Touchstone

In between a 180-mile-long escarpment called the Allegheny Front and a serpentine, tree-covered ridge of quartzite and sandstone called Brush Mountain, there is an interstate as average and ho-hum as a visor on a cloudy day. I headed southbound, the interstate hugging the base of the Appalachian ridge. This elongate mound of earth—whether in budding spring, lush summer, golden-hour autumn, or pubic winter—has been the backbone of my recent history. Like an old, loyal dog, it sprawls its curved body down the landscape I continue to explore and covet. It loomed over the bookstore where I first met an old flame. Years later, I took a new flame to the top of it where he took my hand and asked to be my boyfriend. We married four years later. It is where I trained my dog Silas to hike on loose, rocky terrain. We hiked to the top of the ridge nearly every day, greeting the same footholds, watching for snakes. On one of those hikes, I told Silas that the worst thing that could happen to me is break my ankle. I listed horrible, awful things that I would rather have happen to me. I laughed to myself, knowing that he didn’t know what assault or gun point meant. The next year, I broke both of my ankles at the same time and my right foot’s talus bone had been rendered into loose, rocky terrain. In 2016, a small portion of Brush Mountain collapsed behind a shopping center. When no one was watching, I carefully slipped into the crevasses. An excavator caught me, but I charmed them with conversation and went on my way. My husband and I bought a house where from our patio, Brush Mountain gleams in the distance. Between the black walnut tree and staghorn sumac at the bottom of our yard, we can see the mountain’s talus of exposed rock that locals call the Eagle Talus. It spreads its wings, headless and flightless.

I too am mostly headless and flightless. A whim comes by like a falling leaf and I follow. A bird alights from a branch and, well, let’s go and see. I come across a large rock and sure, I will lift it to see what I will find. I apologize to bloomed flowers for having missed the stages of their growth. I do not aim for much more than delight and discovery. I don’t really need to know everything as it is in our Chronosphere. When I step from the threshold of 6 am-4 pm Wednesday-Saturday, and into the Kairosphere of falling leaves, settling birds, and serpentine mountains, the nonsense of the Anthropocene tumbles like loose pebbles from my shoulders. I already know that humans are following their horrid and beautiful narratives just as well as I know that the essence of the seed aims for light.

I eventually exited the interstate and drove up a rocky, dirt road to an area of the mountain I had never visited. Once out of my car, I listened for the interstate, aware that I was recently a part of that sound. I scanned my surroundings of hibernating trees, exposed rocks, and water unabashedly obeying its various laws. At precisely that moment, I was struck in the gut by a sentiment that poet Mary Oliver so eloquently captured in one of her poems; a sentiment that has become sediment, a part of my personal bedrock:

I Go Down to the Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling on or moving out,

and I say, oh, I am miserable,

what shall—

what shall I do? And the sea says

in its lovely voice:

Excuse me, I have work to do.

In this small blip in time that is my life, these rocks have listened, sat with the weight of themselves, moved with the force of elementals, weathered, and possessed stories. Hikers, hunters, deer, and birds pass by them with their own stories. These trees have sprouted, shook the earth from their heads, and grew, layer-by-layer, season-by-season, the sap moving up and down the length of their bodies. And here I am, small and stout, the sap and stones of my body informed by the flesh and electricity of being an animal that knows words like Wifi and dishwasher. Everything surrounding me is doing what it is meant to do. And what am I meant to do?

I bent down and touched the stones.