PNF

Brevard makes me a little angsty. I wrote about that almost ten years ago too - I'm starting to repeat myself. When I lived in California and Idaho I felt starved for constant canopy and wanted to drink it in every time I visited, but I'm getting plenty of that now. This visit, I felt less desperate to get out on the trails that I know so well. But I still went for a few runs, and the forest still grabbed me right in the same pleasure receptors that it always does. 

The forests of Washington are more beautiful and lush and primeval but Pisgah exists in my bones and flows in my blood. 

It's not even particularly lovely this time of year, just the mottled gray-brown of organic matter and the big bare tulip poplar stands casting their bar code shadows over the coves, the intermittent green of the rhodo and laurel. It's the only time of year that you get some hints of topography, ridges and subpeaks normally blocked by foliage. The smell of sun baked leaves is so strong it sits in your mouth and in your nose. It's quiet except for the punch of footfalls through disintegrating ground cover, the diverse bird call, the pugnacious chittering of tree vermin. 

For some reason running in Pisgah makes me want to write, maybe out of habit since I used to scribble something down after almost every run, before I was getting paid to do so. I just did it out of pleasure and necessity. 

I told Morgan that and she hypothesized that it's because the forest is so storied, so ancient. Yeah, I'd buy that.