Part 7: In which the author’s belly bursts

‘Forty-five years ago, I broke out with a most terrible skin disease all over me, which remained on me seven years, supposed to originate from measles; I also had indigestion, and the last two years of that seven years, I had a bad cough. I had bleeding of my right lung and had nightly sweats for two years.”

How’s that for an appetizing advertisement for a good restaurant?

It is the opening of a testimonial written by Martin Shatley in 1925 about a radium spring he discovered in 1890 in northwestern North Carolina that miraculously cured his ailment.

”It has been about 35 years since I found the spring and got well. I have done as much hard work since that time as any man I know of, and after I was cured, many people went to this spring with skin diseases, rheumatism and nervous diseases, and were all cured.”

People still come to Shatley Springs in Ashe County, and they still drink the water. But most people don’t come to have their afflictions cured, but rather to have their hunger assuaged.

For while the radium water still flows freely, and free — anyone can drive up with a bottle and fill up — it is the restaurant at Shatley Springs that is the real miracle.

Shatley Springs is on North Carolina 16, five miles north of Jefferson and eight miles south of the Virginia border.

It is found in a grassy hollow with a fishing pond in the middle. Around the pond are a handful of ramshackle cabins.

Their floors creak and the breeze blows through the walls; a single, 100-watt bulb hangs in the middle of the ceiling in each room. There is nary a picture on the wall, and the exterior red paint is flaking off the clapboard.

It is spartan in a way a Spartan would never tolerate. But then, the room costs only $45 per night for two. And the air is cool and clean, and you can hear the birds in the trees and the rustling leaves. There is no interstate, and the quiet is salutary.

But walk up to the large, red ranch house with the roaring kitchen fans. Screen doors slam and ruddy-faced people laugh and talk as they always do in the North Carolina mountains.

Dinner is the specialty of the house. If you need to save money, you can opt for the single entree dinners. Fried chicken is $7.95, country ham is $8.95. But I’ve never actually met anyone who has ordered them.

No, the meal of choice is the ”Family Style Country Meal,” which gives you, for an outrageous $16.95 per person, enough food to bloat an army.

There are ham and chicken,

Mashed potatoes,

Green beans,

Creamed corn,

Fried cabbage,

Pinto beans,

Fried apples,

Cole slaw,

Country gravy (the white kind),

Red-eye gravy,

Buttermilk biscuits,

And your choice of fruit cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

All washed down with radium water and iced tea as sweet as molasses.

And refills on everything, if the first round doesn’t rupture your diaphragm.

This is all Blue Ridge cooking, so the vegetables are all fresh and boiled with fatback or bacon and set down in front of you in bowls. This is not ”lean and healthy” cuisine, but it is real eatin’.

People walk into the large common eating area, but they waddle out. On the long wooden porch that runs the length of the building, old-timers sit in rocking chairs, smoke and chat with their neighbors.

And if you do stay overnight and manage to right yourself for breakfast, the family-style breakfast — which will set you back $9.95 — includes cereal, juice, eggs, bacon, ham, sausage, gravy, biscuits, hotcakes, potatoes, grits, baked apples, strawberry preserves and coffee. That’s not a list of possibilities to choose from; that’s breakfast. You get them all, set down on an old wobbly table by a bustling waitress.

NEXT: The Central Appalachians

Southern Appalachians: Mountain crafts

November 22, 2013

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Part 6: In which a sour old man says some difficult things about some very nice people

Alan Hollar

Alan Hollar is a wood carver from Crossnore. He stands about 6-foot-seven and wears a ball cap and big frame glasses. He is giving demonstrations on cutting lathe-turned wood bowls at the craft center at the Moses Cone mansion along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The craft center is a kind of fantasy world, filled with quilts, stained glass, preciously carved wood and beautifully glazed pottery. As soon as you enter, you are hit with the odor of sachet and the sound of Irish flute and dulcimer music.

None of this has anything to do with the Appalachian Mountains, except as it is marketed to wealthy yuppies looking for faux-authentic mountain crafts.

“It’s true, I suppose,” says Hollar. “It used to be that mountain crafts were things that people couldn’t buy and so made for themselves. Now, they can buy pretty much anything they need at the Wal Mart. Crafts have become things that cannot be made by machine.”

Folk Art Center, Blue Ridge Parkway

The problem is one of integrating a past of poverty and make-do with a present of money and art galleries. Hollar is certainly correct when he says, “A culture cain’t stand still.”

Appalachian mountain crafts has suffered from the same forces that stultify Native American arts. both cultures have not stood still and are part of the same 21st century that we all live and breathe, but the market has identified their niches, and forced a “brand” or identity on them that is inauthentic.

In terms of Native American art, there are many fully-integrated artists working, as Native Americans, without having to resort to Indian stereotypes — artists such as Rik Danay, Bob Haozous and Kay Walkingstick — but too often the art-buying public wants instead pots and blankets. It is why artist Fritz Scholder once exhorted, “Stop painting Indians!”

by Harrison Begay

Despite his warning, the market for so-called “traditional” Native American art is clotted with talking blue coyotes, lance-carrying warriors and never-ending rainbirds. And the inevitable “Bambi paintings” of deer and bear.

Originally, the creation of this Dorothy Dunn-style of Indian art was to help promote Native American arts and give talented Native artists a chance to make a living from their art. Perhaps it was too successful: Now, that style is considered “traditional,” and ordinary buyers of the art don’t want to look at anything that doesn’t fit the mold. And “Indian art” is a ghetto from which the truly talented feel pulled two ways: They want to escape the ghetto, yet, they want to create art from their cultural roots.

The Southern Highland Craft Guild has done something of the same for mountain crafts. It was formed in 1929, and was an attempt to make some money for poverty-sticken mountain folk.

Perhaps it has also worked too well, for there is little left of the mountains in these elegant doo-dads.

