John B. Marek is a storyteller with dirt under his nails who weaves tales inspired by a lifetime immersed in nature. His insightful essays and award-winning fiction delve into the complexities of sustainable living, the heart of rural communities and the thrill of outdoor adventure. You can find more of his writing at johnbmarek.com.

At my mountain camp, I don’t have neighbors in the sense that most people understand the word. It’s not my permanent residence – I’ve got a place down in Huntersville for that – but I spend a good bit of time here, enough to feel the rhythm of the mountain in my bones. While the nearest folks are less than a mile as the crow flies, that crow is navigating a rugged path – swooping through dense woods thick with pine and oak, over rushing streams that churn with snowmelt in spring, and up a significant grade that tests even the surest-footed hiker. All that to say, we don’t have a lot of conversations over the backyard fence. Up here, fences are more for keeping deer out of gardens than for marking where one person’s world ends and another’s begins. The isolation is part of the deal, and most days, I’m grateful for it.

Last Tuesday, I was out for my morning walk to the church at the far end of my winding dirt road, where there’s a reliable mobile phone signal; three bars on a good day. It’s a ritual of sorts – boots crunching on gravel, breath coming hard up the steep grade, the quiet broken only by the chatter of squirrels or the distant knock of a woodpecker. I go to check texts and emails, though most days there’s little worth reading. The church itself is a humble thing, white clapboard and a modest steeple, graveyard out back, a relic of the mountain’s past as well as a well-used hub of worship – a place where the road ends and the world feels a little less heavy.

That’s when he came driving down the road, his newer blue sedan humming along, kicking up just a whisper of dust. That car’s about the shiniest thing you’ll see up here, its glossy paint catching the morning light, though it’s already got a few scratches from these narrow, branchy roads. He slowed to a stop, one arm resting on the open window, and we exchanged the kind of nod that passes for a handshake out here. “Morning,” he said, his voice rough but warm, like he’d been up since before the sun. I echoed the greeting, and just like that, we were having an impromptu neighborhood meeting, right there in the middle of the road.

Unfortunately, most of the news was bad. I won’t go into the details out of respect for his privacy, but he’s had a hard time of it lately. Life up here isn’t easy – never has been. The mountain gives you solitude and beauty, but it demands resilience in return. A broken well pump, a winter storm that cuts power for days, or worse, personal losses that no amount of grit can fix – these are the things that weigh on a man’s shoulders. His eyes, shadowed under the brim of his cap, told me more than his words did. I listened, offered what little I could in the way of sympathy, and we let the silence stretch for a moment, the kind of silence that feels right when there’s nothing left to say.

Then he shifted gears, literally and figuratively, and mentioned the other piece of bad news: The pastureland, the very land our sliver of road bisects, was up for sale. That hit me harder than I expected. The pasture isn’t much to look at by some standards – 80 acres of open grass ringed by forest, sloping unevenly toward the creek below. But it’s a rare thing up here, a clearing where the sky feels bigger, where you can see the stars at night without the trees crowding in. It’s where I’ve watched hawks circle on summer afternoons and where, come autumn, the mist settles like a quilt over the grass. The road that cuts through it is our lifeline, connecting my place to his and both of us to the world beyond.

The idea of that land changing hands felt like a small betrayal, though I couldn’t say who or what was doing the betraying. Maybe it’s just the way of things – land gets bought, sold, carved up. But up here, where change comes slow and the mountain feels eternal, the thought of new faces, new plans, new anything carries a weight. While the extreme topography limits what any reasonable person might build – steep grades and rocky soil aren’t exactly welcoming to bulldozers – it’s entirely possible we might be getting new neighbors soon. The word “neighbors” felt foreign on my tongue, conjuring images of fences, mailboxes, maybe even a streetlight or two. None of that belongs here, not yet.

We talked it over for a bit, speculating about who might buy the land. A developer with grand ideas and no sense of the mountain’s stubbornness? A city transplant looking for a weekend retreat, unaware of the realities of septic systems and snowed-in roads? Or, worst of all, someone who’d let the pasture grow over, neglected, until it was just another patch of bramble and saplings? Neither of us said it out loud, but I think we both feared the loss of something intangible – a piece of the quiet, wild heart of this place.

He had to get going – errands over in Elkin, he said – and I waved as the car purred off, its tailpipe coughing faintly as it climbed. I stood there for a while, the road empty again, the church steeple poking above the trees. The signal on my phone was weak, but I didn’t check it. Instead, I turned back toward the pasture, imagining it as it was and as it might become. I thought about the crow flying that mile through the woods, over the streams, up the grade. I wondered if the new neighbors, whoever they might be, would understand what that crow sees – what it means to live not just on the mountain, but with it.

For now, the pasture is still there, still ours in the way that borrowed things are. I’ll keep walking to the church, keep watching the hawks, keep listening to the streams. And maybe, when the “for sale” sign goes up, I’ll find a way to make peace with whatever comes next. Up here, you learn to take the bad news with the good, to hold tight to what matters, and to let the mountain teach you how to endure.