Church in the wildwood

Yesterday morning, finding that the church I'd planned to visit was heavy on the concepts of "rapture" and the "Antichrist," as well as the belief that the Holy Spirit is an actual person, I decided to hold my own church service out of gratitude for ending up in a place that only God could have formed and reformed into a kind of sacred space. I headed out to hike into "the Sods" (the Dolly Sods on top of the mountain I can see from my window). It's that place often described as "a little piece of (northern) Canada, gone astray," a boreal forest with reindeer moss and other sub-Arctic flora.

Now, I'm in really lousy shape from too much sitting, eating, driving, eating -- you know what I'm talking about, most of you, so it was a real challenge to get up the steep forest road that is flanked by refuge land to the top of the mountain where the refuge ends and the Dolly Sods begin. These photos are proof that I did it -- quite a feat for an out-of-shape, elderly woman like me.
 And it was worth it to get to the top where the
sun was shining to beat the band, the birds twittering, and the path narrowing to a sort of secret passage into the Sods. I stopped to rest on a large rock before my descent, which took me under the clouds where a few raindrops plopped down, but I was rewarded by the sight of a large bobcat, walking languidly across the old forest road.


Knowing that there are black bears atop the mountains and that it might be near birthing time for cubs, I got out my keys and jangled them loudly to let any Mama Bear know that a visitor was in the area.


It was just what this lumpy body needed -- an hour and 15 minute walk in the woods. And it's as though that walk dislodged all kinds of stuff in my head that had been stuck up there for weeks. Mostly the debris of worry and anxiety, it was dumped out of the cobwebby gray matter. It didn't yield any real pearls of wisdom except for this one: Sometimes the "rapture" you need is found in a strenuous hike to the top of a mountain God made billions of years ago. And a walk in the woods is a simple thing that can rejuvenate the body and the mind.


I was glad to find my Tweetymobile waiting part-way down that steep road and thankful for the bottle of water inside.