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It has taken three days of travel to get close to our starting point. Each step of the journey has been soulful, a parade of anamnesis.
A word of Greek origin, anamnesis is a particularly potent type of memory, a “calling to mind,” of things past so that they become present. It shares a root with my name, Anniversary in the Greek word ana-, “back,” and has its own other root, mimneskesthai, meaning “to recall” or “to cause to remember.” (1)
Passing through the places of my childhood and The Historian’s and my young adulthood felt as if 60 years of our past and present have been compressed into three days. It put me in mind of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1)
“Squeeze the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question. “
Perhaps it is inevitable to ruminate on a life when you are trying to completed task begun 50 years earlier. These moments of anamnesis surprised me, nonetheless. The sights of the travel brought forth past memories linking our Southern Appalachian of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to our Appalachian Trail adventure now. We see what was, what is, and in many ways, what will be.
The Appalachian mountain environment is potent and the land holds her people strongly. No matter how many years or miles intervene, her people ‘s threads of connectedness are retained. A view, the rain, or a soft-spoken drawl brings them out from their dormancy to full life.
Sometimes Home is Not Where You Sleep
When we flew east toward the AT, our first stop was Salt Lake City. At the present, we don’t fly as much as we did in the past.
For years one or the other of us was on the road for work or eldercare duties or both. The worst year we spent less than 2 months together.
The Delta Sky Club in Salt Lake City was home as much as our house. We would meet there and hand off the car keys. The staff at the Club were our friends and an anchor point.
This trip we were greeted at the Sky Club by the remaining “old crew” who held the memory of us safe as we roamed. Almost all of the staff we knew are gone now; most to retirement and a passed on. Travel without seeing them sometimes feels a little empty.
This trip we were warmly welcomed by people who had known us for decades. It was invigorating and encouraging. There was no passage of time. The past and present merged together into one hopeful moment to send us on our way.
Atlanta: Past and Present Together
When we arrived in Atlanta, it was nearly midnight and the trains were not running. We set our watches to walk and paced ourselves at just under 3 miles per hour in the nearly 1 mile walk from our arrival gate to the hotel bus.
The shuttle delivered us and our packs to the hotel about 1 am. A quick email check showed our tax returns were ready to sign. It was a huge relief, even at 2 am, to take that off our to do list. The 2024 taxes changed from preset to past.
The Present Made Past: The Journey to the Mountains
When I was a child, we would drive from North Florida to Atlanta to visit family, and then on to the mountains that were our ancestral home. This week, after a circuitous trip to the rental car station, we commenced the drive to the mountains and Amicolola Falls for the Trail registration.
Going through Atlanta, I was flooded with memories of family trips 60 years ago. It was as if the past was present.
The Historian drove competently through Atlanta, using GPS directions to change across the 12 lanes of swiftly flowing traffic. My mind fluttered back in time to hear the voices of my mother and father pointing out to us the newly conceived modern marvel of a multilane, controlled access highway. My child’s wonder at the synchronized traffic has not dimmed. Two lanes flowing side by side was as impressive in the 1960s as is the multilane configuration of Modern Atlanta.
Rural Roads: Passing Back in Time
Moving north of Atlanta, we returned to the two lane, two-way traffic of my childhood. The overarching tree canopy—The Green Tunnel—conjured up more childhood memories, leaving time drifting between past and present.
We traveled through an old apple orchard area and I could smell the sweet-tart odor of the apples my sister and I plucked from the trees and placed gently into bushel baskets nearly as tall as we.
In the 1960s, my mom was a school teacher and we lived all summer in a tent in the Chattahoochee National Forest. Our days were filled with rain, warm food, cold baths at the picnic table with water heated on the Coleman stove, and quiet. When the deer wandered through camp, sometimes I would walk along behind them as they went on their rounds.
About every 10 days, we had a town day. Like hikers now, if we had enough money, we took a Zero. We would leave the morning of the first day, make the 3 hour, dirt road drive to Blairsville, eat lunch at the Café, do laundry, and get a hotel room where we could shower and sleep in a bed. The next day we would get groceries, hit the feed store for supplies, get gas pumped by the service station attendant (who also checked the oild and cleaned our dusty windshield), and drive the 3 hours back to our tent. When times were harder, we did a Nero pushing all the town chores into one long day with no shower or bed.
Regardless of the overall family finances, my sister and I were each allotted 25 cents to spend in the dime store. For some now unknown reason, I usually bought jacks or marbles, neither of which I could play on the forest floor of our campsite.
Amicolola Falls
At Amicolola Falls State Park, The Historian and I went in search of the AT registration office and the Arch. When I was a child, the park had few staff, no arch, and was largely deserted. Now, I was as eager to see the arch as a teen going to a Taylor Swift concert.
