Old Gay Hippie Hikes
“It would have been just fine if I’d gone hiking naked. People do that up there you know. Luckily, I took your red towel with me. The one with the champagne glass on it. It probably saved my life. It was all I had to cover up with when I had to sleep in that barn,” said Fergus, at once defending the whole idea, the prerogative that we should all be able to hike naked as well as recounting how he survived 24 hours lost in the chilly Appalachian mountains.
I know Fergus. Fergus knows the woods. He’s usually cautious. He checks the stove before leaving the house. He wears sensible boots. He cares for aging parents on their farm. But he needed a break. So we planned an adventure into a sort of hidden underworld of the deep South. This should be the story celebrating the life force with a beautiful freaks in the woods. But things went south.
This is the story of how Fergus went missing, slept in an abandoned barn, asked lots of mountain folk for help, while holding but not always wearing his towel, then got an orange Fanta and a ride home, in a car packed with 16 hula hoops. “The hula hoop part comes later!” he interrupts me, “And you know I don’t even like soda, but that orange Fanta was a kind gesture from an old lady, and it was all I had to drink in 24 hours. Orange Fanta saved my life.”
He — well, we — hadn’t planned on hiking at all. We’d spent the days before with hundreds of people gathered for camping, going to drumming circles, making nature crafts, exploring heart circles and cooking with wild weeds. This annual event was like Burning Man crossed with an Iron John style sexual empowerment event. Naked young men, costumed pagan womyn, plenty of undefined gender, witches, artists, hippies, old farmers, drag queens, Pan-sexuals, and would-be-geishas come together every May 1 to dance around the Maypole and rekindle creativity. These gatherings happen all over the world. Here in the South, it’s hidden in the mountains outside of, where else, the mothership of creativity, Asheville. People just descend on this camp — no registration, no real plans, no cell coverage, no beeping reminders of home; the only connection with the outside world is a white shuttle van that runs, haphazardly, back and forth to the nearest airport an hour and a half away. But it all comes together magically. Volunteers prepare incredible meals for hundreds. Musicians turn rainy nights into barn concerts. Strangers make new friends on grassy fields while sunning, meditating, napping, screwing, fire-eating and hula hooping.
We began this camping trip down in the lowlands of Georgia, hundreds of miles and worlds away. Four men packed into a Honda Element with one fella illegally reclined on a rolled up tent. Our own big bag of sequins, boas, old denim dresses and palm fibers as a pillow. We set camp, hiked, ate, sewed costumes and pushed into the crowded clay wall sauna together. Our tents touched; the first night they flooded in torrential rains. Surviving a storm bonds people. The next morning, we met the neighbors and joined in communal cooking, wood chopping, and planning for the May Day festival.
On the afternoon of the big event, with Fergus Fingal, as our captain, I mean, with a name like that and true pagan blood flowing through his, at the moment, her veins, we joined the trickle of campers headed down the mountain to the gathering field. Today, people take on spirit names, so we crowned Fergie Fun Gal as our cheerleader, our man, well, whatever, our figurehead for the parade. Wait. That’s a misrepresentation. We joined a parade of bearded nuns, horned satyrs, glittered Pans, mudded hula hoopers, and a 300-pound Carmen Miranda. Beautiful people on parade, beckoned by someone sounding a conch shell. No one else seemed to notice a brown billy goat behind a brown thicket, but we stopped for a group photo with him and a view down the path. From this rise, I spotted a square-shouldered, dazzling blond man, a Viking in organza, pushing determinedly against the flow, coming up the hill. He locked eyes with me and didn’t look away for a second. No side glance at the goat or anything; he came right to me, put each of his big hands on each of my shoulders, pulled me in for a hug, and said, “Did you get the message that the sheriff was here looking for you? Your Mother is in critical condition back home. You need to go.”
Quick decisions left trusty Fergus with all of our gear to handle later. And since we left him, he’d need to find a ride back home, halfway across the country, Rocky Top to Gamecock Land, after the weekend. Fergus looked a little dazed as we left. But he was already in pink taffeta and skeleton makeup, in the woods with a goat and a parade. The Maypole and the celebration waited. And we knew there were others from our state, so he might as well enjoy the party and drum a prayer for my Momma, too. The decision was sound. Normally, the ceremony that we were leaving and Fergus was headed for, would be the story to fascinate and offend: pagan rituals, joyful dancing under a massive canopy of rainbow ribbons. And such. But that’s another story. Let’s get back to Fergus, lost in the Dollywood hills, wrapped only in a red towel with a bubbly champagne glass on it.
