The best cup of coffee I've ever had

Or how transcendent beauty and hard work make everything taste better

Thank you for being a subscriber.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider recommending it to others and becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get dispatches about travel, adventure and #dadlife that will sometimes be heartfelt and profound, sometimes peel back modern parenting life for a look inside, and sometimes be, well, whatever this is. If you want to support my work, I would appreciate it.

---

The freelance magazine writing world imploded four years ago, just like everything else. I was doing a ton of travel writing at the time (and at least as much writing that involved travel), and all of a sudden I had no desire to go anywhere, and no magazine wanted to send me there anyway. Worse, some magazines went beyond stopping giving out assignments and stopped publishing magazines all together. That list included Southwest Airlines inflight magazine, which had been among my favorite clients.

Below is my favorite of the stories I wrote for them.

            The roar of the Linville River woke me up. I unzipped my tent and peeked out. Straight ahead of me angry water cascaded from left to right, spilling over rocks seen and unseen. On the far side of the river, the east side of the Linville Gorge stood nearly straight up, some 1,700 feet into the North Carolina sky. Behind me the gorge’s west ridge rose like a thick green wall.

            I crawled out of the tent and looked up as if from the crook of a U. Gray clouds promised to soak my two hiking buddies and me all day long, but for now, we remained dry. A cool April breeze whistled through the hickory, oak, maple, locust and poplar, cooling my skin and carrying with it a fragrant whiff that confirmed the coming rainstorm.

            My back barked its complaint, chastising me for sleeping on a thin mattress pad after bearing the weight of my backpack for hours on end the day before. I put water on the Jet Boil and waited for it to simmer. I wanted my coffee now and wanted the morning to last forever in equal measure. I smelled everything, heard everything, felt everything, as I do every time I descend into the Linville Gorge, 12,000 acres of untouched beauty in the Pisgah National Forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

            My friend Andy joined me by the fire. Born and raised in Russia, he’s conversant on such a wide range of topics I wonder if he reads 24/7. Once in a while, that ever-whirring brain of his spits out utter strangeness. Like now. As I dumped the contents of a Starbucks Via instant coffee packet into my hiking mug he said, “Be a man! Put two in there!”

            “Crazy Russian,” I thought. But I did it anyway. I took one sip of this double-dosed drink and my eyes opened wider, as if pulled by strings. Another drink and sunshine shot out my ears. A third and I could have juggled the boulders that dotted the river. I peered into my cup. What magical elixir had Andy coaxed me into creating? I nursed it slowly, hoping to make whatever it was doing to me last. It was, and remains, the most memorable drink I have ever had.

            In the years since, I have tried to replicate that cup of coffee—one Via, two Vias, hotter water, cooler water, cream, sugar, black, every combination thereof. But nothing comes close to matching that joyful jolt of java. I finally concluded that the coffee had nothing to do with it. It was the place, not the drink, that warmed my heart that day.

            Such is the power of the Linville Gorge.

--

            My love for the Linville Gorge started simply enough. A few years earlier, I had asked my friend Ryan, an avid outdoorsman, to take me for a daytrip somewhere that combined great hiking and great fishing. The Linville Gorge had long been his go-to place, so he chose that as our destination.

            He picked me up at my home in Charlotte, and by the time we concluded the 2.5-hour drive, we had been transported back centuries. The Linville Gorge is often called the most rugged area east of the Mississippi River, and I’m not going to argue with that. Its forest remains virgin because it would be too hard to get lumber out of there.

            At the time, my idea of roughing it was cooking on a charcoal grill, so the first hour of the hike—starting at the top of the west ridge and going down quickly—shocked me. I cursed the roots put there to twist my ankles and the branches reaching there to slice my skin and the rocks dropped there to send me sprawling onto my face.

            We turned right, the trail flattened out, and thick woods swallowed me. I couldn’t see more than 20 feet in any direction. Did the outdoors have to be so outdoorsy? I started to wonder what Ryan had gotten me into, and whether he’d be able to get me out.

            Then we reached the bottom.

            I looked up and around, and my anxiety turned to awe.

            The sun glistened off the water. The canopy of trees we had just walked out from under shined as green as a leprechaun’s daydream. Sheer rock faces up and down the river hinted at the centuries the water spent digging deeper into the earth. Still working at that task, the water rushed over a 10-foot fall and pounded into a pool below, nature’s own white noise machine.

