IN LIKE A LION

MAPS, MYTHS, & MANIFESTATIONS

(a memoir)

PART 1

This is a story about our curious relationship with belief.

It is a work of complete nonfiction.

As with any tale of the supernatural, you, dear reader, must ask yourself: what do you believe?

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CHapter 1
THe Cabin at the End of the Road

Soundtrack: Listen While You Read

April 2019: Kentucky State Route 11 curved slow and long beneath the shadow of jagged hills upon my approach towards the cabins of Natural Bridge State Park. I had just departed the main lodge, where I had received my key, and was eager to drink beer, grill burgers and play guitar in solitude. I pushed the small Japanese rental car around the sharp turns, cutting ravenously into this ripe, new slice of Earth. Like a flash, a hawk suddenly appeared above me. I was happy.

I slowed down and advanced through the empty ranger checkpoint upon reaching the turn off, looking for signs of life. Miniature rivers, broken branches, rocks and other debris dotted the asphalt, remnants of the massive storm that had just rolled over. RV campers and tents lay splayed out along the banks of the Middle Fork river, backing awkwardly up the slope of the hill bordering the road to avoid the swollen water. 

The way grew steep and narrow and offered impressive views. When I spotted the cabins, the cabin numbers made it obvious that mine, 208, wasn’t anywhere close. Cell phone service was a ghost at best. The higher up the hill I drove, the stronger I felt the potent absence of other human life. Besides one empty pickup truck, I saw absolutely no signs of guests or rangers. Was I alone? A native southerner, I knew places like East Tennessee and north Georgia like the back of my hand; but I was fully uninitiated to this wild, ragged world between Lexington and the Virginias. This was uncharted land.

*****

I lost all sense of direction as the hills began to dominate the sun. The road ran out at a large mossy bluff. I put the car in park, seeing my cabin number on a wooden sign painted in pale mustard yellow at the bottom of a long flight of wooden stairs. The cabin loomed above. I winced. I had already reinjured my bad knee on the first morning of my trip. Full time office work had not been kind to my body. Getting out of the car, I was greeted by the piercing sounds of the wilderness wafting eerily from all directions. I jumped as an owl hooted somewhere closeby.

Groaning, I forced my way up the stairs with my belongings in tow. My clothes, guitar, laptop, backpack, and the groceries I’d brought for the grill required three or four trips. But despite the screaming pain coming from my MCL tendon, I liked this place. I had my own private refuge deep within a haven as strongly established as my childhood memories: the forest.

Once loaded in, I stood perfectly still inside the living room to get my bearings, glancing around the corner towards the bedroom. Something pushed back against me, heavy and laden with shadows. The air grew very still. I instinctually checked my phone—no service. Goosebumps tiptoed across my skin. I felt something similar to the anticipation of knowing someone else is about to speak despite deathly quiet and moved quickly to check every room, finding nothing.

“Get a grip,” I said out loud. “This place is a dream.” I had just stayed the night in another even more isolated cabin two nights earlier, down in Pine Mountain State Park, without incident; the fact that I was feeling unnerved here in broad daylight seemed nonsensical. But when I turned to sit down on the couch, I found myself physically unable to. Something about the light of the late afternoon gave the shadows shape, stretching sparsely in through the trees, spanning the corners of the room. I knew the dangers of the night were trespassing here in the sun. 

*****

“Come on, stop. I don’t believe in anything like that,” I said aloud, a go-to that had come to serve me well over the years. Besides, it was true. Mostly. While I was a seeker at heart—after all, here I was alone in the Appalachian wilderness simply to write stories and play music—in my mid thirties, a father, fiancé, and full time office worker, I was comfortable believing that I didn’t really believe. And as easy as it would be to present this moment as my first unexplainable experience, this nuts-and-bolts spoken statement actually belied my remarkably weird past.

I was born with a heart problem, beat the odds and survived, and was raised to believe that God had a hand in this. Steeped in a charismatic church where miracles were commonplace, we were taught that the Bible was fact. In other words, I was raised to believe purely for the sake of belief. 

