Views from the Looking Glass

You close your eyes tightly and feel Looking Glass Rock hard and cold beneath your back and you are dizzy and intoxicated by the wildness of the forests below. You can smell winter approaching, the silence of snow filling the creek beds and coating the evergreens until the limbs begin to snap and popping sounds ring like gunshots over the mountains.

In spring, you will follow the trails of the Pisgah National Forest winding through the hills as your shaggy terrier bounds ahead on a path, trampling patches of pink trilliums on his way to the creek bed. A patch of Mayapples scrapes the forest floor. You can already hear the crackle of the campfire, see the seared edges of the marshmallow bulging from the end of a stick. 

You remember the sound of the mill wheel spinning slowly around as you roll the bit of sugar cane in your mouth until the heavy syrup spills over your tongue and down your eager throat. “Amazing Grace” plays in your head a hundred different ways — bagpipes and choirs, trumpets, fiddles, a medley of voices rising over the years. You can still smell the sweetness of honeysuckle growing wild in a pasture. Hear the soft whistle as you bite the end off a blossom, holding the green stem in your teeth, breathing in the honey. You see your great-grandmother, her long, gray hair pinned in a bun, bending over the quilting frame by the woodstove in her cabin. You watch her move through the garden, her brown, crinkled hands pulling a green bean fresh from the vine and poking it into your open mouth.

You see a young girl at camp, lying on the top bunk in her cabin, writing letters home and listening to the creek gurgling outside the window as the mice run across the rafters overhead. “Taps” rises clearly and mournfully over the hills, and you are homesick and at home all at once and all over again. Icy water hits your sunburned legs as you leap from the lifeguard stand into the lake. You smell the musty scent of the barn, and you are tall and wild on the back of a horse. 

You see your dad floating down the French Broad River on a raft, his strong arms pulling the oars through dark water while lightning streaks the sky. You scramble together up the riverbank and duck into a cow pasture, and you sense again that quiet moment just before the bull charges you. Gray and angry, he stomps his feet, his nostrils flare. You turn and see your dad, stopped solidly between you and the bull, waving you toward the fence at the edge of the pasture, and you feel the earth hot beneath your feet and the sting of the rising wind as you run to safety.

You see the clearing at the top of Sam’s Knob and the outline of Devil’s Courthouse. A family of deer wanders in Graveyard Fields, the mother’s head tilted high in the air, frozen in time. You see again a skinny teenage boy sitting on a rock beside you at the base of Looking Glass Falls, water spraying your hair and swallowing your words. He is 18, you are 16, and neither of you knows you’ll end up together.

You feel summer slipping reluctantly from the air and autumn moving stealthily in. And then, there is an explosion of color — reds and oranges and golds — through which you see a chestnut-haired girl running down a wooded path, the young girl as much a part of the mountains as the leaves and the trees and the deer and the air …