St. Vincent is the only artist I’ve ever heard who, in addition to her band, also recognized her crew.
Even with the breeze, sweat trickles down my cheek. A yellow and black swallowtail butterfly loops around me, maybe thinking my red backpack is a flower. Andy gestures to the trail in front and behind us and says he likes to remember that this path in the woods runs over two thousand miles and ends up in Maine. It’s nicknamed the Green Tunnel because, most of the time, hikers’ views are obscured by leaves. This early in spring, we can see the low, old mountains rolling around us. They really do look like a blue ridge along the horizon. I know he’d like for me to love this as much as he does but I also know I’d miss not having a hot shower at the end of the day. We had a brief conversation with two sixty-ish women who said they were slack packing, which means they hike a section and then have a shuttle pick them up at the end of the day.
We sit on boulders on either side of the trail to eat lunch when we reach 4000 feet. The Far Out app now shows a happy mountain goat perched on the peak. We’ve hiked three miles uphill. The return will be much faster—three mph instead of the one mph it took us on the way up. The shadows are beginning to lengthen as we make our way back down. My knees and hips complain with each step.
In Roanoke, we stop for a quick dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Rory McIlroy is squandering his lead at the Masters on one of the many TVs. Augusta National’s previous refusal of female members disgusted me. I’m more interested in the women’s volleyball championship playing on another screen. Back in the car, Andy continues to watch golf on his phone encouraging Rory during the sudden-death playoff for the championship while I drive. There’s a lot of epic sports music and hyperbolic language about perseverance and fortitude. “You’ve got this, Rory, just drive and putt,” Andy urges. Rory falls weeping to his knees when he clinches the Grand Slam. He chokes up in the interview but remembers to thank his parents for their support.
Driving home in the dark down I-77, the pink moon, named after the arrival of spring flowers, rises out of the woods to the east. I wonder if any thru-hikers are sleeping back on the peak. I think of all these former babies driving in the dark cars alongside me. Good job, us. We all learned how to operate heavy machinery. We are all of us keeping each other safe. It’s been a long day but we’re almost home now. But for you darling, I’d do it all again. Type Two. It was Type Two fun.
Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared in Quartet, The Collagist, Nimrod, storySouth, LEON Literary Review, Rogue Agent and elsewhere. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she serves as an editor for Painted Bride Quarterly and a reader for West Trade Review/Iron Oak Editions. She wants to meet your dog.