Upward and onward!

Well, it has been a long time since I've climbed on Ajax Rock, but I think I regained my footing when, just a few days ago, I managed finally to hike into the Dolly Sods area of West Virginia and into this ethereal landscape that was first stripped of its valuable timber, then scorched to its bare rocks by fire. That's a good metaphor for what I've been through lo these many months.

But here's the important thing: The Dolly Sods (named after an early German settler named Dahle who was a POW during the Revolutionary War and decided to either defect or otherwise not return to his native land) lives again and has been remade by the hands of God or the natural evolution of the earth, whichever you believe, into a completely different landscape -- and a fragile but sturdy one at that. Perhaps that's what happens when we go inside a cocoon and emerge forever changed by that mysterious process we cannot understand.

Today, right in the midst of the Allegheny Highlands, there exists an ecosystem more Alpine than any place south of the Canadian provinces -- a place of wild bogs, reindeer moss and an insect-eating flower called sundew. A place where the temperature can drop from 80 degrees to 20 degrees on a summer day, when storms whip up out of nowhere. A place where only experienced hikers dare to explore.

Something happened to me when I stepped onto that sacred ground. Let's  call it a regeneration, a renewal or a baptism. Whatever it was, it was something that stirred deep within me and sent up a new, green shoot -- one that wanted to write again, to connect to my family and the strong sense of place that many of us have.

But I don't want this to be my blog. I hope that it will become all of yours, too. Cecilia climbed on Ajax Rock one day and called, "Hello...Is anybody out there?" And she didn't get an answer. Today I echo that call and hope that some of you will find your way back to the place we could all connect, dream, remember and, yes, sometimes use as a soapbox.

It is just four years and two days since Peck was buried (or, as they say in these parts, "went home to be with God"), and soon it will be four years since our mother followed him. More than anything else, they wanted the tribe, the family, to stay close -- to help each other, to keep connected. In that spirit, I'm firing the first volley. I just hope it doesn't land in the fragile, beautiful mountaintop of the Dolly Sods, close to the heart of many of the Unglaciated Allegheny Plateau People: our people.