By Scott Graber
It is Sunday, early, and I’m in the dining room at the Pisgah Inn. This morning the young staff is getting the room ready for the tide of early-rising, Crocs and sock-wearing retirees seeking scrambled eggs, blueberry pancakes and a side of stone-ground grits. My son, Zach, is still sleeping in the room.
I’m here at the Inn — located a Mile Marker 408 on the Blue Ridge Parkway — celebrating my 80th birthday and Dean Moss’ 79th birthday. We are here, with our sons, perched on a ledge roughly 5,000 feet higher than the Town of Port Royal.
Pisgah is not the big-timbered, fireplace-in-the-lobby lodge that comes with a spa and a Michelin-starred restaurant. It is, rather, a collection of modest, low-slung buildings that, on the whole, remind one of a 60’s-era Holiday Inn
But each of those rooms has a balcony where one might sit — assisted and accessorized with three fingers of a Glenfiddich Single Malt — and gaze into an undulating, blue-grey line of mountains that stretch for 30 miles.
It is a fabulous view that inspires contemplation, serious conversation and eventually one slides into an involuntary feeling of contentment. It is well worth the $250 double occupancy room rate.
Yesterday afternoon, we gathered at the Adirondack chairs just below the dining room and examined our maps. Dean and I have always loved maps — the kind of maps come with contour lines, elevation gain, scale and color coded trails revealing precipitous, vertigo-inducing climbs.
These maps categorize the trails as beginner, moderate or advanced/difficult; and up until now we have gone for the vertical, hand-over-hand scramble up and over elongated, tubular stones that once were molten fire on the bottom of the ocean. But now I am 80; and these days I’m painfully aware of a diminished lung capacity; a right ankle that is unreliable; and recently I spent several days at Beaufort Memorial where a hole in my stomach was cauterized.
Normally, the 8-foot high, wrap-around windows in the dining room reveal a lush, green carpet of mountain laurel 2,000 feet below in the Cradle of Forestry. But yesterday morning there was fog — we were in a cloud — and we could barely see the yellow lines in the Parkway as we drove to the trailhead.
In an effort to show the world were aren’t yet done with our ankles (or our lungs) we ascended Black Balsam Knob, then topped Tennant Mountain, parts of the Art Loeb Trail scoured-out (by Hurricane Helene) as deep as the trenches at Passchendaele.
There were others on the trail — actually more hikers than I could remember — and I also remembered that my friend, Tim Wood, had told me many National Parks are “Over-run with tourists and trash cans full of used diapers … eventually we’re going to have to have a lottery.”
But seeing other hikers, especially children passing us by with Disney-themed backpacks, reminded me that Dean and I (and our issue) were stumbling through these wet, blackberry-covered mountains 30 years ago.
Zach and Dean’s son, Will, arranged our birthday adventure with some thought to previous trips on this same trail. In fact, Zach insisted on bringing along four small tins of potted meat — saying this was the entree we ate 30 years ago when we camped just below Cold Mountain — reminding me that we didn’t have a can opener and had to smash the cans (with rocks) to access the paste.
The red-colored meat paste, even when taken with whole grain Triscuits, was a reminder that these early trips had their share of disappointment. Fortunately we also packed-in beef jerky, strawberry licorice sticks and some power bars that rounded out our lunch.
I have been told that life should be a journey of discovery — complete with wrong turns and back-tracking and, sometimes, not knowing where you are on the map. There is the inevitable misstep; the stumbling; the blisters; and occasionally one returns to Pisgah’s dining room with a sore hip.
But one does return. And one does learn from the experience — Zach pointing out that the lids on the potted meat now come with rings that expedite the removal process.
Now the table is set for after-the-hike anecdotes, a well-deserved glass of the Sonoma Valley Chardonnay, the self-deprecating stories that reveal vulnerability.
And, of course, a yearning to do it all over again.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
