SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING
STEEP CANYON RANGERS | BLUE RIDGE WINE | WILDLIFE WEEK DECEMBER/JANUARY 2013/2014
Celebrating
Community
Fibers KNITTING’S RESURGENCE
Unraveling Mountain Myths
Telling Tales, Spinning Yarns O R IGI N A L STOR IES BY:
DECEMBER/JANUARY 2013/2014 • VOL. 13 • NO. 6
Donald Davis Dawn Gilchrist-Young Tommy Hays
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CLOSE-KNIT COMMUNITY • JACK TALES • JONESBOROUGH’S NATIONAL STORYTELLING CENTER • MOUNTAIN MYTHS
Southern Appalachians THE
$5.95US $6.95CAN
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74820 08682
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Mountain Musings with Susan Reinhardt Wintertime Hiking to Waterrock Knob
Contents
FEATU RE STO RIES
KNITTING IN THE ROUND Local knitters create their own communities as they share a love for the timehonored craft. BY PAUL CLARK
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IT’S ALL IN HOW YOU TELL IT
MOUNTAINS OF MYSTERY
WORKS OF FICTION
From the origin of Jack Tales to Jonesborough, Tenn.’s, National Storytelling Festival, oral traditions prevail.
Wild elves, canny cougars, legendary winds, and the battle over the letter “e.”
New works from acclaimed authors Donald David, Dawn Gilchrist-Young, and Tommy Hays.
BY MARLA HARDEE MILLING
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BY BECKY JOHNSON
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Contents MOUNTAIN VOICES
DEPA RTME N TS
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Go get a thrill on Mystery Hill
MOUNTAIN MUSIC
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Woody Platt of the Steep Canyon Rangers
OUT & ABOUT
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pigeon Forge offers Trolley Tour of Lights
OUTDOORS
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The “Many Faces of Chimney Rock”
MOUNTAIN LETTERS
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Books for the gift-giving season
ON THE COVER Beautiful yarn awaits becoming a useful product at the hands of a skilled crafter. PHOTO BY CAROL ROBINSON
ARTS
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
North Georgia’s first traveling art exhibit
CUISINE
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White Duck’s tacos with a twist
MOUNTAIN VIEWS Summing up a life well lived
Good Living
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12 18
20 22 24 26 28 72
Eastern Tennessee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Waynesville, N.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Abingdon, Va. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Crossword Puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Select Lodging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6 michaeljohnmonson@gmail.com
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p e rs p e ct i ve s :
FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR
My mother-in-law is a weaver. She loves her loom, which sits on the second-story sun porch, windows looking out over the tops of old apple trees, across the mountains toward the Blue Ridge Parkway. In the nine years I’ve know her, it seems that she’s always had a project ready and waiting. Meticulously strung, brightly colored yarn gives the loom the appearance of a Technicolor harp just waiting for her hands to make it sing. She says that weaving is soothing, and its rhythmic motions a happy distraction. Fibers interlock, slowly crafting the long, patterned panels that she then makes into placemats, tea towels, scarves and more. She Sarah E. Kucharski makes them for the sake of making them. Only occasionally does she sell her work—she and her husband, a woodworker, are both members of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild—more often giving it away to family, like me, for a holiday gift or sometimes no reason at all. I love yarn. It is an art and an art material just waiting to become something new. I’ve tried my hand at crochet, but confess that the counting of stitches felt tedious, so instead I buy yarn for my mother-in-law. She, in turn, gives it back, and thus when the weather is cold, she is with me, wrapped warm and soft around my neck—sophisticated in grey and black, playful in a multitude of flaxen gold, soft pinks and blues. There are other scarves she has made, each unique, each a cherished possession made of soft, chocolate brown chenille or sturdy black and red wool. It’s tempting to put each of her works away for safekeeping, but that is not what she wants. Her work is made to be used. Whether it’s a Tuesday night dinner of leftovers or the family’s holiday dinner, her placemats are what frame the plates. Her
MARGARET HESTER PHOTO
runners top the piano. And one thick, deep blue wall hanging has held a prominent placed in our bedroom, a gift first given to my husband when he was a younger man making a move from the family home’s near Waynesville, N.C., to Charleston, S.C. She is a giving person. And I continually am happy to accept her kindness, as it’s through this kind of give and take, the back and forth, that we become woven together. This edition of Smoky Mountain Living is dedicated to the theme “yarns.” From knitting circles to tellers of tall tales, we spin a few yarns, long and rambling, of communities bound together. — Sarah E. Kucharski, managing editor
My mother-in-law says that weaving is soothing, and its rhythmic motions a happy distraction. Fibers interlock, slowly crafting the long, patterned panels that she then makes into placemats, tea towels, scarves and more. She makes them for the sake of making them.
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p e rs p e ct ive s :
FROM OUR READERS VOL. 13 • NUMBER 6
THINKING ABOUT THE SMOKIES I have a confession, I’m closer to the Blue Ridge than the Smokies. But still, I look forward to every edition of Smoky Mountain Living. I was born in the Smokies, although we moved away when I was an infant. When I was old enough to go to summer camp, my parents wanted to encourage my interest in outdoorsy things like rock climbing, whitewater canoeing and hiking. It will be easy for you or your readers to see how the Brevard (N.C.) area fit the bill. at facebook.com/smliv and I’ve thought about those summers in twitter.com/smokymtnliving. the Pisgah National Forest often. Even Fans have access to special after my summer camp years, we promotions and giveaways continued to make family trips to paddle including subscriptions, tickets the Green River or climb Looking Glass and more! Rock. There’s a great culture and way of life in the Smokies, and I love how each edition of SML reconnects me to the area. Your story on Curtis Buchanan reminded me of the rich craftsman spirit in the Smokies. And, the picture of his workshop, tucked into the trees, reminded me it’s been way too long since I've visited the area. Thanks for being my tether to wonderful memories—I’ll come visit you soon.
Connect with us
Nick D. Richmond, Va.
“SPLENDID” JOB ON TRAIL TREES ARTICLE Might I say how impressed I was by your magazine in general, and in particular the splendid article about bent trees and the Indians’ navigation system. Splendid work, splendid look. So polished and professional—and impressive! Gretchen H. Sweetwater, Tenn.
Submit your letter to the editor by email at editor@smliv.com or by mail to Editor, Smoky Mountain Living, PO Box 629, Waynesville, N.C. 28786. Letters should be exclusive Smoky Mountain Living. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters. Letters should preferably be 150 to 175 words, should refer to the magazine in general or an article that has appeared within the past two editions. Letters must include the writer’s address and phone numbers. No attachments, please. Smoky Mountain Living reserves the right to use material at its discretion, and we reserve the right to edit material. We'll do our best, but due to the volume of correspondence we receive, we are unable to respond to all questions and comments.
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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
Publisher/Editor . . . . . . . . . . . Scott McLeod editor@smliv.com General Manager . . . . . . . . . Greg Boothroyd ads@smliv.com Advertising Sales Manager . . Hylah Smalley hylah@smliv.com Managing Editor . . . . . . . Sarah E. Kucharski sarah@smliv.com Art Director . . . . . . . . . . . Travis Bumgardner travis@smliv.com Graphics . . . . . . . Micah McClure, Emily Moss Finance & Admin. . . . . . . Amanda Singletary Sales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greg Boothroyd, Whitney Burton, Amanda Bradley Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scott Collier Editorial Assistants . . . . . . . . . . Colby Dunn, Andrew Kasper, Glenda Kucharski Contributing Writers . . . . . . . . . . Paul Clark, Donald Davis, Tommy Hays, Joe Hooten, Becky Johnson, Andrew Kasper, Marla Hardee-Milling, Jeff Minick, Matt Payne, Susan Reinhardt, Mary Kasey-Sturk, Dawn Gilchrist-Young Contributing Photographers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul Clark, Diana Gates, Margaret Hester, Andrew Kasper, Margie Metz, Marla Hardee-Milling, Carol Robinson, Beverly Slone, Stephen Weber Contributing Illustrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mandy Newham-Cobb Smoky Mountain Living is published bi-monthly by SM Living LLC. Smoky Mountain Living has made every effort to insure listings and information are accurate and assumes no liability for errors or omissions. For advertising information, contact Hylah Smalley at 828.452.2251 or hylah@smliv.com. For editorial inquiries, contact Sarah Kucharski at sarah@smliv.com. Smoky Mountain Living assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. Queries should be sent to Sarah E. Kucharski at sarah@smliv.com. ©2013-2014. All rights reserved. No portion of this magazine may be reprinted without the express, written consent of the publisher. Smoky Mountain Living is published bi-monthly (Dec/Jan, Feb/Mar, Apr/May, Jun/Jul, Aug/Sep, Oct/Nov) by SM Living, LLC, 34 Church Street, Waynesville, NC 28786. Periodical Postage paid at Waynesville, N.C., and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address changes to Smoky Mountain Living, PO Box 629, Waynesville, NC 28786.
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ABOUT OUR WRITERS Paul Clark is a resident of Weaverville, N.C., and has worked as a journalist for more than three decades. He is currently studying photography and videography.
Mandy NewhamCobb is a lefty vegetarian artist and illustrator living right outside of Philly. Newham is the illustrator of three children’s books: Razzmatazz!, “Bullet” Joe: A Kansas City Monarch, and The Little Brown Hen (forthcoming). She earned her bachelor of fine arts at Florida State University and her master of fine arts in drawing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Donald Davis sees storytelling is a way of giving and living life. He invites each listener to come along, to pull deep inside for one's own stories, to personally share and co-create the common experiences that celebrate the creative spirit. Davis has been a storyteller at the Smithsonian Institution, the World’s Fair, and guest host for National Public Radio’s program “Good Evening.”
Tommy Hays’ recently released YA novel, What I Came to Tell You, set in Asheville, N.C., and told from a 12-year-old boy’s point of view, is an Okra Pick from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. His adult novels are The Pleasure Was Mine, In the Family Way and Sam’s Crossing. He is Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program and Lecturer in the Master of Liberal Arts program at UNC Asheville. For more information go to www.tommyhays.com.
Becky Johnson grew up in Raleigh, raised by parents who instilled in her an appreciation for the outdoors and wild places, which in turn gave rise to a strong environmental ethos. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999 as a double major in journalism and anthropology and a creative writing minor. She worked as a park ranger on the Blue Ridge Parkway for a year before pursuing journalism in Western North Carolina. She has been with The Smoky Mountain News, based in Waynesville, N.C., since 2003, where she is a reporter and news editor.
Marla Hardee Milling is a lifelong resident of Asheville, N.C. She is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and her work has appeared in Our State, WNC, Charleston, Denver, Blue Ridge Country, Luxury Living, Health, Parenting, Redbook, Pregnancy, American Style and many others. She spent ten years at WLOS-TV as a news producer and six years as Director of Communications at Mars Hill College—but her greatest role is that of mom to Ben and Hannah.
Jeff Minick lives in Asheville, N.C., where he tutors home-educated students and writes for various publications. He is the author of two books, both self-published: Amanda Bell, a novel, and Learning As I Go, a collection of essays and reviews. He can be reached at minick0301@gmail.com.
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Matt Payne
is a travel writer and a television and feature film writer. His television writing credits include CBS’s “Vegas” starring Dennis Quaid and Michael Chiklis, “The Defenders” starring Jim Belushi and Jerry O’Connell and TNT’s “Memphis Beat” starring Jason Lee. Payne’s travels have taken him from the mountains of Rwanda to the Great Smoky Mountains. He can be reached at mattpaynewriter.com.
Susan Reinhardt is an award winning journalist, columnist, and author of five bestselling books, including her latest novel, Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle. Besides traveling and serving as a taxi cab and debit card to her children, she loves to eat and try new restaurants and recipes. She loves everything about Western North Carolina, from the heartbeat of the city life to roaming the outlying areas, finding charm and adventure.
Mary CaseySturk is a freelance travel and features writer. Her work has appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Tennessean, Smoky Mountain Living Magazine, Venice Gondolier Sun, Kentucky Explorer Magazine, Nashville Arts Magazine, examiner.com and others.
Dawn GilchristYoung was raised in Swain County, N.C., where her family has been for four generations. She’s been writing in fits and spurts since she was a child. One story even won the first Norman Mailer Teacher Writing Award. She likes to walk mountain woods with her dog, cook highfat meals with lots of bacon grease and butter, and read.
