A couple of years ago, I purchased ten acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. I try to get there at least once a month. And I love it. I call it “Mother Well” or “Well” for short.
Here in Alabama, we just had ‘Icemaggedon’. My children who just got done with Christmas break got another 11 days with no school. And the world stopped here in Alabama and especially in the valley that I live in where the mountains into the city become impassable.
Having lived almost two decades in Chicago, I scoffed at their ‘weather’ when I first got here. But now I understand. There is no plowing. There are no sand trucks. In Chicago, it went hand in hand with cold weather, the snowplows started going repeatedly through the neighborhoods, and the sand trucks would follow. I remember that sound: the quiet of the winter snow followed by the snow plow.
I never gave them the gratitude they deserved for keeping us on the roads. Until I slid backwards off of a small hill in barely freezing weather, I did not fully understand what they enabled. Now I do.
As soon as my kids got back into school, and the weather went above freezing, I headed to the Well with my partner.
I have figured out living here at the start of the Appalachian mountain range that I am a woods person. I breathe better in the woods. I take daily walks on the small mountain ranges around me, and they are my medicine.
Going to the Well is even better.
I had a small cabin aka shed built on the mountain. I call it Baba Yaga Hut. No electricity. No water. No insulation. Just shelter.
There is a propane heater and grill. Coffee takes a long time in the morning, but it smells better in the open air as it roasts.
Three acres of the Well are bog along a creek and demand respect. Sink holes, copperhead snakes and massive brambles have kept me limited in my exploring on that side, but the other seven acres, I have been getting to know.
This is a mature forest with 100 foot hardwoods. When you get quiet, it comes alive. The birds appear. And spiders. You hear a breeze coming. It cascades throughout the tree tops.
I sing to the trees as I have heard they appreciate it. I know that I do.
Being in the woods in the Hut strips everything back. The second day, my partner and I heated up some water, poured it into a bucket and took a quick hand shower that we both needed after crawling around in the woods.
We have figured out that you can take a fairly decent shower with one gallon of water. I compare it to the massive amounts of water that I use back home.
I have my land on Hipcamp, and I have been sharing the Hut and the ability to get away from all of it with others so when my partner and I turn on the propane heater to warm the cabin, we are conscious of how much propane we use.
We want to be sure and leave some for the next people using the Hut.
Even though the Hut is a good 45 minute twisting and turning drive from the town that it is supposedly located in, there are neighbors that live there.
I find this good and bad. When we are on the private dirt road, we are inevitably asked by a passing car if we are okay. We have met most of the neighbors this way.
And even though I don’t agree with their ‘conquer nature’ views as I am slowly figuring out instead how to live with it, it is still nice to have a half a dozen numbers in my phone should we need something.
That would have been the original purpose of neighbors: helping each other out when you get in a bind. I find this concept largely unknown in the cookie cutter suburbs that I have lived in the majority of my life as in modern life we feel as if we do not need each other.
The second day that I am there, I wake up early in the morning and go outside to sit in the dark.
It is almost a full moon so it is not the complete dark that you get at other times of the month. In the deep woods, you are conscious of the moon cycles as without street lights and electricity, dark is Dark.
But I can still feel the fear creeping along my skin, and I sit and wonder why.
The image that jumps to my mind is that of a tiger leaping out of the dark. Completely irrational. I look at the shadows around: some that seem to move and shift, and I think of sayings such as, ‘you are not out of the woods yet.”
Woods are otherworldly, your ‘human-ness’ feels smaller. You are conscious of what you are taking and giving: water, propane, firewood.
These things that you take for granted in the ‘real world’ become precious.
Reset.
I have been doing a lot of mind ‘resetting’ lately as I have realized just how much my mind gets in the way of what I want to do in my life.
It occurs to me that my jaunts into the woods are my physical reset.
And I am ever so grateful.
