The Absurd

After going back to the Ghost Lights this past week, I decided I would write a piece about the first time I went back in high school. I ended up submitting it to The Phoenix (a school-produced collection of poems, essays, and art). 

The Absurd

Growing up in the Appalachians, tall tales and old legends are as numerous as the trees in the forests and mountains they spring up from. When I was younger, I not only believed in almost all of them, but went out of my way to defend them against the discreditors; the dastardly “others” so grounded in reality they were incapable of dreaming. Part of the beauty of believing in those yarns was that they required complete faith. No one has ever actually seen Bigfoot, right? In the summer of my junior year of high school I crossed paths with a true American mystery, one that has left the minds of many clueless for centuries. 

I had heard about the spot from my older brother, who had visited it several months prior. After verifying the place on a Reddit thread, I pitched the idea of a camping trip to a couple of friends, who quickly agreed. We lit out for the mountains later that day, laden with sparse sleeping equipment, dinner on a budget from Dollar General, and the hopes of seeing something we couldn’t explain when we came back. We arrived at the spot with an hour to spare before sunset. We pitched our camp quickly and went into the woods, desperate to comb as much of the ridgeline as possible while we still had daylight. As the sun sank behind the mountain peaks, we settled down, ate our limited rations, threw on a playlist of mostly Frank Ocean, Rex Orange County, and Mac DeMarco, and watched the groups of families, couples, and friends trickle away from the lookout, clearly satisfied with their Instagram-worthy flicks of the sunset. 

The last person to leave was a local; a spindly and scraggly elder statesman who looked like he had been born on the mountain we were on and had never left. We asked him what he thought about the phenomenon to come, and he told us, between puffs from his freshly-rolled blunt, that the flaming trails of light that would soon illuminate the night’s sky were the souls of spirits from the earth’s core, breaking free to the surface at night while the world slept. Not long after our conversation, the man left, leaving us all alone. Despite the obvious lack of a celestial light show, we were content to sit in the loneliness and beauty of the place. We sat there on that rock for another two hours; talking, listening, thinking, and occasionally puffing from some cigars my dad had given me. Around two in the morning, we agreed we would give the skies another fifteen minutes before calling it a night. And then, as if they heard our calls, the lights started appearing. One by one and sporadically at first, and then incessantly. In the span of an hour or so, we saw just about every variation of them; from campfire-like glows below us in the valley to dancing orbs of red, yellow, green, and white gas and fire above the mountain ridge in the sky. I watched them in awe, completely dumb-founded by the equal parts unbelievability and sheer beauty of the spectacle before me. 

I’m far from the first person to wonder about the lights’ existence; what they are, where they come from, and where they go. They’ve been well-documented for centuries, and in the area are as woven into the fabric of the time and place as the mountains themselves. The origin of the lights has been investigated, but many people refuse to agree with the verdict of the investigator. There’s disagreement even within the ranks of the investigators. Everyone has a theory, and every theory holds equal validity and insanity. There are countless speculations, from Native American myths of fallen warriors and their spirits, extra-terrestrial lifeforms, and wisps of earthen gas to headlights from passing locomotives. Some have been disproven, but most are left to the imagination. The craziest, most hair-brained fantasies are strangely, just as likely as the ones most rooted in reality. 

In all honesty, though, I try not to think about any of the solutions, especially the more logical ones. Sure, some of the lights can be explained away easily and without much thought, but there are just as many that can’t be. Our attempts to comprehend the mysteries of the infinite, which is the creator and its created, will always come up short. If one believes in the existence of a creator, which is something that I hold to, then wouldn’t it be equally possible to put your faith in that creator’s ability to speak things into this world without explanation? The incomprehensibilities of this world, which exist in spades, are themselves the supreme absurdity in which Voltaire understood when he wrote, “I believe because it is absurd” (which is a modification of Tertullian’s maxim). In that sense, belief in a divine and the powers that be shouldn’t be based on what has been proven, but what hasn’t. Humanity will forever strive to learn the infinite better, but will never know it entirely. We have found ways to communicate with each other across the globe in seconds, transport ourselves anywhere on the earth in hours, and have even put men on the moon in days. And yet, despite it all, there’s a place nestled in rural Appalachia with a natural phenomenon that refuses explanation. In ironic fashion, we have forgotten to learn our own world more fully in our haste to chart the vast expanse above and journey beyond the stars. The Tower of Babel, that is the science of man, may stretch towards the heavens, and even poke its head above the clouds, but it will never touch the sky. 

While the lights themselves are beautiful in their own right and worth seeing and mulling over on that merit alone, a good portion of their allure is in the unknowable nature of their existence. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing them again since that night long ago, and every time, I walk away more dumbfounded and amazed than before; not by what I saw and could explain, but by what I couldn’t see fully or make sense of. There are some mysteries to this world that not only have never been solved and probably never will, but force the beholder to believe in and live not by sight alone. Those lights are one of them.