"Black Dome Reprise" by Kenneth Chamlee

– our upward toil over roots, sharp rocks, deadfall, and slippery moss

We also ventured there with the certainty of our convictions and a single fact to prove.

Kenneth Chamlee’s stories have appeared in four previous Personal Story Publishing Project collections, and his poems have been in The North Carolina Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Cold Mountain Review, Pinesong, Kakalak, and many other places. His latest poetry collections are If Not These Things (Kelsay Books) and The Best Material for the Artist in the World, a poetic biography of 19th-century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (Stephen F. Austin University Press). Ken is Emeritus Professor of English at Brevard College in North Carolina and holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. He is currently serving as one of the 2022-2023 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets for the North Carolina Poetry Society. Learn more at www.kennethchamlee.com

Author’s Talk

Ken Chamlee

There’s been a sad change in the canopy tree cover on Mt. Mitchell over the past 50 years. My photographs from the 1960s and 70s show dark vegetation overhead on the trail from the parking lot to the summit. It used to feel closed in but protective, a forest haven with a balsam smell. Now the canopy is much thinner, and you can see the tower from the parking lot where you couldn’t before. Acid rain and the Balsam wooly adelgid have destroyed hemlocks and firs, causing a cleared-out effect. The trail to the summit is wide open, has been paved, and is no longer a mysterious forest walk. The old tower has been rebuilt with a long, accessible ramp winding up to it and a stunning 360⁰ view from a circumscribing concrete deck. It’s more accommodating to tourists, and still a short, steep walk with the elevation high enough to be noticeable in your breathing. 

Memories provide familiar grounding though. One night many years ago my brother and I were lying on a grassy slope next to the steps leading from Mt. Mitchell’s small campground parking lot up to the tent sites. Looking straight up into the dark, no reference but stars, we suddenly felt like we were falling and grabbed the ground with both hands. Clouds were racing by, low and close, creating the illusion that we were moving. It’s the way you react when a car next to you in traffic begins to move and you think it’s your car so you push the brake harder. Imagine that feeling, magnified by the speed of clouds and the vastness of the sky—Kenneth Chamlee