Daytime hours at Warren Wilson College (or: a window into my former self)

Continuing the Warren Wilson College library theme, I spent my nights camping in my former library supervisor’s backyard. She has four dogs, and I have a somewhat severe phobia of dogs. I’m learning that this trip is about conquering my fears, one after the next (and now I genuinely love all of them: Golda, Spirit, Zinnia, and old man Caesar).

Asheville mountains are soft and peaceful. The Blue Ridge Mountains look like static ocean waves in the distance, in various shades of blue. Driving into them always triggers a response in my body that feels at once activated and soft, something like being cradled by Mother Earth herself, an energy much different from other ranges (like the masculine intensity of the Rockies, for instance). It feels like a piece of my heart is reunited with itself each time I come back here.

I lived here for four years as a student at Warren Wilson College. This week, I’ve been doing my freelance writing and editing from my laptop in the college library, where I worked for three years at the circulation desk. Only now, it’s completely quiet. Empty. And I am much older. The doors close at 4:30 p.m. each day—all but one front room, which is lined with windows along one wall that overlook the rest of campus. This is where I work for hours, until 8 or 9 or 10 at night, until I get hungry enough to leave.

Walking along these little campus sidewalks and paths, past old classrooms, the dining hall, all the dorms where I lived … it’s a funny thing. It’s like walking through a former life, a younger version of myself. This place was so influential in shaping my identity in ways I didn’t even realize until years later. I’ll probably never realize all the ways it’s shaped me.

Today, I hiked to Dogwood, a cow pasture that sits high up in the sun and breeze on campus, thinking back to the first time I was there, as a senior at North Hagerstown High School, visiting the college with friends.

Dogwood Pasture at Warren Wilson College

The Warren Wilson campus is just so aesthetically pleasing.

All of this place is so saturated in memories, the land and buildings themselves feel like a part of my physical body, not just my psyche—like it’s ingrained in my entire being. It makes sense that I would be revisiting these places of my interior and exterior world while Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto are retrograde (and soon, Neptune and Mercury will be, too—we’re gonna go *way* back in July, revisiting all sorts of loose ends from our past).

A longtime friend from back home has plans to take a short road trip this summer to revisit each place he lived growing up—mostly places in Maryland, but each with their distinctions, each appearing in his life at different stages.

A place so often defines a passage of time, even if we don’t give credence to it. I wonder what that means for a life lived on the road, how the constant change will affect me.

Going too far off the grid

Deep in the wilderness, a desk is still a necessity.

I arrived at Earthaven, deep in the wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains, around 8 p.m. on Friday, just in time to pitch a tent before dark.

Earthaven Ecovillage is a world within the world, totally off the grid and self-sustainable, operating under its own set of social codes. It’s a commune near Black Mountain, North Carolina, a few hundred acres of huge gardens and cob houses of all shapes, colors, and sizes, built by the 90-some people who live here. It’s almost like its own country. It takes a few days to adjust.

Deb, a friend from back home, lives at Medicine Wheel, a large house that often serves as the first stop for people traveling through, staying here on work trade, or looking to move here permanently. I thought it would be a good stop along my way. I could catch up with a dear friend who I haven’t seen in a couple years and enjoy the fresh mountain air, camping under the stars.

Earthaven, where most everyone smiles and says hello and has a name like Golden or Tree Man.

When I was done pitching my tent in the forest, she told me I should pee around it, to mark my territory for “critters.”

“Do you mean bears?”

“Toby saw a bear here this morning. It was sitting on a big rock where he meditates. He thinks it saw him, and then it took a shit on top of the rock.”

“Have you seen bears?”

“Only once. It was here in the campground.”

She told me to carry bear mace. She told me all of this very nonchalantly.

Bears are my biggest fear. Like higher than being abducted by aliens. Higher than public speaking. I think they’re my totem animal.

I took my first pee beside my tent, inadvertently peeing on my keys as they dropped out of my pocket.

So far, so good.

