I have hiked Rock Castle Creek trail a few times since we moved back to Virginia in 1997, but not in April—not until last week, when I was on the trail twice, with two small bands of walkers and nature-stalkers. It was a kind of home-coming being back in that rich cove forest below the towering crest of Rocky Knob. I visited there again with fond memories and great expectations.
My first passing through Floyd County was for the sole purpose of reaching Rock Castle Creek. I noted with some amusement the single traffic light in the sleepy village at about 8 o’clock on that Saturday morning drive alone from Wytheville, the third week of April, 1975.
I took a right onto route 8, in a hurry, winding down, down past Tuggles Gaps to meet my botanizing Alabama friends, new Tech students, at the trail head at 8:30 so we would not miss the early light. We had heard the place was absolutely covered in wildflowers; we were packing our Minoltas.
And the spot was indeed a botanical wonder. Vast swaths across gentle slope and level creek floodplain were cloaked in dense stands of dwarf crested iris, Virginia bluebells, Dutchman’s britches, red trillium, foamflower, trout lily and spring beauty. We were in heaven.
With great anticipation, I brought all this with me to the trail head last week, and left a few hours later with a certain remorse that things remembered often don’t match the revisited realities. Many of the vegetative visions I had hoped to reproduce on digital film did not appear. But none of my companions held up my nostalgic standards to the scenery around us, and both visits to Rock Castle Creek bore new good memories even so.
We scratched and we sniffed: sassafras and ramps, anise root and wild ginger, hay-scented fern and an almond-scented millipede. We munched giant chickweed, the alien garlic mustard and the soft growing-tips of greenbrier. The threatened rain never came, the day held calm, skies overcast, and the bold creek boisterous with more water than I recall from memories of Aprils past—beautiful crystal spring-water, an exuberance from winter’s generous snows.
The inanimate animated by gravity; movement with music—flowing water was never far away, a metaphor in its one-way passage—of time, of life. In less than a day, the gallon that streamed past me that moment would flow east into the Smith River, then the Dan, co-mingling somewhere along the way with the Floyd County gallon that 30 miles off at that moment riffled over the rocks of Goose Creek in front of our house, bound south down the Roanoke for the Atlantic at Albemarle Sound.
So much time, so much water—have passed through the wooded crease of Rock Castle Creek valley since I first visited. And I should not have expected it to be the way I remembered. In the absence of fire, logging or other impacts of man or cataclysms of nature, a certain, predictable change is the given—until the water wears it all down to the level plain of ocean; until the woodland reaches the steady-state of climax forest. So I had to remind myself that this landscape was 35 years older, just like me. We’d both changed since 1975. And our wrinkles are a little more pronounced.
I look out my window now at our woods, that even in the mere 11 years we’ve been here have changed remarkably. What will one see here in 35 years? It’s wildflowers will have recovered from the ravages of uncareful logging of 1994. The streams will have flooded away a bit more of the pasture, certainly. By then, the bluebells we moved here from Walnut Knob will have spread to fill the meadow. Its poplars and basswood will be giants.
And hikers may come the third week of April to this deep valley with their cameras to sit on the banks of Goose Creek and wonder where the water and the time have gone.
By Fred First [email protected]
