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Home > Feminism: February 2007 > Non-Fiction

Fearsome Beauty
by Sarah Einstein

Morgantown, WV, 1992

I have never been able to stand yards, those tiny cramped plots of grass guarded over by the windows of neighbors. At seven I realized most of my mother’s omniscience was in fact simply the work of an elaborate network of spies, women who watched out their kitchen windows ready to phone in the least misdeed. I could feel their eyes forbidding me to venture beyond the strict code of neighborhood law. There was no time that I felt less alone, or more isolated, than when I was playing by myself in the backyard surrounded by the hostile stares of other people’s mothers. “Outside” was the most public room in our house.

When I was eight, the gate in the backyard was finally opened and I was given the run of the streets. Once freed from the omnipresence of adults, I lived in a world populated by fairies, ancient Indian tribes, and murderers. Every reclusive old woman became a witch, every abandoned house the site of a brutal massacre. Ant trails in the bark of fallen branches were really cryptic messages sent by shaman; broken pieces of Melmac dishes abandoned in the alleys were shards of ancient pottery. I created a world of demons and dryads I knew would crumble under the careful scrutiny of adult eyes. I came to covet my aloneness, even shunning the company of other children who would stubbornly insist on seeing only a discarded glass, never a grail.

Now that I am older, I find that I must go even further from home–and those eyes so filled with judgment–to recreate the world and confront my demons. Each year, as the languor of spring ripens into the lethargy of summer, I make a pilgrimage to Beauty Mountain in central West Virginia. There, amid the teaberry and mountain laurel, I set up my tent on one of the outcroppings overlooking the New River Gorge. Nine hundred feet down–almost straight down–the river tosses fragile rafts back and forth as it rages towards its destination, but on the mountain all is still. I come here to live alone among the snakes and the silence because it frightens me and fear reawakens my senses to the mysteries that surround me.

As I prepare for this, my seventh sojourn to the mountain, I become my own parent. I borrow my father’s eyes to crawl under the car and check the brakes, change the oil, gauge the air pressure in my tires, and check the treads. Like my mother, I sit for hours in front of the weather channel, placing my faith in the mystical powers of meteorologists. I ask a neighbor’s child to feed the cat and bring in the mail; as he takes his ten dollars he calls me “Mrs. Einstein” though I am single, and I know it is because in his eyes I am old.

Of all the rituals necessary to begin this journey, choosing the contents of my backpack is the most crucial and the most superstitious. If I pack my poncho instead of extra batteries, I can ensure that the weather will be good but my flashlight will die. Having caught on to Nature’s contrary psychology, I pack as though headed into the aftermath of some terrible disaster. Over the years, aspirin has replaced alcohol and my Field Guide to North American Reptiles the works of Carlos Castaneda. For days, I equivocate about what to take and what to leave behind, until I reach the perfect balance between practicality and paranoia.

As I load the last milk jug of water into the car, Mrs. Atkins stares at me from the porch next door, nursing a sour look and a forty ounce of malt liquor. “You gonna mow that lawn before you head out?” she commands as much as asks. I bristle. “Paid someone to do it while I’m gone. He’s supposed to be here today or the next at the latest.” I am lying. My shaggy, seedy lawn is a hex sign designed to ward off the prying eyes of women who, like her, have appointed themselves my moral guardians. With a last fond look at my crabgrass and dandelions, I drive off.

Cruising down the quiet highways of weekday West Virginia, I play startling, incongruous music. The Violent Femmes query “Why can’t I get just one fuck?” as the gentle hills roll by. Patti Smith rambles on in an endless stream of psychobabble as I pass by cows peacefully chewing their cud. I drive too fast, smoke too much, and play the music too loud in the hopes that I will frighten off the evil spirits that follow me, waiting for the moment of silence so they can whisper, in the voices of a thousand other people’s mothers, that it is unsafe for a woman to go alone into the woods.

I park the car and follow the power lines up the mountain to my campsite. It seems that no one ever camps here but me; there is no sign of a fire pit or tamped earth. I set up my tent, which is advertised to go up in under five minutes but always takes me at least fifteen, and then string a tarp up next to it. I unroll my sleeping bag and lash my pack to a tree to keep my food safe from scavengers. I gather rocks for a fire circle and set off to find wood.

