Stars and Mountains: Tennesse and Virginia.

• I feel as though this post could suffer terribly if I try to romance the stars as they were in Tennessee. What can be said about them that hasn't been said before? The problems is, when living in the city, it becomes easy to forget the number of stars in the sky and how beautiful it is when there is nothing else to see for miles around. There with nothing but the stars you begin to question your decision to be surrounded by concrete and steel, when the stars are so much more wonderful than all the lights in New York City.

If the Stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Virginia was by far the most beautiful portion of the trip, and at the risk of sounding horribly cliched I will describe the Appalachian mountains as best I can: There is no other way to see the country except by car, since everything is a blur and places have lost their significance, the reasons we go within the US seems to have all the wrong motivations to really experience and appreciate everything beautiful there is to offer. I have no friends that have made trips to Niagra Falls and the Grand Canyons as adults. Every one is off to gamble in Vegas or to the beach or to visit friends, but no one is going to see the mountains or stare at a gorge and to feel the immenseness of the country. So it is by road now that suddenly we can see and take in, when there is nothing left to distract us, the beauty of the mountains that we forgot existed. There on the roads, which wound up and down through the hillside like man-made valleys, yet marked by pavement instead of rivers, suddenly one could feel small and the force of history baring down and not forget the importance of things. Not forget the passage of time. I saw on my journey old and rusty shells of trucks and tractors sitting sloped on the hillside, almost forgot yet in front stood the mark of the modern age in the shape of a misplace billboard. The tree covered mountains rising up through the fog and hugged by clouds that looked as soft as dreams, more rounded than the Rockies, just like I'd learned in school. I saw it it all and it was enough that I wanted to sit down by the side of the road and cry, that all these things could be nearby and yet so far, and that somehow we'd lived our whole lives without seeing them.
  

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself... "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again."...The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.-Henry David Thoreau, Walden