The tourists who glide through the Parkway Craft Center at Moses Cone Memorial Park, or the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville, N.C., want souvenirs more than art, and they want something that portrays the fantasy of a “simpler way of life” that people “used to live” in the rural mountains. So, they find candles, stained glass, soft-colored quilts and jewelry in the form of dogwood flowers or bluebirds and feel they have come in contact with a more authentic way of life.

But it ain’t so. Instead, they have come in contact with a successful marketing strategy.

Some of the art is very nice, even beautiful in its way, but it is a far cry from anything that was made back in the hollers and coves when if you needed a ladle, you carved one from a chunk of wood.

“We were born into a world filled with random shapes and odd angles,” Hollar says, “but we made for ourselves a world of wallboard cubicles and we long for something with a touch of that randomness we miss. That’s why people like those bowls with the uneven edges turned from wood boles.”

Burl vase by Alan Hollar

And Hollar’s bowls are beautiful: They exploit the essential beauty of woodgrain and its colors. He is a master craftsman. But no matriarch living in the cut-off coves of Appalachia before electrification who required a bowl for kneading dough would have been happy with one that sported a great hole in its side.

It isn’t only the visual arts. The mountains are full of music. There was church music — some of it nearly unlistenable — and dance music, and the music that was played on front porches when the aunts and uncles gathered together and played old “chunes.”

Emmett Lundy

You can find old recordings of some of that in the Alan Lomax collections. It is rough-hewn music, in a style that valued a keening, flat-affect voice — a style copied by Bill Monroe that he called the “high lonesome” — and always clearly amateur.

You can hear the old music in re-releases of those Lomax recordings, like those made in 1941 of Emmett Lundy from Graham County in Virginia. There is a plaintive sourness in the playing, learned from his teacher, Green Leonard. No one would call the music pretty, yet it is intensely beautiful. It is authentic.

The racks of CDs at the craft centers feature instead the commercial recordings of professional musicians who have created an ersatz “traditional” music that is hardly distinguishable from New Age pap. It is music with no angles or edges — completely unlike the hard-muscled people of the hills, who were all angles and edges — “with the bark still on.”

The soft-toned flute jigs on the stereo are like no music I ever heard in the Appalachians. Where were the scratchy fiddle tunes with every note slightly flat? Where were the affectless hymn tunes sung by straight-lipped mountain families? Why is that hammer dulcimer playing The Two Fairy Hills instead of the the strummed dulcimer playing Rock of Ages?

This is the mountain experience smoothed out and made marketable, giving the uninitiated the illusion of authenticity with none of the wood soot and bacon grease.

The CDs are on a rack by the register. They are all prettified.

“Do you have any really ugly music?” I ask. The young clerk — probably a college student from the flatlands come up to the mountains for a summer job among the “plainer, simpler folk” — doesn’t understand what I mean.

NEXT: food

Southern Appalachians: Pig Pickin’

November 21, 2013

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Part 5: In which temps perdu come alive for the author

Some 30 years ago, my wife and I were invited to Edd Presnell’s annual pig pickin’. It was an event in Watauga County, N.C., and attracted up to 200 invitees. My wife was a schoolteacher and had Edd’s granddaughter, Mona McGrew, in her class, and therefore wangled an invite.

Edd Presnell died in 1994, his wife, Nettie, three years later. The pig pickin’ ceased to be a yearly occurrence. Sic transit.

Edd Presnell

The Presnell family had been in the area — mostly on the same mountain — since at least the time of Edd’s great-grandfather, James Presnell, who was born in 1796. The mountain was still full of Presnells, many of whom were named after presidents: James Monroe Presnell, Hoover Presnell, even Martin Van Buren Presnell.

Of the lot, Edward Lee Pressnell, known as Edd, was the most famous. He was a renowned makers of dulcimers, and a spectacular woodcarver. How much of his look was calculated, and how much was culturally inherited is hard to tell. He sported a hillbilly beard, was thin as a rail and wore overalls; his hair seemed as if it hadn’t been combed since the Truman administration, and maybe hadn’t been barbered, either. But inside his home was a lattice-work room divider he had carved, 8-foot tall, of mountain laurel and birds that was as delicate and refined as anything made by the best trained beaux-arts master.

It was not easy finding Edd Presnell’s place. It sat on the north face of Beech Mountain in Banner Elk, near Boone, N.C. and at the end of five miles of gravel road followed by another mile of tractor path.

You can see why he wanted to stay in a location so remote: From his back porch you could see not only the local mountains of Watauga County, but also parts of Tennessee and Virginia. Mt. Rogers, the highest point in Virginia, loomed on his horizon.

On the downhill side of his property there are deep woods and laurel thickets. His neighbors’ pasturelands cleared the view, so the trees never completely blocked it.

And in the middle of the several houses, barns and cabins at the end of the tractor path, Edd Presnell constructed two beautiful trout ponds.

The leathery patriarch rarely made an appearance at these shindigs. He was a shy man, but a generous one. He liked to see “young people have a good time.”

So Edd retreated to one of the farther cabins to play pinochle with his brother while everyone else whooped and hollered.

A pig picking, by the way, is when you roast a pig slowly, all day over a hickory coal fire, so the meat, sweet and juicy, pulls away from the bone.

It is like a great Fourth of July picnic, with every variety of Southern comestible. The ice tea flowed in rivers.

Two men were cleaning four or five trout in a bucket of water as we approached the ponds. Each wore a ballcap.

“This here’s a rainbow, thems others is browns,” said one, answering my question. “Edd stocks his ponds ev’y other year, so’s you only fish the top one this year and the bottom one next. That ways the fish get eatin’ big. Like this here.”

He held up a beauty about 15 inches long and glistening in the sun. He slid his barlow knife along the trout’s belly and gutted it, holding it underwater to clean the slop away, then with a movement that told of years of experience, knifed the head clean off.

