Tag Archives: appalachia

The view from the top of the mountain gives you the conventionally Romantic view of the landscape, the long view, closer to heaven and further from the streets. The view is pristine, and the tiny ants below, with their Ford Pintos and 7-Elevens, hardly muck up the scene.

It is the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, of Frederic Edwin Church, of Albert Bierstadt and the landscape stands in for a kind of vast, sublime Eden.

This is the view of West Virginia promulgated by its official state song: “Almost Heaven.” And it isn’t that such a view is false. It isn’t false — there really is great beauty in the mountainscape of the state as seen from its peaks — but it is partial. Conversely, it is easy to see the bottoms of the mountains as some sort of dystopia: the epitome of Appalachia and its poverty, meth use, grime, coal-mining eco-disaster and educational malaise.

But there is a Romanticism of the hill-bottoms, too. I don’t mean a nostalgia for the black-and-white WPA photographs and the “simpler, old-timey folksiness.” That kind of Romanticism is a refusal to recognize reality. That isn’t really Romanticism, it is escapism.

No, I mean that the soot, the coal trains, the sludgy stream in the mountain cove, the old homes, with their collapsing porches and front yard full of automotive detritus can elicit their own sense of the sublime.

You drive through the valleys of West Virginia coal country, around the impeding hills to the next valley and you pass grade crossings, coal tipples, rusting car frames half submerged in the streams, and lines of houses just up the hill from the road. Next to the road is the railroad track and next to that is the stream, all following the same geography.

The central part of the state, the Appalachian Plateau, is a weathered peneplain, where all the mountains are rounded bumps all about the same height, like the mountains children put into their tempera paintings, one seen in between two others.

It is primarily in these mountains that coal is mined. And in those valleys, crossed with a braid-work of streams, railroad tracks and roads, that most people live and work.

In the south, you have McDowell County, a center of coal production country spreading into Kentucky and western Virginia. The collapse of the industry means that the population is one-fourth what it was in 1950, poverty is rampant, and for those men that remain, the average lifespan is the lowest in the U.S. — 12 years shorter than the national average.

In the plateau region, which is what most people think of as “typical” West Virginia, the roads meander through the V-notches between the hills; it is impossible to drive in a straight line anywhere. You are always curving around some mountain into the next valley and around the next mountain.

Until the opening of the West Virginia Turnpike and I-77 and I-79 (work not completed until 1987), traveling anywhere in West Virginia was a slow and tortuous process, and locations not a hundred miles apart as the crow flies, could be more than 250 by car. Aside from the chute-the-chute of the Interstate system, driving in the state is still pretty much a slalom.

In the small towns, smeared longways along the streams and tracks, the hardware stores and groceries have largely been supplanted by Dollar Stores and coin laundries, and the largest private employer in McDowell County is the Walmart. There are satellite dishes — many dangling and unhooked. The macadam at the gas station is potholed and the store sign advertises prices for cigarettes by the carton.

But, despite this triumph of entropy, the landscape has significance. It has meaning: Just ask any who live there. They may be needy to escape, but if they leave, they pine to return. It is a landscape that gets under your skin, like coal dust gets under your fingernails.

It is a mythic landscape, not a pristine one. It tells us things about the universe and about life.

It is a landscape with its own hell: underground fires that can last decades and at night glow red and orange like the combustion of hell. Some count over 500 such fires in West Virginia. Avernus may be the gate to the underworld for the ancient Romans, but it is West Virginia in the New World.

The slow rusting of old refrigerators and Chevys, and abandoned buildings overgrown with weeds and vines, their glass broken out and now enameled with spray-can art, and the closed factories, with lines of smokestacks — these all tally the losses, the sucking down into the past of the present, spinning like water around a drain before disappearing into oblivion. This, too, is sublime. We feel it more in places like West Virginia; it is instantly visible.

Also, because the land is littered with the obsolete and abandoned, you can see them, can pay attention. In suburbia, familiarity has dulled our senses and we hardly notice the clapboards, the street curbs, the cars in the shopping center parking lots, the school buildings, the very trees that line the roads. They are there to be seen, but who actually looks?

In this moonscape of detritus, waste, loss and forgetting, the details are burned once again into us, made unfamiliar by rot and decay, so we can see them again. The very “thingness” of each chesspiece on this gameboard of depletion makes them palpable and gives them presence, and presence imbues meaning — significance.

