In My Mind I'm Going to Carolina

I started going to summer camp in western North Carolina when I was nine years old. It was a real sink or swim experience (not literally, since I did everything I could to prevent having to jump into that freezing cold mountain lake, including feigning illness). I had the wrong haircut and I was finicky about my cabinmates' stepping on the sagging lid of my mom’s old trunk and I was shy and I couldn’t sleep a wink during our campouts. But I kept asking to go back, because from that very first summer a piece of my heart clicked in there. 

I went to camp for several years, eventually making some true, lifelong friends. I came to enjoy the campouts, and our other adventures included rock climbing, swimming at Sliding Rock, and whitewater rafting on the French Broad. The summer we were 16 my friends and I signed up to be “Trailblazers,” which meant we backpacked 50 miles on the Appalachian Trail. That summer I also worked for five weeks on the wait staff at Kanuga, the Episcopal conference center that my camp was part of, my first real job and the longest I’d ever been away from home – except that I was home. 

After I outgrew camp, I continued going to youth conferences at Kanuga, at first as an excuse to reunite with camp friends, but then I transitioned into being on the staff when I was in college and then I was helping plan the conferences and before I knew it 16 years had gone by. Even though I’ve been in California for more than a decade, I’ve always continued to touch down at Kanuga and its surroundings whenever I can. My sister was married there. My niece and my goddaughter were baptized there. A dear friend’s ashes were sprinkled there. It’s where I smoked my first and last cigarette, where I first held hands with a boy, where I first heard a still, small voice calling me into my vocation as a priest. So much of the person I grew into was formed in that little corner of the country. 

And yes, that is all about people and relationships and experiences, but it all happened against the backdrop of those mountains and trees and waters. Most of the towns in that part of the world are named after the surrounding landscape: Flat Rock, High Point, Black Mountain. Last week I pulled out a box of photos taken at Kanuga over the years – for context, it is one of six total photo boxes I have – and almost every photo features beautiful scenery, regardless of the season. Swaths of lush forest, mountaintop meadows, winter sunsets behind skeletal trees. It’s hard to tell where the landscape leaves off and the relationships begin. 

I used to be able to make the five-hour drive from Chattanooga to Kanuga from memory: mostly on back roads, winding through Nantahala National Forest, knowing when to turn based on familiar milestones like restaurants and country churches. A week after Hurricane Helene ravaged western North Carolina, when I pulled up Google Maps and asked for those directions, it said the route is impossible. The roads connecting those two places so close to my heart are closed indefinitely. Time will tell how many of those landmarks have been wiped from the map forever.

The hurricane caused significant damage to the roads and buildings and landscape at Kanuga, but fared better than many of the surrounding area, and it is recovering