“We save these for the cats,” he said, tossing the fishhead onto a pile of several.

Nearby was a cinderblock pit with a hog splayed out with its opened belly cavity spread flat on the rack over the hickory coals glowing with white-hot heat. One elder, in another ballcap, was tending to the pig, brushing it every while in a once with a sauce that seemed to help crisp the fat.

Next to the hog were the fillets of those trout we had watched being cleaned.

I am no Izaak Walton, but my wife convinced me I should give the trout pond a try. So, we borrowed a rod and a wad of biscuit dough and headed to the pond.

Presnell dulcimer

Across the water there was an artist of a fly fisher, with an angler’s cap, a canvas vest and a very impressive looking rod and reel, casting his line out over the water with the grace of a Fred Astaire.

“I just had the biggest trout I’ve ever seen up here,” he said. “Had him right up to the bank, but he pulled loose and I lost him.”

He cast his scintillating fly out once more and cranked it slowly back in.

“I love fishing up here. My and my wife come up every year from Goldsboro and have a great time. Edd really knows how to throw a pig pickin’.”

He swung his arm again and plopped the fly down in the middle of the pond like an expert.

“Have you caught anything yet,” we asked.

“Not yet, but I’ve never failed before. I wished I had that big one.”

Now, there are different reasons for fishing. The pro angler was a genuine artist, and I am sure that he received great satisfaction out of the perfection of form he attained in his sport.

But I have a different reason for fishing. Me, I like to eat trout. I’d use dynamite if it got me more fish to eat.

So, I wadded up doughballs on my hook and dropped it down in the water.

I cast my line out and the bait plinked reassuringly in the pond. Unfortunately, the hook was still at the tip of my rod. I tried once more and the line flew out a good two or three feet from the shore. A third time and my hook made it into deeper water. As I said, I’m no Izaak Walton.

In contrast, the pro in the vest, now on the other side of the pond to avoid the children who had gathered around us, was a ballet dancer, so graceful was the flick of his wrist, so classic was the arch of his line.

But it was my line that gave the tug. Something took over for me; maybe it was instinct, maybe it was years of watching Saturday afternoon fishing shows on the TV. I yanked the line in, letting the fish play with the spring of the rod and then he broke the water in a jumping, twisting splatter. The kids all started screaming. “A fish! A fish! He’s got one!”

And I gave one last pull and landed the trout on the grass. One of the kids freed the hook and threaded an anchor line through its mouth and gills. It was a handsome prize, glimmering like silver in the sunlight.

We anchored one end of the fishline in the soil of the bank and let the fish down into the cold water and I cast my line out again.

Meanwhile the horde of children had found other playthings. There were crawdads in the mud and they were digging for them and taunting the crustaceans into nipping the air with their claws. There were also bright blue dragonflies careening across the surface of the water. Godfinches flitted from shrub to shrub. My line pulled a second time.

I played with the second one just as I had the first and pulled him in. The pro on the other side was getting just a wee bit disgusted with me, I could tell. He still hadn’t landed anything. The kids dropped their crawfish and rushed over to see the new fish.

We added the second trout to the first on the anchor line and wadded another piece of dough on the hook. I cast it out and hit my spot in the water. The sun was climbing ever higher and hotter. Water striders walked over the quiet pond surface. I hooked another one.

This one was big. He must have been the same one that the pro had hooked earlier. He fought and splashed and flipped his gleaming body back and forth, but I cranked him in and landed him. He was about 17 inches long, impressive and handsome. The pro turned away. We added the big one to the string.

I caught two more fish before the call went out for dinner.

About 50 people were lined up for the beans, salads and vegetables. After piling our plates, we walked over to the pit and loaded up on pork and trout. Then we sat in the shade with about a dozen youngsters and lazily ate till our bellies burst.

A breeze stirred our maple tree and made a low hiss. I licked my fingers and rose for another round of victuals. Heaven couldn’t be more satisfying.

The pro found us and with a look of discomfort asked, “You fish often?”

“Almost never,” I said.

“Yer doing mighty good. What you using?”

I could imagine his flybox full of hand-tied flies, each a masterpiece.

“I use doughballs.”

He winced. “If’n it works, I guess you don’t need nothing else.”

And dull practicality won out over art once again, as it so often does in America.

Later, when we cleaned the fish, it turned into an impromptu anatomy lesson for the children who followed us around all day.

“Is that a girl fish or a boy fish,” one of them asked.

“This is a female,” I answered as I gutted the second trout. “See this here? This is her egg mass.”

“Eggs! That’s her eggs,” one girl shouted. They wanted to touch.

“Here, feel that.”

“OOOOoooogh!”

“Can I have the head?” asked one of the boys.

In the distance, behind the house, we could hear Edd’s wife, Nettie, singing “Wildwood Flowers” and “Amazing Grace” to a small audience.

Nettie Presnell

The clouds drifting across the skies, the herky-jerky of thousands of butterflies, the glistening blue of the dragonflies, the chirrup of the redwings, the splash of the trout, the laughter of children, the drawling conversation of the elders — they were all of a piece.

As the afternoon lengthened, carloads of guests began leaving and we gathered up our trout, wrapped in aluminum foil to take home to our freezer and started our dusty, gravel-filled way back off the mountain.

And as we drove off, we could see Edd, sitting on the front porch with Baxter, rocking back and forth, probably discussing rabbit hunting or the heat.

NEXT: Mountain crafts

Southern Appalachians: Ashe County NC

November 20, 2013

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Part 4: In which a mountain county is described

Mt. Jefferson

This morning, an incandescent white fog filled the river valley and the ground was covered with frost. The cows that graze on the bottom land exhaled steam, when you could see them at all. Yesterday was much the same; most of the afternoon was ”whited out,” meaning that everything past four or five feet from your eyes was obliterated by the mist.