The sun is beginning to set as I drag the last of the night’s firewood into camp. I walk out to the edge of the rocky finger. Brilliant reds and pinks begin to touch the clouds that roll by beneath me. Like fire, the color creeps slowly towards me until I am standing in the sunset itself and then subsides, leaving the earth blackened with night. I stand for a moment, watching the stars come out. When the darkness is complete, I head back to camp to recreate the colors in my fire pit.

I lie down and wait for sleep. Sounds are magnified to my ears so used to the constant cacophony of cars and conversation. A chipmunk runs by and I hear a deer; a twig snaps and it is a bear. My dreams, when I sleep, are of vague dangers lurking just beyond the fire’s light. I have come for solitude, but the woods seem full of claws and eyes. “What big teeth you have,” I say to the night as I start awake again. All the better to eat you with, it replies.

The first trip I made alone to Beauty Mountain was in 1985. I was nineteen, and very much taken with the works of Baba Ram Daas and Carlos Castaneda. To prepare, I packed worn copies of Don Juan and Be Here, Be Now, Be Nowhere, but little else. I had not yet learned the value of dry socks or waterproof matches. Nature, I believed, was a kind mother who would welcome me to her bosom and nurture me in my quest for transformation. Surely, I would return from the mount an enlightened being, bathed in the golden glow of holiness that adorns the faces of Italian Gothic art.

That trip was nothing but conceit. I made plans less than I fantasized Disney-esque nature scenes complete with The Pastoral playing in the background. I chose my clothes not for warmth or durability, but for their value as costume. When I arrived at the sight I gathered wood, built the fire ring, brewed tea, and pitched my tent as though I was playing to a full house on opening night. I recreated the actions even as I performed them, living the fiction I would later tell in embellished detail over beers at The Monarch.

I kept up the charade admirably during the daylight hours. The self I had constructed was efficient, competent and, most importantly, not afraid. For a few precious hours it seemed that all that was necessary for transformation was good character development. An act of such magnitude requires an audience, however, and by nightfall the façade began to crumble.

There I was, out in the middle of nowhere, by myself. The voices caught up with me. If you break your leg, don’t come running to me, they said. Did they ever catch that guy who was killing girls along the Appalachian Trail? That Einstein girl never did have any sense. Catastrophic possibilities flashed before my eyes. I was paralyzed. I spent the rest of the night watching my possible deaths in the firelight. At dawn I crawled exhausted and defeated into my tent. That evening I drove home.

This year, as the darkness descends and the movie begins to play, I sit back and watch. I no longer come to this place in search of a holy vision, at least not in the same sense. I come here, year after year, to watch the film in my head play itself out.

Throughout the year, I am miserly with my fears. I put them in boxes labeled “fragile” and stuff them into cramped cupboards in the back of my mind. I wrap them like glass Christmas ornaments in newspaper clippings of men gone mad and women slain. I resist the urge to take them out and look at them, lest they shatter in my hand and leave me cut. And yet, if I leave them there unexamined and collecting dust, they begin to write gothic novels in the margins of my thoughts. And so, each year, I bring them here to hang them on the boughs of the hemlocks that surround this spot.

The fears have created for themselves a sort of hierarchy–the oldest and most organic have their turn first. As the sun disappears a nameless, annihilating dread comes over me. From early childhood, daughters are taught not to venture alone into the wood at night. Cautionary tales like “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf” and “Little Red Riding Hood” fill our minds with grim images of agents of divine retribution lurking in the forest, waiting for us to step off the path. Only slightly less abstract warnings about “bad men” and original sin confirm our sense of being alien in the male world of the night wood. Even now, when the fear of anthropomorphized wolves seeking sexual favors and cakes baked for Granny is only an echo remembered from a more gullible time, the taste and timbre of the fear is the same. After all, the defense attorney would say, what was she doing out there alone at night anyway? And if she wasn’t asking for it, why was she prancing around in that red cloak?

These old, childish fears quickly play themselves out. They are only the cartoons before the feature. There is a brief respite as the projectionist changes reels; in the past I have tricked myself into believing the movie is over. Now I know to use these few minutes of calm to feed the fire and put on more water for tea; the long haul is just beginning. I make a brew of valerian and lobelia, toss a bundle of sage into the fire, and settle in to see what horrors I have been collecting.

