Transcript
Brian (0:00)
This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundries Soap Company Design Butter New Dominion Design Gray Toad Tallow, Squirrelly Joe's Coffee Stone Crop Wealth Advisors and our monthly supporters.
Ben (0:14)
Every week here at Haunted Cosmos, we release a special story driven show called the Dusty Tome just for our monthly supporters over at Supercast. But while we prepare a brand new season of the main show in the Haunted Cosmos Laboratory, we decided to give all of you a peek behind the paywall. So welcome to a special release of the Dusty Tome. It was a perfect day in the bleeding heart of autumn. The sun was bright and gold but was not too harsh or hot. The breeze that blew out of the east was cool and wicking and filled with all the smells of Appalachia's best things. And the leaves. All the leaves. The leaves looked like they were burning, like they had suffered some glorious metamorphosis for all the summer and were now finally showing their true colors. From where I stood, propped up on my mountain bike with one leg standing in the dirt, this was what the whole world looked like. Or perhaps, I thought, more how this is what the world should look like on days like that. The memory of the horrible heat and humidity of summer grows scant in the mind, like a Steinbeckian amnesia. In the Salina Valley, all that seems to have ever been is that perfectly sunny, perfectly cool fall day, the kind with the bluest and most cloudless sky you've ever seen that you can only find in the American Southeast on that day. But the date escapes me. My dad and I were about halfway through one of our regular trips up to a lake house my stepmother's family owned in the rolling blue Mountains of southern North Carolina. It had already been one of the best trips I could ever remember. Spirits had been high since our arrival. The nightly card games and VHS movies had set a soundtrack of laughter under everything that we did, and the endless opportunity for either adventure in the woods or leisure at the lake meant that you could never really be bored. I was young, and times felt simpler then. I'm sure my dad would like to chime in here and say that they weren't simple times at all. But then again, he probably wouldn't. My dad has never been a killjoy. He'd probably rather nod along to my youthful naivete and smile at just how great being a kid with a good dad must be something he never experienced. But even now I do think those days were simpler for everyone. If God gives everything in creation, seasons of rest and seasons of sowing and reaping why would he not also give those seasons to time itself? Is it not a field that he plants his providence in? Looking back, I think those days marked the end of some years where time had been let to fallow anyways. With the wind whistling through the ageless and haunted trees of Dupont Forest, my dad and I buckled our helmets, fist bumped and clipped into our pedals to begin the grueling climb up to the top of our trail. That was a climb that kicked my butt no matter how often I did it. It was one of those that makes you start panting for breath almost immediately because of a nearly vertical first section that required a ton of focus and balance, as well as some stiff legs. That was followed by an only slightly less steep switchback trail that went on for miles. Roots and rocks peppered the trail all the way to its summit ridge, but these obstacles were nothing compared to the sections of loamy and wine dark dirt which were soft. Your tire would just sink right into those and all your momentum would vanish in a flash. Sure enough, a third of the way into the climb had me cursing the day I was born. Youths are dramatic too, and thinking nothing at all of the beautiful woods around me or the perfect weather. All I could think of was Sisyphus. Which is to say, I could only think of myself pushing the stupid rock up the stupid hill every stupid day. Every once in a while I'd take an extra big gulp of air and hold it down while I sucked on my water bladder for a few drops of relief. But then I'd nearly spit out the water in order to grab hold of more air. It was all really good fun in those days. My dad always called me a goat on the mountain bike. I would fly ahead of everyone on the climbs like it was the thing I really enjoyed. I guess I must have been fitter back then, and that accounts for the speed. But one thing that's true now was also true on those days. I always went carelessly fast on climbs because I hated them so much and just wanted them to be over. But I was also too stubborn to not just not do them. It really was careless too. I'd often find myself growing faint and passing in and out of heavy tunnel vision at the end of an uphill. One time I did actually pass out, but I didn't care. All I wanted to do was get to the top of this mountain, play around a bit on the Bald's BMX track at the top, have a snack, and then gear up for a white knuckled descent to the parking lot. Like I said, my dad always called me a goat back then. But when it came time to hop and skip the bike around the switchbacks and over the jumps on the three mile single track downhill, I could only dream of keeping up with him. On this day, I had hopes of finally beating him. But I held those hopes loosely and didn't say anything to him about them. Wouldn't want fatherly pity to slow his bike down to make me feel a little bit better. Now that I'm a father, I know how ridiculous that is. If my son told me he wanted to beat me at something, you can bet it would make me try even harder at