Weather like this is one of my reasons for loving these mountains in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina. I have never seen so much weather. It is as though the weather were condensed, like a stew cooked down from a soup.

Even fair weather is magnified, the air clearer, the sun bigger and brighter, the clouds more manic. The air is often so clear that you’d swear you could resolve individual blades of grass on the side of Mount Jefferson, five miles away.

And the weather changes quickly and dramatically. It is all foretold on the face of Mount Jefferson, in the middle of North Carolina’s Ashe County.

We can see the mountain from the house we are staying at, out the kitchen window. It dominates the more populous half of Ashe County, raising its humped peak over the surrounding hills like ”a Charlemagne among his peers.”

Mount Jefferson will glow with sunlight one moment and turn dark and baleful the next, signifying the coming of a storm. He will evaporate before your eyes in portent of snow, growing whiter and whiter as the snow becomes a veil between our window and the peak. Some days he is blue, some days, gray. In early morning, the sunlight sparks the peak into a glowing orange. At other, very clear times, the mountain is green. Blue, Gray, Orange, Green — Union, Rebel, Protestant, Catholic — they all war on the mountainside.

And every day, the mountain has shown me something new in color, tone, shape, shadow, contrast, mist, camouflage.

And all night long, when the winds calm, as they seldom do, I can hear the rush of water over the rocks in the New River.

New River

Ashe County, in the extreme northwest corner of North Carolina, is 427 square miles of wrinkled green mountain irrigated by clear cascading streams. Away from any major highways, and with no high-profile attractions, it is not overrun with tourists, even in the height of summer.

The people who are sprinkled through these hills and hollows are open, friendly and helpful, especially in winter, when cooperation is a necessity.

The whole county, populated by only about 27,000 people, is a haven for outdoor activities, and visitors find plenty of fishing, canoeing, hiking and camping.

West Jefferson

The New River flows through Ashe County, or rather, both New Rivers, for it is divided into the North Fork and South Fork. Between them, they section off the county by thirds, running from the southwest to northeast.

The river is very old, the oldest in the New World according to some geologists, and it meanders like the Mississippi rather than straightaway seeking its own level and cascading over anything in its path, the way most mountain rivers do. And every other river in the state flows, eventually, southeast. The New River flows north, eventually joining the Kanawha River in West Virginia and then following the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the Gulf of Mexico.

The river twists and folds on itself so mazily that you are constantly surprised, on coming to the river by the highway, that it always flows in the opposite direction you would have thought it should.

About half the roads in the county are paved, but a large percentage are only gravel. Some are only Jeep trails. And all along these roads there are random mountain houses and bordering fences. Actually, the county seems divided in character into its southeastern and northwestern halves.

In the southeast, rolling knolls of pastureland at average heights between 2,500 and 3,000 feet above sea level look as if they had been misplaced from England’s Yorkshire. This half of the county is well populated. The county seat is Jefferson, with about 4,700 people; West Jefferson is slightly less populated but is more developed. When people go ”to town,” they mean West Jefferson. It’s where you’ll find Geno’s Pizza.

There are many farms with tobacco patches, cornfields and oceans of wheat. The biggest industry is beef cattle, and nearly every farmer in this half of the county grows his own steers. Dairy cows are common, too, and Ashe County has its own cheese factory, the only one in the state. Tours are popular, and so are samples.

Also in Glendale Springs is the Last Supper fresco painted by artist Ben Long IV in the 1970s at Holy Trinity Church. Long spent years in Italy studying the technique for painting on wet plaster and had searched vainly in the United States for a place to practice his craft. When he came to Ashe County in 1973, he approached Father Faulton Hodge with his proposal to make a fresco in his church and Hodge told him, ”We’ll take it. What’s a fresco?”

Actually, Long’s first work for Hodge and the parish was at the smaller and older St. Mary’s Church in Beaver Creek. His first work was a large painting of the pregnant Virgin Mary, holding her swollen belly. Some 75,000 people come each year to see the frescoes. Both churches are open 24 hours a day.

But the northwestern portion of the county is broken up with long, high mountains, and settlers have built tiny wind-weathered shacks in the coves. A few longer valleys are nicked with strings of homes, but there is none of the broad farmland that makes the other half of the county so habitable.

Ashe County was once called ”the Lost County” because it was hidden up behind the Blue Ridge — a virtual escarpment that separates the Appalachian Mountains to the west from the rolling hills of the Piedmont to the east — and there was virtually no way to travel up and down the Ridge to communicate with the rest of the state.

What travel and communication early Ashe County residents had was with Virginia, not North Carolina. Even now, there is only one road — North Carolina 16 — that dares climb the face of the Blue Ridge to enter Ashe County.

One of the results of the isolation was that early settlers felt an alienation from the rest of the state. Because they believed that the Raleigh government was ignoring them, portions of mountain North Carolina — including Ashe County, and parts of what would later become eastern Tennessee — seceded and formed their own state, which they named Franklin. It lasted from 1784 to 1788, eventually fizzling out when no one paid it much attention.

Historically, the mountains of the South have always been distinct from the rest of the region. Even during the Civil War, when Southern patriotism was supreme, abolitionist sentiment ran high among the poor farmers of the mountains, and the ”Underground Railway” had a regular stop in Ashe County. In fact, before the United States Geological Survey named the central peak after our third president, it was locally called Negro Mountain, or some less polite version of that, after the number of runaway slaves that found shelter in its shadow.

In 1840, there were just under a hundred registered (and legal) distilleries in Ashe County. When North Carolina voted itself dry, the distilleries went underground, or more properly, uphill.

Corn liquor is still being made. It is popular and available, despite the ”revenooers.” Commercial whiskeys are now available again, but many prefer the corn squeezings; it has a reputation for smoothness. ”Goes down like a pussycat; flies through your veins like a wildcat.”

