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“The sky above you goes on forever, and the landscape appears as endless as the sky. The world is expansive and you are tiny. All of your problems shrink down to the head of a pin,” writes Melina Coogan. “This is why places like this matter–places like Great Smoky Mountain National Park: they give us perspective.”
Just months after Melina got married, she walked out of a doctor’s office with a sobering health diagnosis. Today, for the second episode of our Mileposts series, we travel with her to Great Smoky National Park to see what perspective we can take home.
You can find more of Melina’s writing at: www.thewildercoast.com
Transcript
To unlock new experiences, we have to go past the parking lot, past the ranger station, past the places you know. Our National Parks are our national treasure. Places ancient, epic and wild. Where moments are simple and friendships come alive.
To celebrate the centennial of our National Parks, our team at REI wants to help you to go deeper and explore our nation’s most inspiring places. REI, a life outdoors is a life well lived.
You’re listening to The Dirtbag Diaries, a production of Duct Tape then Beer. With additional support from Patagonia, Kuat Racks and Fireside Provisions.
Hi. What’s up? It’s Fitz. Welcome to the second episode of our new Mileposts Series. It’s a series about the places that mean the most to our community and the people that inhabit them. If it all goes well, you will continue to hear Mileposts stories for years to come.
This year, to kickoff the series, and well, because it’s the centennial of American’s best idea, we’ve decided to take a tour of our country’s National Parks.
A, we’re going to travel to North Carolina with contributing writer Melina Coogan and spend a night out on Andrews Bald in Great Smoky National Park.
I’m Fitz Cahall and you’re listening to The Dirtbag Diaries.
Story by Melina Coogan
The road to Andrews Bald was knee deep with ruts, as if the earth had melted overnight. There had been no transition from winter into spring this year. Yesterday, there was driving snow, and today the daffodils nodded their heads along side the sidewalks in Asheville, and I heard on the news that temperature was going to reach 70. I’m still getting used to the south where seasons change like this in a snap.
I reached the trailhead and stepped out of the car into the soft air, tipping my face towards the sunlight. I shouldered my backpack and started up the trail exchanging greetings with the other hikers I passed along the way. There are more people out than I expected on a Monday afternoon in early March. After all, I was out there because I needed a night to be by myself. Then again, the Smoky Mountain National Park is the most visited park in the country. I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
Half way up the trail my left leg went numb with no warning, as if the same sudden switch that controlled the seasons was at work inside of me. I had to concentrate with every step, wailing my leg to work with me instead of dragging behind me like an old dog.
Then it hit me, “So what if my foot dragged?” Aside from the strangers I passed along the trail, I was alone. Nobody would see me limping up the trail. What would matter?
I got married this past summer in the middle of a field in my tiny Vermont hometown. My husband, David, had just returned from a kayaking trip in Labrador, Canada just two days before the wedding. He was a little underweight from three weeks in the back country and his red curls were sun bright and wild around his shoulders.
Our wedding was this explosion of shoestring budget beauty. Our friends made everything for us. They arranged the blue hydrangeas and baked the rhubarb cream pies and made lanterns from a hundred mason jars.
We didn’t sleep alone on our wedding night. Our friends didn’t have the cash to make it all the way to Vermont and then pay for a hotel room on top of that. They slept outside, or they slept with us, sprawled out like dreams across the pullout bed in the bridal suite. Still wearing sundresses and their good shoes.
I hardly ever get to see them like this, so quite and still. Our friends are a collective whirlwind of climbers and bikers and kayakers, and they’re around the house a lot when the rivers are running in the southeast.
David is the most energetic of all of them, utterly incapable of sitting still. During the wedding, he rocked back and forth on his heels and his hands shook as he read his vows. Mine didn’t shake. I wasn’t afraid to get married, or of public speaking, and I love being the center of attention. My wedding day was for all these reasons, quite literally the best day of my life.
That was the last time my hands were still for a while. A few days later, on our honeymoon in Acadia, the fingers on my left hand began to jerk up and down, as if I were playing an invisible piano. The Atlantic rolled in the background as I held my hand up with a simple, “Look at this David.”
After just a mile or so on the trail, I emerged from the forest out onto the summit. The weakness in my leg had migrated to my arm. It hung useless at my side, but I could walk okay again. The grass up there had been trampled by snow or by feet, or maybe less likely a heard of grazing cattle.
The Southern Appalachians are famous for their mountain balds. The rounded grassy summits within noticeable absence of trees. The lack of forest that this elevation can be expected in colder climates. In the comparatively tepid Appalachians, these lofty expanses of oak grass and heath remain a mystery.
As a new comer to the south, I was fascinated by the balds. They are hauntingly beautiful with views of mountain rangers unspooling in every direction. Layer upon layer of rich lines fading into one another in lighting shades of blue.