By late Sunday afternoon, almost everyone had left those hills. Most had put their pants back on and packed out what they packed in, via a mess of cars or schizo-scheduled shuttle van. Fergus and his two tents may have seemed alone in the thousand-acre-wood, but a dozen or so men live year-round in the group house of the commune. He’d secured the needed ride back to SC but with a catch: the driver had flu and needed a few days to recover. A few stragglers slept on porches so Fergus had the comfort of knowing he could get a cup of coffee, the stimulation of interesting strangers, and the freedom to wander. A beautiful young man named Tecate made him feel welcome, and they even planned a morning hike together.
But when Tecate failed to show, Fergus started out alone. “Since Tecate wasn’t with me, I had no reason to even take the towel, but I grabbed it, put my camera around my neck, and set off on the trails. “They have miles of trails, all through the mountains. All with painted hatchet marks on the trees so you don’t get lost. But sometimes the mark is just a little ribbon tied on the tree.” Fergus got totally absorbed in the moment. He has pictures of caterpillars, rock formations, creek bottoms, and sun rays to prove it. And also to prove how he missed the marks. He was so engaged that it was mid-afternoon before he realized he was lost.
Lost in the acid green woods, golden sunshine, but ahead, he saw — ah joy — a fisherman standing in the thigh-deep cold black water. Fergus held his red towel aloft and waded out to ask for help. “Seriously Fergus?” I asked, “Why didn’t you at least wrap your towel around you rather than approach some mountain man naked?” Fergus defended, “I thought I was still on the compound where it wasn’t an issue. I thought he was a fellow camper so, yeah, I approached a fisherman completely naked. Now that I think about it, the directions he gave me got me lost. Maybe he was from the Bible camp up the mountain or he was a big redneck and wanted me to get lost.”
In any case, the fisherman made it sound so easy: just follow the creek up, take the left fork, and you’ll be right back on the compound.” With reassurance and directions home, Fergus relaxed, walked, took lots more photos. About dark, he realized he’d best worry. Then he saw a barn.
You’d think sleeping in an abandoned barn might be okay. But he didn’t sleep. There was only a mud floor and rock to sit on. No loft, board, or bale of hay to curl up beside. “I counted every second; I didn’t sleep, I just put the towel over my head to capture the heat of my breath and counted every second. No worries about snakes; it was too cold for them.”
With the first gray of morning, Fergus recognized them as different birds awoke. “Wood thrush whistles and gray light; It’s the happiest I’ve ever been.” He bolted up the hill to warm himself and soak up some sun. “I was so optimistic that I was skipping. I was hollering thinking that the search party they’d sent out for me or a farmer would hear me.” Turkeys answered back. Wild turkeys will do that you know — they respond to strange sounds with gobbles. “At first I thought that was funny, so I kept talking to the Turkeys, but after a while….”
He pushed his way downslope. About noon he spotted a tiny paved road but, to get down on it, he ended up on all fours, descending an 80-degree rocky slope. On a paved road, search party helicopters would have an easier time spotting their lost boy, he reasoned. Surely they were looking for him by now.
But the road only led to a second shack that wasn’t much more hopeful than the barn. “But at least I could see a man inside, so I was hopeful.” The old man there had no phone, power, or knowledge of where this fella had come from or where he should go. He offered an apple. “I ended up feeling more sorry for him than I did for me. He looked at his devoted canine companion and said, ‘Imma haveta get rid o’ tha’ dog. I think Imma haveta go t’ prisin.”
Back on the little gravel road, surrounded by spring wildflowers and sunshine of this Dolly-Parton-land, a car passed. Fergus held out his thumb. A teenage fella in a Corolla, on the way home from the night shift at a Subway, picked Fergus up. “I couldn’t believe anyone would even slow down, l was scratched and in a towel.” The fella’s compassion didn’t last long. He didn’t know where the compound was. He let Fergus out at the intersection with a bigger road. None the wiser of how to get back to the compound, Fergus walked uphill and soon another little house came into sight.