A tax-paid legal and commercial version of the moonshine is available in some portions of the mountains for those who want to find out legally what it’s like to drink their hooch from a Mason jar.

The best times of year to visit Ashe County are the spring, when the season works its way up the mountain, trailing clouds of azalea and rhododendron glory behind; and fall, when the season comes back down the mountain, coloring all the trees with orange, yellow and red. Fall colors in the North Carolina mountains have few rivals anywhere.

NEXT: North Carolina Pig Pickin’

Southern Appalachians: Cades Cove

November 19, 2013

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Part 3: In which a Freethinker goes to Church

Big Creek, Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Tourists flock to Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They come to see old houses, old mills, the wooden tools of the past and the peculiar folkways of the Tennessee mountain people.

The Smokies are among the highest mountains in the East — their tallest peak is Clingman’s Dome, at 6,643 feet — but they aren’t a neatly organized range of peaks like the Tetons. Instead, they are a maze of headlands and coves, forks and ridges. And also unlike most Western mountains, they have been thoroughly lived in. At the bottom of every valley — which are locally called ”coves” — you can find either a farm or the remnant of one.

Cades Cove is particularly attractive, for it is a broad valley surrounded by darkly treed hills. It is rare to find a valley this wide and flat in the Southern Appalachians. And it was an attractive place for settlers to build and raise families.

So Cades Cove began its existence as a community in 1819, when the first settlers moved in. By midcentury, there were about 685 people living in 137 households.

The 5- by 2-mile cove now seems remote. To get there you have to drive 10 miles from the nearest town, or about 20 miles from the Sugarland Visitors Center down narrow, winding, crowded roads. If it is midsummer, you can expect to average 20 mph at best, although it will be frequent stopping and starting around congested areas where vacationers are tubing down Abrams Creek and the Little River.

It seems remote, but when it was a thriving community, it was no more remote than most like it in the mountains. It was not considered unusual to take three days for a shopping trip to Tuckaleechee to bring back the salt and sugar that you needed to go along with the produce you grew and the animals you raised.

Cades Cove got telephones and electricity about the same time as other communities in eastern Tennessee. It was not any place special.

But when the national park was created in 1934, Cades Cove was chalked off for abandonment. Most private properties were bought up; the remaining ones were bought up giving their residents lifelong leases. By the 1960s, all the residents were gone.

Cantilevered barn

I feel an odd sensation driving the 11-mile loop trail through the Cove following a caravan of tourists. For most of them, the log cabins and weathered corn cribs must look like something from hillbilly mythology. I’m sure most of them think of the Cove’s late residents as backward and misbegotten. They see the rough-hewn beams and the sorghum mill with its long pole for the mule to pull in a circle. They see the potbellied stoves and the rope beds and think the residents must be something out of a time machine, some forgotten remnant of the 19th century.

But it is different for me and my wife. Her folks came from these mountains and we once lived there together. She made corn-husk dolls as a girl, she cooked on a wood stove as an adult — and not all that long ago.

For the Southern mountain life has not disappeared. It is everywhere out there in the hills of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. It is a shame to see the log houses and cantilever barns presented as museum pieces. You can see dozens more like them, with people living in them and using them, all through Buncombe, Ashe, Watauga and Mitchell counties.

We stopped at the Primitive Baptist Church in Cades Cove, where a wiry, wizened old Southern man stood at the pulpit, reading through the Bible that rested on the lectern. He could have been the lean, sinewed type of farmer that used to work the fields here. But he was a visitor. He’d been here before and seemed proud that the Bible that he’d seen on his last trip was still there, unmolested by the tourists.

”Hit’s been there three years now and none the worse for wear,” he said. He also pointed at a box of a single layer of bricks on the floor in the middle of the room and said, ” ‘At’s where the stove use ter be, you can see the flashin’ for the stovepipe in the ceiling.” He obviously knew the church, or churches like it.

For you still can find them, whitewashed clapboard, warped foundations, unfinished floors and stiff pews, in scores of community churches throughout the region.

And that is the most peculiar part of Cades Cove. It is presented as a kind of museum. But you can attend a service at a church not one board different from its exhibit, an active congregation of the same leather-faced, hard-farming people.

They still grow apples, they still grind corn. They still slaughter hogs and make sausage. They still singe off the pinfeathers of a chicken that they are going to fry for dinner.

“Leather britches” drying

They still make apple butter, still put up fruits and vegetables. They still make half-moon pies from biscuit dough and dried fruit. They still make ”leather britches” — the dried green beans threaded together on a string. Many a home still has a springhouse where milk is kept cold in the running water.

They still make hay from the grass in the bottom lands and keep hives of honeybees. These things are not quaint customs of the past, but a way of life.

Sure, the log cabin very well may have a satellite dish on its roof, and the mule has given way to a John Deere.

But what is important is not the remoteness of history, but its continuity.

NEXT: Ashe County, NC

The Appalachians: Southern Mountains

November 18, 2013

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Appalachians Part 2: In which the author eats a persimmon

On a late October morning, after a solid frost, you can find a bushel of brownish mottled balls scattered on the ground in the rime under the persimmon tree. They look spoiled and perhaps their thin skin has cracked.

You pick one up and tear its skin wide, forcing the orange flesh through, against your teeth. You push the soft, puddinglike flesh against the roof of your mouth with your tongue, separating it from the hard, grasshopper-size pits that you suck on for a few minutes before spitting out.

There are few wild foods sweeter and more delicious than the ‘simmon you find for yourself on an old, deserted farm in the mountains of North Carolina.

The farmhouse has lost most of its paint, there are spider webs on the dusty windows, and a few boards have fallen through on the front porch. The house sits at the bottom of a hill, where hay still is mown in the summer. At the top, there is the edge line of a hardwood forest. At this time of year, along the creek at the bottom of the slope, the red maples are scarlet and the sweet gums are yellow.