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p e rs p e ct ive s :
MOUNTAIN MUSINGS
Stew and stories
W
hen my fuel runs out, and day-to-day living proves exhausting, I know a cure: Mama. Throw in Daddy and his off-color humor, and it just gets better from there. My husband and I recently packed the car with enough clothes for a couple of days, and drove the hour-and-a-half to Spartanburg, S.C., where Mom and Dad, both well into their 70s and waiting on Jesus, live in a sprawling rancher on a cul-de-sac. Walking into their home brings sheets of peace more comforting than those 1,000-threadcount Egyptian cottons. Something about returning home feels right, and I’m fortunate that at my age, my parents are still alive and healthy. If someone tied a Susan Reinhardt blindfold over my eyes, I’d know I was in Mama’s house. The smell, a combination of her cooking and cleaning, and the sounds of settling wood, carpets and appliances, is distinctive. I’d know it anywhere. Mama greeted us with huge hugs and declarations of love, wearing her pink lipstick and “happy” clothes from Stein Mart. I drank in the scent of her perfume and hairspray. Mama’s tall and blonde, not by nature but by choice on the blonde issue. Mean bones don’t find space in her frame, and her heart is about as big as a harvest moon. “I’ve been cooking some salmon stew for you and cut up five pounds of potatoes to make it extra chunky for Donny’s bike race tomorrow, so he’ll be carbed up,” Mama said, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She hugged me, gave me the once-over with discerning eyes, checking my health at a glance. For the next 48 hours, we were pampered. We’d come alone, leaving the kids back home, needing a break to replenish our spirits. Mama reversed the role she played when my younger sister and I were kids—then she’d direct us towards independence by making us clean up after dinner, de-clutter our rooms, scrub our own bathrooms and fold clothes. Now, she treated us like VIP guests and wouldn’t let us so much as lift a tea glass unless she’d re-filled it. “I know it sounds poor, but we love salmon stew,” she said to my husband, who eyed the chowder-like chunks of fish and milky potatoes before taking a bite. Daddy perked up with his bourbon and water, his mirth brought on by Maker’s Mark, the brown courage in his bloodstream making tales slip from his lips. He’s chatty, and
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funny. Unless someone gets him onto politics, then I have to leave the room. But salmon stew, served with steam, sweet pickles and a gorgeous salad, also makes him gleeful. Maybe more so than the bourbon or the beautiful bride he married 55 years ago, still as ageless and blooming as on her wedding day. “Your great-grandmother ran a boarding house and fed everyone from the mill who wasn’t in the war,” he said. “Your granny made this stew, too.” I used to make the stew for my roommates in Myrtle Beach, when three of us cub reporters lived in a beach house across the road from the ocean, and didn’t care that we didn’t have a heater for winter or that one of our showers was outside under the slats and stilts. Memories of food and growing up tend to hit me during fall and winter, seasons of reflection, stillness and a slower pacing, unless one counts Christmas. “I’ve got a wonderful cake with walnuts and some vanilla bean ice cream for dessert,” Mama said, after we raved about her salmon stew, each of us downing more than two bowls. She scurried around the recently-remodeled kitchen, soup bowls clanking and replaced with plates of cake, ice cream sliding off the top. “Tomorrow, I’m taking you shopping,” she told me. “You need to color up that boring brown wardrobe of yours. The Goodwill is OK for some things, but you’ve got lots of public events and speeches, so we’re going to Stein Mart’s 12-hour sale. Plus I’m a preferred customer and have 40 percent more off.”
If someone tied a blindfold over my eyes, I’d know I was in Mama’s house. The smell, a combination of her cooking and cleaning, and the sounds of settling of wood, carpets and appliances, is distinctive. I’d know it anywhere. My wardrobe tends to be either retro or witchy because I love sleeves that fan out like the bells of trumpets. Winged clothing is my thing, not hers. She’s all about fiery corals, greens like brand new Fescue popping up and yellows as vibrant as peaking lemons. As we finished our cake and ice cream, and told all the favorite family stories as if we’d not heard them hundreds of times, Mama paused before resuming her domestic duties. “Have I told y’all how much I just love my family?” she said, hands wriggling in the air—dancing hands. She says this all the time. We’ve come to expect it. Just like the blessing we say as we hold hands before such family dinners, the steam of hot stew under our bowed heads.
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
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p e rs p e ct ive s :
MOUNTAIN VOICES
The Man on Mystery Hill BY MARLA HARDEE MILLING
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for being closer to God. The speaker said as long as one has one’s hands on the plow, God can’t help. Underwood recognized his own grip on the plow, and he prayed for help in letting go, yet he didn’t expect what came next. “I was lying on the bed, and the bed wiggled,” said Underwood. “Then I heard water running, and then the bed wiggled again. I called out to see if Sharon had come home, but the Lord said, ‘No it’s me.’” Underwood said, at that moment, he received divine guidance, claiming God took him on a mental journey throughout Mystery Hill and answered questions that were on his mind. Since then, he learned to listen to that inner voice and to act when he receives inspired ideas.
“When the Lord gives you
MARLA HARDEE MILLING PHOTO
W
ayne Underwood’s wife, Sharon, jokes that he gets so carried away telling stories that she has to kick him a bit under the front counter to remind him they have work to do. He’s supposedly retired, but that doesn’t stop him from showing up seven days a week at Mystery Hill, a peculiar tourist destination near Blowing Rock, N.C. “I’ve never considered this a job,” he said. “I enjoy being personable with people. The best thing we do is entertain and treat people like people.” Mystery Hill draws an abundance of visitors every year—those who are curious about its strange gravitational pull and historical exhibits, along with repeat visitors who enjoy the family-friendly atmosphere and Underwood’s tales about Mystery Hill, which his parents bought in 1958 and first opened as a fish-camp style restaurant. Underwood had started working at another restaurant his parents owned when he was just five years old—his dad would slip coins under the placemats for Underwood to find when he cleared the tables. When the family bought the Mystery Hill property in 1958, Underwood was 10, and he earned the task of pasting bumper stickers on the back of visitors’ cars. However, it wasn’t until a visit from the property’s former owners that the Underwoods learned about Mystery Hill’s mysterious past. Owners Mr. and Mrs. Hudson had read an article in a 1948 issue of Life magazine featuring The Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, Calif.—a site with an out-of-the-ordinary gravitational pull. The Hudsons had noticed that something similar had been happening at their own farm. Mrs. Hudson would get dizzy while walking through a certain part of the apple orchard, and fallen apples wouldn’t stay on the level path, instead they would roll away. The Hudsons traveled to California to see The Mystery Spot for themselves. It sparked their imagination and they returned home with a plan for the mysterious location on their own property. “Mr. Hudson said, ‘We’re going to build a house on that spot, and if it works, we’ll have an attraction, and if it doesn’t, we’ll have a place to put all the apples.’ They opened in 1949,” Underwood said. Underwood’s storytelling is an attraction of its own. He is never at a loss for words, as stories roll effortlessly from his tongue. Even though his cell phone rings constantly, he has a certain grace for answering calls and diving back into his story at hand, without losing his train of thought. Underwood also has stories about his deep Christian faith. He claims a direct communication with God that has left him surprised at times. One day, Underwood said he was listening to a religious program on TV and the message turned to plowing as a metaphor
a vision, he also gives you a provision to carry it out.” — Wayne Underwood
One of Underwood’s favorite stories to tell lays out the miraculous events surrounding how he came to own the Dougherty House. Blanford B. Dougherty founded Appalachian State University, and his family lived in the home through the mid 1900s. As the years went by, the house deteriorated and the university decided to torch it. Meanwhile, the restaurant Underwood’s family ran at Mystery Hill had been torn down. He had been pondering what to put in its place and dreamed of adding a farmhouse where he and his family could display their antiques collection. The answer came in the middle of one night.
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
Mystery Hill draws an abundance of visitors every year—those who are curious about its strange gravitational pull and historical exhibits, along with repeat visitors who enjoy the familyfriendly atmosphere and Underwood’s tales about the attraction.
There’s a peculiar force of gravity at Mystery Hill in Blowing Rock, N.C., where Wayne Underwood has found his calling. MARLA HARDEE MILLING PHOTO
“At 3 a.m. the Lord woke me up and said, ‘You can get the Dougherty House and move it out here,’” said Underwood. He woke up Sharon, excited with this new plan, and she said, “If you still remember this in the morning, we’ll talk about it.” Underwood didn’t have any problem remembering, but he quickly found he faced a mountain of obstacles that would have discouraged most people from even trying. John Thomas, the Chancellor at the university told him the house would be burned in two weeks, and he held firm on that decision. And even if it were possible, non-profit status would be required, first, along with a hefty amount of money to pay to move the structure. But Underwood had already applied for non-profit status for Mystery Hill before the idea of the Dougherty House even entered his mind. “At 9 a.m. the next morning, I went to ASU and laid down the non-profit status paperwork,” he said. He also had raised the needed $150,000 by 4 p.m. College officials looked at him in disbelief and said, “John Thomas said you were going to be trouble.” Underwood also needed approval from the state Department of Transportation in Raleigh because the agency officially owned the home, but college offi-
cials pressed DOT officials to not agree to it, Underwood said. Underwood went back to praying, and he heard, “Go talk to Bobby Shore.” Though he didn’t know why, he already knew what to do: pay attention and take action. When he went to see Shore, he noticed a DOT car in the drive. Shore said, “You know Tommy Klein don’t you?” Klein was the person at the DOT in charge of deciding whether to release the Dougherty House. Underwood unrolled the blueprints he had with him and detailed how he would restore the home and create an Appalachian Heritage Museum. Klein wrestled with his decision, Underwood said. Soon thereafter, Klein and his wife made the drive up to Mystery Hill. Klein pulled up, got out of the car and said, “Wayne, give me a check for $10. They told me I couldn’t give you the house, but they never said I couldn’t sell it to you.” The Dougherty House and the Appalachian Heritage Museum became one more of many attractions at Mystery Hill—including a Hall of Mystery, the Mystery House, a Native American artifacts museum and an inexplicable platform that denies physics. All, one could say, are works of inspiration and the people willing to follow it. “When the Lord gives you a vision, he also gives you a provision to carry it out,” said Underwood.
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Smoky Mountain Living prominently features images from across the southern Appalachians in each edition. Photo essays adhere to the issue’s overall theme. Our Feburary/March edition will focus on neighbors. Send your images of neighbors—those who live adjacent to one another be they friend or foe; things always found together; neighborhoods; or your own interpretation of the theme to photos@smliv.comby Dec. 17, 2013. Submissions should be hi-resolution digital images and include information about where and when the photos were taken and by whom. Reader submitted photos are unpaid but those selected are rewarded with publication in our nationally distributed magazine. For more information and to connect with Smoky Mountain Living, visit smliv.com
Carol Robinson
Diana Gates
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. —William Shakespeare
Diana Gates
Beverly Slone
Diana Gates
Margie Metz
Stephen Weber
I knit the afternoon away. I knit reasons for Elijah to come back. I knit apologies for Emma. I knit angry knots and slipped stitches for every mistake I ever made, and I knit wet, swollen stitches that look awful. I knit the sun down. — Laurie Halse Anderson
Diana Gates Beverly Slone
d e p a r t m e n t :
MOUNTAIN MUSIC
DONATED PHOTO
Grammy- I winning Rangers are on a roll BY JOE HOOTEN
more: y
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steepcanyon.com
t’s no secret that the Steep Canyon Rangers are on a roll these days. The group won a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2013 with “Nobody Knows You” and the band has wasted no time releasing another collection of awardworthy songs. “Tell the Ones I Love” is a blend of blues, bluegrass, country and jam-band grooves, showcasing the group’s songwriting strengths and infectious harmonies, uniquely at home in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The all-original album, however, was recorded far away from the Blue Ridge Mountains. “Tell the Ones I Love” was brought to fruition in the famed Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, N.Y., named for the recently deceased drummer for The Band. The new studio was a departure from the comforts of Echo Mountain Recording Studio in Asheville, N.C., where the Rangers recorded their previous album, but the result is an awe-inspiring, 12-song collective that brims with the confidence of a seasoned band pushing the boundaries of the honored genre. What can be considered a success story today, though, came from humble beginnings. Founding members of the Steep Canyon Rangers—front man and guitarist Woody Platt, bassist Charles Humphrey III, and banjo player Graham Sharp—began penning bluegrass songs and playing them in low-key venues while attending college in Chapel Hill, N.C. The band’s first album was released in 2001. Shortly thereafter, mandolin player Mike Guggino and fiddle player Nicky Sanders joined the band. But the band’s latest musical addition, comedian and banjo picker Steve Martin, is by far one of the most interesting. After a chance meeting between band members and Martin’s wife at a party in Brevard, N.C.— a quaint Appalachian town the rangers call home base—Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers have become inseparable, recording music, appearing on television, and playing shows across the country. There are countless bluegrass bands in North Carolina, but the Steep Canyon Rangers have not only earned their place among their bluegrass peers, they have become one of genre’s beacons. Through spectacular live performances, the group creates a potent concoction that demands attention. The Rangers’ latest album and their upward musical trajectory only solidifies that the band is in a league of its own.
