Five-Hour Drive (part 2 of ?)
Compression Falls
(CW: nudity. Previous post in series: Hartzell’s Ice Cream.)
Part of what caused the “five-hour drive” concept to stick so hard in my brain, on that first trip back from Hartzell’s, was the fact that Compression Falls had always been a two-and-a-half hour drive, for a grand total of five hours in the car.
(We’re just jumping right in. Feels appropriate to me, for reasons which will soon become clear to you.)
I.
Compression’s official, proper name is Twisting Falls; Google Maps redirects you without comment, like a parent whose next sentence just happens to include a corrected repeat of the word their child just mispronounced. It’s a section of the Elk River, right on the North Carolina/Tennessee border, about half an hour’s drive from Boone.
The process of getting there is stepwise and strangely liminal. It’s like acclimatizing to the altitude in the Himalayas, or gradually surfacing from a deep SCUBA dive. Both literally and metaphysically, Compression is far, far removed from everyday human enclaves, and you can’t simply drop in. You must pass slowly through every intermediate stage, peeling back the layers of civilization until you finally reach bedrock.
First you’re driving on highways. Then you’re driving on city streets. Then you’re driving on twisty mountain roads. Then twisty mountain roads with no lines painted on them. Then gravel, with so much green around you that you can’t see the sky.
Finally, the trees open up and you find yourself here…
…and you lever yourself out of the car and groan as you stretch in the hot, heavy sunshine, and you’re still only sort of halfway there, in mood if not in minutes.
Next comes a short, gentle forest hike…
…which eventually takes a sudden left turn and then drops, falling precipitously away in a kind of mischievous foreshadowing.
Pictures aren’t great at conveying steepness, but the descent is substantially sharper than going down stairs. It’s only maybe a quarter of a mile, but that quarter of a mile is a constant fight against gravity, catching yourself over and over on trees and rocks and roots before you can build up lethal speed.
It’s somewhere along this stretch that you realize that you can hear the roar of the falls, that you’ve been hearing it for quite a while and you’re not exactly sure when that started.
And then the trail levels off, and you reach the river proper, and begin the final, easy stroll half a mile upriver toward Compression itself.
II.
In the Peter Watts novel Blindsight, there are vampires. Blindsight is hard sci-fi, so the vampires aren’t magical; there are mundane explanations for why they are the way they are.
One of those explanations is the so-called “crucifix glitch,” an error in vampiric brain physiology such that the perception of perfect right angles causes a sort of epileptic seizure. It isn’t that invoking Jesus gives you some mystical power over the undead, it’s just that a crucifix happens to contain four right angles, which makes for a pretty bad day, if you’re a vampire.
When I first read Blindsight, I thought to myself “haha, what delightfully whimsical worldbuilding! That Peter Watts sure does come up with some fantastically far-fetched ideas.”
These days, I’m much more like “…oh. Oh, no.”
I’m not a vampire [citation needed] but there’s something about Living Inside The Rectangles that genuinely hurts me. It’s a sort of constant, cumulative, low-grade psychic damage, the equivalent of a pebble in your shoe or a scratchy tag on the neck of your shirt or the distant wail of a car alarm.
(Interestingly, I didn’t know that the rectangles were harming me, and was sort of dismissive of the very idea, until after I’d been off the grid and in the woods for about six months. I don’t think my experience is anywhere near universal, but I do suspect it’s a lot more common than many of the people still stuck inside realize.)
Compression Falls is Outside Of The Rectangles. It’s very outside. It’s outside enough that…
(ugh, I’m piling up the metaphors here, sorry)
…an acquaintance of mine once pointed out that nitrogen is a mild narcotic, and thus there’s a way in which everyone is constantly just a little bit drunk, and you could in theory get even more sober than sober, if you found some other inert gas and breathed in a mixture of oxygen and that.
These days, I live in a gravel road neighborhood on the edge of the woods, and I’m relatively sober as far as The Rectangles go.
