There is No Such Thing as a Mountain
Is there such a thing as you?
I stood at the peak of Watterock Knob. My dog Lydia and I looked out across the Plott Balsam Range, a part of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, NC.
Waterrock Knob does, indeed, peak at a knob. There is a rockiness to the peak that differs from the rounded, tree-covered summits we could see around us and in the distance.
The Appalachian Mountains are among the oldest in the world. The geological activity that created these mountains happened longer ago than the events that pushed up the Rockies or Himalayas or Andes.
This ancient quality leads to the rounded and rolling nature of the Appalachian Mountains. Because the mountains are over one billion years old, they are eroded and tree-covered and lacking in the rocky protrusions that give name to the mountains of the American West.
Geological activity has continued in the mountains where I live. Roughly 50 million years ago, volcanic activity popped up in places along this range. (I wasn’t living here then.) Large bodies of water have shifted across the face of this area.
Still, the hills are ancient and rounded. And so incredibly green. And blue. And haunted. And magical.