There is a difference between the pretty and the beautiful. Postcard sunsets and green mountain vistas are all pretty enough, but they distract us from the essential facts; they are a magician’s misdirection, keeping our eye from the real thing. As Tom Robbins wrote, “The ugly may be beautiful; the pretty, never.” The real thing is our gaze into the eye of eternity, and you get that from contemplating anything bigger, vaster, scarier, more overwhelming than yourself.

Yes, you can look at the old tires and relic houses and see only a failed economy, but you look instead at the passing of time engraved on those same objects and you see intense beauty.

Northern Appalachians: Maine II

December 1, 2013

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Part 5: In which we consider living in Maine

Maine is poor and that makes it rich.

Compare it with suburban Massachusetts and you see the difference. In the hills around Boston, the old homes have added jalousie windows — large panes of plate glass — and behind them you can see a collection of things bought in antiques shops. Out front is a Volvo or a Beemer.

But in backwoods Maine, the same antiques have gathered dust in the old farmhouse since they were new. Out front is a rusted Chevrolet or a Ford pickup.

The New England homes, with their thin clapboards, are thickly painted and repainted their chalky white, and the paint nevertheless peels back on the window trim, showing gray, weathered wood underneath. The foundations are wavy with age and the lines of clapboard match them, looking like uneven topographic lines of a map. Screen doors have holes; barn doors sag on their hinges. But it is the sagging of use, not of neglect. In Rumford Point, for instance, many homes proudly tell the date they were built. You see ”1762” on one door, ”1780” on another. On one small building, you see ”1964,” which is a joke.

Along the Androscoggin River are tall-steepled churches left over from the middle of the past century, still with their signs out front: Services held 10:30 a.m. Sunday.

One of the characteristics you notice is that the farmhouses are connected to the barns by a covered series of adjacent outbuildings. The winters are so severe that no one wants to go outside to tend the livestock, so you pass from the kitchen to the garage to the toolshed to the barn, all in toasty comfort. Well, as toasty as you can be when the siding boards are as loose as lattice and don’t always come down to the dirt, leaving an ankle-high draft.

There are scrollwork on the eaves, wide fans over the door transoms, white fences along the sidewalks and, even in midsummer, storm windows. For even in July, on a wet, rainy day, it can be a raw, humid 70 degrees and it gets into your joints, so you feel arthritic. Or perhaps they are needed for protection against mosquitoes as big as hailstones that gather in swarms in cool, muggy air.

But the countryside is poor, or if not poor — because that brings to mind inner-city malnourishment and anomie — certainly not well-off. As in much of southern Appalachia, the poverty is misleading. The people own their homes, grow their own food, know their own land. There is a Yankee self-sufficiency that grows with the spartan winters, lack of amenities and isolation.

NEXT: The Appalachians enter Canada

Northern Appalachians: Maine

November 30, 2013

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Part 4: In which we enter the landscape of the mind

Each of the United States has its own flavor, its own existence as myth. It is the sense one has, if one does not live in that state, but imagines what it would be like to visit.

One imagines what Arizona must be like, with its cowboys and cactus, but the reality of Phoenix — “Cleveland in the Desert” — negates that myth. That is the nature of myth.

Some states have bigger personae. California, for instance, which existed as myth both for “Forty-Niners” and for Okies. Montana offers big skies and clean air. Oregon had its trail and Mississippi has its Yoknapatawpha County.

Texas claims for itself the largest myth, although it is hard to warrant such big ideas if you have actually been to Midland or Odessa. Texas is only big in hectares. Otherwise, it is the state of large hats as substitutes for small manhood.

Each state has its mythic presence, although it is hard to make the case for Delaware as anything but the “gateway to New Jersey,” and the Garden State gains any resonance it has only from Tony Soprano and Bruce Springsteen.

But one state led all the rest historically in this landscape of the mind, as a special place in the American imagination, a place you dream about when you think your daily life is too mundane.

Lubec

Historically, the state that has had the longest claim on the American spirit is Maine, with its deep woods and rocky coast, its taciturn, independent people and its echoing loons. Maine is the original great escape, the place to go to return to nature and feel what it is like canoeing across a backwoods lake with a mist rising from the water.

Maine is the place Henry David Thoreau went when his Walden Pond seemed too citified. Maine is the place that dozens of American artists went to find some glimmer of inspiring wilderness.

It’s also the place the 19th-century robber barons went for summer vacations.

As America has expanded westward, Maine has lost some of its magic, but it is still a mythical place, drawing millions of visitors every year.

But there isn’t a single Maine. Regionally, there are at least four Maines.

