Going Before A Fall (or Why I Stay Indoors)

In 2005, my wife and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary with a long weekend in the mountains. On these trips we always liked spending an afternoon driving up the Blue Ridge Parkway, hiking the trails at Craggy Gardens, and enjoying the view from the summit of Mt. Mitchell. I am decidedly not an outdoorsman, but none of this was particularly adventurous. These are all places with parking lots and nicely maintained gravel paths.

But we'd made that drive many times, and I wanted to find something different to do. In the sitting room of the B&B, I happened across a book about North Carolina waterfalls, and a couple of the ones it described sounded like they were relatively easy to reach, even for a confirmed indoorsman like me. I wrote down some directions and off we went.

Our outing started with the usual drive up to Craggy Gardens, then we departed from the familiar: following the directions, we turned onto a nondescript gravel fire road that wound its way down the mountainside. This was not genuine wilderness, of course; this road was maintained by the Park Service and in good repair. But there was no sign of civilization, nor even any other vehicles.

Eventually we descended into a valley and started to pass mailboxes and houses. These were the outskirts of Barnardsville, a tiny town nestled between the mountains north of Asheville. I found it breathtaking: a picturesque pastoral scene, farms and rolling green fields, framed with the mountains as a spectacular backdrop. I wanted to stop and take some pictures, but I didn't want to park in somebody's driveway, so we just kept going.

The directions took us through the town and up a mountain on the other side by way of another gravel fire road, much like the first. We had the windows open, and soon we could hear the sound of cascading water growing louder. Then we came around a curve and saw Walker Falls. As promised, it was right by the road.

My wife stayed by the car, but I decided I wanted to get closer to the water. Leaving the camera with her, I followed a little path that went down the embankment, and I ended up standing right next to the stream. And then I decided to do something stupid.

I wanted to see what kind of view I could get from the other side of the water. The stream was not deep at this point, nor was it broad; I figured I could easily hop across to the other side without even getting my shoes wet. What I didn't consider was that the rocks on the other side might be slippery. As I stepped across, my right foot slipped out from under me, plunging into water that completely soaked my shoe. I thought I had recovered from this misstep, but then my other foot slipped, and I ended up falling right down on my butt in the middle of the stream.

I was fortunate in three respects. First, the impact did not injure me. Second, the slip had not carried me to the left, where the stream descended in another cascade to more rocks at the bottom. And third, my wife did not take a picture of me sitting in the middle of the stream.

Back in the car, I arranged myself on a pillowcase to avoid soaking the seat, and we continued on our drive. We never again spoke of the incident.

***

Five years later, we were in the mountains again, this time so I could visit a friend in Asheville. Our twelve-year-old daughter had accompanied us this time. She was no more outdoorsy than I was, but I thought she might enjoy seeing Walker Falls, since I knew how easy it was to get to.

So we drove up to Craggy Gardens and then headed down that little gravel fire road toward Barnardsville. Once again, it was a fun drive; my daughter enjoyed the scenery as we wound our way down the mountain and through the town. Bardnardsville was as captivating as I remembered it, and I wondered what it would be like to spend some time there. Eventually, we found our way to Walker Falls.

Things were much more overgrown than they had been the last time I'd seen it, but I found that the little path to the edge of the water was still accessible (if only just barely). My daughter seemed interested in getting a closer look, so I decided it was worth trying to get down there again. It was perfectly safe, I told myself; I had no intention of trying to hop over the stream this time.

We began to pick our way down the slope, but I stopped when I saw ahead of us a dense swarm of insects hovering just above the path. "I don't think so," I said, not wanting to walk through a cloud of bugs. My daughter asked why we were stopping, and only at that moment did I realize that I wasn't looking at a swarm of flies. "Because that's a swarm of bees," I said, beginning to panic. I told her to get back up the hill and run.

In retrospect, I am not proud of the way I reacted, but I think I understand it. I was stung by bees a couple of times as a small child, but for the next three and a half decades, I'd managed to avoid stinging insects. Consequently, my fear of bees and wasps became exaggerated by the memory of childhood trauma, untempered by later experience that might have put it in perspective. I suppose it was a bit of a minor phobia. And I was afraid for my daughter even more than for myself (she had never been stung). In my defense, I wasn't just afraid of getting stung by a bee; I was afraid of being attacked by a swarm of hundreds of bees.

Whatever the psychology, we both hastily climbed the hill, and things deteriorated from there. She started to scream because she felt stings, and I started to yell for her to run to the car. We fled in panic back to where my wife was waiting, wondering what was going on. In my imagination we were being pursued by the entire swarm, like in a cartoon, and I could only yell repeatedly for everyone to get in the car. (Fortunately, my wife had the presence of mind to stop me and brush several bees off of my shirt before we did so.)

Once we were safely in the car, I could feel that I had been stung in a couple of places on my arm. But even in my panicked state, I noted with some interest that the pain wasn't that bad (indeed, I hadn't even noticed the stings when they happened). Unfortunately, my daughter in the back seat was screaming and crying, and it wasn't clear at first how badly she'd been stung. Meanwhile, I was terrified that she might have an allergic reaction, particularly since we were far from any medical facilities. There was nothing I could do except start driving as fast as I could manage, back down the road to civilization. The next half-hour was horrible, as she cried in the back seat and we worried.

And I felt horrible, because I realized that this was all my fault. Not just because I took us into a dangerous situation, but because I had reacted as foolishly as I had. I was sure that her reaction was from fear as much as from pain, fear exacerbated by seeing her father so afraid. I was disappointed that a very enjoyable day had been ruined by one unfortunate moment. I suspected that we'd never again visit Walker Falls, and indeed I wondered if we'd ever convince my daughter to go near the mountains at all.

Thankfully, we made it back to town with neither of us showing any signs of anaphylaxis, and by this time, it was evident that neither of us had been stung more than a couple of times. I went to a drugstore to buy some topical Benadryl for our stings, and when I got back to the hotel room, the girls were both happily playing a two-player game on their Nintendo DS handhelds.

The day, it turned out, was not wholly ruined. We ate pizza and played video games, activities that were much more in line with our proclivities. And I suppose I learned a useful lesson: the bee stings I'd received, after decades of fear, had been rather anticlimactic. Good to know.

But I also learned another useful lesson: Go outdoors at your peril, because Nature wants to kill you. It is a philosophy that has guided me for most of my life, and it was foolish of me to try to defy it (twice, even). If I want to see a waterfall again, there are plenty of pictures.

***

In August my wife and I are going to the mountains to celebrate our thirty-seventh anniversary. We will be staying in a cabin in Barnardsville, that town I first saw exactly twenty years ago, and haven't seen again since the day of the bee-sting incident.

I am looking forward to the opportunity to enjoy the mountain scenery. Without leaving the cabin.