The Vanishing World of the Hidden Valley
Why the pursuit of the place safe from the evil world should never be our goal. Even if those places are really nice.
It’s been a whirlwind of a weekend for me. On Saturday, I went to DuPont State Forest for the first time, and Monday evening I went to see Bob Dylan with my dad at the Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium.
While both are very different (and I will mostly be drawing on my experience in the forest), there was a connected thread that I will call the “hidden valley,” which is something like a place of safety, connectedness, and fun that our real world is generally seen as lacking by most.
The Unexpected Encounter
I went to Dupont State Forest, fully planning to just mountain bike from the Lake Imaging parking lot, but I’m pretty new to riding a mountain bike without a motor, and I vastly overestimated my fitness. So as I schlepped down to my Subaru, I said, “I’m not that far from some of the waterfalls here, why don’t I just hike those instead?”
Normally, I love to know everything about what I am going to do, but I kind of just looked at my map and said, “Let’s go.” I think we should (when we can) do that more often, because wow.
I knew vaguely that the waterfalls were pretty popular and a “must-see,” but I had no idea that the waterfalls with big pools below them were teeming with (human) life.
Descending out of the trail into the wide clearing filled with people, animals, and smells reminded me of the dinosaur movies of my youth that all featured the same motif: a hidden valley where dinosaurs could live free from fear of predators, with plenty of grass to graze, and life was able to flourish.
In these movies, the hidden valley was seen as the Platonic ideal and the logical end of one’s journey after a life of suffering and pain. Certainly, after several miles and 90-degree heat, I would be happy to make this first stop the end of my journey, but it would be a crime to end the journey so quickly, no?
Leaving the first hidden valley took me to a second one - albeit far harder to reach with rocks to clamber and slippery scapes to hop past to reach the most magical part of WNC I have visited to date. Men and women sprawled on rocks like lizards while kids and pets splashed in the clear mountain water with reckless glee.
Once again, I was tempted to stay on my chosen perch forever (or at least as long as I could), but home called and I finished my journey back at the still packed parking lot I had started in that morning.
Putting the Genie in the Bottle
Oftentimes, when I am out and about, my mind races with ideas for how I can translate the observations I am making in real time on Substack. The mind of a writer is busier than Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport!
I debated a few different points of view, but it was not until I was sitting in Orchestra Left at the Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium that the thesis of the Hidden Valley really clicked for me.
Bob Dylan, like several other artists and comedians, contracted a service called Yondr to require all attendees to put their smartphones or other recording devices into a pouch that they lock at the start and unlock at the end of the show. It was actually a really seamless experience, and forced everyone to actually talk and engage with their fellow man in ways that you normally don’t see at concerts today.
I was with my dad, who is a big fan of live music, and this was our second time seeing Bob Dylan together (the first was at the Wang Theater in Boston, MA wayyy back in 2009). While Dylan is in his 80s his performance was pretty strong (all things considered), but what I noticed most was the lack of camera flashes, watching a concert through people’s screens in front of me, and kids on iPads watching Cocomelon.
The atmosphere was buzzing with excitement, and despite Bob Dylan not being one for encores, everyone stayed on their feet, offering raucous applause, hoping to entice the legend to do just one more hit to keep them in this temporary valley of joy.
Why You Cannot Stay in the Hidden Valley
While the Hidden Valley provides joy, community, and a respite from the ills of the world around us, the Hidden Valley is not forever. What the dinosaur movies like The Land Before Time neglect to mention is that the valley of peace and opportunity did not last forever. The dinosaurs faded into memory and eventually into the Earth to be found and rediscovered much later.
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens
- Ecclesiastes 3:1 NIV
There is a certain good to having places and spaces that we can encounter the beautiful, the transcendent, the delicious, even, but we must be careful not to overindulge.
Oftentimes, people are so caught up in the space that they think is the only provider of joy or meaning, and neglect the spaces we more commonly inhabit on a day-to-day basis. The office, the grocery store, the kitchen, the bedroom.
If we spend all of our time, energy, and resources on things with which we can only inhabit periodically, we will allow the spaces we actually inhabit to crumble and that seems to do something to our soul. There is a rampant ideology, almost a disease, that sees the ills of the modern world as merely ordinary and not worth any particular concern: vehicular deaths, oppressive anti-human architecture, offshoring of jobs, and many more issues that happen in the world we inhabit in our daydreams and nightmares.
It is important that spaces like DuPont State Forest exist, but we cannot allow our minds to be so scared of interacting with those around us that we would abandon our homes, communities, and cultures in chase of that which cannot sustain us.