This year, the fire itself sparks the beginning of the movie, as pictures of riots flash before my eyes. Again, I see a trucker pulled from his cab and beaten by boys filled with rage. A familiar face rises up, bloodied and bruised, until a foot in a black, black boot shoves it down again. It is replaced by the bloodless face of my best friend’s mother in her coffin. I had driven my friend down to the funeral, and then later to the trial, where her father was allowed to bargain down to manslaughter and do no prison time. I see a boy–naked, bleeding, scared–as he is handed over by police to his supposed lover. This year there has been a bumper crop of horrors, and I see them all again as I stare into the fire.

As the gray glow of dawn begins, the credits role. I assign blame to make sense. Produced by the federal government, directed by the legal system, special effects by CNN…I pull radicalism around my shoulders like a protective blanket and crawl into my tent.

I spend my days with the routine terrors of copperheads and the ticks that invariably imbed themselves into my scalp. These minor, manageable villains help me to regain my sense of control. I watch a group of rafts shoot through “Double Z”–an especially tricky set of rapids–but the screams of fear and delight are lost in the distance. Pink and purple mountain laurel surrounds me in a Georgia O’Keefe fantasy; I find a stand of hemlock and lay down on the mossy ground. I feel self-indulgent and foolish for having been so frightened the night before.

I walk down the path to The Playhouse, a natural amphitheater that leads to a shelf overlooking the river. I play Portia and Gwendolyn Fairfax to the trees. One should always have something fascinating to read on the train. By day, solitude grants amnesty from the seriousness of my burgeoning adulthood. I twirl and bow and ham it up, enjoying the sound of my own voice. And yet, as the first pinkness touches the clouds, I head back to my tent to prepare for the night’s show.

The second night is more personal, the fears more familiar and thus less urgent. I imagine that I have left the coffee pot on and that my house is going up in flames. It occurs to me that if my father had a heart attack no one would be able to notify me. I worry that if something awful did happen to me up here, no one would think to go through my drawers and throw away the more embarrassing evidence before my mother got there. Is the neighbor’s kid really feeding the cat? Maybe I shouldn’t have paid him till I got back. By eleven, I crawl into my sleeping bag and fall asleep almost immediately.

In the morning I drive to a near-by town. After a truck-stop breakfast, I head down to Mermaid Rocks, a shallow place in the river where the hollows in the bedrock form natural Jacuzzis. I slip naked into the water. It pounds out the knots in my shoulders and kneads my back. I move to a deep pool and swim in aimless circles, searching out the warm spots. Driving away from the sunset and back to the mountain, I sing “Big Yellow Taxi” along with Joni Mitchell and wish I’d brought a bottle of wine.

The nights pass in peace now. I sit by the fire making plans rather than conjuring demons. I remodel my house a hundred times, adding turrets and gables and greenhouse windows. I create plot summaries for enough novels to last a lifetime and pretend to believe that I will write each one. I play aimless tunes on my penny whistle, weave vines into crude baskets, and miss my lover. Old friends stop by to visit, to talk about things I thought I had long forgotten. By day, I walk through the hollows and along the creek beds, remembering what keeps me in West Virginia. On my last night on the mountain a Bob White calls his own name as the sun goes down. Sar-ah, Sar-ah, Sar-ah, I answer him, recreating myself–sane, adult, brave–for the journey home.

George Winston plays quietly in the background as I drive back to Morgantown. My snakebite kit and rain poncho lay blessedly unused in the bottom of my pack and there are still three full jugs of water in the trunk. I am only mildly disturbed by the metallic naked women on the mud flaps of the truck that plays leapfrog with me between Big Otter and Flatwoods. Having just burned up a year’s worth of psychic garbage at my campfire, I can afford to be a little forgiving.

As I pull up in front of my house, I see that the yard has turned from bush to jungle in my absence and that the mail sits uncollected in a stack beneath the mailbox. The cat eyes me reproachfully as I unlock the door, and to punish me refuses the first can of food I open for her. The answering machine blinks, but I ignore it. The house fills with the smell of wood smoke and I realize I need a shower.

Hot water courses over my body, washing away the last of the sweat and the grit accumulated over the week. I pull on the silk nightshirt brought back from Paris as a consolation prize by an old lover and crawl between cool, clean sheets. I begin to reach for the Mary Daly I had been reading when I left, but my hand lights instead on the more familiar pleasures of Charlotte Brontë. It’s too early to start collecting fears for next year’s trip. As I settle in to help poor Jane navigate the treacherous road to womanhood, I make a mental note to borrow Mrs. Atkins’ lawnmower in the morning and to call my mother and tell her that I survived.