The first is the southern coast, which first attracted a wealthy clientele a hundred years ago. This is where old money came for the summer. It is where former President George H.W. Bush had his place in Kennebunkport. It is also home to the new Yuppie tourism centers on Penobscot Bay, where you can always get a good brioche: Camden and Rockport. They are not much different, in their way, from Carmel, Calif., or Sedona, Ariz. — all trendy shops and new museums. You visit L.L. Bean in Freeport, and see a hundred other factory outlet stores.

Mooselookmeguntic Lake

Then, there is the mountainous Maine of the western part of the state with its thousand lakes, from Rangeley Lake to Mooselookmegunticook. This is the part of Maine famous for its out-of-place town names: Mexico, Norway, Paris. It is a place to go for fishing and camping or renting a cabin for a week.

The large northern part of the state is especially impressive. Vast tracts of woodland crisscrossed by narrow logging roads down which rumble the most frightening, earthshaking pulpwood trucks, piled high and tenuously with rattling bundles of spruce trunks. It is the north of Baxter State Park and Mount Katahdin. This is the Maine that Thoreau wrote about in his book, The Maine Woods. It is also the part of the state, on its eastern side, where they grow potatoes.

But it is the fourth Maine that I love the most: the upper coast, from Mount Desert Island to the Canadian border.

This is Down East. It is the least touched by commercialism. It is still composed of blue-collar working towns where men go out to fish or pull lobsters from the rocky-bottomed sea. It is old wooden houses on granite foundations and cars rusted out from wet, salty winters.

Otter Cove, Acadia NP

It is called Down East because when 19th-century sailing packets traveled up the coast from Boston, they sailed downwind, with the prevailing breezes abaft. Back then, Maine was still part of Massachusetts. Maine owes its statehood to slavery: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 let the slave state Missouri enter the union, but separated Maine from Massachusetts and entered it as a state at the same time to keep a balance of free and slave states in Congress.

The coast of Maine is about 250 miles long, as the crow flies, but it must have been a very drunken crow that first flew the distance. With all the bays and headlands, the actual distance of that zig-zag coastline is closer to 3,000 miles. And that’s not counting the islands, thousands of them.

Mount Desert Island is the largest of them. It is properly pronounced Mount “Dessert,” as if it were filled with chocolate moose, but most people just call it MDI and be done with it. MDI is the home of Acadia National Park, one of the most beautiful in America.

Monument Cove, Acadia NP

It is also the home of Bar Harbor, one of the most congested towns. In the summer, Bar Harbor is a vacation nightmare, with no parking, crowded restaurants and no room at the inn.

Acadia National Park covers about half the island and includes Cadillac Mountain, the tallest mountain on the East Coast north of Rio de Janeiro. At 1,530 feet, it catches the first rays of sunlight to hit the U.S. each day.

A road to the top provides splendid views.

But it is the view of Cadillac Mountain, rather than the view from it that is best. And the best views are from the coast roads that continue farther down east.

The real Down East begins beyond MDI. From Ellsworth — which may look like one unending K mart and KFC — you drive east and north on U.S. 1 and you leave all the tourists and development behind.

Fox Lake

The towns you pass are small and picturesque: Sullivan, Gouldsboro, Sorrento, Winter Harbor, Jonesport. You see tall church steeples and town squares with bronze statues of World War I soldiers.

This is Maine for the traveler rather than the tourist. You won’t find many fancy restaurants, and the motels are all low-dollar. Look instead for breakfast in the local lunch counter with the lobstermen. There are no “destination locations.” You have to be interested in the place for itself, and not for an amusement park.

If you are looking to get away from it all, Down East is the definition of the phrase.

Machias

There are mountains to be climbed, woods to be hiked, lakes to be canoed. There are heaths to be gleaned of their blueberries and birds to scout out and listen to.

Blueberry heath

If you hike in the woods behind Sullivan, off Taunton Bay, you will find the abandoned granite quarries that used to provide curbstones for the cities of the East Coast.

Climb 1,069-foot Schoodic Mountain for the panoramic view. Or if that is too high, try 397-foot Tucker Mountain. A walk through the birches and alders will bring you to a splendid view of Frenchman Bay and Cadillac Mountain.

Schoodic Point, Acadia NP

From Gouldsboro, head south to Schoodic Point, which is part of Acadia, but without the crowds. The waves boom on the rocks and a cold ocean separates you from Cadillac in the west. If there is one perfect place to visit Down East, Schoodic Point is it.

