Walking With History

Being present while stirring up the past.

I’ve never been one to dwell on the past; history was never “my thing." There is something in the subconscious about creating and trying to pull from the unknown that predisposes a person to a forward facing mindset. And yet there are times when the mind whips to attention, recognizing the thing stirring around you is absolutely the past.

And so I found myself on the Craven Trail on the side of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. The first few hundred yards were as familiar as a trail in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan - wide, rock-strewn, slowly slaloming to and fro. Full of promise. The point is not that this was an overly exhausting or ambitious trek - more that you couldn’t climb through this military park without thinking about the "Battle Above the Clouds" from the American Civil War.

Five steps, lunge, stop, straighten up, breathe. Six steps, small lunge, stop, straighten up, breathe. Limestone, moss, pay no attention to your right which slopes away quickly 200 feet down. Eventually, the path stops slaloming and starts to jink. Two people wide - not two meters. I’m thinking about the army volunteers who cut trails up here to monitor the 650-mile-long Tennessee River and keep the supply route to Union forces in Atlanta open. Heat, cold, fatigue, infection. The accomplishments of a few can impact many generations in ways they could never know. A perfect encapsulation of these sloppy times. Could the soldiers have ever envisioned a thriving city at peace below, multi-racial, healthy, and financially comfortable? Would they have cared?

Stay focused, walk up the occasional cut-in steps. Wet limestone will take you out in a hurry. No time to get careless. I run across a couple of climbers taking a small break, and the conversation turns to pitches and cruxes and 5.7 this, 5.11 that. I move on - up and up with smaller and slower steps. Finally, the trail tops out over a wonderful small ridge after just a couple of miles up. I’m winded but happy and connect with a couple of other hikers lunching and soaking it in. Now it’s the same route down. One careful step…and another. Down is always harder, as we like to joke. But it’s true.

Who and what determines when an area becomes “sacred ground”? How does one appropriately pay homage to those who fell before our time? I have no answer for that. But I do know the beauty of travel - even to places that don’t stand out historically - is to generate experiences.

I was able to use one simple experience in a way that would never generate an equal memory from a movie or a ballgame. Nothing wrong with those—I love them both—but this is a reminder that exploring the one track that provides a “forever memory” never disappoints. The easy choices would have just been tossed onto the cart of lesser memories that don’t tick any particular boxes.

Maybe in the future I won’t be so quick to shrug off the history of a place before visiting. And just maybe, we must see things as they once were in order to dream of what they can be.