Mountaintop Removal. Roastedpork Revival.

Out into the province of wild turkey and whistle pig, of turk's cap and blueberry and jewelweed, to wash the muck of commerce and its labors from our dusty skins. With nought but a slack pouch of water between the two of us, Ilena and I scaled a mountain peak in a single hour this afternoon, the humid air slick beneath the canopy of rhododendron. Not content with the fogged majesty spread out before us at the pinnacle, not sufficiently dwarfed by the domes rising around us on all sides (their hulking green bodies resembling nothing so much as the mottled osage apples I called brainfruit as a child), we climbed down into the mountain and shouted each other's names against the wet-sharp walls. I brought her hands of half-ripe blackberries—which tasted oddly of soap—and she bared her bright stomach against their red and ebon juices, the lone spot of light in that dingy, narrow cave. 

After our emergence and descent, we happened across a cramped cantina several miles from town. We stepped inside. Minutes later, at a tiny wooden table, I came face to face with a dish that leapt up like a woodsmoke memory from childhood, wafting its pendulous come-hithers beneath my nose. My friends, it was a barbecue taco, but it was no mere taco, no. Slathered with red sauce and purple cabbage coleslaw, the roast pork thrummed with bassnotes as playful as my father's drawl, while the hand-drawn sign claiming   humane, sustainable   thrilled every self-righteous bone in my meaty, hormone-free body. Even as it bound me exquisitely in the moment, friends, this taco sent me reeling with nostalgia. With the second bite, I smelled the black cauldron of "flea dip" in my parents' kitchen as they circled around its bubbling cargo, adding dabs and dashes in that timeworn family ritual. I felt the texture of cheap one-ply paper plates at Great Aunt Darkus's picnic table, the tacky surface of the flowered plastic cloth. And then, I saw the covered dishes rise before my closed eyes row on row, with condensation forming on their gleaming shells. These sensations echoed like a struck chord, and above the chord—gently at first, now gaining volume gradually—a melody arose, tickling out like the squeals of pigs cavorting in a muddy creek. Oh friends, I heard the age-old rustle of wax paper against gristle, but there was no gristle—only a chestnut-smoked succulence which ran its blackened fingers across my tongue. 

I threatened to buy three dozen, take them back to town and hand them out to passersby like pamphlets from some deep pit missionary. But then I realized: this is my religion. No one else will sense its proof.