Blue Ridge Mountains, NC

[Newanderthal]

Spent 8 consecutive days in total isolation in a secluded valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

I hiked in with an overloaded backpack (was on Walkabout and had more than just backpacking gear) and pulled a muscle in my right leg when searching for my misplaced adventure hat. Once inside the valley, I was completely alone and the condition of my leg demanded that I stay there for several days. I strung up a tarp shelter near a small pond and limped around searching for the source of the stream that fed it. Eventually I found a small spring that emerged from the base of a large oak. The water was crystal clear and cold enough to make my teeth hurt. I would drink from that stream for the next week.

For food, I had a bag of instant rice, a few granola bars, some summer sausage and a few other goodies. It was enough for about four days. Armed with a basic knowledge of edible flora and no aversion to gobbling bugs, I had more than I needed.

Once I had cut a stick to serve as a crutch (the only damage I inflicted on the forest) I began exploring my temporary home. The valley stretched for miles east to west and about one mile north to south. It was surrounded on all sides by the low mountains of the Blue Ridge and adorned with the fall foliage that the area is famous for. After an entire day of exploration, I could find nothing man-made save for my own footprints. There were no trails, cigarette buts, or even black marks from a long-gone fire.

Most days, my meals consisted of oatmeal for breakfast, a weed salad snack with pine needle tea, a bit of summer sausage and rice for dinner, and plenty of crickets and pine grubs (crickets are fine, grubs are a little too juicy).

On my first morning in the valley, I awoke to find myself listening to a strange sound. It was a rhythmic humming noise similar to distant waves washing over a beach. The sound was constant in speed and volume and no matter where I turned my head, I could not discern the direction. Finally, after nearly fifteen minutes of confusion, I covered my ears and discovered the source. I was listening to my own pulse. Never before had I believed the old expression "so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat" to be anything more than an expression, but in the complete lack of man-made background noise, I could hear my pulse as clear as these very keystrokes. Each morning I spent nearly an hour in silent meditation, hearing only my pulse before the sun came up and the winds started to blow. It was a magical experience, that utter silence, that I have yet to experience since.

When there's no one to talk to for almost 200 hours, communication with one's self is automatic. I wasn't really talking to myself, but sharing with myself. There was a sort of examination that went on for days as I looked over my life from begin to present. I had a lot of time on my hands as I couldn't move around much and my only distraction was a journal. So I looked over my life and myself and took stock of things. I decided that I'd wasted too many hours on pointless things and passed up too many opportunities. I'd taken certain things for granted and placed too much importance on trivial details. The process that had began when I started my Walkabout came to a head in that valley and it was there that I decided that I had to change myself as a person (or rather, allow the changes that had occurred on my trip to become permanent) and I had to change how I lived my life.

It hurt to look at nearly 30 years and say that there wasn't much for which I was proud, but it was a relief that I now had a clear view of the road ahead and knew how to live fully. Better yet was that I had discovered the knowledge and strength to move in the right direction. I had discovered that while limping around in a quiet valley.

I could write an entire book about that valley and my 8 days there, about the 7 turkeys I saw every morning and every afternoon, about the doe and fawn that studied me from a short distance every so often, trying to figure out what I was, of the howling morning wind that rose up with the sun, tearing leaves from the trees and roaring down the mountainsides. I could write hundreds of pages of those things and more, and one day I will. But today, I just wanted to share a little bit, a thin overview of perhaps the most important part of any trip I have ever, or will ever, take.