I should mention that the campground is really just a forest with a space cleared for a fire pit (that I’m not allowed to use) and a compost toilet of sorts. It’s beautiful but wild. Truly wild.

By the time I got everything from my car ready to go for the night, it was pitch black outside. So dark, I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. Nothing. Realizing this, I was suddenly terrified to leave the safety of my car to walk down the dirt road with a flashlight and then try to find my tent in the woods while possibly running into a bear. I debated it for a good hour, then rearranged everything in my hatchback and made a bed with some towels and a pillow I had left in there.

Did not sleep well.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what I was going to do for the next two weeks. The plan was to stay here for two weeks. Am I gonna sleep in my car for two weeks?

The next night, I decided to brave the woods alone. Get there at dusk. Get inside my tent. Wait for darkness to descend. Pray.

I did. And I slept so soundly, the sound of the creek lulling me to sleep. Then I did it again the next night. And the next. Deep, deep slumber—no light, no wifi, no electricity, just earth and sky and the cool, rippling creek. I thought I’d conquered something, grown. I carried my bear mace with me everywhere. I wore my bear bells like a warrior.

But eventually, the wilderness won. After a restless night, with wild animals waking me every hour or two, curiously poking and prodding at my tent (one actually scurrying around underneath it, somehow), I woke at 4 a.m. to the sound of growling, panting, and snarling. A pack of something—coyotes, I assume—surrounded my paper-thin tent, and I lied there, holding my breath, adrenaline coursing through my veins. I lied there, waiting. It felt like a movie. Would they shred the tent? Would they shred me? Eventually, I heard them run off, one by one, and could see their vague shadows passing by my tent. I never did fall back asleep.

It’s a delicate balance out here, finding time for rest and work, space for wilderness and culture. I’m learning as I go.

*some names have been changed to protect privacy

First Stop: Pittsburgh (or: A Desk of One’s Own)

My storage space in Pittsburgh, where I immediately put up a plastic table to start writing.

A landline phone is ringing. I’m not sure whether it’s coming from inside the house or from someone else’s. Everyone’s windows are open on this narrow street, where rows of 1940s single family homes sit close to one another. It’s apparently one of the first sunny mornings in days (weeks?). Pittsburgh weather is notoriously gloomy. I woke up to the sounds of people walking down the street talking and car radios passing by, a few birds, trains. Later, I heard a woman who sounded like she was praying (preaching?) from somewhere in the neighborhood.

There are churches everywhere.

Something comes alive in me every time I visit this city. I was born here, lived the first 12 years of my life here, and I believe it’s imprinted on my psyche, these hilly, cobblestone roads and bridges and weedy lots and old mills and factories—all of it, as if it were the setting of some old dream I had years ago that still lives inside me somewhere.

I thought it appropriate to start my road life here, at my roots. My family immigrated to the Pittsburgh area from Italy and Sicily three generations ago, and it will always feel like home to me.

I’ve technically been living on the road for two weeks but mostly just circling the Baltimore area, wrapping up interviews and some other work before heading farther out. I don’t think it’s occurred to people—even those closest to me—that my life on the road has already begun. I’m already used to living out of bags. I’ve adjusted. I’d forgotten how that feels—setting up somewhere for a few days, finding your nook, a place to sleep well and a space where you can work, only to have to pack it all again and move on to the next and recreate your nook all over. That’s part of the allure of nomadic living: defining spaces—claiming them, creating them—as we go. It’s also part of the hassle, like when your tent is blowing away, tumbling through the yard, as you’re on your way to an interview that you’re already late for, and then it starts raining.

Sometimes it feels like everything I do is in preparation for what I really want to do—which is to provide myself with the time and space to create. That’s all I want to do here. As a kid, that’s all I did. I made things. I made little books and bound them together with that thick, white paste they give to elementary school kids. I spent a lot of time in the woods, too, collecting rocks and making trails and writing poems and songs. Eliminate the demands put on us to make a living and sustain ourselves somehow in this world, and I guess not much has changed.