By age 7, if I wasn’t curled up with a sci-fi fantasy novel I was leading my two dogs through the woods, getting lost between the towering trees, looking behind every bush and boulder for “It,” that unseen current behind the mythos of Narnia, Tessering, or the Black Cauldron of Prydain. I developed a taste for paranormal TV shows, but all it took was one abduction story to put the fear of God in my young heart and kill the buzz entirely. 

Age 16 brought my first UFO sighting. I also experienced my first miracle during an evening worship service at church. Not long after, a group of friends and I all heard a disembodied voice singing to an empty forest, hand in hand with the sunset. It was all around me, and I was wonderfully and wildly fascinated with It.

I first struggled with my faith in college at the age of 21, surrounded by logic and proof, until my congenital heart defect forced me back to the hospital. I had to undergo an emergency cardiological procedure which required signing a more than slightly macabre legal waiver acknowledging that dying within the hour was a real-world possibility. This flipped the final switch.

Instantly, all around me: Heaven, Hell, and The Unseen. The architecture of the material world—career, debt, legacy—all faded away into a grainy, monochrome blur. I explored Europe by myself and, after graduating college, moved to the Pacific Northwest, following the call to camp and backpack alone in the wilderness. Memories of church and the magic therein paled in comparison to the holy initiation of sleeping alone in the forest or hiking upon the coastal cliffs.

By age 28 I had moved back home to build a career, write music, and toy with speculative fiction on the side. Uprooted and uninspired, I wobbled back and forth between belief and the matter of facts. Though a series of failed romantic relationships inspired me to dust off a few sacred texts I had saved from college, and though I learned meditation and flirted with the edges of true inner peace, any interest in the esoteric was blown to pieces at age 33 when my now-wife and I had a surprise pregnancy a few months after falling in love. My car and computer both died within a month of each other, cutting off my only sources of income. It was the biggest ordeal I’d ever faced in my life. The material world had returned for its due.

*****

Fast forward three incredible and difficult years later: I had replaced creativity with a car note and was commuting to and from a full-time office job to support a family. Having so mastered the architecture of the material world, I had neither the time nor the headspace to deal with the idea of staying in a haunted cabin on the last night of a long overdue creative retreat. I was here simply in search of fresh air and screensaver sunsets. 

But nonetheless, here I stood a statue. Something real—not my imagination—gripped me in its hand. My heart pounded and my throat constricted. The aura of the cabin’s interior; the empty space overhanging the chintzy, dated furniture; the heavy, magnetic buzz…I felt pushed and backed out towards the door. I left so quickly I forgot my cooler of groceries and had to come back later, shaking in fear, to retrieve it. I started the car and drove back towards the lodge, nausea taking over, repeating to myself, “But I don’t believe in any of this…”

CLOSING CREDITS

Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || Chapter 5

OF DREAMS of BONFIRES

Soundtrack: Listen While You Read

There is a highway that curves away from the city towards the coast on the southern border of a land whose name hides upon the tip of your tongue. The dream begins as a map splayed out across your vision, growing, morphing with your descent. You’re flying in, almost low enough to see the cracks in the pavement when the scene levels off and evens out around you, trees and buildings slowly moving backwards on the other side of the car window. 

Your hands rest casually on the steering wheel as you slow down for a red light. The passenger seat is empty. The sparsely populated countryside is dotted with old houses and motels longing for tourist season. Everything within these foreign environs—sky, clouds and horizon—is tinged brown and green. The air isn’t of a place undiscovered but of a time untouched. 

The highway ends at the main intersection of a small beach town. Turning right cuts you off from civilization entirely, westwards into the wild, all the way to a forested trailhead and an old stone wall. Here you find yourself accompanied by a faceless friend beneath a cerulean canopy so thick it seems to cast an artificial light, the sun shimmering and sparkling through green lantern leaves above the deep, cavernous maw of ancient tree trunks. 

