Tag Archives: Trail of Tears

This is the summit of the North Face of “the mountain.”

Being from Minnesota, I have to think that there is nothing about snow and ice in Western North Carolina that I can’t handle, especially with all wheel drive Sassy the Subaru Forester, though with only street, not snow tires, no chains, no metal studs.

Stupid me. Notice the bevel of the road is rather severe from left down to the right, and it’s all slick ice. And, at this point, the car just wouldn’t stop tumbling down the mountain side if it started to slide ever so slightly. But, hey, I’m clever! And immortal! I can do anything! Especially filled with adrenaline!

And that’s why these roads are eventually closed in the winter time by the Forest service, you know, for people like me. Sigh.

I’ll see if I can’t put up a video of at least parts of this Trail of Tears, which pretty much starts in my parish church and heads out to Nebraska.

I don’t have to go this way on Communion Calls, but I do because it is a short cut and so very beautiful. I’m quite certain that I have the most beautiful parish in the world.

But then again, I recall the words repeated to me as spoken by Humberto Cardinal Medeiros before the Archdiocese sold a castle in the forest on the rocky north shore of Massachusetts. Someone commented to him standing atop that castle while looking over the beauties of nature just how very beautiful it all was. His response was that he himself found the grimy steel pylons of the elevated trains back in the city to be so much more beautiful.

Well, I’m sure there is the same adrenaline rush on an icy Trail of Tears over Tatham Gap as one might have being jerked around by the rickety and now closed El-Train in Boston. I remember it well. Someone else also remembers such things: