Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out - Softcover

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Jennifer McGaha has taught creative nonfiction and memoir writing for more than twenty years, currently at the University of North Carolina–Asheville. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Flat Broke with Two Goats, and her work has appeared in the Huffington Post, the Bitter Southerner, Brevity, CHEAP POP, Lumina, PANK, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Passengers, HerStry, and elsewhere. A native of Appalachia, McGaha lives in western North Carolina with her husband, two cats, six unruly dogs, ten relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of hens.

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Why We Write: Searching for Beauty in an Imperfect World

CaesarsHead is a granite outcropping just over the North Carolina-South Carolinaborder. Created by shifting tectonic plates and water erosion, the rock is3,266 feet above sea level and rests on the southern edge of the Blue RidgeEscarpment, the line at which the Blue Ridge Mountains gives way to the SouthCarolina foothills. On a clear day, you can see three states from the top—North Carolina,South Carolina, and Georgia. You can buy a map and trinkets at the visitor’s center. You can hike one ofthe trails in Jones Gap State Park in the Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area, a13,000-acre forest.What you may not do, at least legally, is enter the park at night. There aretoo many obstacles to trip over, too many wild animals prowling about, too manyways to, like the dog for whom the outcropping is allegedly named, go tumblingoff the mountain.

Nevertheless,on a bitterly cold night in late November of 2016, a few weeks after theelection that handed Donald Trump the presidency, my three adult children and Isnuck past the signs warning visitors not to enter the park after hours. Myhusband waited in the parked car, the headlights illuminating the parking lot asthe rest of us scaled the gate, then headed into the fog. Using the flashlightson our cell phones, my kids and I navigated a short path, then emerged on the rockface.

Fierce wind rolled up the mountain and stung our faces. Toget a full breath, we had to turn our backs to the wind. Huddled together, thecold seeping through our gloves, we tucked our hands in each other’s elbows andsurveyed the forest below. It was dusk, just before sunset, and everythingbelow had a dull, grayish hue—the trees, the birds, the mountains. Normally,this state park received about seventy-nine inches of rain annually, but thisfall had been one of the driest seasons of the century in our region, and nowforest fires raged across the region. In the waning daylight, we could seepockets of smoke here and there, a bit of haze in that valley, a mountain overthere obscured by fog. The air smelled of campfires. The world was on fire,both literally and metaphorically, and though I could not yet know exactly howthe next four years would play out, watching the blazes, I imagined thedevastation in the woods—the terrified animals, the century-old treesexploding, the habitats destroyed, the stench of death—and I was filled withforeboding.

Then, just as we gathered near the protective rail at therock’s edge, the sun slid behind a mountain below, leaving only fire andshadow—reds and oranges and grays and deep blackness—a stunning display offlickering light. One mountain to the west was backlit with flames, a cinematicfeat of nature. What had moments before struck me as tragic had beentransformed, and the scene was breathtaking, otherworldly, spectacular. Whatshould have been darkness was light, and what should have been light wasdarkness, and in that moment, I no longer knew who or what or where I was, fromwhence I had come or where I was going. Gazing at the blazing spectacle beneathme, I was air—cold, smoky, fiery, permeable, one with the vast expanse beforeme, part of the fire force that no longer felt malicious or destructive or apurveyor of impending doom but simply was. Light in the midst ofdarkness. Calm in the midst of chaos. Beauty even in destruction. 

In his devastatingly beautiful book about the Vietnam War, TheThings They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes about this inherent contradictionbetween beauty and destructive forces:

How do you generalize? War is hell, but that's not the halfof it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage anddiscovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty;war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makesyou dead. The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, thatwar is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, youcan't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracerrounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch inambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admirethe fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shapeand proportion, the great sheets of metalfire streaming down from a gunship,the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow ofnapalm, the rocket's red glare. It's not pretty, exactly. It's astonishing. Itfills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like akiller forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raidor artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—apowerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth aboutthis, though the truth is ugly. (77)

O’Brien’s exploration of truth stunsme anew every time I read this passage. How does this knowledge of the moralindifference of beauty inform our lives? How does this change how we move inthis world? Admittedly, beauty can be difficult to summon at times. In fact, asI write this, during a raging pandemic, following four years of political andsocial upheaval, just before the next election which will most certainlydetermine fate of this country, it almost alludes me now. Searching for it, Ireturn again and again to the woods, and, again and again, in every season,both literally and metaphorically, I find it there. In the spring, there aretrilliums and May apples and bluebirds and fawns. In the summer, gushingwaterfalls and baby bears and patches of wild huckleberries and blueberries andblackberries. In the fall, acorns and chipmunks and buckeyes and brilliant fallcolors. And in the winter, profound silences and solitude and miles-longvistas. Such exquisite abundance.

Inher 1942 memoir We Took to The Woods,Louise Dickinson Rich writes about this power of nature to shift our gaze awayfrom the hardness of this world, to rock our metaphorical tectonic plates. Inthe mid 1930’s, Rich moves with her husband to the backwoods of Maine. Duringher stay there, Rich, who grew up “more or less a lady” (244), has no modernconveniences—no running water, no plumbing, no electricity—and though summersin Maine are mild and lovely, winters are brutal. Early in the book, Richdescribes the nightly trek to the outhouse: “This is no great hardship in thesummer, but in winter, with the snow knee deep, the wind howling like a maniacup the river, and the thermometer crawling down to ten below zero, it is asupreme test of fortitude to leave the warmth of the fire and go plunging outinto the cold, no matter how great the necessity” (17). Even for 1942, this isa rough and rustic existence, a life well outside the mainstream, and thus thepulse, the momentum, of this narrative becomes threefold: Why is Rich here? Howdoes she survive? And what lessons does she learn?

Rich, in fact, names the chaptersafter questions people have asked her: “Don’t You Ever Get Bored?”, “Aren’t YouEver Frightened?”, “Is It Worthwhile?”, etc., an interesting structural devicethat demonstrates that she understands that her lifestyle is intriguing, evensuspect, to the average person. In moving to the woods, Rich has become an“other,” a feminine Thoreau. Throughout...