But Compression Falls is yet further along the line that stretches between a place like Manhattan and my current home. It’s about as un-rectangle as you can get. It’s so un-rectangle that, when I visit it, I actually get a temporary boost like a Mario star, and for the next week or two I can walk among the rectangles with impunity. It’s like breathing air with absolutely no nitrogen in it at all.
“Okay, but isn’t that going to be true of basically any pristine natural environment?”
Yes, and no. Yes, you can get out into nature anywhere, and most humans agree that this is healing and refreshing and rejuvenating whether it’s a marsh or a desert or a lake or a mountain meadow. But still—there’s nature, and then there’s NATURE.
There’s a sliding scale of just how much a place is Doing The Thing That We Mean When We Say “Nature,” and Compression is pretty darn close to the top. More amazing places certainly exist, but they are few and far between.
And (importantly) Compression isn’t just nature to be looked at. It isn’t nature that you simply pass through, untouched and unscathed. I often see people in parks and on trails, and nine out of ten of them seem to be maintaining a certain kind of aloof distance—keeping their hands clean, sweating as little as possible, wearing shoes and clothes and hats and sunglasses and sticking to the trail and taking pictures through their phones and munching on processed snacks in prepackaged bags and generally staying as-separate-as-possible from the experience that they’re currently having. Shouting at their kids to not do any of the things that their kids want to do—any of the things that the landscape is inviting them to do, begging them to do.
That … doesn’t work, in this place.
Compression is not a place you can touch without letting it touch you back. You can’t even reach the top of the first cascade without wriggling your way in amid the vines and the rocks, getting dirt under your fingernails, letting the leaves caress your skin.
And you can’t get to the second and third cascades at all without plunging fully into the water or picking your way across a rock face in close embrace.
It’s sudden and vital and intimate and real in a way that is the exact opposite of the numbed, dissociated, partial experience of many well-off people’s day-to-day. It’s like being cradled in someone’s lap when you’ve been touch-starved for months. It’s deeply nourishing—deeply healing—to a mind/body/soul that’s been wrapped up in the prophylactics of modern life so long that parts of you have started to atrophy away.
(Bonus: you can often get away with being naked, at Compression—I won’t turn this particular essay into another one of my anti-clothing rants but I will note that clothes are frequently just a subtle kind of Rectangle.)
And it does all of this while also being almost unbelievably beautiful, and remote, and tranquil, and absolutely bursting with life. You could in theory walk into the woods pretty much anywhere and commune with the dirt and the bugs, if you’re sufficiently enthusiastic and sufficiently enlightened. But most of the green spots on the map lack the … natural specificity?
…the place-ness, the distinctiveness, the epic grandeur of the sort of landscape that Albert Bierstadt would have stopped to paint. Compression holds your hand a little bit, if your ability to experience awe has gotten a little rusty. I can make a story out of my visits there, in a way that’s hard to do with random undistinguished wilderness, and while it might be a little bit sad that that matters, it nevertheless does.
III.
Speaking of telling stories, and places where people tend to get a little bit rusty…
When was the last time you jumped?
A few years back, a FB friend sent me the following screenshot from a discussion about gender, along with the message “by this definition, you, Duncan, are the most/the only cisgender person I actually know.”
I’ve written about the thing I call “boy gender” before:
…my standard joke goes something like “I turned twelve when I was eight, and I’ve stayed twelve ever since.” My internal experience is basically the same as it has been for the past thirty years (minus the whole coercive puberty patch, which I largely reject as not-really-me) and I underwent no major shift to ‘manhood.’
When I am out and about, it’s almost embarrassingly obvious that the things which catch the attention and approval of boys catch my attention and approval, and that things which baffle and confuse boys (but not girls or women or men) baffle and confuse me as well. My ideal friend group is a band of marauding blood brothers. I have a gigantic trampoline in my front yard. I play with LEGO and nunchakus and Magic: the Gathering cards, I do parkour and freerunning, I eat Lunchables and Pop-Tarts and Gushers, I like to make dry ice bombs and set off thermite just for the fun of it, and when I can’t be naked I wear shirts chosen specifically for their radness (often XXXL shirts from the boy’s section since they largely don’t make rad shirts for men).