it. A father and a son are strange things in this world. So full of tension and so full of affection. Makes one wonder what it all means. Finally, the claustrophobic trees gave way to an open sky on the trail. As it did, the slope grew milder and milder until it was a rolling flat singletrack baking in the endless sun. It was exposed to my heaving breaths, settled down into rhythmic drones, and I could hear the birds chirping everywhere once again. I also suddenly regained my appreciation for my surroundings, thinking how foolish I'd been to think it was too hot only a few minutes ago. You know what they say about alpinists, right? How the best of them have the worst memories? Yeah, that can be said about a lot of things. Mothers, pastors, triathletes, and apparently high school mountain bikers too. After a while, my dad came crawling up the trail after me. We sat in the shade trees on the fringe of the bald and ate a quick snack. The hard part was over. It was time to just enjoy the ride down. But there I go again. I think enjoy is the wrong word, trying to race down a single track mountainside in Dupont State Forest. Especially when one of those riders. Racing is actually fast isn't exactly something you enjoy. It's fun, make no mistake. But it's only fun after the fact. When you're in it, it's mostly just terrifying. The good kind of terrifying, though. The kind that makes you focus on the trail ahead of you. The kind that makes everything else fall by the wayside. It shoves your mind into a state of necessary control and. And presents your very manhood with the question, how courageous will you be? Daunting. We finished our snacks and drank a little bit more water. I admired the salt stains on my shirt from how much I'd sweat and how quick in this weather it had dried up. Then we strapped back in and rolled toward the little Channel of re entry to the woods. What followed was something of a paradox to me. To be honest, I don't remember much of the descent. It is more muddied with memories from other cool rides I did in that area. I remember hitting the jumps faster and more confident than I had before. I remember braking later and lesser than I had on the switchbacks. I trusted my tires. I looked as far down the trail as I could. I pedaled in sections that made me question whether doing that might kill me. But that's it. Just vague images. Surely the wind must have felt wonderful as it yanked tears out of my eyes and down my cheeks. I would bet the farm on. The checkered light coming in half blocked and half brightened by the bleeding leaves above me made it even harder to pick the right line through root and rock gardens. I'm sure of these things, but the details are fuzzy. What I do remember is getting to the bottom of the trail before my dad. I remember how I could hear him cheering me on not far behind me at the beginning, shouting about a nice jump here and a nice turn there. Shouting woos over and over and over again as he had his own fun and terrifying time, pushing his own limits. I just assumed that he had been right behind me the whole time because of this. But looking quickly back over the ride, I realized that somewhere in the midst of it, his cries had fallen away into the woods. I'd gone down one of the wildest downhills we knew about faster than my dad. When he did fly out of the trail, the smile on his face was enormous. I figured it was because he'd had so much fun, and he did. But when he rode over to me, I learned the truth. He held out his hand in a sort of thumbs up, but without the thumb, and said, if I had a torch, I'd pass it to you. My dad was happy because he was proud of me. He was happy because I was the only guy in the world he wanted nothing else for than to surpass him in all of his greatest qualities. And I had, in this small thing of riding a bike quickly downhill. He was happy that his son had beaten him. A piece of my soul stayed in Dupont Forest that day. It became a place that helped make me, and therefore I will never escape it. Isn't it funny how that works? Place is such an interesting thing. It gives us so much that we take and consume for granted. But it most certainly demands things of us too. It demands our affection, even undying, and an unmistakable peace, dare I say, of our soul. Of course Using language like this can get problematic for our modernist ears, which so often insists that putting something in one place means it absolutely cannot be placed in another place, too. This is folly, and we all know it to be. So before anyone gets nervous and starts thinking that this might actually be some pantheistic nonsense pushing its way into this beloved project we're all doing together, let me present you with an illustration. Imagine an oak tree, strong and beautiful, very, very old. Imagine it's cut down by a logger somewhere, where, had the logger not been there, nobody would have heard it fall. The branches are lopped off and the stick of heavy timber is placed onto a truck with other oak trees that look just like it. The truck drives to the lumberyard and some summer employee fires up the sawmill. A couple of forklifts work together to haul this beast over to the mill or its rough sawn into all the little planks it will be displayed by and sold for. Its branches were taken, its bark is gone. It's now just a bunch of much smaller pieces that will be further separated by the different carpenters and weakened warriors who buy it. Of course, one could ask the question as to whether or not it is still the same tree, and if it is, which piece of it is. But that's not the point.