Back on the highway, turning left takes you across the border through town. Carefully, you navigate the steep hills and sharp curves as you grip the steering wheel of your small car. Quaint structures grow taller around you as the harbor comes into view. You stop, gazing at the foreboding horizon, certain that this eastward path lies before you ripe and open. Unlike the westbound highway that led to the forest path, this place isn’t at all warm or comforting. It feels odd here, surprising, like the hidden messages within your favorite childhood stories decoded as an adult.

*****

If you don’t believe dreams mean something, pause and look at the clothes you’re wearing right now. There’s a good chance that you’re wearing an item that might not exist without one man’s journey through his own dreamland. Ruled by a savage king, the soldiers inhabiting this realm bore spears pierced near the head: a design that proved to be the final piece of Elias Howe’s sewing machine invention, which he successfully completed a few hours after waking up. 

Descartes famously fathered the scientific method, inspired by a series of dreams. Without these, he may never have paved the path still walked by scientists—gatekeepers of objective, tangible data—almost five hundred years in the future. There are countless examples of dreams inspiring monumental achievements (perhaps you already know the origin story of the periodic table of the elements). But the most fascinating might be the confounding chemical makeup of benzene, discovered by the scientist Friedrich August Kekulé, thanks to his unconscious encounter with the ouroboros: a snake swallowing its own tail.

The topic of dreams tends to confound because there are so many different interpretations, none of which can be “proven,” necessarily… What exactly are we seeing when we see a place no one else can see? Who or what is uttering that which we’ve never before heard? The science around the topic is inevitably boring. It might stand up for itself; it might inform; but the medium doesn’t do justice to the esoteric experiences we undergo within the subconscious realm. 

There is a certain type of dream that stands out to me. Not some random reorganization of hopes, fears or memories; it is its own place/time marked by a startling realism: an eerie connection has been made that relies not only upon the world of the dream itself, but from my instant recognition. I’ve known this place as long as I’ve known myself. It’s not just that I’ve been looking for it: it’s the surprise of realizing that I’ve been looking for it for as long as I can remember.

Hence, my solo maiden voyage to Kentucky in April, 2019.

*****

I wasn’t sleeping much. My full-time office job, not to mention our three-year-old, dominated the entirety of my days. I needed to retreat. Around February, I began planning a trip to an exotic city, maybe Montreal or even Cartagena, to decompress, people-watch and finally knock out my novel. 

One night, grabbing the five or six hours of sleep that I could before another day of sedentary busy work, I dreamt of a campsite: a blue tent set in the shadows of looming conifers with a smoky bonfire in the center. Soon the dream took on that ominous, cinematic quality and I was on the road, behind the wheel, watching a colorful, sparkling city emerge ahead through the dirty glass of the windshield, glistening like Oz, a rural Atlantis lost to the land of the living. I was bitten by that sudden familiarity, the discovery of something I had long been searching for without realizing it. The image, pure and clear, seared permanently into my memory.

As the scene dissolved in a wave of dissonant voices and images and my body slowly became conscious of cool bed sheets brushing against skin, I had a clear realization that the dream was a direct and specific reference to Kentucky. The surprise of this added to the dream’s significance. I had never explored Kentucky (despite its proximity to Nashville) outside of a few forgotten childhood trips to Murray and Paducah. I cracked open my eyelids, squinting in the early morning sunlight amplified by the full length mirror, and a rush of adrenaline hit me: there’s a vast, unexplored world of mountains, rivers and woods right in my backyard! I sat up with a little boy’s grin and declared to my fiancé: “I’m going to rent a car and explore Kentucky for my writer’s retreat. Two nights in the woods, one night in the city.” 

“Kentucky? Why?” she replied, stretching and rubbing her eyes after another oft interrupted night’s sleep, as the toddler began crying from the other room. 

“It came to me in a dream,” I replied half-jokingly, still grinning like a dummy. 

“You should,” she said after a pause, smiling and putting her hand on my shoulder. She was worried about me, I could tell.

I booked the entire four-day weekend later that day: two state park cabins, one at Pine Mountain and one at Natural Bridge, and a basement apartment in Louisville. Two months later, grinning the same grin, I hurtled down the Cumberland Parkway out of Glasgow towards Somerset and I-75, charcoal clouds canvasing the sky through the windshield, long stretches of empty country on all sides. My dream had come to life.

