IN LIKE A LION PART 1: CHAPTER 5
In Like a Lion
Maps, myths, and manifestations
(a memoir)
BROWSE CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 5
A Strange Road Home
Soundtrack: Listen While You Read
I often wonder what it would have been like if I stayed the night in that eerie cabin. Perhaps it would have made for a sleepless night, floorboards creaking, branches tapping at the window, all alone at the end of that long mountain road. Would the very novel I had traveled all the way there to write have turned out any differently?
After all, there was no real reason to leave that cabin. I’ve traveled solo for years: I’ve navigated small towns in foreign lands in the middle of the night without knowing the language, broken into abandoned buildings, slept under the stars in the Oregon wilderness, gotten lost miles from the nearest highway on an empty tank of gas—yet never before had I felt fear as certainly as I felt in that cabin. Why succumb to the visceral dread like a child? Why not take it and use it as fuel, like I used to? Why give up now for the first time after a life of exploring empty, unknown places?
This interview with author Olivia Laing about the bliss of
being totally and completely alone gave me comfort in my lonelier years.
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I had never even considered owning windchimes. It was antithetical, myself being one who, if there is to be clamor, prefers the all-natural variety. But something about them jumped out at me in the gift shop.
I’ll hang them above our outdoor furniture, I decided, on the apple tree. We had built a beautiful outdoor lounge area under this beloved tree, decorated with tealights to create the perfect backdrop for our chiminea. It was the first place I had ever lived with such a grown-up backyard. I looked at the gifts splayed across the passenger seat and smiled. I felt…accomplished. It occurred to me that perhaps this was a time in my life when I should finally give up on the whims of adventure and turn my focus onto the permanent: our house. Our home. The last thing I wanted was a Quixotic mirage of everlasting youth to turn me into a failure in the eyes of my family.
And yet, Route 11 slithered among tall, bony hills, sucking me back into the spirit of the road before widening and straightening out with a looser speed limit. I grew high off the wild, far removed from any interstate, buzzed from the adrenaline of not knowing what would be found around the next curve or over the top of the next hill.
Adrenaline coursed through my heart. I passed through Beattyville, a small splash of civilization that reminded me how temporary this thrill actually was. Ravenous for more before returning to a life of stability and sense, I pulled off the main road and detoured onto a smaller highway to dwell in some backroad beauty and test some tighter curves. Consulting my phone, it seemed I could catch Route 587 and take it all the way to Route 399 south, which would lead me straight to Route 30 and I-75. And I wouldn’t lose more than half an hour.
Proposed Detour Off the Main Highway (KY 11)
But as soon as I left the main highway, everything changed. The compass directions on the GPS seemed drunk compared to the route the highway was taking. I persevered, relying on signs and instincts, as the land grew rougher and old, bouldered brooks, offshoots of the Kentucky River, began crossing under the highway.
My phone screen was a cloud, a mirror linking parallel worlds: one of two-dimensional cartography, indicating the clear and logical path, and another, its strange reflection, the multilayered world where all directions pulse with limitless unknown, a fractal web of asphalt edging under, over and through this worn, weary Appalachian Earth. I was lost in the latter, betrayed by the former.
Time toys with you here. I stopped, turned around and retraced my route two, three, four times over again, trying to find 399 South to the main highway, I assumed over an hour had passed, yet the clock on my phone insisted it was far less. Beginning to worry, I grit my teeth and hit the gas, buzzing down the highway, determined I could find my way no matter what else had happened.
I lost myself on the long, winding road which followed a stream of clear, flowing water spilling over a bouldered stairway of sacred stone. Thoughts of travel time, maps, of right or wrong directions, or even of home, all faded. Everything within these foreign environs—sky, clouds and horizon—was tinged brown and green. The air isn’t of a place undiscovered but of a time untouched. I was in my dream place, lost in Kentucky, my mind free from words, my memories separated from my past, living this blissful embrace of a vast, majestic landscape.
Actual Route (before giving up and returning to Beattyville)
I crested a massive hill to find a wide expanse of open country. Here I stopped and found myself double checking where I actually was. My heart leapt into my throat when I saw that I was on a direct course for Berea, tragicomically both towards and away from the Natural Bridge State Park. A moth distracted by the light of the sun, I had somehow gotten tangled in this web of river, wood and vale. I doubled back at top speed to where I had left Route 11, obeying my phone’s suggested route for the duration of the trip. Panicking, I looked at the time. But how had only forty five minutes passed? I somehow arrived home before sunset, in time for dinner, my family welcoming me despite their exhaustion and fatigue from four days on their own. I could see plainly now that they needed me, and, for a reason I was utterly unequipped to face, this image of sacred responsibility slowly drew out from within me a deep, bottomless fear that failure had already defeated me.
CLOSING CREDITS
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Writing prompts:
What’s the best experience you’ve had getting totally lost?
What’s the worst experience you’ve had getting totally lost?
Have you ever been to a place where you felt time behaved differently?
NEXT: IN LIKE A LION PART 2
HOME IS WHERE THE WEIRD IS
Back to life. Back to the city. I was determined to focus on my job and give up on adventure. But something from East Kentucky had tagged along with me on my drive home. Something that had other ideas.
I did my best to ignore it, to shut it out, until that deep, earthy weirdness began to reveal itself within every layer of my life. Something ancient. Something real.
When I finally turned to face it, when I finally decided I was ready to discover what it was trying to get my attention from the other side, it almost killed us.