There, in all those thousands of acres of wilderness, I cannot make out one spec or shadow of human existence. No houses or highways or blinking radio towers, just the blue wash of mountains and the heart green stocks of grass underfoot. If I had wanted a lonely place to spend the night, I’d chosen well.
Okay. It’s windy out, you might catch that. It’s really windy. We’re at the top of the bald. The first time I realized I was out here alone was when I set up my sleeping bag and I had crashed against one side of the tent like you do when you’re sharing it with someone. Then I realized that I could just put it in the middle of my tent, because I’m going to be out here alone tonight.
Nobody knows this, I’m going to be 31 in three days and I’ve never slept in the wilderness by myself in my life. Frankly, I’ve never wanted to. I’ve always just much rather be with somebody else.
Actually, you know what? It’s not so bad. It’s not bad when I’m alone to be having these symptoms, because I’m constantly trying to hide them from everybody. Just because I don’t want to worry people and I don’t want to always be talking about what’s wrong with me. It’s nice to be, “Okay.”
I’m watching my leg and my arm twitch like crazy, like hop off of my sleeping bag. It sucks, but it’s happening. At least I don’t have to worry about hiding it from anyone.
After the honeymoon, the trembling in my hands subsided and was replaced by a more troubling set of symptoms. One night while some friends and I camped on the East Fork, a searing pain shot through my face from one side of my jaw to the other and all night long I lay rigid inside the tent, afraid to move, the sound of their laughter, pieces of their stories floating in through the nylon walls.
After that night, I was too spooked to ever go too far from home. I needed to be close to my bed, show all of my pills and the hot water in the bathtub. My symptoms were constantly changing, sometimes painful, other times just inconvenient.
One morning I woke up and I was paralyzed. It’s a type of nocturnal seizure. I was conscious but unable to open my eyes as I try to workout in my brain whether or not I was even awake. It took five different doctors for me to be diagnosed with neurobrucellosis. Which, if you’re never heard of that, is late stage chronic Lyme disease with a neurological presentation. It’s possible you’ve never heard of that either.
What a relief initially. We’d like to think of a diagnosis as synonymous with an answer, a treatment plan, a cure, but there is no answer for chronic Lyme. No known cure except an experimental multi-year onslaught of high dose antibiotics that may or may not make you feel better.
I took my chances on the medicine and we handed over our savings, David savings if I’m being honest, in exchange for an arsenal of rattling orange bottles. Three times a day I swallowed pills by the fistful and we hoped for the best.
My day started all right. The sunny optimism of morning and the pleasant buzz of coffee. I later learned that in the morning my brain had a high level of cortisone, a natural steroid that cut my symptoms manageable.
I would make plans for the day, biking at Pisgah in the afternoon or an evening session at the climbing gym. As the cortisone wore off, I would get progressively worse, and the evening would find me in bed, fingers running up and down a set of scales I hadn’t asked them to play, jaw clenched. The inability to predict what each day will bring turns you into a less than reliable person on all fronts.
I canceled my plan so often that eventually there are less people to make plans with in the first place. Not everyone of course, but some of those friends we would spent our wedding nights sprawled out on the daybed in the bridal suite. They came around a lot less. If I did run into them, they always seemed to be confused, “You’re still sick?” Those were three words I grew accustomed to hearing.
“I thought you had Lyme’s disease? Isn’t there a treatment for that?” “Not really,” I’d say “and it’s not Lyme’s disease. It’s Lyme disease.” I wasn’t always easy to be around.
David would walk in the door at 5:00 sharp every evening and do his best to gauge what day it had been for me. A question as benign as, “Did the dog get a walk today?” Could trigger an implosion of self-pity on my part. “She didn’t. I tried. I’m useless. I’m sorry.” or maybe some misplaced resentment was my disposition de jour. “Of course she got a walk. What else would I do with my day? Everything is fine. I’m fine. The dog is fine. We’re all fine.”
Not knowing how long this disease would stretch out, hoping to rash in the empathy of my new husband, I did my best to gloss over the more alarming symptoms, muscle spasms, slurred speech.
On weekends, I pushed him out the door, urging him to spend the whole day at the river. I actually get some work done anyway I’d say. After he left, I’d climb back in the bed, the ceiling fan turning in the quiet house and feel the hope and optimism that belongs to the young. The happy and the newly married start to wash away.
I set up my tent as the sun begin to set over the Smokys and setting a tent with only one working arm is no picnic, but I got it done. Vapors of violet and crimson settled between the layers of mountains, low lying wisps of smoky haze that gave this range its name.
See, I knew there was a reason why I really liked to camp with other people. It’s because it’s a lot more fun. This is nice to be outside and it’s nice to have the simplicity of everything. Everything about it is nice, but this is the point in the night where … I don’t know. This would be the social part of the night. Where you look forward it when the dishes are done and you have that little bit of time where you have just enough energy to tell a couple of ghost stories or drink a couple of beers and then you’d go to bed. That’s my favorite part of, I think, my whole life are those moments. You know this is when I start missing people.
