There’s a little mountain stream outside of Blowing Rock, N.C. It’s down a winding road with a grade so steep it will rip the gears out of a transmission. When you drive that winding road, your vehicle groans and curses and threatens to leave you stranded.
This stream runs beside a cabin. If your transmission holds out, you can make it there. You can sit on its porches beside the stream and listen to the water. It talks to you.
You should do this. A Carolina mountain stream has much to say. But you have to take the time to sit and listen. To take in its wisdom. To hear what it’s trying to tell you.
Like how you shouldn’t sit and watch “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” “No, no, no,” says the stream in its gentle Southern drawl. “There are more important things to see.”
Like its endless flow of water. Funny, it never looks any different. Maybe after a good storm. Rougher. Faster. Muddier. The water rises. The rocks disappear. But an hour later it’s back to normal. Back to babbling. Back to calm and tranquil. You can watch it for hours. Rolling and rolling and rolling. An endless loop. Somewhere to go, but in no particular hurry to get there.
“Watch the important things,” the stream says. “And don’t go rippin’ the gears out of your transmission all the time.”
Wise advice, little stream.
A stream will tell you what to say at just the right moment. Like when you’re sitting by the fire with your wife. You hear your daughter call out, “Hey mom!” Your wife looks over and says, “You know your daughter’s in the middle of the stream. Do you sanction that?”
The stream whispers what to say: “Just shrug. Tell her, ‘She’s a mountain kid now.’”
Streams are witty like that.
It will give you guidance. Like when you can’t decide whether you should have that third s’more. Listen to it. Listen carefully and it will tell you, “Hell yeah! Eat that thing!”
Or when you worry about running the punishing hills. That you’ll get smoked by one of the athletes from the fitness camp at the bottom of the mountain. The camp trains runners hoping for a shot at the Olympics. A girl trucks by the stream every day. Up and down the steep grades she goes, over and over again. Like it was flat as Florida.
She wasn’t having any transmission problems.
“Who cares?” says the stream. “Go out there and get smoked. At least you did it. At least you won’t regret it. Then you can come back here and sit by me.”
A stream will tell you all kinds of things. To be kind to the world. To always help others. Like when you’re marveling at fireflies with your daughter. Only one keeps flashing in the same spot. That’s funny. And when you look, it’s caught up in a spider’s web. That stream tells you, “Y’all go on now. Help it.”
My daughter and I carefully unspooled the firefly. Unwrapped the sticky threads that bound it. “This is ridiculous,” I thought to myself. “There are a million out here.”
But we kept working. Sitting under a porch light beside the stream. We kept at it. It started moving again. Then it walked along our arms. Then it finally spread out its wings and flew away. My daughter gasped. “We did it,” she said. She gave me a high five.
“You know, she’ll probably remember that for the rest of her life,” my wife told me.
Thanks, stream.
It will tell you how to start a fire — to be patient and not get frustrated with the damp wood. “It’ll take some time,” it says.
To ditch your flip-flops and hop the slippery stones barefoot with your daughter. Like a couple of mountain frogs. (Are there mountain frogs, little stream? We’ve only seen deer and snakes and fireflies.)
To go with the flow. Ha! No pun intended. But that’s what it kept telling me. To take it easy. To take a little bit of it back with me. When that intoxicating sound of rushing water can’t whisper wisdom to me anymore. To remember everything it said. Especially when the real world sets back in.
“Don’t rip the gears out of your transmission,” I hear it say as I leave. “And don’t forget to always eat the third s’more.”