Almost Heaven, West Virginia

Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River

Life is old there, older than the trees

Younger than the mountains, blowin like a breeze

Country roads, take me home

To the place, where I belong

West Virginia, mountain momma

Take me home, country roads

All my memories, gather round her

Miner's lady, stranger to blue water

Dark and dusty, painted on the sky

Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye...

So that song was running through my head this entire weekend. Of course in my head it's not sung by John Denver, rather it's Social Distortion - who's cover version I absolutely adore. I gotta give my props to the great state though, it really is beautiful country. Previously my fondest memory of WV was the Mountaineer basketball team dancing through the NCAA tournament this year. Now I have something a little more tangible.

To reiterate: my weekend kicked ass. It started with a 5-hour drive Friday night to a chilly Fayetville campground. We pitched tents in the darkness, passed out for the night in our zero-degree sleeping bags, and were up by 8 the next morning for some breakfast and a trip down into the Gorge. The day was beautiful, the rock was inspiring, and my mood was calm but eager.

Of course, I knew things were going to go well before we even left the OAC parking lot. Our group consisted of 12 intrepid climbers, led by two of my fellow co-workers who "know the ropes" in a manner of speaking. They prepped all the equipment, got us where we needed to go, and made sure nobody got killed or maimed. After those noble trip leaders, there was Cody, myself.... and eight girls.

That's right; me, Cody, and eight girls. You couldn't have scripted it any better than that. Of course, Cody and myself were the first to sign up for the trip weeks ago, making it clear the kind of crowd that studs like us draw to an event. In all seriousness though, this was great for reasons even beyond the obvious. For one, I was the best climber of the group, and not the only one climbing outdoors for the first time.

I don't know what I was expecting from those chilly crags, but my first climb was an experience I'll never forget. After ambling over a few stacked boulders, I made may way about 20 feet up an 80-foot crack. When I turned around and glanced downward, I was hit with surprisingly strong waves of vulnurability and fear. It was quite intimidating hanging off that cliff face, with a long fall of nastiness below me, and a wide vista of river valley stretching out behind.

I felt much higher than I thought I had climbed, and my belay-anchor Cody looked awfully small as he held the rope that connected me through a pair of carribiners, some 50-feet up that I couldn't see.

For a brief moment, I panicked. I felt genuine fear. I clung to that rock as though my clenched fingers were the only thing keeping me from an untimely death. I suppose it's a good instinct to have, but a little uncomfortable for my likes. I eventually willed myself to drop off, let the rope catch me, and feel some return to security. Sure enough, the equipment held, and with a new confidence I slowly - very slowly - meandered my way to the top.

When I got there, the view itself may have been worth a broken arm. It was one of the most hardcore things I have ever done, and I was rewarded with an equally hardcore snapshot of nature's splendor. Natural beauty: now there's a motivator. Honestly, is there anything else even worth working for? I'm not so sure at this point.

We climbed until darkness, pushing the envelope to a point where our group got split up, and I had to lend Mike (trip leader A) my headlamp to go on search and rescue. Everyone found each other in the end, and we made our way back into town for an epic pizza dinner at Pies and Pints. (Alas, I couldn't get a pint; OAC trip rules.)

The highlight of the evening for me though, went beyond the delicious balsalmic chicken pizza. It was the stars.

Oh man those stars.

Few times in my life have I been privy to such a breathtaking view of the night sky. Constellations, shooting stars, the Milky Way... Mars was closer to us Saturday night than it will be for the next 13 years. I drank all this in like I was downing shots on my 21st birthday. The effect was just as intoxicating... if only for the fact it kept me on my back for about half an hour.

I think the Milky Way was what got me the most. I alway thought it a rediculous prospect that we could look to the night sky and view the galaxy in which we actually reside. Now I better understand the concept though, and looking at that majestic band of starry pinpoints, it felt like the universe had something profound and important to say. Like it was trying to tell a story, and each star was just a different word. Our solar system became a a scentance. Our galaxy; a paragraph.

I've made the decision that if you really look at the night sky long enough, contemplate the stars deeply enough, and understand their essence honestly enough; you can figure everything out. And I mean everything. All of it. From next year's Super Bowl winner, to the true meaning of joy. From the combined weight of squirrels in Akron, to the secrets behind pyramids in Egypt. Every single thing there is to know about our reality is somehow written in those stars.

Think about it like this: we are humans and we inhabit this earth. The stars have been hanging in our sky since the dawn of time. Now if there is a God, (just saying if) and this entire universe was built with us humans as the crux, (which many have come to believe) then what have the stars ever really done for us throughout our existence? Seems to me they've been nothing more than a cool portrait to look at. An image to ponder over. I don't think it's really that farfetched.

Stars are extremely bright fireballs of energy, set far enough away that their radiation comes at us like tiny lasers from all directions. They're clustered into various systems, moving rythmically around the sky; each twinkling at us through trillions of miles of empty void. Everything we know about stars we've learned from indirect observation of their starlight, and even if we could someday bend the laws of physics to visit one or two, we'd never check them all out as there are just too many.

So now you're God: why put so much effort into so much matter that can only be appreciated at a distance? I know of course that at least some stellar energy seems necessary for existence, and their internal fusion reactors cook up the elements we know and love. But we couldn't even appreciate concepts like this until the modern era of scientific discovery. That's a small slice of the human existence pie. Those stars were just doing their thing for the past 10,000 years before we ever figured out why. Could this have been God's signature on the universe?

The night sky would be pretty bland, even a little scary, if we didn't have billions of cosmic rays to look at. So God gave us a reflection of our world out there. He gave us reason to believe in something, and thus reason to believe in ourselves. If we can really see that whole picture, we'll see everything he's been trying to do, and the meaning of life should come full-circle.

I guess that's just part of what I got out of this weekend at "The New". There's another trip planned two weeks from now to the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, and Cody and I are thinking about attending. It's funny, when I first started getting into climbing people were telling me "Just don't become one of those hardcore climbers that do it all the time, those people are crazy." I assured them I never planned on such a thing, and I really didn't, but somehow the seed still got inside me, and now it's grown into a powerful oak. That's a dumb analogy, but the truth is in there.

Climb on.