Sam Knob

Long ago white granite boulders shook their shoulders free from the loam that blankets the small mountain called Sam Knob. It is these white boulders that inhabit my memory most strongly. They huddle together in massive clusters, their skin embedded with quartz that sparks like fire in the noonday sun of fall. They loom, imposing, impressive, and immovable, tufts of White Mountain laurel growing at their base. All around them the skeletons of scrub bushes rattle in strong wind. The bare branches are ash white against the November sky and, naked of their leaves, they look dead. The white grows everywhere from the loam, accompanied by the droning of bees among the laurel and the goose bump weather of hot sun through cool breeze.

White is a sterile color. Something we associate with hospitals, bleach, insane asylums. But Sam Knob’s white holds something special for me. It is the white of a fresh canvas, of primer that serves to brighten the pigment that covers it. The world below Sam Knob is a riot of color. The red clay path from the Blue Ridge Parkway is deeply carved into the earth by the passing of decades of pilgrims. Deceivingly bleak at its head, it is little more than a scar cut through a rocky ridge. The earth is dusty and dry beneath the loose slag that coats the trail. Tall pines line the path, judiciously sprinkling their poisonous needles across the earth to kill off competitors for sunlight and root space. Not much grows here beneath the tyrannical pines.

My family walks the trail with me. This is our second trip to the mountain and far later in the day than last time. My father and brothers play pranks, trying to scare each other, making my mother holler first and last names reproachfully. She’s taking the trail more carefully, her knee being weakened from long years as a dancer. It is prone to excruciating bouts of pain when provoked. The five of us move in fits and bursts, leaping forward or slowing down to enjoy the path more fully.

Before long the sun shines brightly past the last of the tall pine trees and reveals the remainder of the path. There is a meadow at the base of Sam Knob across which the red clay path winds like a serpent, parting the tall green grasses. Wildflowers sprout everywhere. Baby’s Breath, Lavender, and Bluets accompanied by waving fronds of fern and golden grasses. The silence of the meadow is profound. It is the silence of a person sleeping. You can hear their breath, maybe even the sleepy murmuring of a dream, but these sounds fade to the background because of their consistency. Sam Knob’s glade hums with bees and the sighing of the grass as it sways in the fall breeze, but these sounds fade away, leaving only the dull thud of my boots on the path and the rising beat of the heart in my chest. If the hike to Sam Knob was as Dante’s climb from Inferno, the glade must be the gates to Paradiso.

Suddenly, alarmingly, I hear my mother gasp. She’s stepped into one of the many low places on the trail, a spot worn into the ground by rain. She’s twisted her knee. I hear the telltale rise in vocal pitch that means serious pain while she explains to my father what she’s done. She can’t go the rest of the way. Looking to my parents, I wait for them to give the order to return. The longing I feel to reach the top of Sam Knob is palpable and I think if I should be forced to walk away my heart will break. My father, frowning slightly out of concern for my mother, hands me a cheap, hand-cranked flashlight.

“You and Paul go on and get to the top. Jack and I will take Mom back to the car and we’ll wait for you there. It’ll be dark soon. Use that flashlight.”

Paul and I are hardly children anymore. He is 20, I am 17. Yet I still feel the childlike sense of adventure as I clutch the flashlight in my fist, my clear plastic weapon against the dark. Together my brother and I lope to the base of the mountain, our mouths set and silent in anticipation for the climb.

Sam Knob rises above the meadow, desperate to singe its pate against the burning zone. Two rolling crowns, devoid of trees, give Sam Knob its name. Nothing taller than a man grows atop the crests, giving the observer a full circle view of the world at the mountain’s feet. Summits like these are called knobs or balds. The trail to the bald is precarious at best. Roots and loose rock rise up in the fading light to catch the toes of my boot. It isn’t long before Paul and I stop to break walking sticks from the deadfall along the path. We hurry though there isn’t any real rush. There is a desperate sense of urgency around us and to this day I don’t know where it came from. I feel like we are racing against the darkness that, because the sun sets on the far side of the mountain, is quickly seeping up the trail behind us.

The trail turns back on itself over and over as it rises. Truthfully there are perhaps fifteen or so switchbacks, each with weathered stone steps to mark them. The steps are old and looked formed by the elements rather than by any hand of man. In my race against the dark, listening to the puffing breath of my brother and my own laboring lungs, I feel as if there are a thousand twists, a years worth of seconds before we break free into the setting sun.

Once at the summit, the single path that cut the glade like a serpent and twisted infinitely across Sam Knob’s waist now explodes into a spider web that nets the crown of the mountain. It is here, next to the paths, that I saw the whiteness of the place.

When someone is young, they can feel magic in the most mundane places. As a child I saw wonder and adventure in the overgrown gardens of an elderly neighbor. There were fairies hiding in every shell on the beach and trolls under every footbridge in the woods. Skepticism was something you used only when you chose not to believe. But age robs this from us. Wisdom dictates that we must believe only what is true, forgo the faith of our childhood, and move into a new age of understanding. Reality is only what we can see and touch. There is no place for make-believe in a grown-up world.

The white of Sam Knob defies wisdom and logic, replacing it for an hour or two with the childlike wonder I had nearly forgotten. The white stones are the pillars for a fairy court, the ashen bushes are the remnant of a dragon’s breath, and the sunken red path is a highway for the spirits. As bleached, rocky faces shine and enhance the color around them, they also seem to enhance reality, turning what was once an average afternoon to a foray into unknown territory, into the pages of Never Never Land where belief in the impossible is everything there is.

My brother and I cease our frantic race from the darkness. We lose our rage against the dying of the light. There is nothing here atop the twin peaks of Sam Knob but the smell of the laurel and the bubbling, eddying breeze through the bare branches of the undead brush. We don’t speak. We simply wander, occasionally crossing paths as we trace the myriad walkways around the boulders and bushes. Every angle, every possible vantage point is beautiful. This is the first time I have seen Sam Knob at sunset. I want to stay for days, sleeping in the shelter of the great white stones and a springy bed of moss and wildflowers, but Mom and Dad are waiting for us. Together we tumble our way back down in the failing light, sprinting across the glade and scrambling between the tall pine trees.

Upon returning to the trailhead, the dark asphalt of the parkway and the metal bodies of the cars in the parking lot are strange and unearthly. Reality seems to flex, trying to fit together the world with Sam Knob’s summit, but it can’t be done. The whiteness fades from my mind just as the magic faded from childhood. And so the paths will continue to be beaten deeper into the earth as generations of pilgrims return to the spot where, for an afternoon in the fall, I could believe in fairies once again.