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Q&A with Woody Platt of the Steep Canyon Rangers SML: Congratulations on your Grammy for “Nobody Knows You.” How was the award ceremony experience? Woody Platt: It was a pretty surreal evening. At the last minute our label offered up a limo; we were staying with Steve (Martin) in Bel Air; everything was just very surreal. And then to actually win, it was over-the-top. It was a wonderful moment for the band, and we’re still grinning about it. Going from the bars in Chapel Hill, in the early days of the band, to winning a Grammy seems like it could be overwhelming. We’ve just been blown away by the great things that have happened in our career. We joke about it, but when you start a bluegrass band in college with your buddies there’s a lot of goals you might set for yourself—like maybe a gig or two or trying to get a record deal—but a goal to win a Grammy is something you don’t think about. “Nobody Knows You” was your first record on Rounder Records, a highly respected label. Did you consider signing with them to be a big step in your career? Yes, it was. I can remember when we couldn’t get labels to respond to our inquiries; we’d reach out and never hear back. When we hooked up with Steve, his stuff was on Rounder and it made a lot of sense for them, and for us, to streamline the music through them. They are the Cadillac of bluegrass labels, so it was a real honor to be accepted by them, and then to have a Grammy record with them has helped our status. What has the band learned from its relationship with Steve Martin? Lots of things, such as his ability to entertain an audience—and for us to watch that night after night from the stage, some of that is rubbing off on us— how to design the best show possible, all the effort and energy that goes into it. Working with Steve has opened the door to a whole new level of entertaining that is really important for a band that wants to put on a good show. It’s not just about the music—it’s about the whole experience. You once said that the Steep Canyon Rangers have learned not to play down
to an audience, to leave out the hokey, backwoods, stereotypical redneck jokes. It’s about presenting this American music in a very respectful way. Bluegrass has its roots in the South and in the mountains, and being a hybrid of other genres of American music, it doesn’t mean it has to fill that stereotype and be accessible to only rural or mountain folk. It’s a very heavy, intellectual music that features some fantastic, virtuosic playing and really good harmony singing. I think presenting it at the highest level is very important.
d e p a r t m e n t :
MOUNTAIN MUSIC
“When you start a bluegrass
Thematically, what is different about your latest album, “Tell the Ones I Love?” The themes of our songs have become more relevant to our lives and our everyday experiences and not so much of the tried-and-true cliché themes found in bluegrass, you know, like moonshine or killing your girlfriend (laughing). There’s a lot of that in bluegrass, these themes you expect to hear about, and for us, we try to be more relevant to the times. Even the title track to our new record, it’s a train song, and that’s a very old bluegrass theme, but it has a modern spin on it, something we can relate to now.
band in college with your buddies there’s a lot of goals you might set for yourself—like maybe a gig or two or trying to get a record deal— but a goal to win a Grammy is something you don’t think about.”
“Tell the Ones I Love” was recorded at Levon Helm’s studio. How was that experience compared to your previous sessions at Asheville’s Echo Mountain Recording Studio? Very different. Being up in Woodstock, N.Y., in Levon’s barn where there’s been all that amazing music played and recorded, where Levon lived, Echo is a great studio, but it was just too easy for us to hop in our cars and drive back to our homes. it was like it was a day job, but when we were up in Woodstock, we’d go back to the rental house down from the studio and keep working on music and just stay fully
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entrenched in it. It’s an interesting time to camp out with your band in a house for 10 days, grocery shop, eat meals together, to live like a family, and to try to capture that comradery and brotherhood. In true Steep Canyon Rangers’ fashion, there are a lot of different influences that pop up across your new album. Who influenced you as a teenager? I was all over the place, but I was really influenced by my mother’s music, which was Doc Watson, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, a lot of (Bob) Dylan’s folk albums, they really got me. I love the harmonies of the Beach Boys. But growing up, one genre I didn’t listen to was pop/Top 40 radio, and I, actually, didn’t really listen to country music. I listened to my brother’s music too. He was into a lot of alternative music. I even listened to the Drifters. I really was all over the place.
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OUT & ABOUT
HIGHWAY HONORS BLUEGRASS GREAT Bluegrass legend Del McCoury has become a part of Mitchell County lore now that a stretch of N.C. Highway 261 north of Bakersville bears his name. McCoury was born in York, Pa., but both his parents and his wife’s parents are Mitchell County natives. McCoury himself never lived in Mitchell County, but he did get to visit quite a bit. His father’s family was from Glen Ayre and his mother’s family was from Buladean. McCoury traces his musical heritage back to his family. He remembers a tale about his mom’s father playing fiddle at the Cloudland Hotel, which was located at the top of Roan Mountain, and said the lore is part of his family heritage.
The holograms of Dolly Parton, Jacob Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Present appear on the set of Dollywood’s “A Christmas Carol,” which opens Nov. 9. DONATED PHOTO
Celebrating the season A Pigeon Forge Trolley Tour of Lights is the perfect way to take in the 24th Winterfest displays and all 5 million of their sparkling lights. Trolleys are heated and handicapped accessible. Your tour of lights includes a personal guide who will share stories of Pigeon Forge. Tours depart at 6:30, 7:45 and 9 p.m. from Patriot Park, Monday through Friday during November and December (closed Dec. 24 and 25). Dollywood becomes a winter wonderland when it presents Smoky Mountain Christmas. From Nov. 9 through Dec. 30, Dollywood is wrapped in more than 4 million twinkling lights and features heartwarming holiday shows that the entire family will enjoy. New this year is “Dollywood’s A Christmas Carol,” the classic Charles Dickens’ tale, complete with original songs penned by Dolly Parton. Many of the park’s award-winning rides will be in operation during Smoky Mountain Christmas, weather permitting.
Del McCoury (center) with the Del McCoury band. DONATED PHOTO
“Our mountains and foothills have a national reputation as a music-rich region, and our traditions of old-time string band music, ballad singing, and bluegrass are internationally renowned,” said Angie Chandler, Executive Director of Blue Ridge National Heritage Area Partnership, which is collaborating with counties in Western North Carolina and the North Carolina Arts Council to develop the Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina. “No other area of the country has had more impact on the development of the banjo as a bluegrass instrument than here in Western North Carolina. Del McCoury has exemplified that musical heritage through his 50-year career, his ability to appeal to younger and older audiences, and his innovation of various musical styles.” 20
MUSEUM IMMORTALIZES PINBALL ERA Pinball wizards may try their fingers at the Asheville Pinball Museum, which features more than 30 machines, some dating back to the 1950s—each open for play, and playable as often as one likes for one set price. Open seven days a week in downtown Asheville, the museum exists for fun and education. Each machine has a plaque providing information about when the machine was built. The family-friendly establishment also sells snacks, sodas, and cans of beer from Asheville Pizza Company. Admission is $10 for adults, $7 for children. For more information, call 828.776.5671 or visit ashevillepinball.com.
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
&
Knitting Quilting
Kanuga is situated on 1,400 mountain acres near Hendersonville, North Carolina, with scenic Kanuga Lake at its center. We welcome more than 25,000 guests annually for conferences, retreats, camps, outdoor education and guest periods.
January 16-19, 2014
“Kanuga Kni ing and Quilting Retreat (KKQ) has opened the doors for new friendships and learning more about our cra from exceptional instructors; I am blessed by both! KKQ is a special weekend of restoration, relaxation, and learning shared with an awesome collection of men & women!” -Linda Gysin, Greer, SC (KKQ 2010-13)
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OUTDOORS
Take a walk on the wild side
A past Wilderness Wildlife Week presentation gave attendees an up-close view of owls. DONATED PHOTO
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early 100 mountain experts will guide guests on walks and hikes, host seminars, hands-on workshops and lectures on topics ranging from Smoky Mountain history to plant and animal habitats as part of Wilderness Wildlife Week. The annual event, based out of Pigeon Forge, Tenn., will run from Jan. 25 through Feb. 1, with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most popular national park in the country, as a central focus. Throughout the week, experienced instructors will school naturelovers in a wide variety of topics. A map and compass lesson, outdoor photography classes, a hike to a Smokies waterfall, backcountry cooking lessons and a birding identification course give a small sampling of the festival’s offerings. Live mountain music and Appalachian cloggers are also scheduled as evening entertainment. All lectures, slideshows, panel discussions and other indoor activities will take place at Pigeon Forge’s LeConte Center—a newly constructed facility and exhibition hall along the city’s greenway. Meanwhile, outdoor excursions are planned to various sites in the region. A full schedule can be found at mypigeonforge.com. Though Wilderness Wildlife Week is free, some events require advanced registration and have limited space.
A photo competition depicted the “Many Faces of Chimney Rock.” DONATED PHOTO
From the vista point on top of the rock, visitors can catch a 75-mile panoramic view of the Broad River and Lake Lure below, as well as the Piedmont mountains to the east. The park also offers trails, rock climbing, animal education programs, caves and ancient geological features that attract visitors from around the world. Photographs from the competition were taken inside the park between Sept. 13 and Nov. 30, 2013, and a panel of photojournalists selected winners. Runners up and winners are on display on the park’s website, Facebook page and Pinterest board. For more information, visit chimneyrockpark.com.
A DIFFERENT VIEW OF CHIMNEY ROCK
BREEDING PROGRAM SIGNALS HOPE FOR BROOK TROUT
Enjoy one of Western North Carolina’s iconic destinations this winter via online galleries featuring the best images from Chimney Rock State Park’s “Many Faces of Chimney Rock.” Launched in fall 2013, the competition prompted amateur and professional photographers to capture images of the Rutherford County rock outcropping.