            Ryan and I stepped onto a smooth, multi-tiered ledge in the shape of an L that overlooked the pool. We put our fishing lines into the water. The current took our bait up and to the right, the inverse of the L we were standing on. Then and now, I’m a clueless fisherman, but even I couldn’t miss the trout and smallmouth bass so desperate to introduce themselves to me.

            We drained that pool of all its fish then turned north, looking for the next spot, dancing along the west bank of the river, each bend more spectacular than the last, indelible memory piled on top of indelible memory. I hopscotched into the river, 10 feet from the edge, onto a rock the size of a hula hoop. I hollered at Ryan. “Do you think anybody has ever stood here before?”

            He smiled and shook his head at me. On the next cast, I landed a trout I’ve lied about so often I can’t remember how big it was. I’ll call it too big to carry and leave it at that. My excited, goofy, bellowing, gleeful laughter echoed off the gorge walls. “I guarantee nobody has ever done that from there before,” Ryan said, and I’m not 100 percent sure he meant at as a compliment, but I will always think of it as one.

            The climb out that day, following Cabin Trail, was brutal—1,000 feet up in three quarters of a mile with a 32 percent grade. It was like walking up your roof if your roof was overrun with rocks and trees and mud and roots. My heart pounded, half out of exhaustion, half out of fear. Darkness loomed. I unleashed a torrent of silent epithets at the crackpot who blazed this trail. Seriously – what nutjob thought straight up was the best way out? When we finally reached the top, I bent over to catch my breath. It reminded me of a great movie in which your favorite character dies at the end, and you’re mad about it at first. But after letting it soak in, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

--

            A few years after that first trip to the Linville Gorge, I got laid off from my full-time magazine job. I had a million questions and zero answers to any of them. Was my writing career over? How would I provide for my wife and kids? Life felt like a constant scramble up the Cabin Trail, only I never reached the top. I carried the lies of anxiety like an overstuffed backpack.

            Meanwhile, a bunch of friends and I had been planning a trip to the Linville Gorge. I wore myself out worrying about whether I should go. What’s an unemployed guy doing going on a weekend getaway with the boys? I tried to convince myself that not going would be even worse than going. My perception of my situation was warped. All I could see was the trees that had swallowed me. I needed to step out—or be pushed out—from underneath them.

            I love the strange symmetry of finding temporary peace by putting down intangible challenges and picking up real ones. A hike in the Linville Gorge is all consuming. Your feet can’t wander from the path and neither can your mind. I walked out front for much of the hike, pushing through brush so thick I occasionally lost the trail. But I always found it again, even if I had to stop and backtrack. At one point, I shuffle-footed across the river, trying to avoid sharp and slippery rocks on the bottom, while holding on to men on either side of me as braces against the current that pounded our thighs. Our long slog up the Cabin Trail was hard again, of course. But not as hard as the first time.

            We camped up top that night, high above the river. The glow of the fire illuminated our tired faces. I ate a bratwurst that was almost as memorable as Andy’s coffee. We told stories deep into the night. Some of them might have even been true. I hadn’t relaxed like that in months.

--

         This is the part of a love letter to a place where normally I would issue a call to action, to urge you to visit the Linville Gorge, to promise you beauty, joy and peace unmatched. I believe all of that is true. But I also feel like I should gently and humbly say that the Linville Gorge is not for everybody. Of the 39 miles of trails there, just about every single one of them offers a knee-crunching, hip-busting, back-breaking reason to stay home on the couch.

            I developed a mantra that I say to myself when I hike there: “One easy step. That’s all I want. One easy step.” I rarely find it. I mumbled that as I lurched over a fallen tree during my most recent visit there. I looked up and was surprised to see a group of 20 somethings carrying fishing poles in a rainstorm. I’m fairly certain they were as high as they were wet. Or maybe they just drank hella good coffee like I did. Anyway, one of them said they had caught a bunch of fish, but they were all “too big to carry,” a line that cracked me up so much I have used it over and over without giving him credit.

            The coffee was just coffee. The bratwurst was just a bratwurst. That line … was it even funny? I don’t know. I thought so, in that time, at that place. It reminded me again that the source of Linville Gorge’s power—the reason coffee tastes better, the leaves look greener, and excited, goofy, bellowing, gleeful laughter echoes louder off the walls—is that the gorge is real and hard and punishing and unchanged by our changing world. 

            So, yes, please, visit the Linville Gorge. Immerse yourself in its rugged beauty. But be careful. Watch your step. Wear your sturdiest hiking boots and carry your biggest fishing net. And most important, bring your favorite coffee. Double servings. Trust me on that.