CLOSING CREDITS

Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || Chapter 5

Shameful Solace

Soundtrack: Listen While You Read

Nightfall approached. The way down the hill was quicker than the way up. Fickle beams of light stretched above in their departure away from the steep hills and stark hollows of Natural Bridge State Park. Swiftly and severely did I devour that road, attacking the serpentine route like a slalom course in my rush to put the conundrums of the empty cabin behind me forever.

“I’ve gotten soft,” I muttered with a laugh. It was true. My belly bulged, still aching from the bag of sour gummy bears I had finished on the drive out from Lexington, where I had stopped to eat an entire carnitas burrito, followed by a pint of unfiltered India Pale Ale to wash it down. My eye sockets ached. I needed sleep. My sore knee continued to scream. I was a mess.

Once a way of life, driving out alone into the wilderness was now a feat I hadn’t braved since my fiancé and I got pregnant three years prior. The call of the wild had grown weaker. I could still feel it, but something held me captive from answering. Something dour. Something wordless. At this stage in my life, if I wasn’t sitting down to work, I was either sitting down to eat, sitting at a bar to drink, sitting in my car or sitting on the sofa. 

I was uncomfortable. 

I wanted to go home.

*****

I parked the car at the main lodge once again and limped to the desk, sheepishly fibbing to the young clerk that while the cabin certainly seemed as nice as advertised, I could tell simply by looking at the stairs leading up to it that my injured knee wouldn’t carry me, and may I please transfer my reservation to a room in the lodge? I expected him to reprimand me or at least show a half-ounce of curiosity, yet he obliged as naturally as if I had asked for a bucket of ice, even refunding me the difference in cost.

Twenty minutes later I returned to the desk after realizing in horror that I had left my groceries up at the cabin (in a brand new cooler, no less). I was forced to contradict my previous deceit, explaining earnestly to the clerk that I had actually gotten my food into the fridge before my knee really started to go, and may I please get the key back so I could drive up to the cabin and retrieve it? Again, I expected push-back; again, my expectations were blown to dust: the clerk immediately handed me back the key without so much as a raised eyebrow.

I retrieved my beer and bratwurst without incident and returned to the lodge for good, quickly finding the bar. It was an impressive room complemented by floor-to-ceiling windows, setting the ancient, jagged hills at a proximity both magnificent and safe. I sat and talked with a friendly middle-aged couple visiting from Cincinnati, soon realizing that despite having brought food to eat, I had already prepared unconsciously to settle in here for dinner. The thought of being alone in my room was distasteful at best.

We supped. We conversed. We enjoyed the local spirits. I downshifted into autopilot. I bragged about my job. I identified as an outdoorsman. I demonstrated how loudly my knee popped whenever I fully extended my leg, resulting in laughter and astonishment. The bartender could hear it crunch from twenty feet away, so she said. When our bills arrived, the gentleman from Ohio decisively ordered a flight of bourbon to punctuate the evening. I grinned, straightening up, preparing to divide and conquer in good company, when the couple abruptly offered their goodbyes. I watched incredulously as they departed the room, leaving me, five shots of Kentucky honey and the bartender to navigate the sudden silence.

*****

The bartender went out for a smoke. I swirled my liquor around and around and around, watching the sepia cyclone fall off the sides of the glass into the single-barrel whirlpool again and again and again as I muttered to myself in my head.