The Southern Appalachian brook trout is one of the most beautiful fishes in the Appalachian Mountains. Brilliant red bellies and bright golden spots appear with the change in seasons, heralding the coming of autumn, and the brook trout’s history is a storied one among natives and settlers in the region. Once abundant in the headwaters of
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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
East Tennessee, brook trout now populate just three percent of their historical range. Logging activities wiped out much of their habitat, and larger and more resilient rainbow trout, which are not native to the Appalachians, largely have pushed out the brook trout population. However, work is being done to reverse the recent course of history. With a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute began a study on captive breeding techniques for the native trout species. Biologists began by collecting 50 fish from Tennessee’s Hampton Creek in October 2012. The fish were brought back to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga and—in what is considered a hatchery breakthrough for wild brook trout—the fish were able to produce a healthy batch of offspring. In August 2013, biologists returned to Hampton Creek to release 255 juvenile trout, each implanted with a tiny wire tag, which a graduate student will survey throughout the winter to monitor the success of the project. Meanwhile, biologists prepared for another round of releases, inching closer to an expanded program that might one day ensure robust populations of these unique fish.
d e p a r t m e n t :
OUTDOORS
A couple watches the sunset from Waterrock Knob. ANDREW KASPER PHOTO
Solitude on Parkway peaks BY ANDREW KASPER
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ong after the autumn tourists are gone and only the burliest of leaves are still clinging to the trees, lookouts and trails stemming off the Blue Ridge Parkway become a haven for the hearty traveler. One such winter jaunt is to the top of Waterrock Knob. Located at mile marker 451, about a 45-minute drive west from Asheville, N.C., or a 20-minute drive east from the Smokies, Waterrock Knob makes the perfect half-day trip destination. The blustery peak awaits those who are daring enough to step out of the comforts of their heated automobiles and ascend the steep trail. The walk to the knob is the last hike before the Parkway ends in Cherokee. At 6,292 feet in elevation, Waterrock Knob is the tallest peak in the Plott Balsams mountain chain, sandwiched between the Great Smoky Mountains and Great Balsams ranges. It is also the 16th tallest peak in the eastern United States, only about 400 feet lower than Mount Mitchell, the tallest. Waterrock Knob has something going for it that a fair number of its looming Appalachian counterparts don’t. The journey to the top is not reserved for mountaineers or the best of longdistance hikers—it’s a short, half-mile, partially paved trek from the parking lot to the top, though at times the route devolves into rocky steps and steep footing. A lot happens in the half-mile hike. From the parking area at 5,820-feet to the summit, the
trail crosses the threshold where deciduous trees and thicker soil give way to conifers and rocky crags; it’s where light breezes become weighty gusts and fair-weather tourists are separated from those willing to don an extra jacket to own a mountain for a day. Known as southern spruce-fir forests, high-elevation Appalachian peaks like Waterrock Knob
clear day, hikers might even get a glimpse of mountaintops as far as 50 miles away. Those not looking for a hike, or who forgot to pack a pair of mittens before heading up to the Parkway for the day, should at least drive up to Waterrock Knob’s parking lot for a quintessential Smokies’ sunset from behind the windshield or bring a thermos of something warm to savor as the solstice sun sets. Though Waterrock Knob has a visitor center, it’s only open until Nov. 3, making for even more solitude. Parkway-goers need to be aware of one other detail when it comes to winter trips along the national motor road: sometimes sections of the roadway are closed. There’s nothing more disheartening than building up the courage for a winter outing only to find the access road to the Parkway blockaded. The National Park Service routinely closes the roadway in the winter based on the presence of ice and snow. Although it can be a bummer when snow hits because the road surface isn’t plowed or treated with salt or sand, it’s probably for the best that it’s closed. Check with the park service ahead of time before cruising toward Waterrock Knob or any other destinations along the 469-mile roadway. A hiker descends the trail from Waterrock Knob. ANDREW KASPER PHOTO
“There is no soulquenching equal to the silent nakedness atop an Appalachian peak like Waterrock Knob when the thermostat drops.” are home to ecological holdouts of a colder, bygone landscape. Glaciers once brought frigid climates to the North American south and ecosystems similar to modern day Canada. After the ice sheets receded, the conifer woods retreated to only the tops of the coldest peaks. Once atop Waterrock Knob, one is rewarded with stunning views. To the west is Cherokee, and the southern entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. To the Northeast is Maggie Valley, a homespun tourist town known for its winter ski hill and southern hospitability. On a
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While a warm-weather trip to the parkway brings a relaxing pleasure, sunshine, and the warm grace of Mother Nature, there is no soulquenching equal to the silent nakedness atop an Appalachian peak like Waterrock Knob when the thermometer drops, especially with the knowledge that the descent brings a toasty, scenic car ride home.
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d e p a r t m e n t :
MOUNTAIN LETTERS
Appalachian bound, page by page BY JEFF MINICK
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ith the arrival of the holiday and gift-giving season, so too come friends and family seeking to make the mountains part of their festivities. Indeed, in wintertime the Appalachians wear a stark sort of beauty. Yet there are those who can’t make the trip or who want to carry home a piece of the mountains. Luckily, there is no shortage of books about the Smokies. Whether the people one cares for live right next door or on the other side of the world, they can escape to the mountains via books, in which pictures and text bring alive the beauty of the place we call home. In The Blue Ridge Ancient and Majestic: A Celebration of the World’s Oldest Mountains (ISBN 978- 0 -9821-16227, $39.95), photographer Jerry Greer and writer Charles Maynard offer a feast for the eyes and the heart. Greer’s photographs are stunning. A picture taken from Grandfather Mountain at dawn—a two-page spread near the beginning of the book—seems surreal, as the sky and mountains look as if they had been dipped in a red dye. Many of Greer’s other photographs—waterfalls, old cabins, vistas—invite the viewer to linger over the pages. Maynard’s accompanying essays fit neatly with these pictures, giving insights not only into the natural beauty of the Blue Ridge but its history and the affection those who visit or live here have for the place. Richard Mack’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes (ISBN 978-0-97539542-4) offers an intimate look at different parts of the park from a man who has photographed the park while camping and hiking his way through it. Mack’s affection for the Smokies comes across in his introduction and in every photograph that follows. His long shots of the mountains, like Greer’s photos, are beautiful, but it is in his pictures of creeks and streams that Mack brings the terrain to life. These pictures in particular—snow-covered stones in the middle
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of a stream, the green moss on rocks and fallen trees by a creek— vividly evoke our mountain waters, and are evidence of a fine photographer devoted to his craft. One may not quite hear the rush and spill of water over stones, but these pictures will bring one close. For those wanting a more prosaic look at the mountains—or simply a smaller book for the purposes of mailing or a casual gift— Blue Ridge Parkway: Impressions (ISBN 978-156037-252-3, $12.95) is a fine choice. Photographers Pat and Chuck Blackley take scenes from along the scenic drive that begins in North Carolina and ends in Virginia. Cara Ellen Modisett, who lives in the Shenandoah Valley and wrote the accompanying text, is a fine guide not only to the photographs, but to the Parkway as well. Blue Ridge Parkway Celebration: Photographs, Poetry and Prose (978-0-9892870-81, $47.95) features Nye Simmons’ photography. Simmons lives in Knoxville, Tenn., and has spent 10 years taking pictures along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Accompanying his lush photographs are short essays and poems by 47 Appalachian writers. The editors have done a fine job of matching pictures to text. Anne Gaillard’s poem “Frosted Oak” accompanies a photograph of just such a scene near Bunches Bald Overlook, an ice-covered oak with just a few red leaves left on the branches, looking more like a painting than a photograph. Finally, for those looking to understand the mountain’s human landscape, there is Tim Barnwell’s The Face of Appalachia: Portraits From The Mountain Farm (ISBN 0-39305787-9, $29.95). Barnwell’s black-and-white shots of Appalachian farmers and rural families, taken from the 1980s on, cover an array of faces and events—from a lone girl standing on a porch to men gathered for a hunt, from a baptism in a creek to a funeral. The work includes short essays from the people in Barnwell’s photographs, many of whom have died by now, adding extra poignancy to the photographs and the subject’s written memories. The Face Of Appalachia is a reminder of how much our region has changed in just the past few decades. For additional recommendations of books about our region, visit any local bookstore.
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
All is merry and bright.
Living at Deerfield means activity-filled days and nights, an extensive list of amenities that includes a fitness and aquatic center, a spa, art and craft studios and classes – everything you’d want in a continuing care retirement community.
Our beautiful campus is located just minutes from the historic Biltmore Estate and Asheville’s eclectic downtown. Call to schedule a visit and learn how you can make your retirement bright and fulfilling.
Spacious, maintenance-free residences mean you can retire your snow shovel forever! AN EPISCOPAL RETIREMENT COMMUNITY
1617 Hendersonville Rd. Asheville, NC www.deerfieldwnc.org toll free (800) 284-1531 (828) 274-1531 press 1 WWW.SMLIV.COM
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MOUNTAIN ARTS
Local food and crafts HandMade in America, in partnership with Blue Ridge Food Ventures, will present the second annual Cool Craft Holiday Market Dec. 13-15. More than 40 of Asheville, N.C’s, creative vendors will be selling natural products, decorative and functional craft items, jewelry, pottery, ornaments, artisanal food products, and much more. “The clients at Blue Ridge Food Ventures are some of the most creative folks I’ve worked with,” said Chris Reedy, executive director of Blue Ridge Food Ventures. “The collaboration of the
craft artists of HandMade in America and the artisanal producers at Blue Ridge Food Ventures seems like a perfect fit.” HandMade in America grows economies through craft and creative placemaking, transforming both individuals and communities through education, entrepreneurship and economic development. Blue Ridge Food Ventures supports natural and artisan food product entrepreneurs in product development, market access, guidance through governmental regulations, packaging, business support, distribution, and more. For more information, call 828.252.0121 or visit handmadeinamerica.org.
BUILDING BLOCKS FOR THE GARDEN Walk by an 8-foot tall hummingbird, admire a 7-foot rose, and go nose-tonose with a 5-foot butterfly, as The North Carolina Arboretum’s eight acres of formal gardens and exhibit hall feature the exhibit Some Assembly Required through Jan. 5. Renowned children’s author, Sean Kenney, created 27 sculptures using nearly 500,000 colorful LEGO blocks. Based in New York City, Kenney is one of only 13 LEGO Certified Builders worldwide. He spent so much time playing with LEGO toys as a child that he decided he might as well make a career of it. A self-described “professional kid,” Kenney has been turning ordinary LEGO bricks into spectacular works of art for nearly a decade. In addition to Kenney’s pieces, the arboretum also is featuring creations from LEGO enthusiasts in the community. Children and adults alike have been invited to enter the Some Assembly Required LEGO Brick Competition. Participants’ displays are on view in the Baker Exhibit Hall. More than $2,500 in prizes will be awarded to the top entrants. For rules and entry forms, call 828.665.2492 or visit ncarboretum.org. 26
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
79-37
Breakfast & Lunch Daily!
BE YOUR OWN TOUR GUIDE Explore Northeast Georgia with an audio guide to 75 locations throughout the region. Artist and historian John Kollack winds his way from Clarkesville to the FoxďŹ re Museum and Heritage Center, Vogel State Park to Helen, the Dahlonega Gold Museum to Traveler’s Rest. The Experience Northeast Georgia CD set features four albums and an 84page booklet that describes each location on the tour. Each location is on its own individual track, making it easy to start and stop the tour at any point—perhaps at Black Rock Mountain, Georgia’s highest at 3,640 feet, or at the Big Red Apple in Cornelia, a monument to the crop that saved regional farmers from the economic depression the boll weevil brought to cotton growers. For more information or to purchase the audio tour set, visit seenortheastgeorgia.com.
ART ON THE MOVE Nine Georgia communities have been selected to host the state’s ďŹ rst traveling art exhibit, featuring 28 pieces from Georgia’s state art collection. The state art collection, owned and managed by the Georgia Council for the Arts, is an extensive, vibrant chronicle of work created by Georgia artists from the 1970s to the 1990s. The new exhibit is the ďŹ rst of its kind in decades and highlights the diversity of styles, media and techniques in the collection. Original works from some of Georgia’s iconic artists including Benny Andrews, Lucinda Bunnen, Herbert Creecy, Howard Finster, Ruth Laxson and Nellie Mae Rowe are featured in the exhibit. For more information, visit gaarts.org.
Holiday Baked Goods Delicious Old-World Breads Mail-order Service Available
WWW.HOFERS.COM (706) 878-8200
Foxfire
Museum
& Heritage Center
Experience Southern Appalachia as recorded and documented by the students of Rabun County, GA—and shared with the world through The Foxfire Magazine and The Foxfire Book volumes. Visit the legacy they created in honor of their families and neighbors over 45+ years.
Home of the Foxfire books– our newest:
45th Anniv.
1SR ÂŻ7EX EQÂŻ TQ
Museum gift shop offers regional folk pottery, home-made soaps, knitted & woven textile crafts, Foxfire books and related titles on history, plant lore, skills & trades, more! Take US 441 to Mountain City, GA. Turn onto Black Rock Mtn. Parkway. One mile up, follow the brown signs. [[[ JS\½VI SVK ˆ - WWW.SMLIV.COM
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MOUNTAIN CUISINE
Virginia’s Blue Ridge wineries: vines with a view BY MARY KASEY-STURK
Virginia is the fifth largest producer of wine in the United States— behind California, Washington, Oregon and New York—and the wines in this region won’t disappoint. From large wineries with chateaus to smaller ones on family farms, each location offers a taste of the region and the hospitality of the people.
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t Peaks of Otter Winery and Orchard the eagle has landed—really. This mountain destination is so enticing, a bald eagle has taken to dropping by on a regular basis, and one will see why when one visits this whimsical farm winery. Located in the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains at the foot of the Peaks of Otter (three exceptional peaks), the enterprise is a love affair for the Johnson family which has been here for generations. Creative flavors incorporate pears, peaches, blackberries and even crabapples to produce more than 25 inventive wines including Strawberry Shortcake (light apple and strawberry) and Cinfulicious (apple and cinnamon). Farm grown fruits, cider and jams are also deliciously tempting. A 15-foot statue of Johnny Appleseed sets the tone as one tastes wines or enjoys a picnic in the pavilion. Plenty of trails in the orchard are perfect for hiking and walking with breathtaking views.
