For weeks last winter, I slept only in gasps—then woke, dazed and sweating, to the pitch before dawn. Nothing worked to vanquish the dreams I was having: not whisky, not podcasts, not meditation. In one of my dreams, I saw the grandmother I lost. In another, I saw children that I’d never had. I’d lay awake until I couldn’t bear the sound of my husband’s breath; then I’d get up and trudge out into the thin, yellow light that announces winter mornings in the Blue Ridge mountains.

Even in February, there’s immense beauty there for those that speak that language: the jumbled whistles and trills of unseen birds; the blades of hearty grasses scribed in frost; the scratchy silhouettes of oak, pine, and hickory, sketched like ink over watercolors. Our temporary Georgia home, which we’d rented for eight weeks, sat on a small residential outcropping against the greater bulk of the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest. Since 1936, the forest has grown to encompass almost 870,000 acres, roughly half designated Wilderness areas.

I saw the wild from the beginning—but not the beautiful. I’d lost three pregnancies and my only grandparent in the months before we drove down to Georgia from Buffalo, New York. This trip, I hoped, would clear my head. It would return me again to the living world. At home, in the rusted gray confines of the city, I had slipped into some sort of shadowy, in-between place, where I no longer understood or identified with the routine concerns of other people. Instead, I felt translucent, disembodied, unmoored—the loved ones I lost were more real to me than any landscape I traversed. My grief had itself become a wilderness: a lonely, unrestrained, perilous place, with no roads in or out of it.

“My grief had itself become a wilderness: a lonely, unrestrained, perilous place, with no roads in or out of it.”

Without roads, I took to walking: long, heedless, haphazard loops through the Georgia woods. In the mornings I traced the edge of the Chattahoochee-Oconee where it neared our deserted neighborhood. In the afternoons, my husband and I took an unmarked trail down a steep hillside to the shores of Lake Blue Ridge, inside the forest proper. This being Georgia, the beach was clay and clumps of granite: it looked like a graveyard for kitchen counters.

That sort of metaphor came easily to me, especially on days when the clouds sat cold and low. Or on mornings after nights in which I didn’t sleep, my nightmares interrupted by familiar ghosts. I couldn’t imagine returning home to the company of other people, now that I saw how fleeting our lives were: all our hopes and loves and secrets, the things we hold most dear, little more than dust-like spores in a vast, indifferent universe.

For a time the mountains seemed to vindicate my morbidness, and I treasured them for that. The inert hulks of blue-gray granitoid, massed at most horizons, spoke to a longevity I couldn’t guess at. Many thousands of people had walked this forest, going back to before their violent seizure from the Cherokee, and now only the trees and rocks still remained. The Blue Ridge spoke of our brevity.

But the bitterness of mortality also mellowed as I spent time in the woods. I saw my first armadillo in the Chattahoochee-Oconee: a silly, scuttling thing that made me scramble for my phone. I spotted bands of bluebirds hung like baubles on a Christmas tree, a sight I’d never seen on a bird feeder at home. I watched stars so bright and numerous I needed an app to teach me the names of the constellations.

One afternoon in late February, I stood facing southeast from Hogpen Gap and watched the mountains fade with distance from gray to gas-flame blue. A hawk wheeled in the updraft overhead; the air was still but for the drip of melting icicles. I reached, as I often did, for my sadness, but it shrunk down to nothing before that view. “Wilderness puts us in our place,” Barbara Kingsolver wrote. “It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd.” Our plans, yes—but our losses, too. I could not believe I’d given so much time to my grief, when spring thaws and Rayleigh scattering existed in the world.

“I stood facing southeast from Hogpen Gap and watched the mountains fade with distance from gray to gas-flame blue. I reached, as I often did, for my sadness, but it shrunk down to nothing before that view.”

During our last week in Georgia, my husband and I drove to a trail in the Raven Cliffs Wilderness. The day was bright and hospitable for March, like an earnest payment made on summer’s promise. “We couldn’t ask for better weather,” I kept saying, delighted, because by then I’d long returned to appreciating the sun. I also missed my friends at home and slept through the full night, no podcasts or yoga required.

We cleaved to the sunshine where it filtered through the trees, cutting abstract, fretwork shadows along the trail trail, which traces Dodd Creek to the Raven Cliff Falls, then doubles back on itself. There’s no sense of a journey coming full circle; no impression of continual forward progress. But you walk one way, and you walk the other, and you one day walk out of the wilderness.

Heading back across the parking lot after our hike, I noticed a sign I’d not seen before: “WHAT IS WILDERNESS?” it asked, in bold capital letters, before quoting from the 60-year-old law that created America’s Wilderness areas. Only later would I learn that Georgia is home to 10 such areas, or that many of them were formed from the wreckage of logging, mining, and environmental degradation. Later, I’d learn the 1964 Wilderness Act is widely considered one of the country’s most poetic pieces of legislation.

In that moment, however—after eight weeks in the forest— it felt as if the text was written for me: The wilderness, it stated, is a natural place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

I stood reading the sign until my husband called me; he'd started the car and was ready to go. And so was I, I knew, happily: ready at last to return home.

You too can find a place to heal or rediscover yourself among a National Forest. If you’re in the Southeast, head to Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest’s Aska Trail System, two hours north of Atlanta, where 17 miles of trails offer incredible mountain views.

About the Author

Caitlin Dewey is a freelance writer based in Buffalo, New York. She was a staff writer at The Washington Post for six years and has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Guardian, among others.

Cover photo by Caitlin Dewey.

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