“How in God’s name did I end up here. Oh, right, ‘I saw it in a dream….’ Kentucky. That dream must have been a memory, though, not a vision. A memory of a time when I would’ve come here to hike a few miles, camp, sip a beer and go to bed early enough to catch the sunrise. Besides, the most memorable part of the dream was the magical city cresting the horizon. ‘Louisville…’ pretty sure I misinterpreted that one. I wandered around Bardstown Road looking for live music last night and all I found was a rainstorm, forcing me back early. And what about tonight? The final night of your trip? You were gonna play guitar and work on your novel on a screened-in porch, with owls as your muses. But just look at you here. Face it. You’re a washed out office worker, too pathetic to sleep the night in a cabin, hiding away in your safe space, enjoying—if you can even call it that—your natural habitat. A bar. Of course dreams aren’t magical. They’re just nonorganized patchworkings. Memory quilts. That recurring ‘dream place,’ the small town on the wilderness highway, is a place you used to live in: Pistol River, Oregon. One of the most remote places in the world. When you lived there, you would just up and camp the Rogue without second thought. All on your own. There’s no magic. It’s just how dreams work. Memory quilts. And the only dreams based on this trip will be about eating undercooked chicken alone in a bar, or grabbing a teddy bear from the gift shop to help you fall asleep.”

A sick sweet shock shot through my heart. My eyes tempted to well up. Something flashed in my eyes. I realized it wasn’t just about wasted time, or even that I was too soft to brave the empty cabin. It was the lie. The lie I had told myself. To say I didn’t believe in any of it…that was just something I said out loud. It had no meaning. If I could run away so childishly, then some part of me did, in fact, believe. The idea that I was strong enough to control this belief was just wishful thinking, I guess. Of course there had been nothing else in that cabin. Just me. Maybe that’s who I was most afraid of.

CLOSING CREDITS

Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || Chapter 5

Ghost Stories

Soundtrack: Listen While You Read

“Closing up already?” I asked the bartender.

“Yep,” she said, loading the dishwasher.

“Got any good ghost stories around here?” I asked with a sloppy grin. 

“Yep.” She answered immediately with furrowed brows. The question seemed to concern her.

“Really!” I sat up. “Damn. Gimme something. I’ve been cooped up in the city for too long.”

“Huh,” she said, furrowing her brows. “Like, my granddad for instance,” she said after a pause. “He was born around here and never left. He was always real mad, y’know, like, just an angry person? When he died, swear to God: a wolf came right up to our house. And we didn’t know he had died. But it turned out to be the exact same time. We saw it sneakin’ around, tryin’ to get in the dog kennel. That wolf wanted blood.”

“At the exact same time…” I echoed, wide-eyed. 

“And now, whenever we try to visit his grave, you know, weird stuff happens, like, the animals act up, or one time, we almost got in a freak accident. Stuff like that, or whatever.”

“Damn!” I said, a little too loudly, eyebrows raised over a dumb smile. 

“How about you,” she said politely. 

“Not really. I mean, my fiancé has always seen red-tailed hawks everywhere she goes. Like, literally every time she leaves the house. Same with owls for me, sort of. But that’s about it. City life: what can I say,” I smiled sadly.

“Well, there’s lots of stuff up here. My husband and I had a bad breaker in our breaker box that made the hallway light keep coming off and on in the middle of the night. I still ain’t used to it. I always make him go down and flip the breaker off just to get it to stop, but that turns off the space heater, too.” She looked out the windows, expressionless, and rubbed her arms to stay warm. “I’m in other people’s houses a lot for my other job as a CNN. I don’t know. I just see a lot of stuff out here.”

“Damn,” I repeated, at a loss. “Must be tough to have two jobs.” She brought out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

“Three,” she corrected me. Three jobs...I felt overwhelmed by my own weakness. “I used to be a housekeeper here before I got bartender. Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly, stopping in her tracks. Her eyes lit up, “This one time, we were up around the bend working the cabins, and we saw shadow figures inside.”

“…Shadow figures?” 

“Kind of...see-through. Just dark, black figures. They were, like, running through the cabin. Or moving really fuckin’ fast, at least. Back and forth, back and forth.” She traced their route with a long index finger. “Scared us pretty good. We took off, but we knew we’d have to go in there and clean eventually.”

“Damn,” I said, throat dry. I viscerally recalled that nameless weight pushing me back out the cabin door, back into the realm of the owls, back down the hill, as a sick chill grew deep within my intestines. “Um, I mean…well, I bet you feel better being down here now, right?”

