Going into Grassy Bald on Roan Mountain one day in May, I met a man and his two dogs coming out. Actually I first met the man's skiddish border collie, then I met his master and dog two. I stopped to pet dog two when the man asked me if I was staying over. I said I was and he said it was really beautiful where I was going. To which I said I hope it doesn't rain. He paused for what felt like a considerable time, looked out toward the sky, and said, 'Nah, I don't think so.'
With that prediction at hand, I continued walking toward my vision of a clear night on top of a mountain, a number of miles from any kind of civilized thing.
At first I set up my tent next to a thicket of rhododendron. Then I thought better of it and pulled all my stuff over to a level spot next to a stone fire site that was obviously used a lot. It was flat and open and, I reasoned, less vulnerable to attack by bears.
The opening to my tent faced north, so just before I pulled myself in for the evening, I sat in the long grass and made a sketch of sunlight finishing out the day on mountain ridges to the north and east, each becoming dimmer and lighter in blue until the last in line could be easily mistaken for a low bank of clouds.
It had been gusty since I arrived but as soon as I got settled in, my nylon tent began to ripple and breathe like some gelatinous being. The walls would cave forward or fly backwards and my head would bob around inside as the tent sides snapped, buckled, and kited this way and that. I grabbed some 10 pound stones from the fire place and tossed them into the corners of the tent. Still, the prospect of sleeping seemed distant.
I had resolved to stay put when, about 11 or so (I'm guessing since, whoops, I forgot to bring any kind of timepiece) I noticed the tent flickering as if a firefly had happened by. In a sudden panic, I realized it was not an insect, but a major electrical storm somewhere nearby. I thought: OK, I'm on a bald at about 6,000 feet, in the open, with the wind about to toss me in the air, in the path of a major electrical storm, meaning much lightning and rain. I'm a target, I thought. Do I pack up everything and try to get back to the car in the middle of a huge storm, across two open balds, with clouds sweeping the mountain, along dark footpaths that I didn't know too well?
In a sort of fit of 'well, do something!', I rampaged through everything in the tent, stuffing bananas, water color tin, oat meal bags, loose socks, camp stove, water bottles (I'd brought two), trail maps (for another mountain), sketch book, sardines, and extra glasses in my my pack. I shoved the pack on one shoulder, then grabbed the tent and hauled it across the long grass so that it came to rest snug against a room-size boulder with an alley underneath a man could crawl into. This tent site was far from flat and I shared one wall of the tent with the boulder, a fact that became oddly comforting.
I tossed my pack in and then myself, with everything sliding toward the rock on a fairly severe pitch. I figured if worse came to worse, I could get out of the tent and crawl under the boulder and last out the night there through the tempest that was on its way. I just remember thinking, 'Oh, Jeez, I've pitched my tent on the edge of a weather front on a mountain.'
Then, and only then, something dawned on me. Between occasional wisps of clouds floating by overhead, I could see stars. I flipped on my stomach and began watching the lightning storm. It was all happening beneath me. Up the valley, west to east, maybe 2,000 feet below, a war had broken out. First one side would fire a series of volleys. Huge cumulus clouds would light up in a sequence of illuminations. Then, to the east let's say, a series of answering volleys. Mega-explosions, sometimes eight, ten, a dozen in a row. The sky reverberated and the clouds danced with white light. It appeared very possible that the city of Elizabethton had gone to war with the town of Damascus.
And it wasn't a brief skirmish. On and on they fought, past midnight, past one a.m., and when I wasn't watching, I'd keep track of the parries and thrusts on the sides of my tent. Finally, at some point in the war, with my legs buckled against the boulder and my body sliding inexorably toward the depression at its base, I fell asleep. I remember a few raindrops hitting the tent, but I must have crashed at least for an hour or two before the next event.
There were times in all the whipping of the wind across the boulder and through my tent when everything would grow still and silent. One part of my brain had it figured out as the eye of a very rare mountain tornado. Another part took the viewpoint that maybe the wind was subsiding. At any rate, just in the middle of one of these odd silences, I un-scrunched my legs to full length and scooted my head outside the tent opening. Over top the blue nylon, the sky had become a spectacle. The handle of the Big Dipper did that sort of lazy pointing thing at what seemed to be several gobs of pinholes flaring out of the deep blackness. Every star, and there must have been hundreds, seemed like flakes of crystal up there, occasionally winking through a wisp of cloud passing over the bald. I was mesmerized. The war had apparently quit down below with no clear winner. Up here, above Grassy Bald, stars flickered messages from distances impossible to grasp. They were simply distances on the other side of the universe from this mountain--so far that my entire lifespan would be a wink in the voyage of light from even the nearest one.
The rest of the night I lay there, too lazy to change my tent site again, reveling in my charmed escape from armagedon. I tried to use my pack as a pillow with tiny successes, so tiny that I recall I was still working on the problem when I heard a distant bird cry and realized that the world was becoming a dull blue.
I had no idea what time it was and smiled when I got to the car and realized that I had made breakfast, cleared camp, packed up everything, and scrambled over the Appalachian Trail a mile or two, and it wasn't yet eight o'clock. Still, to be up then, with no one else on the path and the sun scraping across the ground, electrifying the green of the balds, vaporizing the ground fog, well, it is enough to know the earth has turned around another time and I am on it.
On my way down the mountain, I stopped at the little store, bought gas and a cup of coffee. The roads were puddled up and the gloss of rainwater hung on parts of the pavement. I asked the man at the store if it had rained down there.
He said, and this is a direct quote, 'I really don't know. I was in bed by 11.'
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