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hateau Morrisette Winery stands regal along the mountainside, elegant yet accessible with friendly staff both in the tasting room and the dining room. Coming here seems like an event—it’s not unusual to find many diners in celebratory moods. The winery is located at mile post 171.5 along the Blue Ridge Parkway and has wonderful vistas of the New River Valley and Buffalo Mountain. Known for specialty wines such as Our Dog Blue and The Black Dog, Chateau Morrisette currently offers 20 varieties of dry, off-dry, sweet and fruit wines. The restaurant provides great views and tasty dishes such as: Chateau filet mignon, pan-seared catfish and shrimp and grits. Several menu options in-
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online:
To learn more about these and other regional wineries and visiting the Roanoke, Va. area, head to visitroanokeva.com. y
Peaks of Otter Winery and Orchard Open all year. 2122 Sheep Creek Road, Bedford, Va. 540.586.3707 • peaksofotterwinery.com
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Chateau Morrisette Winery Open all year. 287 Winery Road SW, Floyd, Va. 540.593.2865 • thedogs.com
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Virginia Mountain Vineyards Open seasonally. 4204 Old Fincastle Road, Fincastle, Va. 540.473.2979 • vmvines.com
corporate wines with delicious results. One may even catch a glimpse of the owner’s black labrador retriever bounding around the property and other dogs as well because the winery is dog friendly and one is welcome to bring his or her canine buddy.
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o popular is wine, that Virginia Mountain Vineyards is taking it to the next step by offering wine making classes in 2014. Owner David Gibbs said, “The wine school concept is a hands-on educational experience where participants actively become involved in harvesting and processing the grapes. We will cover the topics of sorting the fruit, crushing, pressing, juice analysis, addition of fermentation aids, yeast strain selection, etc. Further into the course, we cover barrel aging, wine stabilization and bottling. The participants are actively involved in each stage and come to the winery approximately four to five times during the school.” Surrounded by the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains, Virginia Mountain Vineyards features Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Traminette and Petit Verdot among the wines it produces. There’s also a full menu of fun events, including stargazing with the Roanoke Astronomy Club, complete with chili, chocolate and, of course, wine.
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
d e p a r t m e n t :
MOUNTAIN CUISINE The Big Chief’s Quiche Casserole for Vegetarian Pilgrims GET YOUR FILL AT FULL SERVICE BBQ
SARAH E. KUCHARSKI PHOTOS
Anthony DiFranco knows that where there’s smoke, there’s barbecue—and so does everybody else in Maryville, Tenn., where DiFranco has turned an old gas station in to Full Service BBQ. There are three smokers on the roadside property. These days, “Bubba’s” job is purely in advertising. The hulking smoker, named for the man who made it, is responsible for wafting that beautiful barbecue smell along to passersby and signaling that, indeed, Full Service is open for business. There are brisket and ribs, pulled pork and chicken; thick beans that balance sweetness with spice; coleslaw, pickles, bread, and copious amounts of sweet tea. One orders at a small window at the former cashier’s kiosk turned tiny kitchen and eats under the gas station canopy or uses the drive-through window to get a meal to go. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s good. 113 S. Washington St. • Maryville, Tenn. fullservicebbq.com
The taco says ‘quack’ One of many in the string of establishments that has convinced Ashevillians that it’s now cool to hang out in a parking lot down by the train tracks, White Duck Taco is anything but easy to find and everything but conventional. Perched on a hill adjacent to Asheville, N.C.’s, Jeff Bowen Bridge, which stretches high above the French Broad River, the restaurant shares its seemingly precarious place with a small gallery, the doors of which open onto an open air patio. A dozen or more large, wooden picnic tables are choice real estate here, as in the warmer months, taco lovers jockey for prime position and the elbow room required to keep one’s taco at the proper per-
This zucchini and potato quiche casserole is a guest favorite at Mast Farm Inn in Banner Elk, N.C. 8-12 portions 8 organic eggs 2 shredded potatoes ½ onion sliced 1 zucchini sliced 1/8 inch salt and pepper to taste 1 tsp herbs de Provence 1 grated garlic 1 ½ c heavy cream 1 c shredded white cheddar 1 tbsp Dijon mustard ½ c artisan goat cheese 2 tbsp olive oil 2 deep 9" pie crust Sauté the onions in olive oil; add the potatoes, salt, pepper, herb de Provence, and garlic, and cook until tender; layer onions and potatoes on the bottom of the pie crust. Sauté the sliced zucchini in olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and herbs de Provence. Fan zucchini on top of the potatoes; add a coat of cheddar then crumble the goat cheese on top of the cheddar. Whisk the eggs with the mustard, salt, pepper and heavy cream; pour egg mixture on top of the cheese and bake for 45 minutes at 350 degrees.
pendicular angle. Seating inside is limited. There are no run-of-the-mill tacos at White Duck—no beef and cheese in a crunchy shell. Instead there’s the West Coast inspired crispy fried fish with crunchy cabbage, jerk chicken and Thai peanut chicken, tofu so tasty it’s got mass appeal and the Carolina barbecue version of carnitas that’s served with coleslaw, each wrapped in two soft corn tortillas. Side items are unnecessary, but if one requires more than a cross-cultural trio of tacos (three make a solid meal), choose among chips with salsa or queso, green chile black beans, or the Mexican Chocolate Pot du Crème with Pistachio Nut Crunch. The only downside to White Duck Taco is that the restaurant is closed on Sundays and opens just before the lunch hour Monday through Saturday, which means that there’s often a line to order that goes
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out the door. Service is snappy however, and diners seem to know it’s less than friendly to linger at a table after eating when fellow taco fans are looking for a seat. Oh, and the name White Duck Taco? It comes from a nickname the chef earned when she’d get excited and talk too much to her kitchen staff —“La Pata Blanca.” Find White Duck Taco in the River Arts District at 1 Roberts Street in Asheville, N.C. whiteducktacoshop.com
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Preserved Forever. Reserved For You.
View from Model home
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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
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PAUL CLARK PHOTO
THE TIES S THAT
BIND
happen one stitch at a time B Y PA U L C L A R K
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ix women sat around a coffee table, skiens of yarn echoing the colors in a bowl of brightly colored candies and knitting needles softly clicking the way hard candy does against one’s teeth as the tongue shifts the sweetness from side to side.
Hands and tongues are always busy at The Knitting Divas, a small shop in Weaverville, N.C., where owner Greta Hillin and her fellow knitters Jackie Keener, Cindi Herald, Ceil Sanow, Lorraine Chamber and Cheryl Walker, gather each Monday morning. “This isn’t a place to be productive,” Keener said. “But it is a place to get help with your knitting. I’m making lots of progress, not just in everyone showing me how to do things but encouraging me, giving me more confidence than I would have at home figuring it out.” “It’s not the same, sitting at home,” Sanow said. “Well, you get more done, but it’s not as much fun,” Herald cracked.
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
“There’s just something about having some place to be, about putting ‘knitting circle’ on your calendar every Monday,” Keener said. “I get excited about coming here. If I have to miss, it’s ‘oh no.’” “That’s how we all feel,” Chamber said. “If somebody has to miss, we physically miss them being here.” Indeed, one knitter from the group was out to watch over her — Jackie Keener mother who had just had surgery, but so as not to worry anyone, she’d made sure to stop by the shop to tell Hillin that the surgery had gone well. The knitting ladies were relieved to hear it. “Is that a dropped stitch?” Chamber, a beginning knitter, asked, about a small mistake Hillin had made while helping Chamber with her work. Apologizing, Hillin took the knitting out of Chamber’s hands. Walker looked at Chamber’s work and said it was beautiful. Herald noted how precise it was. The precision of looping stitch after stitch is relaxing, Chamber said. “That’s what I love about it,” Chamber said. “Until you drop a stitch,” Hillin said to big laughs. Chamber watched Hillin rework the dropped stitch, a seeming metaphor for Chamber’s life— “Finally, after living here 14 years, I feel like things are on track,” she said. Lorraine Chamber (from left), Ceil Sanow and Cindi Herald come to The Knitting Divas in Weaverville, N.C., as “I found my niche.” much for the laughs as the knitting. PAUL CLARK PHOTO Herald nodded in agreement. “This Sisters in Stitches is an Asheville group with more than 200 is the first time I’ve felt like I’m home,” she said. Herald doesn’t active members, all ages and backgrounds. Anybody is drive. She and her husband, who have lived in the Weaverville welcome—knitters, crocheters, cross-stitchers, quilters, area for two and a half years, do everything together. “I love him embroiderers, menders, whoever. The group meets across the more than anything in the world, but he’s not a knitter,” she said, Asheville area, at places like Tipsy Star Quilts, Kitsch Fabrics, causing the group of women to stop their work and laugh. “I The Foundry, Filo, and the Battery Park Book Exchange & look so forward to Mondays,” she said. “I hope that I never lose Champagne Bar. this. I’ll love these ladies forever. They’re stuck with me.” “We’re like a floating party,” Starr Nielsen said, at Black The group, like any other group of people with kindred Mountain Yarn Shop. A dozen members were sitting in the front interests, is about more than the task at hand. Knitting together of the shop, their projects and materials strewn all around. is a social activity. In Europe in the 1400s, there were exclusively “We had a member about a year ago who had open-heart male knitting guilds and fine needlepoint work historically has surgery,” Deane Giordano said as she knitted. “People in our been a woman’s skill, once carried out in kings’ courts. Less is group who didn’t necessarily know this person rallied and known about the history of knitting circles, but it’s a safe bet that brought her food and groceries, sat with her and took care of her they’ve been around since the utilitarian skill was passed down and her husband. If you have a need or a problem, they’re going the generations. Like most handmade traditions, knitting to rally and be there for you like people do for each other, when experienced a downturn in popularity with industrialization. they’re sick or in pain.” However, a movement to reclaim homesteading skills such as “Women nurture,” Gina Arnone said, looking up from the canning and sewing, along with the globalization of the fiber patch she was making for a quilt. market that made alpaca, merino and other natural fibers more “Life is hard. We need each other,” Delores Donnan said. widely available, has sparked a knitting revival. It’s become “And one of the best ways to be there for each other is to do commonplace to find shops, cafes, libraries, and circles of friends something as mundane as knitting together. Our group may practicing the skill, as magazines gush about celebrities who come together over knitting, but this is really about life and knit, such as Julia Roberts and Winona Ryder.
“There’s just something about having some place to be ... about putting ‘knitting circle’ on your calendar every Monday.”
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Above: Deane Giordano, left and Starr Nielsen trade tips and stories at Sisters in Stitches at Black Mountain Yarn Shop. Right: Pete Petersen (from left) spins a yarn for Deane Mae Driscoll, center, and Gina Arnone at Black Mountain Yarn Shop. PAUL CLARK PHOTOS
getting through life together.” “If you’re looking for companionship and some fun, a good starting place with strangers is to have some common interest,” Nielsen said. While such groups have a social element, those who don’t want to join in on the conversation are still welcome. “You get to be in the community but without the pressure of having to be social,” Giordano said. Donnan, knitting a blanket for a newborn, didn’t know anyone in the area when she moved to Asheville from New Jersey a year and a half ago. Sisters in Stitches not only introduced her to a great 34
bunch of people, but it also helped her find a reading group to join and restaurants to visit. “Knitters are always the friendliest of people,” she said. “They’re even better than a barber shop or a hair salon,” said Pete Petersen, 80, and the only man working alongside the rest of the group. Petersen’s mother taught him how to knit in 1942, when he was 9, so he could knit scarves for soldiers. After the war, he put down his knitting needles. And then, a few years ago, he started up again, prodded by his church to help create squares for children whose parents had died of AIDS in Africa. SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
Shop owner Don Farrow, busy helping customers in the shop, noted that stories like this are common when people are knitting. People talk about their jobs, their families, their kids, good things, and bad things. There’s no tolerance for gossip, and bringing up religion or politics goes nowhere. “Community like this, it’s not anything that you can flip the switch and it happens. It just happens,” Farrow said. And it’s happening more and more among men knitters. “There are more of us than you’d expect,” Dan Tan said, as he and Rik Schell knitted together at Purl’s Yarn Emporium, the only representatives of the men’s group that has been meeting there twice a month for more than two years. Schell and his wife own the store, located in downtown Asheville. As he and Tan quietly conversed over their work, aromas from nearby restaurants and strains of street chatter floated through the shop’s open door, and their stitches swung in time to the jazz on the radio. The two were working on a project they found online, a mystery pattern for a shawl released in stages by a pattern designer on ravelry.com, a free international social network for knitters and crocheters.
