Sunset, September 2018
Hi, friends! Adult-ish will be on a break this week. Your regularly scheduled programming will resume on Wednesday the 19th.
While I’m gone, please read this guest post I did for
- “The Language I Love Has No Place” - if you haven’t already. It’s a favorite.I also want to invite you to reflect on the upcoming seasonal transition. What are you leaving behind as we go into fall? What are you looking forward to?
xx
Camille
When I was a little girl, I would go to Lake Toxaway with my parents and little brother every summer. Lake Toxaway was a magical place where nothing could go wrong - well, almost nothing. A bee did sting me right on the asscheek one year.
The sun always sparkled across the water as it moved throughout the sky, and the mountains were like big hugs, never moving or changing. I would sit on the teak dock that lined the lake and talk to the mountains, imagining they could hear me back. Only later in my life would I discover that many wise women did the exact same thing with the land they loved and that I was not alone in trying to form a lasting relationship with this origin story of a place.
We would leave Greensboro on I-40, driving the same route yearly despite local bypass constructions and highway widening. I, ever the observant passenger, began to notice the patterns. Humans are creatures are habit, and we would reliably stop by the time we got to Morganton, a tiny town near the base of the mountains in what we call the foothills.
You begin to really see the mountains in their majesty in Morganton. You aren’t in them, but you’re close enough to go, “Mountains! Mountains!” My dad would join in our clamoring, I think loving being a parent a little extra when he got to experience life through our eyes that way again.
Soon after Morganton was Old Fort, or as my dad called it to a chorus of groans, Old Fart. Old Fart meant we were “going up the mountain!” 6 miles of runoff ramps for trucks lay on the left side of the road as we curved around the majestic Blue Ridge mountains, climbing higher and higher, the view never ceasing to take my breath away.
The white squirrel(a white variant of the eastern Grey squirrel) is only seen in Brevard County and nearby areas. July 2021.
When the road finally leveled off, we stopped in Black Mountain, a cute, quaint town with the same restaurants and coffee shop - the Dripolator - today that they had 25 years ago. I always park in the same place - at the First Bank. They never tow. From there, I would know it was an hour until the car would bump off of Cold Mountain Road, a bump of a left turn that makes you feel as if you’ve just gone over a speed bump with the car turned on its side.
The lake would come into view through the spaces between the motel rooms turned condos, and I would feel the excitement buzzing in my arms and legs, all the way down to the pit of my stomach. I was home.
Out of the car I leapt, sick of being cramped in the backseat with my baby brother, and down the spotty grassy lawn I flew right down onto that teak dock, my eyes big with wonder. “Hello, lake,” I would whisper. “Hello, mountains”. As I went on my first walk down the dock of the year, I committed every detail to memory as if I could make this place become a part of me.
December 2022, afternoonish
And it did, as much as the aunt and uncle that were often there to greet me in my younger years with obvious joy and promises of LaCroix and gingersnaps. Even as I began to spend time at the Lake alone or without my family, the homely hardwood condo that sat atop the lake held the promise of a week filled with love, my aunt pouring hot water over coffee grounds so we could enjoy huge mugs of coffee together in the morning, sleepy afternoon naps, rides on a boat that would only reliably die out in the middle of the water, and sunsets so beautiful you couldn’t look away.
The lake cleansed me, year after year, not in the things that changed - like a few of the neighbors, or the hammock that used to hang between the trees, or me, or family that was born and died, or the rotating cycle of boats my aunt and uncle maintained so that their family would have access to sunset cruises and rides on inflatables that crested the nearest boat’s wake, or the retractable awning my uncle bought one year, or the porch redo, or my willingness to get in the subzero water - but in the fact it stayed the same.
The trees were always as I remembered them, summer after summer. The mountain laurel has always been in the same place, never quite growing but always healthy. The water faithfully laps against the dock, day in and day out.
The mountains are always exactly as I remember them, and with the exception of one new home built in the past few years, the houses in my eyeline across the lake are the same, too, from the family to the left who chose to put their house on an island to the family on the right that opened their $18 million home, complete with an aviary for an open house one summer and we all went and simply gawked.
The landscape around Lake Toxaway is ever-changing and never-changing as well; Highways 215 and 281 are still a white-knuckled driving experience for me but lead to some of the most beautiful and well-loved trails. Whiteside Mountain, Little Sliding Rock, Laurel Falls, Schoolhouse Falls, Turtleback Falls, the Blue Ridge Parkway access near Rosman - I experience them differently because I am different, but every time I hike these trails, I take the shadows of my 6,8,13,15,19,21-year-old selves with me.
I am not one anymore, celebrating my grandparents’ 50th anniversary at Lake Toxaway. My beloved grandparents are dead, I am set to marry the love of my life next May, and I am 25. Times have changed. Yet, I still go. I went in March of 2020, right after Granddad died and COVID took the rest. I didn’t know where else to go. I parked at the First Bank in Black Mountain. I stopped in the Dripolator. I learned, sitting on that couch in the master bedroom, that Drexel EMS would cease operations for the rest of the semester. The world was falling out from beneath me, but the mountains never changed.
March 2020, midday
I took my best friend Lilly there in 2018, when we were juniors in college and two hurricanes were making their way inland to North Carolina. I took Reid there for New Year’s, driving up despite the threat of ice.
I’ve learned that no matter how much change comes knocking, I’ll always love Lake Toxaway, this place that holds the spirit of my innermost carefree child and an uncanny ability to make me feel safe.
It’s eternally summer at Lake Toxaway, even when the president of the HOA comes knocking in 20-degree weather. Even when a pandemic rages. Even when hurricanes are coming. Even when it doesn’t feel a lot like summer in my heart.
Here, guarded by the mountains, I am home, and the world once again holds the glimmer of infinite possibility.
I still talk to the mountains and the lake, and now I know that they talk back in ways I may not be able to hear, holding me close as I drive the roads we’ve curved through them, nurturing my dreams and my hopes as I rest my head next to them.
The summer after my grandmother died, I started going out at night to see the stars. There’s almost no light pollution at Lake Toxaway. At night, the lake is like a liquid black pool. That was the only summer I saw two shooting stars soaring above the mountains. The lights of the lake twinkled reassuringly below as if we were trapped in some kind of beautiful, timeless eternity.