Max Patch is a bald mountain along the Appalachian Trail, near the North Carolina-Tennessee border. Driving west on I-40 out of Asheville, it's hard to decipher which peak it is from the road, as four lanes of interstate traffic race past it.
You exit at Harmon Den and take a right, and there are no signs for a while. You just have to trust.
The road quickly becomes dirt with big, car-swallowing potholes that slow you down dramatically. Even in my old Subaru, the road to Max Patch felt treacherous. Quick hairpin curves with no guardrails, a drop to your right that goes down hundreds if not thousands of feet. You don't want to slip. You can't rush this. If someone is coming downhill, there is barely enough space for both of you. You must focus, pay attention, be generous, be forgiving.
Wait.
If it has rained recently, the pot holes fill with a thick, pasty mud. Knock them the wrong way and you may sit, spinning your wheels until a stranger stops to help.
It can all go so wrong so fast, in so many ways.
But if you've been here before and know what you're getting into, if you take your time and move slowly through the mud and the holes, to the shoulder when necessary, it can be a lovely drive. Make sure the music is good. Make sure the company is kind.
When you get to the top, there's only a few hundred feet to walk from the small, overcrowded parking lot.
There used to be a path straight up the face of Max Patch, but so many people converged on the mountain during COVID lockdown that the direct path became wasted and muddy. To protect the face, they roped it off, let the grass and wildflowers go. (You know what Dolly says about wildflowers: they don't care where they grow.)
Now, the only option is to go around the long way, to take the trail AT hikers take, crest the bald through the back door. This path is covered by a thick canopy of old growth, peekaboo views now and then. It's a well-trod path along a well-trod trail.
Suddenly you reach the treeline and a new, beautiful world unfolds before you.
From here, there is no telling which part is Tennessee and which part is North Carolina. These are just mountains, among the oldest in the world.
The ancient terrain is covered in deeply rooted evergreens, so green they look blue from afar. There's some kind of science that takes place between the trees and the soil and the air, that pulls a misty fog over the mountains from time to time.
To the white colonists who didn't ask questions, who believed they knew all, who drove out the Natives, coming upon these mountains from a distance, this effect looked like smoke.
The Blue Ridge Mountains.
The Smokies.
They didn't know the green, ancient mountains were breathing moisture against the cool, clean air. They didn't know the illusion was just a distant exhale.
My wife Mercedes and I have walked this path too many times to count. We have walked it in the morning and at midday and at dusk. We have walked it in the rain and the snow. We have walked it through the rusty transition of autumn. We have walked on clear blue days that deceived us, finding our bodies wading through thick clouds halfway into the woods. When we could barely see ahead of us as we wandered the curves of the earth, hoping that the payoff at the top would still be there. We walked into the thick white mist with faith and promise, because we knew the 360 view atop Max Patch is one of North Carolina's most precious natural wonders.
The silence atop a mountain is a special kind of silence. To stand here and see, over there, the white thread of a distant waterfall. The silent swerve of a tiny car on a toy road.
The view from Max Patch is so burned into my brain, I can see it right now, far away, if I just close my eyes to blink, yet we always feel compelled to take photos. It is as though we can't believe it, again and again. That this is our world too. That this beauty, these mountains, are always here, have always been here.
These mountains were here when I rode into town that first time. They were here when Mercedes came for residency. They were here before our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers. They were here before white people rode over them with horses, before Indigenous people walked over them on foot. These mountains were here before the ice melted and seas receded, when the dinosaurs roamed the world. Their peaks and valleys and contours and curves were as beautiful then as they are today. The eyes that have gazed upon their shadows and trees are too many to imagine. And until the Earth is blown to bits by a meteor or by the mistakes of men, they will continue to gather mist in the morning, deceive those from afar about their color and condensation.
Standing atop this mountain, I look around.
These years of trying have left me in a blur, a misty fog of cloud around my head that follows me away from the mountains and into my home.
I have lost track of how many times we have failed to have another baby. I've lost track of the HPTs and the tears and the hope and the worry. It's all what life just is now.
It's autumn and we've come here again, because we need to have routine things that have nothing to do with eggs and sperm and blastocysts and blood.
Mercedes carries a tumbler of pumpkin spice latte and I have one filled with plain coffee because I can't stomach drinking squash.
The air has a slight chill, but also a subtle heat. The trees that change with the season offer such a brilliant array, I have to mindfully catch my breath.
Our one-year-old daughter is buckled to Merce's back, her hands pulled into a pocket of air between her belly and her mommy's sweater. She is napping, breathing shallow, clueless to the effort it took to bring her to this beautiful place. Clueless to the beauty. Clueless to the way it makes her mothers feel.
In a few days, we will go to the clinic for IUI again, and we will keep going again until it works.
Or until it doesn't.
It's possible that this will never work.
A trail hiker has pitched a tent that's blowing with the wind. Its zipper pulls, smacking against their own metal teeth, is the only sound I hear aside from my own breath. They have come here for their own reasons. They are thinking their own thoughts. I won't see their face, we won't share our hopes. But for now we are here together, on top of a mountain with this view, getting what we need, comfortable with the presence of peaceful strangers.
Maybe months from now this moment will be a story at their wedding or funeral or simply a place they go when they blink their eyes, as their life carries on with its highs and lows. Distant in the background of their memory will be two women and a baby, two cups of coffee, an inaudible exhale.
Maybe they too will remember, as they stand in the whir of the civilized world, that they know how the top of an ancient mountain looks and feels and sounds and smells.
Right now, it's just this few of us, here together. Bit actors in each other's life-giving moments.
It might never work, what any of us are trying to do.
We and the mountains will be OK.
Kim Ruehl is a writer, editor, and folk music advocate based in Asheville, North Carolina. Former editor-in-chief of roots music magazine NO DEPRESSION, her book, A Singing Army: Zilphia Horton and the Highlander Folk School, is out now, from the University of Texas Press. It is the first biography of this woman who inspired thousands of working people, and left a legacy that changed the world.
