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Arts & Letters
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| "Sky" photographed by Erika Milo. “The universe,” Thoreau wrote, “is wider than our views of it.” |
Sub-zero weather is unusual in the Ozarks. Unlike the Blue Ridge mountains, where I lived for a number of years, this section of the Ozarks is not too far above sea level, which keeps the winters mild and the summers hot. On this day, however, it was bitterly cold, and the wind battered us like a herd of belligerent, displaced yaks. The sunny cold heightened the senses, chilling the lungs and challenging the eyes with an acute glare.
We struggled for footing on the icy ground, walking below a long, low mountain marked by a line of distinctive cliffs, a stark black outcropping that stood in relief against the snowy mountainside. This linearity seemed a bit unreal in the gentle rolling Ozark hills, an embellishment that spruced up the ridge with a stripe that extended as far as sight allowed.
This was only my third or fourth hiking trip in the Ozarks since moving here in late summer. For the first time in my adult life, I now lived outside of North Carolina, and while the Ozarks and the Appalachians share many common traits, so far it was the differences that I’d noticed: the Ozarks weren’t huge, upward-thrusting granite mountains that had pierced the heavens for eons. Rather, the Ozarks are more like an eroded plain, where the dominant features are valleys lined with bluffs of sedimentary rock. I longed for familiar 4000-foot Appalachian elevations, the robust creeks, and the steeply-sloped, rhododendron covered thickets. Instead, the Ozark hills were a series of gentle geographical undulations, the smaller creeks often bone-dry, and the vegetation a mix of familiar pines and hardwoods with cacti and spanish moss. Roadrunners and armadillos roamed the woods. The Ozarks were strange and unfamiliar, and home was far away.
Added to this sense of dislocation were the pressures of a new job and the loneliness that comes from being hundreds of miles from my family and my closest friends. I was concerned about my father’s waning health, and he was now a two-day drive away. I was finding the acclimation process difficult, and in the rush and rumble of settling in, I had often neglected getting outside. It had been a long time since I’d wandered in a mountain field with no distinct plan or path.
I was walking with my new acquaintances Tilly and Amanda, strolling across the land Tilly and her husband had farmed for half a century. As we passed single-file through a gate, Tilly paused to tell a story. She had been looking out her window during the blizzard that had covered these hills when she spied a strange man, someone she had never seen before. He emerged from the storm and walked across her hay field. Strolling behind him was a deer, tagging along like a faithful and obedient dog. They crossed the field and walked off into the blizzard.
As we smiled at Tilly’s tale, my hiking companions were suddenly immersed in waves of light. Without warning, a dazzling brightness abruptly began to hover around them, dancing along, piercing and intense, engulfing Tilly and Amanda. The lights wavered with an eerie, shimmering brightness, just transparent enough so that I could make out the bare tree limbs as I gazed through them.
Tilly concluded her tale. “The reason I saw the deer following that man,” she said through the incandescent glow, “is because my land is enchanted.” With these words the lights lost luminosity and faded from view. The whole story, lights and all, lasted less than five minutes. We crossed the field and headed back to Tilly’s house.
Dumbstruck by the beauty and intensity of these dancing lights, I waited for Tilly and Amanda to comment, but they said not a word. I soon realized that I alone had seen them, profound, shimmering and wavering. I had gazed into their depth, and clearly saw shapes through them. This was not glare off the ice; the light seemed more like a localized, ground-hugging version of the northern lights. Had I just had some sort of hallucination? I remained mum. What had I just seen, and why had I seen it, when my peers were unaware of it dancing around their heads?
Over the years, I have witnessed various kinds of luminescent phenomena in nature. Darkened forest floors are spotted with phosphorescent larvae, and countless fireflies fill warm southern nights. Standing in the warm surf on a summer’s evening, I’ve marveled as incandescent waves washed around my feet. Refer to a field guide and science quickly resolves these oddities, leaving no mysteries to ponder.
Less easily explainable are the Brown Mountain lights in western North Carolina. From a distance the lights rise above Brown Mountain’s 2,600-foot high ridge, hover for a while, then vanish. This is a common, well-documented occurrence, witnessed by thousands.
Interest in the Brown Mountain lights was such that, in 1922, the U.S. Geological Survey sent George Mansfield to “undertake a thorough investigation of the reported phenomena.” Mansfield observed the lights from various angles, recording his observations with charts and maps. He concluded that the lights were merely reflections from locomotive or automobile headlights. Or perhaps, he added uncertainly, they were the result of brush fires.
