I enjoy camping. Solitude. Enjoying primitive conditions. Witnessing the power and beauty of nature. It helps one keep a good Hessian frame of mind. I try to go as often as is possible and there is one location near me that I frequent rather often. After a bit of a drive over old logging roads through the hills I stop and pull my car off the side of the road and put on my pack and get my rifle at port arms. To get to my favoured camping area it is a 5 mile hike that for a short while follows an abandoned narrow-gauge railroad that some logging company built to expedite the extraction of resources from the area many years back. The place I like to set up camp is a tiny, elevated clearing in the pine trees next to a small creek from which I can get water. The area is a temperate rain forest of sorts, so there are 3-6 foot tall ferns everywhere, and in old-growth areas that have not fallen prey to logging, you can see the triple-canopy growth that is common to all rain forests. However, most of the forests around have been logged at some point so this sight is rare. I use a small shovel or a machete to clear out the ferns so I have a nice place to build a camp fire and an area to lay out my sleeping bag. The chopped down ferns double as a nice mattress.

After I pack up to leave, I take one last look at the campsite and it is obvious that a person has been camping there: the chopped down ferns are mashed flat where I slept on them and there is a small patch of bare earth where I have dug the fire pit and subsequently doused it with water then covered it over with dirt. Nature has clearly been disturbed. But nature always wins. Within a month, when I return the ferns have grown back so rapidly I cannot tell where I have previously camped. The whole area has been logged at some point in the past, but the only evidence is the occasional giant tree stumps that have large, mature pine trees growing out of them. Even the old railroad is returning to the earth; the railroad ties are disintegrating as insects bore into them and plant life grows on them. The iron rails are rusting and growing mold on them so as to appear almost like the rock from whence they came. Indeed, I’ve seen many elk and deer using the railroad as a convenient pathway to get from one clearing to the next. Nature does not care, it is will and power that will surge forward with even the most meagre of opportunities.

Metal is nature made music. Wild, powerful, strong. The corporate suits tried to strip-mine metal with glam and death-core. Hipsters tried to clear-cut metal with post-metal. SJWs are trying to pave metal over with politics. They can succeed in places and for a time, but the wild spirit of metal will always remain in some hidden corner of the world ready to burst forth again in mighty abundance. True metal is eternal and timeless and thus true metal will always win.

Tags: camping, eternity, metal, nature