Whispers of My Blood
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I climb the dirt road, rising above the Beaverdam valley until I crest the ridge at Craven Gap. The extreme cold stuns me. Furious winds whip across the Black Mountains, staggering my footsteps. Icy flurries pepper my face and hang in my beard. Massive snow clouds shroud the mountains, invisible. Hurriedly, I slip into the woods and access the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. The earthen path is stiff with rime ice. Thick icicles drape the boulders. I’m entering another domain, potently wild and alive. I sober to the moment and set myself for the final ascent to Rattlesnake Lodge. Snowflakes burst from the sky, pouring into the forest like torrents of rain in a spring freshet. By the time I reach the grounds of Rattlesnake Lodge the trail is covered. I head straight to the crumbled remains of the stone grotto that houses the springs and drop my pack. The ground inside the grotto is slick with mounds of ice. Pristine water bubbles from the eye of the earth, undeterred by the freeze. I brace my legs to keep from slipping and stoop to cup the icy liqueur to my mouth. I fill my canteens and hustle up the hill to the camp. I don’t have a minute to waste. Before dark I want to relax in my home and take off my sandals. (From Chapter Five: Blizzard at Rattlesnake Lodge)
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About the Book
“Mickey Mahaffey is a singular American explorer, a fearless saunterer across our modern-day dilemmas of faith and faithlessness, who has written a deeply personal and poetic memoir of his extraordinary life.”
—Jeff Biggers, author of The United States of Appalachia, and In the Sierra Madre
About the Author
A natural storyteller and orator, Mickey Mahaffey has put his oral tradition on paper only intermittently as a guest newspaper columnist before this memoir. Born in Hendersonville, North Carolina, in 1953, he remains based in his native territory, dividing his time between Asheville and its Blue Ridge Mountains environs and his homeof-the-heart in Mexico’s Copper Canyon and Chihuahua City. His involvement with the Raramuri Indians of Mexico led him to found the School of the Traveler (www.schoolofthetraveler.com) in 1997, offering guided journeys in both the Copper Canyon and the Blue Ridge Mountains—traveling by foot with minimal gear. His participation in the Semanta Santa ritual with the Raramuri became the subject of a documentary film, Being the Diablo, which will be released in 2010. Mickey is currently producing a documentary of his own about the Raramuri ultramarathon runners.