Luminous Darkness

Unusually, my travels have taken me to a second World Heritage site in less than a month. I have been in Nashville for a few weeks and have had a great time here exploring the city and listening to lots of live music in the bars and honkeytonks downtown, and had a good day on Saturday driving up through Kentucky to visit the Woodford Reserve whiskey distillery and Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace. However, the highlight of the weekend was definitely my visit to Mammoth Cave National Park. Mammoth is the largest cave system discovered in the world, with over 365 miles of mapped caves, and many more that have not yet been explored. I took two tours, one that was about four-and-a-half hours long and another that was two hours long. Both were interesting and very different, and I was fascinated to see the beauty in the cave in a number of different ways, from enormous caverns to tiny cracks and passages. Words really cannot describe what it like to be in those ancient places and spend several hours walking underground in an environment that spends much of its time in perpetual darkness and silence. Definitely food for thought.

Since becoming a Companion to the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, one of the ways that I am living out the required Rule of Life is by saying the Daily Office of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer (or at least Compline if I do not get back early enough in the evening). I have found it to be an extremely valuable discipline, and one that puts focus to my life that is usually busy and filled with many other things. I’m certainly not perfect at saying it every day, but I do make a pretty significant attempt, and that is rewarding as well.

There is a great post over at the Daily Episcopalian asking why at least one Episcopal Church in most major locations around the country couldn’t offer this as a congregational service. As someone who travels about seventy-five percent of the time to different parts of the United States, I know well the frustration of trying to locate a church that offers regular public worship services of any kind. The author of the article also makes the good point that most weekday services are offered at times when working people would not be able to attend. Whilst I have no problem with saying the Office by myself, having the option to say it within the context of a a worshiping community would be something that I would definitely make an effort to attend.

Perhaps ought to mention this to my own rector…

Since I am clearly a bit behind with this blog, I shall make no apologies, but will just try and get on with things. The most recent bit of reportable news is that I have added another UNESCO World Heritage Site to my list. I was working for a few weeks in the western part of North Carolina last month, only about a three-hour drive from Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so I decided to spend a weekend there.

I arrived on Friday afternoon and drove up to my hotel in Gatlinburg, TN (a fascinatingly garish tourist mecca about which much could be written) through the park from south to north. This took me past a number of very beautiful views of the mountains themselves and I stopped several times along the road, including once to see a small black bear cub walking around on the hillside. By the time I got to Clingmans Dome, the tallest point in the park (and therefore also usually the most tourist-filled) it had started to rain quite heavily, and by the time I parked it was a complete downpour. Having a fairly good sense that this was likely to be a short term rain shower, I waited in the car and said Evening Prayer whilst watching people run back to their cars. By the time I was done, the rain was also done, and I headed up to the top.

It is quite a climb, although not too long of one, to get to the top, but the view is spectacular and very worth it. This is in spite of the fact that pollution and smog have made the views much less stunning than they once were (as a number of National Park Service notices explained in great detail). Oddly, the rain seemed to have dampened people’s enthusiasm for the climb since I was actually up on the observation deck for about ten minutes completely by myself which I would guess is fairly unusual for the height of the tourist season.

After this I headed to my hotel and planned my hike for the next day. My good friend Eric is currently finishing up a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail, and so had been through the park a few months before. He had given me the suggestion of a fairly good day-hike with a good climb at the beginning meaning most tourists wouldn’t try it, but not too long that someone like me who doesn’t hike all the time would get totally exhausted. It started out at the Cades Cove Picnic Area, headed up to the AT, went along that trail for a few miles, and then circled back to the Cove for a total distance of about fourteen miles.

On the way up it was extremely humid and I was soaked to the skin within an hour with my glasses fogged up so that I could barely see. However, the views were wonderful and, after I left the river behind, the silence was almost total other than occasional animal noises. I do believe that I saw a pair of either bears or hogs (which are apparently just as big as bears according to the Park Service trail runner I met) in the woods only about an hundred feet off the trail, but the mist was very thick at that point and they raced off as soon as I got near to them.

Coming back down after lunch it was much less humid and the sun actually came out a bit. Overall the hike was beautiful and gave me a definite sense of peace and serenity, as well as isolation since I only saw about ten other people on the trails during the course of the entire day. I would definitely go back since I barely scratched the surface of what there is to see, and I would highly recommend the park to anyone.