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David Tan, left, and Rik Schell catch up on their work and each other’s lives at the men’s knitting group at Purl’s Yarn Emporium in Asheville. One of the few men at knitting groups he attends, Schell says he’s no less welcome. PAUL CLARK PHOTO
Women always outnumber the two guys when the Smoky Mountain Knitting Guild meets in Waynesville. “So it’s nice to have a …,” Schell said. “ … a shared experience,” Tan said. “Yeah. It’s nice to get together with the guys. There’s nothing wrong with that,” Schell said. “We trade stories about going into yarn shops and getting strange looks,” Tan said, looking up at a visitor over his glasses. Linda Merritt had been walking around the store. She walked up behind Schell. “Now that’s unusual, to see guys…,” she said. “There you go,” Tan said to the visitor, laughing. Merritt and her husband were visiting from Clinton, and one never sees men knitting there, she said. “How did you all acquire that habit?” she asked, correcting herself that she meant to say “skill.” Tan replied that the word “habit” sums the hobby up pretty well. Schell and Merritt fell into a conversation 36
about crafting. Merritt even made her own wedding dress. She watched the men work for a while. “It’s relaxing, isn’t it?” she said. “There are times when it gets frustrating,” Tan said, eliciting laughter and general agreement. “But for the most part, it’s my stress relief.” An accountant by trade, Tan likes the math of counting and keeping track of stitches. He likes that he always has gifts to give. And he loves how knitting brings him in contact with SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
others who share his love for the craft—and who push him to be creative, like Schell, with whom he’s got a bit of competition going. Each man tries to take on complex projects and modify the stitch patterns to make the work his own. But the competition always is friendly, so much so that when Schell’s car broke down near the end of a long drive from Ohio back to Asheville, N.C. he called his knitting group friends for help first. Within moments, he had the help he needed. That’s the nature of knitters—they’re a tightly woven community. A women’s knitting group also meets at Purl’s; one group member moved to Asheville to take care of her mother and didn’t know anyone else in town. She joined the knitting group, and when she needed care herself after breaking her foot, her fellow knitters brought her food and mowed her lawn. This sense of community is palpable at The Knitting Divas as well. Storeowner Hillin was passing around a photo of a dog with a
crocheted hat when group member Walker shoved her needles and project into her plastic tote and announced she had to go. Her fellow knitters protested. Walker’s voice dropped to a near whisper—she was going to see a doctor, she said. Hillin reached for Walker’s arm and asked if everything was okay. Walker patted her heart. “It’s been fluttering,” she said. The group’s mood fell. Walker said it was nothing, not to worry, and each knitter told her to take care—and meant it. In that way, these knitting circles are circles of trust. Unless, that is, a fellow knitter says something funny. Then, everyone cracks up. Launching into a story about visiting the new Trader Joe’s grocery store in Asheville, Sanow drew knowing nods from her fellow women knitters. “I swore I wasn’t going to go the first week until they got all the kinks out,” she said. “Of course, you can’t get into the parking lot; you can’t get out of the parking lot. So I did what many people are doing, which was park at that Harris Teeter across the street,” she said referring to the city’s other, immediately adjacent, brand new grocery store. “I said something to this guy at Trader Joe’s. He said, ‘You know, you could be towed.’ I
“Our group may come together over knitting, but this is really about life and getting through life together.” — Delores Donnan
said, ‘OK, we better hurry up!’ So I get all the stuff I want, I’m waiting in line to get checked out and I was just so excited, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I said to the checkout girl, ‘I’ve been waiting for you since 1994!” Throughout it all, the knitting needles kept moving and no one dropped a stitch. “One of the guys that worked there, he came over to me and said, ‘I bet you cook well,’” Sanow said, referring to a Trader Joe’s clerk. “And I said, ‘I cook reasonably well,’ and he said, ‘There’s a lady down there trying
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to decide which olive oil to buy.’” Sanow looked around at the women, who had stopped knitting and were looking at her. “Do I look like I know anything about olive oil?” “Well, a little bit,” Keener said. “So I go down the aisle and I’m helping her,” Sanow continued. “I mean, she’s a total stranger to me. And we’re talking about olive oil.” She mimicked the stranger’s voice as she repeated the conversation: “I don’t know, should I get the one that says ‘packed in Italy,’ or is it okay if it was imported from Italy but packed in America? This one says ‘Ingredients, 100 percent olive oil,’ but this bottle over here doesn’t say ‘ingredients,’ but it does say ‘100 percent pure olive oil.’” Herald leaded in toward Sanow. “Ceil, you had the experience of meeting yourself.” The women’s laughter was explosive—loud, long and loving, it washed through like a cleansing spring rain. It was the kind of laughter that made one feel good just to be in it, to be with people who enjoyed one another so much that they could tease each other so gently. “She doesn’t like that I know her so well,” Herald said, again putting the women in stitches.
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Crowds gather under the tent at Jonesborough, Tenn.’s, National Storytelling Festival to hear some of today’s biggest storytelling talent take the stage. PHOTOS COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL STORYTELLING CENTER
Gather
y stor ‘round, I have a
to tell
BY MARLA HARDEE MILLING
L
istening to family stories has always been part of Sheila Kay Adams’ life. Some she heard freely, saying “Daddy and Mama were always telling stories about family members.” Other times, she would press her ear to a pipe running straight down from her bedroom to the kitchen and she could hear every word her parents said. Adams has lived her entire life in Madison County, N.C., a place she refers to as “paradise.” She’s an accomplished storyteller, ballad singer, old-time banjo picker and author, and she recently was honored as a 2013 National Heritage Fellow.
Adams knows how to keep a crowd entertained whether she’s telling a tale, singing or strumming, but she claims a gowith-the-flow attitude when she hits the stage, saying she never knows exactly what she’s going to do before she does it. “All I do is get up there and talk,” she says. “I walk out there and just open my mouth.” That sounds simple enough, but it’s important to keep in mind that Adams is backed by years of experience and dedication. She keeps fans coming back, again and again, to hear her stories of growing up in the Sodom Community, because she’s so carefully honed her craft and grown into the confidence that allows her to hit the stage without pre-planning. She’s also telling stories about the people and places she loves, so the words flow easily
from her heart and mind. “Kids today are socially awkward,” says Adams. “When we were growing up old folks put us outside and we weren’t expected to come back until dark. Today’s kids have trouble dealing with the real world, but that’s where storytelling comes in—hearing stories of ‘don’t do that again.’ “I think the tradition of storytelling will survive,” she says. “I don’t ever see it dying out.” A good storyteller can take just about anything that happens and include it in the framework of a larger story designed to provoke reactions from the audience. Donald Davis first heard the pleas “tell it again, tell it again” in
“Today’s kids have trouble dealing with the real world, but that’s where storytelling comes in— hearing stories of ‘don’t do that again.’” — Sheila Kay Adams WWW.SMLIV.COM
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“In every culture, the folk tales will tell you what that culture values. The theme is often the same—if you treat other people with respect then good things will come to you.” — Elizabeth Ellis
PHOTOS COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL STORYTELLING CENTER
grade school as he would repeat tales his grandmother had told him and classmates would beg for more. The chant grew even louder by the time he was in college. Telling stories that made friends laugh or get a lump in their throat ultimately catapulted him into a career as a professional storyteller. He’s a retired Methodist minister (yes, he has some hilarious tales about funerals and weddings) and serves as a featured storyteller at festivals around the globe. He’s a prolific author and master teacher of storytelling courses and workshops. There’s a careful cadence and rhythm to Davis’ stories. He knows how to command an audience’s attention, when to pause and how to precisely deliver a punch line that brings howling laughter or quiet reflection. But perhaps more importantly, Davis understands an audience isn’t really listening to a good story. Instead they’re seeing the story in their own mind. A good storyteller
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chooses words and descriptions in such a way to paint a vivid mental picture. “People don’t realize how much work storytelling is. It’s an all-the-time type of thing for me,” Davis says. Davis often draws upon real life events for his stories—the “first time” his father died being one such example. The death was a mistake, the result of a mixed-up phone call. After what Mark Twain would call “greatly exaggerated” reports of his death, Davis’ father went on to live another 23 years. The experience taught Davis an important lesson. He needed to ask more questions, get more details about his family. It’s advice that he passes on to every storyteller. “There’s only one rule of family storytelling and it’s this—it doesn’t matter if they want to hear it or not. Tell it to them anyway,” Davis says. Stories permeated his life from as early as he can remember while growing up in Waynesville, N.C. His grandmother, who he visited often at her home in Fines Creek, was always talking about what “Jack” had been up to lately. Davis didn’t even realize what he was listening to was part of the Jack Tales tradition continued in the Southern Appalachian region by ScotchIrish, English and German immigrants. In his book, “Southern Jack Tales,” Davis writes: “there was a time I was convinced that [Jack] was a boy who surely lived just around the mountain
from my grandmother’s house.” Instead, Jack was a representation of values and culture. “The hero in these tales is clever and lucky. He can stand up in situations where people may be trying to take advantage of him and that’s Jack,” says retired Appalachian State University English Professor Thomas McGowan. McGowan has spent time working with authentic Jack Tale teller Orville Hicks. Orville is a cousin to the late Ray Hicks, a master teller of Jack Tales and other stories, and who was named a National Heritage Fellow in 1983. “The Hicks, Harmon and Ward families of Watauga County and also Avery County were notable tellers who liked Jack Tales. The tradition continued because of the commitment of people within families to keep telling them,” says McGowan. While some point to Hicks’ distant relations as being the ones to bring Jack Tales to American, American folklorist Richard Chase helped make the tales famous when he visited the Hicks, Harmon, and Ward families in Western North Carolina’s remote high
“The festival actually enables the older people to talk to younger people. It’s a way of embracing the past and enables young people to make sense of the stories.” — Kiran Singh Sirah, International Storytelling Center museum manager
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
country in Watagua and Avery counties and recorded their storytelling. “I’m not sure how he wrote it down,” McGowan says. “I’ve heard there was a stenographer with him who recorded some of the tales. “ Chase’s book, The Jack Tales, first appeared in hardcover in 1943 and has gone through repeated printings throughout the years—it’s popularity just as sound as it was originally. There are some scholars who claim people read Chase’s book and that’s how the stories continued, but McGowan isn’t sold on that—other people, like Davis’ grandmother—were telling Jack Tales elsewhere in the Appalachians. “My grandfather in Kentucky was a wonderful storyteller,” says Elizabeth Ellis. “I heard stories in the Jack Tales tradition, but he was often called ‘Little Nippy’ instead of Jack. I never heard him called that anywhere else but Eastern Kentucky. “They are elaborate tales with intricate plots,” she says. “They often deal with Jack being clever and overcoming great obstacles with his cleverness. He’s not always a good role model. Sometimes he steals and takes advantage of others like in the story of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ where he takes things from the giant. It depends on which version you hear.” Along with Jack Tales, Ellis tells “Jill Tales.” While Jack represents the common male folk hero, there are also stories with strong female characters, she said. “The stories tend to be about the youngest daughter who has a big obstacle to overcome,” Ellis says. “She is courteous of her elders and willing to help others, and she is rewarded for that. In every culture, the folk tales will tell you what that culture values. The theme is often the same—if you treat other people with respect then good things will come to you.” Take for example the young woman named Mutsmag. Mutsmag and her two older sisters are walking a path, and an old woman tries to capture them. Along the journey the girls are given opportunities to help others. The two sisters refuse, but Mutsmag always takes time to do what is asked of her. When she passes an apple tree, the tree asks her to pick some apples because they are weighing down a branch to the point of breaking. Mutsmag obliges. She
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“It doesn’t matter if they want to hear it or not. Tell it to them anyway.”