“Kind of,” she shrugged, putting on her jacket. “I mean, we do get the Purple Lady here a lot.”

“The Purple Lady? Like, her skin is purple?” I grinned weakly through nausea.

“A lady in purple clothes,” she responded after laughing politely. “Like, an old purple dress. Threw a big-ass pot at the manager, one time.” The bartender, clearly weary in spite of her young age, exited out the patio door, leaned stiffly against the railing and lit her cigarette, facing the dusk laden wilderness like a statue mourning for the sun.

“Damn,” I said to nobody. I looked out the window and then down again at my last shot, an electric amber sacrament glowing red atop the wood grain tray.

*****

Imagination, as a word, is overdue for an upgrade. It’s been associated with delusion, insanity and Saturday morning cartoons for so long that it cheapens almost any sentence containing it. “It’s all in your imagination.” Etymologically speaking, consider imagination as the machination of an imagining. What if, simply by believing in the Purple Lady, her porcelain mask clashing harshly with the orange light of the overhead bulb, I summoned her forth, standing quietly in my room, watching me in my bed while I slept? What if the bartender had used my innocent, arable mind to conjure a fantastic entity…a psychospiritual creation…an…imachination…

*****

I dragged the heavy metal door to my room open over the cement floor looking warily at the large, floor-to-ceiling mirror on the wall facing the bed. I kicked off my shoes, got in bed and began phone-scrolling to try and settle in, subconsciously imagining the ghost of a woman wearing a purple evening gown, gliding phantasmagorically through the mirror at the strike of three o’clock. 

I flipped on the TV. Die Hard 4.0 was on TBS. It was impossible to see what waited within the wilderness right outside the window beyond the tungsten sheen of the dusty porch, so I closed the curtains, grabbing a “might as well” beer while I was up. An hour passed. Bruce Willis persevered on the other side of the screen, despite his age. Defeated, I no longer even slightly aspired to his level of health. I think I’ll just get fatter and relax the rest of my life, I thought. This is nice… 

The room hummed along with the wall-furnace. There were no signs of life or anything otherwise. I looked back at the floor-to-ceiling mirror and, thankfully, felt nothing. Turning off the television, I noticed the soft glow of my laptop’s power cable and sadly remembered my novel’s lack of progress before finally closing my eyes and spiraling down a black, barren well.

*****

I woke up with the dawn and went on a mad, five-hour writing spree to make up for lost time, pounding coffee and nursing my head. After packing the car, I decided to walk a trail I found at the edge of the parking lot as far as my knee would allow. I was surprised when the trail soon led to the same narrow, winding road I had driven to reach the the weird cabin the day before, revealing that by escaping to the lodge, I hadn’t actually avoided the area at all—everything was on the same exact hill.

I checked out at the desk, distracted by a low pain in my chest. I visualized my fiancé in our house without me, struggling to tame our son’s animal heart, wondering when I’d finally be home. I considered how I had selfishly abandoned them to go chase ghosts, only to run away when I found them, with nothing to show for it but a hangover, an incomplete manuscript, and an even sorer knee than when I first left. 

“Enough,” I thought aloud, darting into the gift shop to grab a couple of souvenirs. I refused to return empty-handed. “Time to get my head out of the clouds. Be a better parent. Get a promotion. Love my partner.” I bought a stuffed horse, a stone owl carving, a yellow coffee mug and a set of local artisan wind chimes.

“I’m headed towards London: what do you think about taking the 11 through Beattyville for a scenic drive?” I asked the clerk.

“Sure, you could do that,” she posited inquisitively. “It’s a lot faster now that construction is done.”

I was off again. The narrow highway slithered into view as I turned right out of the parking lot into the wilderness. One more slice of freedom before reality. A smile slowly crept across my face. I felt alive again out in those old woods, under the shadows of those ancient rocks—albeit sheltered in the confines of the driver's seat. Maybe, despite the cowardice and everything else, this wasn’t a total waste of time.

CLOSING CREDITS

Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || 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?

*****

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.

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.

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

Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || Chapter 5

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.

In Like a Lion Part 2

Coming soon!