The Devil’s Backbone State Natural Area is a 950 acre natural area in Lewis County TN. The trail follows Tennessee’s Highland Rim accessible from the Natchez Trace Parkway, a 400+ mile recreational road that meanders through the southern states of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. It was a route first used by Native American Indians, and then as you would expect, as Europeans colonized the Amercias the route became well worn by slave traders, robbers and soldiers all in different measure, decimating the native peoples of this beautiful land.

“You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

She would write with a lupine hunger, hunting the words into the hot breath of the day’s ending. The wild imaginings of her dark dreams given life in the moments as the sun, cosmic tethers clipped, fell from the sky. This creative hunger gnawed at the edges of her. And slowly she would become the hunger. Ravenous, she would become a fanged wolf stalking the words across the bright night light reflected from the snow-laden forrest floor of her flat.

Countless nights had he walked these city streets, under throws of equisite Parisian light. Alone in the small secret hours, he would catch whispers of her, the soft quiet of her cadence, dancing on the breeze. Her whole heart, for her whole life. These had been her whispered words to him. But then as quickly as she had exploded into his life, her love had retracted, imploding in on itself, consumed by the endless aching hunger of her pain.

The black and yellow Ambassador, hurtled head-long into the newly breaking dawn. The taxi heaved and lurched, its horn squawking in constant conversation with the ceaseless torrent of tatas, padminis and rickshaws swimming against the current of its own petrol powered propulsion. The city unfolded vast beyond measure clambering in all directions to the heat-hazed horizon.