Despite this and other scientific attempts to explain them, the Brown Mountain lights defy close analysis. While easily viewed from a distance, “no one has actually observed the light on Brown Mountain,” Mansfield wrote, “when he himself was on that mountain.” This fact remains constant about the Brown Mountain lights: no one can get close to them. Climb the mountain with instruments and cameras to measure the photons and solve the riddle, and you’ll sit up there in the dark.
Once, in a college class on Hinduism, my professor related the tale of the westerner who moved to India, ostensibly to practice Hinduism. One day an Indian friend of the westerner’s told him that a famous holy man would be visiting the village to meditate and levitate. The westerner was overjoyed at this unprecedented opportunity. He could hide a camera under his clothing and record on film, for the very first time, documentary evidence of someone actually escaping the bonds of gravity through levitation.
That night the holy man chanted and meditated for hours. The westerner patiently waited in vain, for the guru remained grounded. The following day his Indian friend was bursting with joy: “Wasn’t it amazing!” Confused, the westerner said, “I didn’t see it -- I was there, I watched him closely the whole time, and he remained on the ground.” His friend looked at him and said. “I’m sorry. Of course you couldn’t see him. You’re not initiated.”
Annie Dillard describes her search for “the tree with the lights in it.” She sought it through several seasons, to no avail. Then one day, while “thinking of nothing at all,” she came across her backyard cedar “charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.” She called it a “flood of fire” and remarked that the experience “was less like seeing than being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.”
Standing in that cold Ozark hayfield, I soaked in the photons and gazed at the shimmering waves of light. On Tilly’s enchanted land deer act as if tame, and lights fill this observer’s eyes. I felt as Dillard did after she had seen the fiery cedar “I had been my whole life a bell,” Dillard remarked in awe, “and never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck.” It was “the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”
I often think about the lights that danced that Ozark jig. Reason keeps suggesting that, perhaps, they were merely a reaction of my eye to the icy glare, or some variation of St. Elmo’s Fire. Or perhaps they were a localized version of the northern lights, an aurora ozarkus, flown south for the winter like a flock of travel-hardy waterfowl.
I’ve come to believe that this experience is slightly outside reason’s grasp. There’s a certain mystery here that instruments and data are not designed to measure. “The realm of rational knowledge is, of course, the realm of science which measures and quantifies, classifies and analyses,” asserts Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics. “The limitations of any knowledge obtained by these methods have become increasingly apparent in modern science.” Some truths are slippery, and craftily elude science’s facile skills to explain and quantify.
Consider the wayward westerner, afoot in India, a transplanted rationalist in a culture he didn’t understand, relying on reason to observe levitation. Not only observe, but render into data. He sought to prove that a devout Hindu could elude gravity and hover above the ground. He waited, worrying about f-stops, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t initiated. It’s like climbing up Brown Mountain to see the lights. The instruments will show no readings, the film no images.
A few months after I witnessed the Ozark lights, I returned to my old home in the Blue Ridge and went hiking with my friend Edwin. It was the first warm day of spring, and we trekked up the familiar side of Grandfather Mountain, a mile-high monolith that some geologists consider the most ancient mountain on Earth. We basked in the vernal sunshine and gazed across the distant ridges. I shared the tale of my wintry Ozark vision with Edwin. He nodded excitedly, noting that he had experienced a similar event on Grandfather Mountain, just down the trail from where we sat. After discussing our experiences, we sat silently.
As scores of religious teachers and thinkers intone, truth often presents itself when we stop thinking and simply pay attention. Stop the mental chatter and the bird alights nearby. Hints and reminders, glimpses of grandeur beckon daily, showing us the reality that lies just beyond the delicately thin membrane of our humanly constructed world. “The universe,” Thoreau wrote, “is wider than our views of it.”
Sometimes, however, when we fail to stop and pay attention, the mountains open up, lights roar in, and we’re inundated with a brief glimpse of a much larger reality just beyond the realm of sight. We reencounter the immediacy of here and now, leaving us with little choice but to surrender to the lights that emerge, unbidden but undeniable. Toss out the guidebooks, watch and listen. The whole world is like Tilly’s farm, full of enchantment, a vast, fertile realm ripe with intimations.
Copyright ©2003 by Gene Hyde
Mr. Hyde is an academic librarian, writer, and observer of nature, known and not known. Visit Gene Hyde's web site at http://www.radford.edu/~wehyde
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
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