And the ubiquitous zigzag rail fence will seem to outlast everything in the decaying farmhouse but its chimney.

It is the Blue Ridge, the first range of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. It rises as low hills in northern Alabama and continues north, growing higher through Georgia, South and North Carolina and Tennessee, then thinning out and shrinking again in Virginia, only to sink below the soil once more in Maryland.

The Blue Ridge is what we think of first when we consider the Southern mountains. Its people, its wildlife and its landscape are distinct: black bears, porcupines and possums play in thickly forested hills interspersed with valleys, or ”coves,” where leather-skin farmers grow feed corn and burley tobacco and pasture their cattle.

These Eastern mountains are very different from the higher, wilder, but simpler ranges of the West. They are lower for one thing — the highest is Mount Mitchell, at a mere 6,684 feet. They are round, soft, fuzzy with trees.

And they are inhabited.

There are wildernesses in the Blue Ridge, accessible only by serious hikers, but you can’t really think of the Appalachians without thinking of the people who live there. Every creek-filled crease in the folded rock has its two-story clapboard house, its barn, springhouse and root cellar.

In the cool fall days, you can see the blue smoke rising from stone chimneys and hear the distant sound of chain saws bucking another cord of wood.

Times have changed some: You also might find a satellite dish in the yard. Because these old houses — some a century and a half old — are so hard to heat, the descendants of their builders sometimes have moved into a mobile home parked right next to the noble old house.

However, you will always find the woodpile, the kitchen garden and the pickup truck on the dirt driveway.

The people of the mountains, however, are not mere stereotypes.

By and large, they are comfortably in the 21st century. There are fast foods, hardware stores and Kia dealerships. High-school kids wear Nikes and everyone waiting for the schoolbus seems to have an iPhone.

However, there is something different about them, their clipped dialect, wary sense of humor, flat-pitch singing, white-clapboard religion and, above all else, an unbreakable attachment to the land. Those who leave spend the rest of their lives pining for it, dreaming of going back.

”I lied to my God when I left the mountains and kem to these devilish cotton mills,” said one old mountaineer, quoted by Appalachian historian Horace Kephart. ”Ef only he’d turn me into a varmint I’d run back tonight. Boys, I dream I’m in torment; and when I wake up, I lay thar an’ think o’ the spring branch runnin’ over the root o’ that thar poplar; and I say, could I git me one drink o’ that water I’d be content to lay me down and die.”

For nature is so insistent, both for the brutality of its winter and the beauty of its summer, that the mountain population grows right into the rocks and soil of the hillsides. Pull one out and his roots remain in the ground.

I know. I have become one of them.

Everything about the Southern Appalachians sticks in one’s innards.

So that when the midwinter snows close the schools for weeks at a time and the white tufts gather in the pine needles, deadening all the sound of the landscape, you might hear in the distance the county plow scraping the pavement and the clatter of tire chains.

The hillsides are scratchy with gray branches and beech trees with smooth aluminum bark, and last year’s dry papery copper leaves rattle in the breeze.

Then the spring: It is spring when the Appalachians are most themselves.

The cool humid air hangs as fog in the river bottoms and the dew hangs on the stamens of the rhododendron, which snake out of the flowers like a lizard tongue.

Witch hazels spread over the ice-water stream.

The area’s waterfalls are at their peak, spreading water like a coat of varnish over the gray, lichened and mossy granite.

There is color under your feet and over your head. The redbud tree spatters the forest with a spray of reddish purple; the wake-robin grows pinker by the day. There are buttercups, columbine, maypops, geraniums, trilliums, mayflowers, fire pinks and yellow lady’s slipper.

Everywhere, low under your ankle, there are the leaf-whorl and drooping antenna-flower of the common humble violet.

The mountain winters are frozen solid, so when the spring thaw comes, the whole landscape pops open.

And no matter where I was living, when spring came, I thought of it in these mountains.

Next: Cades Cove, Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Backbone of the East: The Appalachians

November 17, 2013

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The East Coast of North America varies more widely than any other region of the continent. Westerners are Westerners, but no one could confuse a Manhattanite with a Cajun, a Down Easter with Virginia gentry.

There are drawls in the South, missing R’s in New England, even French in Quebec.

But there is one thing that ties the East together, a kind of central nervous system that defines both its history and emotional core: the Appalachian Mountains.

Running from southwest to northeast for 2,000 miles from Alabama to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Appalachians are a true cordillera, not a single mountain range of peaks but a chain of ranges that span a continent.

There are the Unakas, the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, the Green, White, Black, Blue and Brown mountains, the Berkshires and Catskills, the Notre Dames and Shickshocks.

They were this nation’s first frontier, a physical barrier to continental expansion in the 18th century that helped define the original 13 colonies.

It took an unusual sort of pioneer to settle the green stony hills, and their inhabitants to this day maintain much of their independent nature. It is one of the strengths of the Appalachians.

They are among the oldest mountains — parts are more than a billion years old — and they are also structurally complex.

They can be divided into three very different sections from east to west. This structure is clearest in Virginia.

There in the front range of the Appalachians are the old, volcanic Blue Ridge, rising abruptly from the Piedmont. Behind it lies the broad, fertile Great Valley — a kind of cordillera of valleys — best-known in northern Virginia as the Shenandoah Valley. The Ridge and Valley Province comes next, fronted by the Alleghenies. It is a long series of low sedimentary ridges, like a line of breakers at the shore. In these loaf mountains are some of the nation’s early iron and copper mines.

Behind that is the Appalachian, or Cumberland Plateau, the wide belt of rocky bumps of almost equal height extending through most of West Virginia and into Kentucky. In these hills, miners still dig out the soft, bituminous coal that is the nation’s greatest single natural resource.