My head was spinning at the hustle and bustle of the park. As we neared the building, I began to tear up, moved by the spirit of the Appalachian Trail, tantalizingly close. My past had arrived at my present. I tried to keep it to myself, but the emotions were strong. The Historian looked at me but I could not control the tears that threatened to spill from my eyes.
My anamnesis was confusing me. The past was like a snake eating its own tail. I could not quite sort out my place in the circle of time. In a moment of self-grace, I allowed the emotion to be present and tried to be patient with it.
Registering and Hang Tags
We found the registration office, which is tucked behind the store. We were instructed to use our registration number on a tablet to prefill our application. Soon, we were handed hang tags. Emotion again. My hand hovered over the tag. I could not touch it, nor could I not touch it.
My past roiled into the present. In 1975, there was no fanfare or ceremony. No one welcomed you or admonished you to take care. There was no registration or hangtag. I don’t remember seeing anyone at all for a day or two. Now the pressure on the land is so great, before you hike, you are invited to spread out to stay connected to, but not cause harm to, the land.
We watched the video with 3 other aspiring hikers, all of us too shy to say much. Both the Historian and I enjoyed the humor and seriousness of the video, glad that each hiker was encouraged to watch it. It takes all of us being stewards in the present to protect our precious Trail and its natural inhabitants for the future.
The Arch
We found the arch, a novelty for the past and a marker of the present. I heard in my mind’s echo the comment of other bloggers, that is was smaller than they expected. Smaller, yes, but no less beautiful. I suddenly felt no tug to to approach the Arch.
A family with a teenager were standing in the arch and pulled us in with their questions and kind offer to take our photos. The teen had a professional camera and clearly knew what she was doing. She took wonderful photos of us to memorialize the moment. We have no photos from our Springer past, but standing in the arch, we marked our present and posed for our future.
Springer to The High Country in NC
This trip, Springer is not our start. She is our past, and pointing us to our present. We will depart from where I left off in 1975 near the Watauga Dam. Before we get on the trail, we are spending a few days with family who will deliver us to the trail and be the custodians of our seasonal clothing changes.
As we drove from Springer to the North Carolina High Country, the past and present were sharply delineated by the environmental changes of tourism and Helene. We passed through areas we knew well from the 1970s and 1980s when The Historian and I made our home here. The memories flashed about as we recognized old haunts amid the new tourism buildings, but mostly we were taken by the changes wrought by Helene over six months ago.
Post Helene
Areas we remembered as narrow winding passages through the mountains with small creeks had been carved wider by flood water, massive landslides, and blow-downs. Narrow clear streams we had fished in the 1980s were muddy, rock-strewn, braided rivers with more water than made sense in the current drought conditions. The narrow roads that used to hug the contours of the river and the hill beside sit awkwardly in the newly formed terrain, their broken pavement another testimony to the storm’s power. This anamnesis shook our understanding of our former home.
Rain last week created more landslides across the unstable hillsides. We came around a curve and saw a pedestrian bridge still suspended in the trees above the road where it had come to rest in October of last year. There were abandoned houses near the rivers. Some houses were being rebuilt on high foundations in an attempt to outsmart any new floods. Other houses were mere foundations being built higher up from the river.
Utility workers were busy. Storm dislodged electrical cables loped along the side of the road suspended closer to the ground than the air, unable to carry any power. New, live lines are being strung. Piles of tree parts were being stacked with heavy machinesry, awaiting some unknown fate. A half a year out from the storm, houses still had piles of saturated drywall, mattresses, toys and other household items in front of them. There simply is not enough labor to move everything.
As we drove through Elk Park, I was assailed by the 1975 memory of walking down the sidewalk where the short row of town buildings perches 15 feet below the road and about 15 feet above the river. The buildings retained their fine Georgian architectural lines, but I did not see that my footprints from 1975 had left any impression.
The Last Stop Before the Start
We are staying a few days with my sister to visit and help her with some Helene damage. Although the floodwaters did not rip through their house, the ground was so saturated the well and its parts were disturbed and must be replaced.
Like so many Helene victims, there was no hint of flood danger in the official documentation of their home. They do not live near a river nor in a flood plane. They are on a somewhat flat property with no close hillsides to slide.
The land could not manage what Helene dished out after she collected so much power from the warming waters of the Gulf. It was simply too much. The ground wept like I did at Springer Mountain when I fully took in the environmental changes through the passages of time. My tears were but a moment. The land’s tears for Helen will last a lifetime changing the past, the present, and the future of the land and the people who experience her anamnesis and stand shimmering in her love.
(1) Eliot, T. S. (June 1915). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Monroe, Harriet (editor), Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 130–135. see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock (2) Vocabulary.com, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/anamnesis
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