PHOTOS COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL STORYTELLING CENTER
passes a cow that says it is in pain from not being milked. She stops to milk the cow. Then she comes across a loaf of bread baking in an oven. It asks her to pull it out so it won’t burn, and she does. Because Mutsmag had been so helpful, in return the tree, the cow and the oven help her by sending the old woman on a wild goose chase so Mutsmag can get away safely. Ellis encourages parents and grandparents to tell stories to their kids as a way of teaching them compassion and empathy for others. “Children need to hear stories,” she says. “Their moral imagination needs to be developed and that needs to happen at home. It doesn’t happen through TV or video games. It happens between the living breath of the storyteller’s mouth and the
— Donald Davis
child’s ear and heart. We are growing more people in our culture who have never developed compassion or empathy and without it civilization is impossible. “Storytelling is like going to the gym for the imagination,” she continues. “What we use
expands and grows. What we do not use begins to atrophy. When we don’t use our imaginations enough, it begins to atrophy. A vivid imagination can show you there are multiple ways to respond to whatever problem you have.”
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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
Jonesborough, Tenn.’s storytelling festival
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“We will allow people to submit stories in creating a more peaceful world,” he says. It’s easy to assume that the younger generation—the generation geared toward electronic communication versus the spoken word—doesn’t have an appreciation for storytelling. However many storytellers say this just isn’t the case, even though this particular festival does draw a predominantly senior audience. “A storytelling festival is an artificial construct,” says storyteller Elizabeth Ellis. “It costs a lot of money to go there and stay there.
he quaint town of Jonesborough, Tenn., is the site of the National Storytelling Festival and the International Storytelling Center. The first festival took place in 1973, the brainchild of Jimmy Neil Smith who was a Jonesborough mayor and journalism professor. He rolled an old farm wagon into courthouse square, and a modest crowd gathered to swap stories. Ray Hicks was one of the tellers at the inaugural festivals and helped ignite a renaissance of storytelling. Two years later, the National Storytelling Association was founded in Jonesborough, and it paved the way for the current organization, the International Storytelling Center to stake its claim as a premier organization to promote the legacy of creative storytelling. Smith retired from the center in December 2012, and folklorist and museum manager Kiran Singh Sirah took over. Originally from Scotland, Sirah earned a master’s degree in folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He’s personally interested in the connection between the Scotch-Irish ancestry through much of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee and the stories that continue to be told. “When I hear stories here, I hear the linkage between the ballads and stories I heard in Scotland,” Sirah says. Sirah not only wants to compare the links between the traditional and old stories, but to take a look at the contemporary and modern stories emerging in the region as well as the stories being told today in Scotland and Ireland. The reshaping of stories and telling of new ones is part of what draws people to the National Storytelling Festival again and again— Each year downtown Jonesborough fills with visitors who are drawn in by the craft of storytelling. The continuing the tradition. festival appeals to all ages. PHOTO COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL STORYTELLING CENTER “We’re opening opportunities for younger storytellers to come to the festival,” Sirah says. “We engage with schools, and we ask the question: how do we A storytelling festival represents a small picture of what pass on these stories to a younger generation? The festival storytelling is and whom it appeals to. It draws those with actually enables the older people to talk to younger people. It’s a disposable income and disposable time.” way of embracing the Storytelling also happens at schools, churches, community past and enables young centers, prisons, battered women’s shelters, and within groups like people to make sense of scouting and boys and girls clubs. It also takes place inside homes, the stories. It’s something among family and friends. A T-shirt at the festival sums it up well, we’re very interested in.” saying, “The shortest distance between two people is a story.” Along with the yearly Storytelling becomes the vehicle within a community to share festival, the center offers the collected wisdom of the world. Many stories illustrate how storytelling programs pitfalls have been avoided or new choices made to live a more throughout the year successful life. Stories can be humorous or serious, but they bond including a resident storyteller program featuring a variety of the teller with the listener and help reveal a universal truth that tellers who spend a week at the center offering performances the listener recognizes. and workshops. “All 12-step programs are based on telling your story, and in the Sirah also hopes to find ways to engage a worldwide audience telling of it and listening to other people’s stories, you begin to through digital media and social media as well as developing new see that you can make different choices,” Ellis said. “It holds out international partnerships. A new one that’s currently underway is the idea that if you don’t like the story you’re currently living, you a joint project with the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation. can change the plot.”
“The shortest distance between
two people is a story.”
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DOWNTOWN WAYNESVILLE, NC HISTORIC MAIN STREE T
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ED KELLEY • EDKELLEY.COM
Historic Downtown Waynesville is a vibrant friendly small town with many fine shops, galleries, & restaurants. There are many venues offering entertainment throughout the holiday season, live music, theater, movies & more! Please refer to our website for the latest calendar.
ART after DARK — Friday, December 6• 6-9 p.m. Shop in our many downtown galleries, open late featuring artist receptions, refreshments, musicians & more.
Waynesville CHRISTMAS PARADE — Monday, December 9 • 6 p.m. “Dreaming of a White Christmas”
A CHRISTMAS Carol— December 6-15 • 7pm HART Theater 828.456.6322 harttheatre.com
A NIGHT Before CHRISTMAS— Saturday evening, December 14 Shops, Galleries & Restaurants open late. Caroling, live music, Bethlehem Marketplace, live nativity, old fashioned wagon rides, storytelling, poetry, luminaries, SANTA & more. 6-9pm
“It’s a Small, Small Work” Artist showing — Through Dec. 28 Haywood County Arts Council’s Gallery 86, 86 N Main Street haywoodarts.org 828.452.0593
Snow Days— January We are Open! Come Shop, Eat and Play with Us!
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Debunking
BY BECKY JOHNSON
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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
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he Smoky Mountains’ urban legends—or rather rural myths—are a sure-fire way to strike up conversation. But be forewarned. One could be walking into a hornet’s nest, or opening a can of worms, or even, as some say around here, stepping into a cow pile. Swagger up to a produce stand and ask folks if they’ve ever seen cougars in these parts, and one’s liable to unleash a round of heated speculation from anyone within earshot. “There are no cougars here,” said Dan Gibbs with the Tennessee Wildlife Agency in Morrisville. But those are fighting words to many, especially people who have seen cougars in the Smokies with their own eyes, clear as day, cross their heart and hope to die. Gibbs regularly fields calls from people who’ve seen a cougar in the mountains. But there’s never been a bona fide claim. He chalks up purported cougar sightings to mistaken bobcats or coyotes. “People see things in shadows, and your mind plays tricks on you,” Gibbs said. Cougars were once as integral to the Smokies as lions are to the African savannah. But the early settlers weren’t exactly fans of the big cats, and they were hunted out by the late 1800s. “Basically, people extirpated them because they were a predator,” Gibbs said. There’s been a spike in cougar sightings in the past decade—but they turn out to be hoaxes. “We’ll get pictures from someone who says, ‘I captured this on my trail cam the other day,’ even though you’ve seen that same photo five times over the past few years from different people who swear up and down they took it,” Gibbs said. “The internet makes it easier for stuff to be pushed around.” Wherever one finds cougars, one might just find the local elf population. When the Great Smoky Mountains National Park reintroduced a herd of elk to Cataloochee Valley several years ago, park rangers fielded an irate call from an irate taxpayer with creative ears who understood that monies had been used to reintroduce “elves” to the park. The popular host of the long-running Heartland Series on WBIR Knoxville, Bill Landry, heard the story and ran with it. Landry cooked up a segment that aired on April Fool’s Day featuring elementary school children dressed as elves. With the help of an agreeable park ranger, Landry captured woodland elves by firelight and then released them from the back of a cattle truck bearing a huge sign on the side that read “elf reintroduction.” And thus a new legend was born.
NO ANSWER IN SIGHT For decades, ecologists have debated how the grassy balds of the Southern Appalachians came to be. “There are a lot of theories out there. It is like a million dollar question,” said Chris Gentile, director of the WNC Nature Center in Asheville. Maybe Native Americans burned balds routinely for hunting, keeping them free of trees. Maybe the soil is inhospitable. Or maybe mastodons, tapirs and giant sloths roamed the balds, grazing them clean. “There’s no way to tell, but we think it is an interesting theory,” Gentile said. Bones of Pleistocene creatures have been found on the balds. And after the big guys moved on, elk and bison picked up the torch, Gentile postulated. At Roan Mountain, famous for its high-elevation meadows, the mega-fauna grazer theory is a leading one, touted on exhibits in the visitor center. But rangers also offer up folklore behind the balds—namely that bloodshed from great Native American battles on the balds cursed the ground so nothing could grow. “There are tons of theories, and we really don’t know exactly,” said Jacob Young, manager of Roan Mountain State Park in Tennessee. Young favors the obvious: it’s just really cold up there. “My theory is weather,” Young said. “You go to the top of Roan Mountain, it is like going to Canada.” The winds are fierce, up to 100 miles an hour. And snow covers the high mountains until spring—at least it used to. “In the last 100 years the weather has gotten milder and milder,” Young said, which might explain why balds are disappearing. Warmer winters correlate with the steady march of trees and shrubs into the oncegrassy meadows over the past century. But that theory falls short, Gentile said. Some 6,000-foot peaks are covered in trees, while some as low as 5,000 feet are treeless. He believes the disappearance of grazing animals from the landscape equates with the loss of balds. Recently, goats have been pressed into service to help keep balds bald. Their
Cougars were once as integral to the Smokies as lions are to the African savannah. But the early settlers weren’t exactly fans of the big cats, and they were hunted out by the late 1800s. WWW.SMLIV.COM
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The origins of Brevard, N.C.’s, white squirrels are up for debate, but some speculate their light coloration gives them a natural advantage. DONATED PHOTO
unrelenting nibbling is a lot less laborious than mowing and slashing the mountaintops by hand, a tactic used by some public land managers. But anyway one cuts it, the origin of balds remains shrouded in mystery, despite the million dollar views from on top.
GETTING SQUIRRELY The highly unusual colony of white squirrels in Brevard, N.C., is believed to number more than 600 today, and according to local legend can be traced to a single Adam and Eve. The short version goes like this: in 1949, a teenager got a pair of pet white squirrels from her uncle. One got lose from its backyard cage, and the other was then set free. Within a few years, people starting spotting white squirrels around Brevard. Barbara Mull, the teenager who started it all, tells the story in her aptly titled book The First White Squirrels of Brevard Were Mine. But is it possible? Could the burgeoning colony of white squirrels around Brevard really have come from a single pair, more than 60 years ago? Yes, says retired Brevard College biology professor, Bob Glesener. And here’s why this improbable sounding story is, in fact, genetically sound. “People will brake for white squirrels, but they won’t brake for grey squirrels. They shoo the grey squirrels away from their feeders but let the white squirrels feed. So it is little things like that,” Glesener said of the animal’s unusual advantage. The town fathers even passed a local law in the 1980s, declaring Brevard a squirrel sanctuary, making it illegal to hunt, trap or kill squirrels in the town limits. While it seems the squirrel’s white color would make camouflage a challenge, Glesener postulated that hawks, fox and owls may not recognize white squirrels as meal potential. “It could be that predators don’t have a white rodent in their search engine,” Glesener said. Glesener has conducted scientific annual population counts of Brevard’s white squirrels for 15 years. The population has increased steadily year over year. They now account for 40 percent squirrels overall. If Glesener takes the squirrel’s population trajectory and traces it backwards, the growth rate perfectly matches the proposed 1950s origin. 50
Brevard is king when it comes to white squirrels, despite a few other places in the country trying to horn in on the fame. “There are hotspots where they are common, but most places they are very rare. They never become abundant enough to become a colony,” Glesener said. So why Brevard? “Bingo,” Glesener said. To him, that’s still an unexplained mystery. “It could be the Adam and Eve brought to Brevard and released in 1951 had with them not only genes for a white coat but other genes that made them very vigorous,” Glesener said. And that gene is being passed down as well. Squirrels have can have two litters a year, with well-fed squirrels producing up to four or five pups in a litter. So a fat and happy momma could have eight to 10 baby squirrels a year. Glesener hasn’t bought the squirrel’s tale wholesale, however. “I have problems with parts of the folklore,” Glesener said. Glesener questions the mythology of how the original pair came into Barbara Mull’s uncle’s possession. The story goes that a circus caravan traveling through Florida wrecked, and white squirrels on board got loose. The squirrels took up residence in a pecan orchard where Mull’s uncle worked. He helped the orchard owner trap them, then SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
brought them back to Brevard and gave them to his niece. Glesener doesn’t buy that story. He believes Mull’s uncle indeed brought them back from Florida, one of the few other regions in the country with white squirrels of its own. But Glesener has found documentation of a pecan orchard owner selling white squirrels during that era, and thinks the exotic story of a derailed circus caravan was a cooked-up marketing gimmick. Brevard has seized on its white squirrel stardom. It has the two-day White Squirrel Festival, a White Squirrel Institute, a town law protecting the squirrels, and even an AM radio station with the call letters WSQL. Donna Stout, owner of the White Squirrel Shoppe in Brevard, likes to point out she chose the name of her shop 25 years ago before Brevard was gripped with the white squirrel obsession. “You better betcha,” Stout said. “Everybody is trying to get on the bandwagon with the squirrels now.”