The internal experience of boyhood (despite the obvious unfortunate realities of both aging and social ageism) is a pretty central aspect of my whole “deal.” It’s one of the most powerful decoder rings for making sense of my behavior and personality (some other big ones are “autism,” “diachronic,” and “Ender’s Game”).
And this fact-about-Duncan—
(that my gender is basically the entirety of the film Max Keeble’s Big Move)
—is why you’re currently reading about Compression Falls instead of Angel’s Landing or Mammoth Cave or Giant Forest or Lake Tahoe or Fontainebleau or any of half a dozen other places of breathtaking primordial beauty that also encourage you to get up-close and intimate with your environment.
Because—you see—at Compression Falls, you can jump.
You can jump into the pools below all three of the waterfalls.
You can jump from something like two dozen different places, at heights ranging from a couple of meters…
…to something closer to ten.
And while I do appreciate the tranquility and the intimacy and the pristine natural splendor, the thing that really keeps me coming back to Compression in particular, dragging my bemuséd friends and family along with me…
I don’t know. I’m not certain I’ll be able to convey it. I think, for most people, “jumping off of a high thing into some water” is probably not akin to a religious experience, probably not deeply tied to their innermost sense of self. I think that if I try to tap into your own excitement about leaping off of rocks into water—
(to the extent that’s a thing you even have)
—I’m unlikely to be pointing at the same thing that’s going on, for me. Jumping (probably) isn’t important to you. I feel sort of like a grownup trying to explain to a child that things like wine and coffee and touring art museums and getting spanked and going to bed an hour earlier than usual are all great, actually. The child’s experience of those things is just different from the grownup’s.
(I’m pretty skeptical of all of those things myself, for the same reason.)
But to try to bridge the gap anyway:
There’s something in this world that you value. Some way that you want to be, some axis that you care about. Maybe it’s altruism, maybe it’s acclaim, maybe it’s being a good partner or a good parent or pursuing excellence in your profession.
(It doesn’t have to be just one thing; there could be many.)
Some days have lots and lots of that-which-you-treasure, hopefully. Some days, life is full of it.
On other days, it’s absent. Its opposite might even be present.
Perhaps, for you, that-which-is-bright-and-golden comes easily, or at least without resistance. For instance, I take great pleasure in attentively tasting dark chocolate, and for the most part, there’s nothing stopping me from pressing that button. Things can get logistically tricky, I guess, especially with my toddler around, but I can pretty much just taste dark chocolate whenever I want.
But maybe that-which-makes-life-worth-living isn’t easy, for you.
Maybe it’s expensive.
Maybe it requires discipline and practice.
Maybe you have a disability.
Maybe the world resists it, disapproves of it, makes it difficult to access.
Maybe your moments of shining glory are rare, and hard-won.
(Maybe you value them in part because they’re hard-won. Maybe part of what makes them valuable to you is their preciousness. I actually have quite a lot of fun playing video games with all the cheat codes, when I’m invincible and can fly through walls and I never run out of items, but I’ll readily admit that it’s a different kind of fun than overcoming adversity with skill and persistence.)
One of the things that I deeply value is boyhood. Boyishness. The-experience-of-living-life-as-a-boy. Doing the sorts of things that a boy would enjoy because I, a boy emeritus, enjoy those things. My life is brighter and realer and truer on the days when it closely resembles the way my life was circa 1998 (or even better, the way I wanted it to be, circa 1998).
(It’s a bit circular, but there really is a circle, in the sense that I have embraced this fact about my internal experience, chosen to double down on it, so I really do get warm-fuzzies from enacting the archetype. I straightforwardly still love the sorts of things that I loved, as a boy, on their own merits, but I also love new things because they move me closer to boyhood. I am consciously self-authoring a story in a genre that I’ve chosen on purpose, and so it feels like success whenever I manage to lay down another paragraph.)
