I-40 stretched forward for a seeming eternity,  and then I noticed the sky. It was full of stars. I started to cry, realizing just how few I’d seen in the urban apartment I now called home. At my parent’s home, just downhill from a Whittier cemetery, I used to walk out the front door in the middle of the night and sit on the gravel, staring up for ages. Trying to name stars or find constellations. The pitch black around me seeming less scary when I felt it was allowing me a better view of the vast field of forever.

The mountains are like that for me, I think. Clouds impossibly high billowing around ancient monoliths that act as sanctuary to life large and small. When I was a kid we would take inner tubes down a local river named Deep Creek. I became obsessed with how the tree roots touched water. Winding and dipping, occasionally puncturing sheer rock. Listening for animals, observing bugs under the rocks. As a kid these activities were peaceful and beautiful to me. The mountains will forever be that for me. Those small intimate moments and the grand ancient ones. Mossy foggy carpeted underbrush to bald stone touching the sky. It will always be home.

Elijah Quillen, Havelock, a member of Carteret-Craven EC