Quoddy Head Lighthouse

Or take the narrow road south of Lubec and you will come to the West Quoddy Head lighthouse, the easternmost point in the U.S. Out on the horizon you will see Canada’s Grand Manan Island. It might as well be China.

Take a look at any map of the eastern bump of Maine and see how the web of roads thin out. Hancock and Washington counties are nearly unpaved. It is empty. It is beautiful. It is the real Maine.

NEXT: Maine redux

Central Appalachians: Empire of the diner

November 25, 2013

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Part 2: In which the lucky reader gets to eat pie

Central Appalachia is the home of the stainless-steel restaurant.

Built of sparkling glass, steel and neon, these old diners are beacons from America’s earlier decades, of a time when all highways had two lanes and to eat out meant a ”blue plate special.”

These days, there are a lot of ”Postmodern” diners around the country, with cute names such as the Five and Diner or the Road Kill Cafe, but they are not really diners. They play doo-wop music on the jukebox, often have young gum-chewing waitresses, menus written with cloying puns and lots of atmospherically campy Hollywood publicity photos on the wall.

But they are not really diners. They are theme parks. Those who eat there are more likely yuppies than truck drivers.

The real thing is not nearly so self-conscious. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and southern New York are their natural environment. You find the real thing huddling along the sides of old U.S. highway routes.

The real things were establishments where you could get a ”regular” meal at an inexpensive price. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy were the norm, or ham with a ring of canned pineapple on top, or roast beef topped with the same brown gravy you found on the meatloaf. Ethnic food meant spaghetti.

Haute cuisine it was not, but it was filling.

Or is — the diners still exist, although not as common as they once were, now replaced by burger and fried-chicken franchises.

The real diner doesn’t usually have young fresh-faced waitresses in pink skirts and cute white hats. Instead, you more likely will be served by a wrinkled, gravel-voiced waitress who has served meatloaf to truckers for 30 years.

There is no glamour in real diners. They are noisy, smoky and busy. The pie is good and is often baked on the premises. The coffee is good if you are lucky. If you are not, it will be able to etch glass, and in the bottom of the Syracuse stoneware cup, you will find a layer of sediment to chew on, that will keep you awake for three weeks into Tuesday.

The heyday of the diner stretched from the late 1930s into the ’60s. The earliest prefabricated diners were of porcelain enamel rather than steel. The smooth, pearly colors in panels along the side imitated the look of railway cars, leading many people to believe that diners were adapted railroad dining cars. They were not.

They were built in factories, such as the Jerry O. Mahoney Co. of Bayonne, N.J., or the Kullman Dining Car Co. of Harrison, N.J. Assembled in the factory, they were pulled into pieces and trucked to the site and reassembled by a factory team.

Their construction made them easy to move later on, if the owner thought a new location meant better business.

Serro’s Diner, a famous old place in Irwin, Pa., cost $23,000 when it was built in the 1950s. The original building later was moved to Butler, Pa., where it was renamed Morgan’s Eastland Diner. The Serro family bought a new diner in Irwin.

Such stories are common in the diner world.

Less common is the alternate spelling of ”diner.” In northwestern Pennsylvania, with a spillover into Ohio and West Virginia, the word often is spelled ”dinor.”

The food is the same, however. Some diner specialties are not likely to win the American Heart Association seal of approval.

You can find fried krautcakes, scrapple and fried eggs, chicken and waffles, fried sticky buns and ”Texas Tommies,” which are hot dogs split longways, stuffed with American cheese and wrapped shut with bacon and then deep-fried.

But the signature of most diners is their pie. Apple, lemon meringue, coconut cream, rhubarb, cherry, strawberry, shoofly, pecan, sweet potato, Key lime, lemon chess, mincemeat, banana cream, pumpkin — even grasshopper pie.

And they sit in glass cases, lighted like jewelry under the cash register, or in revolving plexiglass towers.

Some diners, such as the Melrose in Philadelphia, became so famous for their pies that they built full-scale bakeries on the back of the building.

So, after you’ve eaten your pot roast, stay and have a slice of pie with a cup of coffee before setting out on the highway again. It’ll put you in the mood.

NEXT: Roadside attractions

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

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

—Richard Nilsen

Archive

Tag Archives: appalachia

The sublimity of decay

Northern Appalachians: Maine II

Northern Appalachians: Maine

Central Appalachians: Empire of the diner

Southern Appalachians: Pig Pickin’

The Appalachians: Southern Mountains

Backbone of the East: The Appalachians