I don’t know. The reason that I’m out here is because any disease is isolating, right? This idea of a neurodegenerative disease, like a disease that gets worse and worse and there’s only so much pities onward.
People only care for so long and then they get back to their life. Of course, you don’t have limitless supplies of energy and time and … It’s like I don’t want to tell anyone now because I know I’m going to get worse. Maybe I should just wait till I get worse. Anyway, that is what I’m thinking about right now. That’s all I got for now.
My anxiety has extended beyond the physical concerns of pain and disability. It ignited within me the most base and vulnerable of human fears, “What if everyone left me because of this?” “What if the complex, and to be blunt, incredibly boring realities of life with a chronic and potentially degenerative disease. It’s just not something that anybody could handle. Not for the long haul.”
If it was fear that was causing me to harden and to hide, then I needed to face it. How many times had I gone into these mountains with my friends to camp and climb and be together? This time I went into the park to be alone, but to be alone on my terms.
Not all solitude is created equal. There are the afternoons alone in bed, the world reduced to the ceiling fan, watching the sunlight’s glacial glide across the white painted wall. Relative to your tiny universe, you feel too big.
Then there’s the solitude you choose for yourself, like this one, where the sky above you goes on forever and the landscape appears as endless as the sky. The world is expensive and you are tiny. Your sickness is tiny. All of your problems shrink down to the head of a pin.
Here’s something. I always manage to get out of camping by myself because I always thought I’d be really afraid when it got dark, and it turns out that I may have been afraid before, but now I’m so incredibly bothered. It’s like, “All right. Give me something real and scary over this constant pain and just annoyance.” Yeah, I’m less freaked out than I thought of my surroundings more annoyed by my own self.
Which is a kinda major bummer, because you can leave any place except for yourself. Yup, major bummer if you’re what’s really bothering you.
That night, the wind that blew across the summit strained the rain fly on the tent and made a machine gun rattle. Sleep was not going to come easy that night, although I didn’t mind. Eventually, I gave up on the idea all together. Unzip the tent and stepped outside on to the brutal grass.
The sky above me was luscious with stars, constellations spread out like little glints of steel. What caught my attention, what held me completely captivated with the little lights trembling all across the horizon, lights that belong to cars and homes and all the people who lived inside them.
Somewhere to the east of all that wilderness, David was fast asleep at our home where the lights from the streets blotted out the stars above him. The same way that I pushed my sleeping back into the corner of the tent, David keeps to his side of the bed when I’m not there. I know this because I spent so many nights out in the living room when I can’t fall asleep. When I creep back into our bedroom in the morning, I catch him lying like that, one arm stretched out into the space where I should be. Reaching out for me even in a sleep.
I was the only person on the mountain top that night. When I thought that I was completely alone in the wilderness, I was mistaken. The lights glimmering around me, I couldn’t see them when I first arrived. That’s the miracle of darkness that I had never understood until that moment. Darkness is what allows us to see where the light comes from. It’s what helps us to recognize those people who, no matter what happens, no matter how long it takes, will never stop reaching out for you.
This is why we need places like these, places like the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, they give us perspective. Those airy mountain tops remind us of what it is we need to see. I could have sat there until the sun came up. Its rosy streamers erasing the stars and the lights in the distance.
Sickness can keep you suspended between it is what it is and it is what you decide it will be. It’s a delicate place to have to exist. Then again, we’re all on that place in one way or another. When you think of it that way, none of us are alone out here.
Support for Mileposts comes from REI, who just built a new app, a crowd source guide to the National Parks. Easy to find guides, beautiful photos and maps the best trails. To learn more, visit rei.com/nationalparks. REI, a life outdoors is a life well lived.
Additional support comes from the good people at Patagonia and from Fireside Provisions, mouthwatering meals for the campfire or cabin, and from Kuat Racks, avid cyclists, outdoor enthusiasts and fine ale connoisseurs who teamed up to make a better bike rack. Check them out at kuatracks.com. It’s that time of year where my rack goes on the back of the truck and we point it for the desert.
The diaries is also made possible by you, our listeners. To pledge your support, go to our website and click the button in the upper right hand corner. Thanks to everyone who had donated already. Seriously, it makes a huge difference. It allows us to hire writers, pay people. Imagine that? Thank you.
Music today from Kai Engle, The F UP Beats, the cassettes and Chris Zabriskie. Jacob Bain and Nis Kotto created our theme music. As always, you can find the links to the artist on our website.
This story was written and recorded by Melina Coogan. You can find more of Melina’s writing at thewildercoast.com. This episode was edited, mixed and produced by Jen Altschul. I helped out a little bit. Expert guys. Our executive producer is Becca Cahall, who is back from maternity leave. Yes! That is awesome.
You have been listening to The Dirtbag Diaries. Thanks for tuning in.
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