But the Appalachians are also partitioned from north to south. It is traditionally divided into the southern, central and northern sections: The first, from Alabama to Maryland, includes the highest peaks in the East. The second, running through Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, are mostly long ridges. And in the north, encompassing New England and Atlantic Canada, the mountains grow once more in height and ruggedness.

For the several blog entries, we will look at the Appalachians and the people who live in them, taking them section by section.

NEXT: The Southern Appalachians

The Dumbification of a nation

November 16, 2013

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”For one million dollars, how do you spell IQ?”

If you asked America that question, America would not win a million dollars.

What can I say? When Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was popular on network TV, a study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that most Americans thought it counted as educational television.

Some 70 percent of those asked also identified the Oprah Winfrey Show as ”serving their children’s educational needs.”

It has only gotten worse since then.

As a nation, we are dumbing down. We have decided, like one third-grader told my wife when she was teaching, that ”my mama says there’s only so much the brain can hold or it will explode.” And we’re playing it safe.

So we think the questions Regis Philbin asked were actually tough.

”Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

Although, actually, most of the questions on that show involved celebrities rather than past presidents. The only Grant who counted was Hugh.

Another study found that 80 percent of seniors at 55 top universities flunked or nearly flunked a basic high school history test.

So that, nowadays, it is rare to find an actual quiz show on TV, outside Jeopardy, which keeps up a decent and atavistic standard. Instead of watching smart people answer questions, we now prefer to watch people being stupid and doing stupid things on “reality TV.” Perhaps this gives us the illusion that if we are not as idiotic as the contestants, perhaps we are now the “smart” ones.

Nothing says as much about the course of empire than the slow dumbing down of quiz shows, from the really arcane questions that Allen Ludden asked on the G.E. College Bowl to the pap that passes for knowledge on Millionaire. It is no surprise that in its current syndicated incarnation Millionaire is hosted by Cedric the Entertainer.

Nowadays, we are amazed when a contestant remembers the name of the cute little girl on Family Affair.

It tells us what we, as a culture, value. And we don’t value learning. We value entertainment.

In the past, even people who didn’t have much education valued it and made sure their children received its benefits. Older schools often have the names of great thinkers or artists carved into friezes around their sides: Aristotle, Mozart, Pasteur, Newton. They stood for high goals we should set and aim our efforts at.

That all has changed.

It isn’t merely that schools being built now might scribe the names of Katy Perry, Justin Bieber or Beyonce, but that we think there should be no names at all.

For in our warped sense of democracy, we have decided that ”all men are created equal” means that no one should be better than anyone else.

I never have understood this: We somehow maintain the belief that there are basketball players who are more talented than everyone else, and we reward them richly. We keep the belief that there are more successful CEOs and reward them richly too. But somehow we are not to believe — or at least applaud the fact — that there are some people who are smarter or more talented academically or artistically. We reward such people only with suspicion.

And we make our education system inane to the point that everyone can earn a ”B” and keep their wonderful sense of self-esteem.

Then we wonder why our kids don’t know where Chicago is on a map, can’t balance a checkbook, or believe George Washington was the general on D-Day.

Obviously, we decide, our school standards are set too high, and we lower them yet further.

For it isn’t just the students who don’t know anything of history, geography or spelling but also their parents and teachers who don’t know and don’t think it important.

Another study, by the non-profit Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition, found that half of all current education majors in college — those who will become the teachers of our children — don’t read books other than what is required for class. And 60 percent think there is too much emphasis placed on books.

What do they want instead? If they are like most Americans, they want to be entertained. They want wall-to-wall television. And they’re getting it.

It is the democratization of culture, so that if you have the Encyclopedia Britannica on one side and Project Runway on the other, we decide they have equal weight.

Learning gives us the context to understand events. It prevents us from making egregious choices. It gives us skepticism.

Learning turns us into individuals rather than demographic statistics, rather than mere consumers. It gives us the confidence to make difficult choices and makes us the free agents for political choice that democracy was originally meant to nurture.

But we have become instead a nation of intellectual and emotional infants, swayed by commercial advertising, hoodwinked by ”alternative” science, led by politicians who can utter no thought longer than a sound bite.

We have the world’s largest and most sophisticated military yet are left defenseless by our own embrace of ignorance. Read your Gibbon.

Altered States

November 12, 2013

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Bing Crosby: If you kill me, how are you going get the bird? And if I know you can’t afford to kill me, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?

Bob Hope: Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill.

Crosby: Yes, that’s … That’s true. But, there’re none of them any good unless the threat of death is behind them. You see what I mean? If you start something, I’ll make it a matter of your having to kill me or call it off.

Hope: That’s an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides. Because, as you know, sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.

Crosby: Then the trick from my angle is to make my play strong enough to tie you up, but not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment.

Hope: By gad, sir, you are a character.

Crosby: Buh, buh, buh, boooo.

Read those lines and in your head, hear them in the familiar voices of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, and instead of a detective story, you are on the road in a comedy. “Road to Malta”? Dorothy Lamour as Brigid O’Shaughnessy?

This is a new game you can play, entirely in your head and using your auditory imagination. My brother explained it to me last week, saying he sometimes has trouble going to sleep at night, and instead of counting sheep, he recasts classic films in his mind. It’s a neat idea, and needn’t serve solely as a soporific for the insomniac — any more than the Goldberg Variations.

There are two contending variants of this game. The first, like above, is to cast wildly inappropriate actors. Imagine these famous lines spoken by Tony Randall:

“You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

Perhaps he was talking to Oscar Madison when he speaks those lines.

“Okay, you know you don’t have act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not with me. Oh, maybe just whistle. You remember how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together … and blow.”

I am imagining that spoken by Lily Tomlin’s bag lady character.

