My high school cross-country team had summer practices off campus. We interpreted the term “long run” to mean “long time gone” rather than “long distance traveled.” We’d arrive at 9 a.m., ditch our shirts and jog a hilly, forested trail to the dam on Vickery Creek.
The dam is old, and water flows over it and through chinks in the stacked stone. The resulting cascade is wide and strong with a deep pool carved beneath it by years of falling water.
The trail stops at the top of the dam. The rest of the way down is a steep tumble of stacked boulders, slicked black with wet mist and soft green with healthy moss. It was clean when I spent summers scampering down it after the whooping, howling Lost Boys of the men’s team and the equally high-spirited lady runners.
When I went back last year, the foot of the waterfall was brown with foamy, polluted scum, and the rocks were littered with beer bottles, condom wrappers, a half-eaten container of pasta salad, plastic bags, unmatched flip flops and empty water bottles. Several college-aged kids in swimsuits and fashionable sunglasses sunbathed and Instagrammed from towels laid over the stones.
There were no runners jumping from the rocks or trying to scale the waterfall. There was no appreciation for how cool the water feels after a hike or how the sun glazes the boulders gold in the late afternoon or how the water bubbles around the rocks like white lace. There were kids smoking cigarettes and flicking the ash on the green moss. There were kids drinking beer in a wake of abandoned bottle caps and broken glass.
I have a bone to pick with people who go out into the woods just to drink and smoke, to seek isolation not for the physical and mental challenge but so they have a better chance of not getting caught with the shrooms they brought with them.
I don’t have any philosophical beefs with drugs or alcohol, but I do have a problem with the lack of self-awareness that comes with the territory. When you’re in the wilderness trying to change your state of mind, you forget to hang the food from a tree and the animals get to it, or you forget where you’ve put your trash, or you answer nature’s call and don’t bury it. Things can get nasty, and pristine wilderness can become less than pristine pretty fast.
Every time an oil tanker goes over in the Pacific Ocean or a factory dumps toxic waste in a river, everyone gets up in arms. What about that party you had by Jordan Lake? That cooler of beers you took to the Eno River State Park? Were you any more careful?
I love camping, even next to RVs and hot dog-roasting families. But if you’re going to do that and call it an outdoors experience, at least try to be friendly to the outdoors (and other people) while you’re doing it. Disperse your campfire ashes, pack out trash, pick up those beer cans, those bottle caps.
