Frosty mountain sets poetic mood for Richmond hiker

It's winter in the Virginia mountains and, for the first time in a long while, everything has been snow-covered for weeks, thanks to the longest cold snap in years.

Richmond outdoorsman Andy Thompson recently hiked the closed Blue Ridge Parkway to Humpback Rock Farm. His remembrance of that day is in today's Richmond Times-Dispatch in his piece, "Frosty mountain sets poetic mood," where he very well captures the feeling of isolation, cold (frigidness), and admiration for the mountain people who lived there a century ago:

It's hard to convey the sense of isolation up there. Less than two hours earlier, we'd left snowless Richmond; the weatherman said River City would get to 40 degrees. Up on the mountain, we were alone in a winterscape. A few old cross-country ski tracks ran alongside us. Animal prints crisscrossed the road. Treetops offered a brittle creaking, straining not to snap in the wind. It felt as if it had been a long time since another human had come this way.

As mentioned in a previous post, a two-foot snowfall would have isolated the hardy folks who lived in the mountains in those days.

Mr. Thompson reintroduced me to a poet I had read years ago, Robert W. Service, who wrote about the Canadian north and the men who invaded that land to search for gold:

In Service's most famous poem, "The Cremation of Sam McGee," the key lesson is perspective. The title character is from Tennessee and can't handle the Yukon cold. In a world of hard men, McGee was the only one who complained. There was no room for Sam McGees in a place like Humpback Rocks 300 years ago. The challenges of life were too many and too self-evident to grouse about.

Mr. Thompson's words reminded me of my relatives, the hardy stock who still live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia and North Carolina. Visiting my great-grandparents' log cabin on a mountain knob in western Grayson County, Virginia, I have often marveled at the survival skills of those who went before me.

Years ago I asked an elderly relative, who has since passed away, how she had survived in that isolated cabin during the harsh winters with cracks in the walls, water fetched from a nearby spring, and a fireplace as the only heat source. She had married young and lived in the cabin briefly with her in-laws around the 1900s. Her first child had been born there, and she and her husband later settled nearby where she lived out the remainder of her years. I was having a hard time imagining raising an infant under those frigid winter conditions.

She smiled at my question, shrugged her shoulders, and said, "I don't know. We just did it."

"We just did it" ... because there was nothing else to do. They didn't complain. The just did it.

Mr. Thompson's thoughts during his hike made me thankful for those hardy Irish folks.