by Marcus Wohlsen

The streets of Brevard don’t take long to learn. About 6,000 people live here, the population of an average apartment building in Hong Kong. After a week, you know your way around town.

Before long, the drive to the grocery store or the commute home from work requires only the barest participation of the conscious mind. The necessary motions-slow down to 45 m.p.h. on the downhill to avoid the speed trap, remember to switch to the right lane before you get to the intersection-become rote.

Which means you should have plenty of space in your mind to look around. You might notice the twin basketball hoops standing forgotten in a grassy field. Or the plastic model home that stands isolated along the forested highway, the suburban dream home without a suburb, unlived in, unloved, an emblem of dreams waiting to be broken.

But I don’t tend to notice these things. They go by too fast. After a few times down the same road, I turn inward. My mind wanders to bills or politics. I fiddle endlessly with the radio, always searching for the great song that’s never on, bingeing on the musical equivalent of high fructose corn syrup.

This is why I hate to drive. Not engaging enough to keep you interested, but not passive enough to let you read, write, or play guitar while you’re doing it. (I did once see a guy playing Gameboy while he drove his Toyota down I-26.) Driving for me is a chopped-up, jittery experience that gives about the same pleasure as watching a half-hour sitcom that contains fifteen minutes of commercials.

Except for yesterday. Yesterday I hit the weather just right. I had stayed late at work. The afternoon storm had passed over. The evening sun trickled through the rising mist, which floated lazily across the summit of a Blue Ridge mountain whose name I’ve never learned.

Off beyond through the haze, I could make out the sharper angles of Black Balsam and Sam’s Knob, two venerable 6,000-footers near Shining Rock.

As the mountains drew my gaze outward, the rest of my mind followed. Instead of the road’s haphazard cycle of stimulus-response, radio static, thoughts pinging in and out of focus, I felt anchored for a moment by a deeper impulse, an abiding sense of longing that comforts even as it whispers to you that you’ll never fulfill the ambitions it commands.

Such is the power of mountains. Many of us who spend time in the mountains, especially on foot, are chasing after this transcendence, a desire to be enveloped in something massive, continuous, and, in the end, beyond comprehension. We don’t ever find it.

Yet the draw of mountains never truly diminishes. They call us back, again and again, a tragic dance, because we know that no matter how often we return, they’ll never give up their secrets.

Marcus Wohlsen has been the senior editor of Blue Ridge Outdoors for the past two years. He will be leaving BRO this month to pursue graduate studies at UC-Berkeley.