Huckleberry Knob, NC (5560') ...and the Great American Eclipse

Chattanooga--and my friend there--proved quite hospitable. My hiking buddy and I arrived at his place in the late afternoon; later that evening, another pair of friends from Northern Virginia joined us. We spent the next day resting from our various drives and lives, then turned in early that night.

Our plan for the following day was to drive up the Cherohala Skyway to the bald summit of Huckleberry Knob, the high point of the Unicoi Mountains. Though a thousand feet lower and much less prominent (both topologically and in terms of renown) than its northern cousins, the Smokies, that peak was smack-dab in the middle of the Great American Eclipse's path of totality. On any other day, it'd be a gentle 1.2-mile stroll from the Skyway--pleasant, no doubt, but hardly worth a ten-hour drive--but for two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, starting at 2:35 pm on Monday, August 21, 2017, the sun above that mountain was going to disappear. And we planned to be under it.

Hazy-Bordered Flashback Time

As the sun sails the high skies of summer, an old red Honda makes its way down I-81, the bumpy backbone of Appalachia. The car shoots across the Tennessee-Virginia line, then turns eastward and upward to climb over high green hills into North Carolina. Halfway to Asheville, it circles off the interstate and follows a series of mountain roads, each rougher than the last, deep into the dark narrow valleys of the Black Mountains. It stops at last, late in the afternoon, at a campground beside the South Toe River, here little more than a creek. Above loom densely forested foothills, mountains in their own right... and beyond them, Mount Mitchell, the pinnacle of the eastern United States.

Here the driver disembarks, pitches her tent, and waits out the night.

In the pale purple dawn, before light reaches over the eastern hills, she rises. Still sleeps the campground. She checks her pack once last, then trudges to the trailhead to begin her solitary climb.

Prologue: The Windowless Room

Midway to the middle of my journey of life, I found myself in a windowless room.

In that room, there was work enough to keep me busy as long as my strength would last. There were others passing through for company, though none lingered overlong. There was sustenance, of a sort. And satisfaction... all the satisfaction of building a wall each day and tearing it down the next.

I spent a long time in that room. Long enough that it became a part of me, its boundaries the limit of my thoughts. We'd face each day together, the room and I, knowing that beneath its ceiling there would be no surprises, no challenges, no strain, just the same fluorescent white.

I almost wish that room had been enough for me. But it was not.

And so I dreamed...