It can go the other way round, too. In Slingblade, the main character begins: “I reckon what you guys want to know is what I’m a-doing in here. I reckon the reason I’m in here is ’cause I’ve killed somebody. But I reckon what you guys are wantin’ to know is how come I killed somebody, so I reckon I’ll start at the front and tell you.”

Now imagine that said, not by Billy Bob Thornton, but in the round, dulcet, veddy British tones of Sir John Gielgud.

The second variant isn’t about finding the absurd, but considering what could have been real casting choices. Imagine, say, George Raft saying “You dirty rat,” or James Cagney saying, “You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!”

Or imagine Jack Nicholson saying, “I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya punk?”

Nicholson has such a distinctive voice, it’s possible to imagine quite easily the sound of him saying, “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chi-an-ti.” No, it wouldn’t be better than Anthony Hopkins, but you can hear it in Nicholson’s voice, can’t you.

You can recast whole movies in your head. Imagine Casablanca, like an the earlier versions of The Maltese Falcon, with Ricardo Cortez as Rick, Bette Davis as Ilsa, and the cast filled out with Pat O’Brien as Victor Laszlo (almost anyone would be less wooden than Paul Henreid), Eric Blore as Captain Renault, Sig Ruman as Major Strasser and Arnold Stang as Ugarte. I really don’t think we want to see Mantan Moreland as Sam.

The varieties are endless. Drift off to sleep one night considering Charlie Sheen saying, “I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me … but I can assure you now … very confidently … that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave … I can see you’re really upset about this … I honestly think you should sit down calmly … take a stress pill and think things over … Dave … stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave …… Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.”

Or imagine Leslie Nielsen in Airplane! saying, “Sometime when the team is up against it, and the breaks are beating the boys, tell ’em to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock, he said, but I’ll know about it and I’ll be happy.”

Oh wait, he’s already done it. And he didn’t smell too good.

The Maxim Gun

November 11, 2013

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Nobody writes epigrams anymore, and we are the worse for it. Instead, they are too busy writing Tweets. The difference? A Tweet says in 140 characters what no one needs to say. An epigram says in a few short words what can be unfolded and stretched out into a book: It is a seed waiting to sprout in the mind of the hearer. A Tweet goes everywhere in the world, but goes nowhere.

A Tweet is flaccid and generally pointless; an epigram, or maxim, is a gun that fires rapidly.

La Rochefoucauld

I love rambling through such terse cynics as La Rochefoucauld, and I eat up the ”eternity in a phrase of glass” of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the punchy paragraph perorations Henry Thoreau.

I don’t claim to be any Martial, but over the years, I’ve squeezed out a few. Here are some, strung together and pretending to be pearls:

–› Curiosity is the libido of art.

–› Art doesn’t come from the brain; it comes from the base of the spine.

–› I don’t want to know an artist is clever; I want to know he is more alive than me.

–› We need to know that the moments of time are connected to one another and are not merely adjacent.

–› Meaning depends on ambiguity. The more precise a word is, the less it describes.

–› You can forget knowledge; understanding changes your life.

–› It is the conservative’s impotence that he can only react, never create.

–› Ultimately, what counts is not the wisdom of Solomon, but stories of that wisdom.

–› Design is your awareness of everything in the frame.

–› Western art is really a branch of physics.

–› Art history is fine for the historians, but the rest of us must watch not to be hit by the flying debris.

–› Reality is no excuse.

–› What you know prevents learning.

–› There can be no great beauty that doesn’t know tragedy.

–› There are those for whom the world is rote. For whom knowledge is an orderly collection of facts, not the experience of understanding. For whom a set of rules prescribes behavior and describes art, music, politics, commerce. They are the managers, the commissars, the education reformers — for them, the planet turns on a dry axle.

–› To the degree that you use someone else’s words to express yourself, to that degree you don’t understand what you are saying.

–› The difference between a commercial artist and a fine artist is that a commercial artist knows what he is doing.

–› Art is the discovery or creation of meaning and order from the chaos of perception and experience.

–› The artist knows that 1 plus 1 equal 3. There is the one apple, the other apple and the two together.

–› Art is not a product; it is a byproduct.

–› A fact is a fragment, a truth is a wholeness.

–› Science is the test we give to hard facts, art is the test we give to everything else.

–› Art makes you aware that you are alive. That is not always very pleasant.

–› Art worth remembering is art that tackles knotty problems. Everything else is wallpaper.

–› Entertainment diverts us from the cares of life; art makes us feel alive. The two things are opposites.

–› Design is not a set of rules, it is a level of awareness.

–› All the questions that matter are insoluble.

–› Civilization is an irrational fear of the irrational.

–› Art creates civilization, not the other way around.

–› Everyone asks questions; intellectuals ask questions about the questions.

–› Opposites do not exist in the world separate from the language that describes them.

–› One end of the cigar is lit, the other is where we draw smoke. We call the two ends opposites, but there is only one cigar.

–› You can teach knowledge, but understanding has to be learned.

–› Aesthetics is the use of large words to describe what you can feel in your fingertips without any words at all.

–› Everything changes, said Heraclitus. Nature is a verb; a noun is only a parking space.

–› All art is regional art; New York City is a region, too.

–› A Truth is never probable.

–› A Truth satisfies an inner need for order.

–› It’s not what you know, but what you are willing to be aware of.

–› Words are the smoke screen art attempts to penetrate.

–› You must look at art longer than you can stand.

–› Boredom is an essential part of the art process, for artist and viewer alike.

–› Art starts out with only one belief: that the intuitions and emotions of the artist are valid. Period.

—Richard Nilsen

Southern Appalachia: Shatley Springs

Southern Appalachians: Mountain crafts

Southern Appalachians: Pig Pickin’

Southern Appalachians: Ashe County NC

Southern Appalachians: Cades Cove

The Appalachians: Southern Mountains

Backbone of the East: The Appalachians

The Dumbification of a nation

Altered States

The Maxim Gun