And this one was just right. Another primitive, mostly off-the-grid cabin but with a lovely veggie garden and a pack of dogs. To Fergus, the dog lover, that meant this was a place with good people. Suzy was good people. She lived her work out here, watching and recording for a wolf restoration project. She let him know her strengths quickly, telling him that she did things in the ’60s, in the military, that she could only allude to.
Suzy and Fergus passed a nice morning after she told him, “Go wash in the creek, and I’ll find you some pants.”
From the creek, there was a view of the road. Out of nowhere, a white van appeared on Big Hill Road. Believe it or not, it was the van, the white shuttle from the commune, so Fergus flagged them down to find out that he was 5 or 6 miles lost. All he had to do is walk straight up Big Hill Road. Easy, if he weren’t scratched up, dehydrated, and dead tired from not sleeping. He could have just gotten in the van. Or he could hang out with Suzy for a few hours and catch it at 1 p.m. on the return trip. The driver told him, “Be out at the road at 1! I’ll probably have forgotten about you by then so be on the road!” Fergus thought, “She’s nice, her dogs are sweet, she has a green parrot; I’ll just hang out here and catch the van at 1 p.m.”
But at 12:30, from the porch, Fergus watched that van go roaring by in the distance. True to his word, the driver forgot him. “Goddammit. How will I ever get back?” He wondered. “And I’ve made all of these people worried. They’ve probably called my parents.” Suzy saw that this whole thing was causing him serious stress so she started calling on old friends. She finally revealed that she had a phone for emergency use only. Fergus first called his parents to relieve their concern. Of course, until he called, they’d known nothing of their youngest son’s ordeal with who knows what kind of hippy mountain cult, a parrot and a pack of wolves. Now they were worried but with little help to offer. “Now I felt worse! Dad couldn’t help in any way. But he canceled his dentist appointment!”
But he didn’t know who to call about his current situation. So Suzy called her friend Bobby Noble, ‘’he knows everything around here,” she said. Bobby, a proud Vietnam Vet, a man of action, listened to the story over the phone, asked Mrs. Noble to make a little picnic meal to get this boy back up to par. “So he showed up ready to take care of everything. I climbed up in this plush truck. He’s got an oxygen tank on the seat beside and a cooler. I drank an Orange Fanta, and ate a pimento cheese on white bread sandwich, shirtless, while he navigated this maze of tiny, forever upward roads. I knew I’d never have figured this out alone. He saved me. At first, I thought, ‘What’s he gonna think when he learns I need to go to the giant gay hippy compound? Will that freak him out?’“
But Bobby Noble put him at ease, “I know right where you belong, no problem. We’re so proud that we have the biggest hippy camp in the country as our neighbors.” He dropped Fergus off at the barn.
“The first person I saw was the big blond Scandinavian man who’d come to find you, the one who’d told you about your Momma and he said right away, ‘Good News! We heard Momma’s going to be just fine.” He’s one of the men who lives on the compound, in charge as far as anyone is in charge there. This was a lucky coincidence: If anyone had been in charge of the helicopter search, if anyone had gotten a message from the van driver, if anyone was on top of my situation, here he was, at the gate, worried about me. But I could tell from his face he hadn’t missed me. All he had to say was, ‘Oh….What happened? You were lost?’”
“He didn’t even know I was gone!”
Fergus walked on toward his tents, hoping his ride back to South Carolina hadn’t been too worried about him while he nursed the flu. “We looked in your tent, your sleeping bag looked full, we didn’t wake you. But we’re about ready to get on the road.” Tired Fergus, full of stories of adventure and in need of sympathy, had to pack the two tents and lug out the coolers and clothes that we’d left on our sudden departure. And rapidly make his own.
With two new friends in charge of driving, wearing a pair of pants that belonged to a wolf-lady, nestled in the back seat with damp tents, bags of clothes smelling smoky and comfy, and 16 hula hoops, “I didn’t complain,” he said, “but I did wondered how anybody, even a hula hoop dancer could have needed 16 hula hoops for just one weekend.” Nestled in the back seat, Fergus quit wondering. With his wandering over, Fergus was headed home, and everything felt just right.