You and God and the Canopy

It’s 2017. I sit at my desk in Kansas City (Missouri, not Kansas). It’s a cooler summer day, only 101 degrees, and I’m thinking about Excel sheets.

When on God’s green earth did I become a person who thinks about Excel sheets?

My office is in the Crossroads district; it’s an older part of downtown, built before skyscrapers, when every brick building was 3-4 stories tall. I can see Union Station across the railroad tracks and, beyond it, a hill with the National World War I Memorial prominent on top.

Kansas City is plopped right on the last of the hill regions before everything flattens out into the Great Plains, the parts of Kansas where the highest points are the tops of the windmills, and if you’re not from there, and have seen Twister, you feel exposed, like you’re a golf ball on a tee waiting for a tornado driver.

When I moved out here a couple years back, it was February. I looked out the window of my Toyota with the trailer attached to it and saw dead yellow grass for miles, and thickets of bramble trees that covered the creeks and rivers and spread their gnarled webs into the dead fields.

But after living here a while, I like to get off work at 5 and head down I-35, pick an exit, and decide if I want to go north or south — Baldwin City, Paola, De Soto, Louisburg — there’s always another little town to meet. They’re tucked into the rolling country which, in May, lit up green, and in the evening the amber haze makes all the long grasses wave you into a stupor.

Today at my desk, though, my mind is full of rhododendrons, big oaks, sugar maples, and big tulip poplars with their leaves the size of umbrellas, flitflatting down to the forest floor — I’m home in my Appalachians.

Sometimes this scene is at Rock Creek beneath mighty Unaka, overlooking the valley in Unicoi County where I grew up.

But lately, it’s has been the lower reaches of the Alum Cave trail in the Smokies. The bottom parts of the trail bunny-hop along Trout Branch before the trail cuts up Balsam Point to Alum Cave and on to LeConte.

I’ve been to the top of LeConte a couple of times — the elevation is such that you hike out of our temperate ecosystem into a spruce-fir forest. The effect is spiritual because the wood-scent feels like the inside of your nostrils has been turned to pine, and you know the only reason you’re experiencing that is because of your own two feet carrying you up.

But I like the lower reaches, where so many trees are crocheting their canopies above that you can’t see their tops. All around are the trunks, which feel like furniture holding up a pillow fort and keeping you safe inside — a secret place for you, a couple of buddies, or maybe just you and God.

I can hear the wind rushing through the woods. Every shift in the canopy sends shivers through the whole forest, and miles away, maybe even in North Carolina, you can hear the breeze working its way down the valley.

And then at my desk back in Kansas City — I have a deadline for a video by 5, plus I need to pull some stats from YouTube to put into an Excel sheet.

But thank God for green earth.