And I don’t know if you’ve spent much time around boys—
(and of course, #notallboys, there is a wide range of traits and behaviors in any vast demographic, I’m talking about the middle of the bell curve here but yes, obviously, different people are different)
—but boys, as a class,
really like jumping off of high stuff into water.
The individual ingredients of the experience sound mundane and meh, picked apart; there’s an alchemy to it, like flour and egg and milk and sugar combining into cake, making something greater than the sum of their parts. But if I squint very closely at what’s happening and why it seems good to me, some of what I get out is:
F A S T. There’s no other context on earth in which I can go that fast, unaided by any kind of technology like skis or bungee cords or trampolines or parachutes (although all of those things are also rad).
Breaking the rules! Fulfilling the fantasy! Nobody’s telling you “no” this time! No blankfaced buzzkilling, nobody giving you shit for doing the obvious reasonable thing that anybody in this situation would want to do. (But why can’t we clamber up the rocks, it’s not even like it’s particularly dangerous.)
Terror? Overcoming terror. It’s not easy to make yourself leap out into space; it’s frightening to stand on the edge and contemplate the water, so very far below, and thus there is a distinct experience of triumph when you finally manage to make yourself do it.
Being An Initiate In The Secret Rites. There’s a fellowship, a fraternal order—we are the ones who have done it. We are the ones who have Been There. We are the ones who Know. We belong. We have seen. We have shared. (I get a distinct thrill every time someone new shows up at Compression, and I can tell them where all the good spots are, show them the paths and the trails, where to put their hands and feet, where to aim, and then they join me in the ranks of the initiated, hey, did you know you can jump from over here, too? Whaaaaat, show me.)
Relatedly, forging into the unknown. Penetrating the mysteries. Going where you, at least, have never gone before. Being seeing feeling something truly new. Not just another day circumscribed by the rectangles.
Not Being A Disembodied Head Floating In Visual Space. Suddenly my arms, my legs, my lungs, they matter, they’re coming online, holy crap that’s right I have a body and this is its purpose, this is what it’s for. Feeling powerful, because you are powerful. You can tell that you’re powerful, because look what you just did.
SPLOOOOOOOSH fwblrlrlbblghhh ohmygoshcold G A S P gasp gasp gasp haHAAAAAA
In short: this is what life is.
This is what life is supposed to be like. Surrounded by friends, in among the leaves and vines, wrapped in the roar of the water and the drone of cicadas. Grit and tenacity and daring, hauling myself naked and glistening over cliff faces by my fingertips, ascending into the very sky with the strength of my hands and feet, hurling myself out into the infinite void, being swept downstream by surging rapids. Being at Compression is exhilarating, peak aliveness, an entire afternoon that is five or ten times more real than usual, embroidered with a scattering of individual moments of weightless, crystalline perfection.
And every time another year has passed and I’m still there, still fighting the ravages of time, still limber and capable and not yet broken—
If I were immortal, I would go to Compression every single summer, because the experience itself is (a certain flavor of) everything I want out of life.
But it sure doesn’t hurt to add to that the feeling of winning one more battle, of successfully resisting the bleak, drab slide into adulthood, not just hanging on to the surface aesthetic of boyhood but hanging on to what it actually was, what it actually felt like, I don’t get to be a boy anymore but for one afternoon last week I got to Do The Thing again, for real, not a cheap simulacrum but the actual thing.
And that’s precious to me. It feels like going down fighting, spitting in the face of death, staying true to yourself even as hope inexorably fades away.
And that, too, is part of the story of boyhood. Part of the ethos, the mythology, the canonical value set. It’s part of what’s written in Stranger Things and Stand By Me and Ender’s Game and Stephen King’s IT and Lord of the Flies and Netflix’s Lost In Space and Animorphs and Pay It Forward. It’s part of why boy feels, to me, like the best sort of person to be. Leaping off of high things into water is a quiet and silly and indulgent sort of fighting-back, but I love it no less, for that.
I’ll go five hours out of my way for that every chance I get.
Appendix: Jump points at Compression
…for more detailed descriptions of how the trails work/how to actually get to each of these places, message me.