IN TO THE DEPTHS OF A LONG, LOST MINE Glenn Cardwell has seen a passel of people disappear into Greenbrier Cove over the years to hunt for the fabled lost silver mine of the Smokies, only to come out empty handed with nothing but scrapes and scratches to show for their trouble. “Nobody has ever found it but they keep trying. I am not going to say it doesn’t exist… but I think it is more fiction than fact,” said Cardwell, a ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for 35 years, now retired. If any place could hide a secret silver mine though, it would be Greenbrier Cove, ensconced with thick, gnarled, tangled rhododendron groves known as “hells” to old-timers. “I wouldn’t send my worst enemy in there, it is so boogered in,” said Cardwell. “I gave up on it. I just didn’t want to fight it.” The Schultz family of Sevier County, Tenn., handed down the tale of the silver mine. Legend claims Perry Schultz discovered
a silver mine in the mid-1800s but died without telling anyone its location. There have been various embellishments, involving Cherokee Indians, secret markers carved into trees, or tales of Schultz’s wife serving as a look-out while he mined. Perhaps the best story traces the mine’s demise to counterfeit coins Schultz made with the help of a mold by Schultz’s nephew allegedly smuggled out of the U.S. Mint in Washington, D.C. where he worked. According to that tale, Schultz went on the lam when the government began tracing the fake coins, taking the location of the mine to his grave. “It is a well accepted truth in the Schultz family, but my question to them is why hasn’t somebody in the family retained an artifact?” Cardwell said. “If there was a silver mine, you would think the family would have some artifact.” The only hard evidence pointing to the mine’s existence are articles of incorporation for a Sevier County Silver, Copper, Lead and Zinc Mining Company in the 1860s—but that doesn’t mean there was a mine, or that it produced anything of value. The Smokies once were home to iron,
copper and gem mines, and gold panners even spurred an Appalachian gold rush in the 1830s. Perhaps Schultz filed a claim, hoping to get in on the boon and planned to worry about the pesky details later—like the actual existence of a mine. “Your guess is as good as mine,” Cardwell said. Cardwell points out the family certainly didn’t have any wealth to show for the alleged mine. “They were true mountaineers like everyone else, living off the land, making do or do without,” Cardwell said. Carroll McMahan, the Sevier County Historian, said the legendary mine is forever trapped in the annals of Smoky Mountain history. “Whether there was actually a mine or there wasn’t is in question,” McMahan said. “I’ve heard about it, it’s been written, but it’s one of those mysteries that can’t be settled.”
WHAT’S IN A NAME? The Smokies are famous for colorful names: Possum Holler, Hurricane Creek, Chunky Gal Mountain. Some are self-explanatory like Flat Laurel
Creek—a flat creek with lots of laurels growing along it—or Wagon Road Gap—a gap in the mountains where a wagon road passed. Many pay homage to Cherokee words, like the Nantahala, Tucakseegee and Oconaluftee rivers. But the origin of some place names remain in dispute, like Boogertown in Sevier County, Tenn. “There are three or four different tales of how it got its name and there is no way to really know,” said Vida King, an archivist at the library in Pigeon Forge. King has collected reams of oral histories from old-timers on how places got their names, but her sleuthing into Boogertown was a quest into the tale of her own childhood. “When I was younger I was embarrassed to say I was from Boogertown,” King said. “But now it is fun to say.” King has ended up with a whole handful of stories of how Boogertown got its name. One version claims an early settler was riding through the dense, steep holler and “spotted something white that he thought it was haint or a booger, an old-timey word for kind of like a ghost,” King said. “He told people about the booger he saw in this
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Much ado about a vowel
S
moky versus Smokey? The raging spelling war has been brewing for decades in the (ahem) Smoky Mountains, but there’s no end in sight. Both sides claim they are right, and both have their own poster child. The Smokeywith-an-e contingent has Smokey the Bear in their corner. The Smoky-sans-e camp stands in solidarity with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Slowly, in past decades, the e-less variety has been edging out its rival, likely due to the national park namesake. But Ron Crivellone threw caution to the wind when bandying names around for his DJ business in the Pigeon Forge area. He hitched his wagon to the “e,” despite warnings he’d regret it, and settled on Smokey Mountain Sounds. “People told me I didn’t need the ‘e’ but some part of me was like, ‘No, sorry, I need that ‘e.’ It will bug me if I don’t,’” Crivellone said. “To me, Smokey with an ‘e’ is how it should be spelled. It didn’t look right without the ‘e.’” Four years later, he still gets hassled about that fateful decision, eliciting raised eyebrows when handing out business cards at networking meetings. “I’m like, ‘It belongs in there,’ and they say, ‘No it doesn’t,’ and I say, ‘Yes it does,’” Crivellone said. The no “e” Smoky’s can be irritatingly smug in their position, pointing no further than the entrance sign to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as proof positive.
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How’s that for home-field advantage? But the “Smokeys” are quick to cry foul when their opponents rest on those laurels. “I think it is like gray and grey,” said Jenniffer Dall, a teacher at Smokey Mountain Elementary School near Sylva, N.C. “They’re both right.” Shades of gray aside, they might both be right, but one is “more” right, according to Richard Weisser, an outdoor photographer under the banner Smoky Photos. “The ‘e’ is an acceptable spelling—but it is more correct not to have the ‘e,’” Weisser said. His softened stance is an about-face from his early years as a “Smoky” purist, however. “The park did not have an ‘e,’ so I was very careful about that,” Weisser said. But he was foiled by all the deviants out there who tried in vain to locate his online database of Smokies photos, running afoul by typing in his web address with the wrong spelling. “I would say no ‘e’ in Smoky, but invariably they would put the ‘e’ in it,” Weisser said. “They would always say, ‘The site isn’t up. The site isn’t working.’” So he hedged his bets. You can now find him under both smokyphotos.com and smokeyphotos.com. The extra $15 a year for both names is well worth it, he said. In Asheville, the smoky-versus-smokey mystery hangs like a dark cloud over Smoky Park Highway—or is it Smokey Park Highway? Road signs declare it both
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
Smoky Mountains photo courtesy of Richard Weisser and SmokyPhotos.com.
ways, making for a smashing “whodunit.” The N.C. Department of Transportation dodged the bullet—it has nothing to do with street signs and, further, it uses numbers internally to catalog roads. “We don’t get all knotted up about names. We don’t get into the naming battle,” said Marshall Williams, traffic engineer with the DOT in Asheville. For the definitive spelling, Buncombe County Emergency Management was called in—whatever is on their maps, the ones used for dispatching fire, police and rescue, is, by default, the official spelling. “The county database has it officially spelled as Smokey with an ‘e,’” said Carolyn Scarberry with the county mapping department. “How it came to be though, I can’t answer that question.” As for the spelling discrepancy on some Smokey Park Highway road signs? “If there are some spelled ‘Smoky,’ it is possible there could have been a mistake. It wouldn’t be out of the question,” said Becky Sensabaug, with the Buncombe Fire Marshall’s Office, who places orders for road signs when they come in. Merriam-Webster also provided little clarification A footnote listed “smokey” as an allegedly acceptable variant for “smoky.” The three-pronged definition of smoky was nonetheless eye-opening: “filled with smoke; having a flavor, taste, or appearance of smoke; and very attractive or sexy,” which begs the question of “Smoky” Mountain Living’s true meaning.
community and when it was retold, they kept saying the place where the booger was seen.” Another version traces the name to riders hearing an unexplained sound in the woods, at night, through the thick, low-hanging limbs that formed a tunnel overhead. The source of the sound was chalked up to a booger. According to one tale, a booger was blamed for unexplained killings of calves and lambs. Boogertown’s origin will never be known.
The cryptic carvings on the giant soapstone boulder known as Judacalla Rock have puzzled archaeologists for decades. Who inscribed it? When? What do the markings mean? Cherokee legend claims the elaborate petroglyph in Cullowhee, N.C., is the handiwork of a mythological giant who could leap from mountaintop to mountaintop. Judacalla Rock was a map, marking his territorial domain. Judacalla wasn’t bad, but he was powerful—he made lightening and thunder, after all—and thus should be respected, said Russ Townsend, archaeologist for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. “He was a caretaker of that part of the world. If you play by the rules Juducalla will take care of you, so don’t break the rules,” Townsend said. It’s probably safe to say that ancient people, not Judacalla, made the markings—the soapstone boulder was easy to carve. Perhaps the rock was inscribed during spirtual ceremonies. Maybe the markings honor important people, or maybe they mean nothing at all, little more than an ancient version of graffiti. Those who believe in paranormal activity have even seized on the mythical rock, asserting that Judacalla has some kind of supernatural origin. But in recent years, researchers have solved many of the unknowns surrounding Judacalla. There once was dispute over how old the markings were. Some thought they could be 10,000 years old, others thought may be only a few hundred. It’s now known the markings were made over a period of many centuries, somewhere between 1,000 B.C. to 1,000 A.D. Archaeology of prehistoric villages nearby have pinpointed the inscriptions to that period, Townsend said. “There are stylistic and cultural differences that go along with artifact types that help us narrow in on a time frame,” Townsend said. For example, automobiles from the 1930s look
DONATED PHOTO
JUDACALLA ROCK: A HARD CASE TO CRACK Carvings on Judaculla Rock may never be fully explained.
“I think what was going on was they were marking that rock at certain times for certain events. What events they were recording we’ll never know.” — Russ Townsend, archaeologist for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians
a whole lot different than cars today. “I think what was going on was they were marking that rock at certain times for certain events. What events they were recording we’ll never know,” Townsend said. “Personally, I feel we are not going to be able to understand exactly what these things meant.”
BLOWING ROCK The legend of star-crossed lovers behind The Blowing Rock is an appealing one no doubt. The towering cliff rises 3,000 feet above a river gorge, and when the wind blows through steep flume-like walls far below, it creates a powerful updraft. But could those winds blow a love-struck Cherokee brave who leapt from the rock back up into the arms of his maiden? “I don’t know if the Native American brave blew back up, but absolutely if the wind is blowing strong enough you can throw a leaf or flower petal off and it blows back up,” said Ruth Bullock, who works at The Blowing Rock. “I can see the leaves stirring right now as I am looking out the window, and it would be enough to work.” Bullock said The Blowing Rock has the unique claim to fame as the only place on earth where it snows upside down. One day, when it started snowing while she was at WWW.SMLIV.COM
work, she ran from the visitor’s center down the trail and out to the edge of the rock. “I thought I was in a snow globe. I looked over the wall—it truly looked like the snow was coming up from the bottom of the gorge,” Bullock said. But precipitation and a person are two different things. Thus Appalachian State University’s physics department was put to task, as physicist Leah Sherman volunteered to put the legend through the paces of modern physics. “I have been running some calculations here, and essentially, the force pushing up has to counter your weight. The forces have to be balanced,” Sherman said. An object with a low mass and large surface area—such as a leaf—can surely blow back up. But assume the legend’s Cherokee male was 150 pounds and six feet tall. The wind would have to be blowing 80 miles per hour to keep him from falling—at least teetering in place; however, the actual equation includes variables such as crosssectional area, drag co-efficient, air density, and for good measure, relative velocity squared (in other words an actual leap off the rock and gravity’s pull). “It’s not working,” Sherman said. “People always laugh and ask, ‘Can I throw my wife off?’” Bullock said. Based on Sherman’s calculations, the answer is a definitive “no.” 53
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Yarn: a long or rambling story, esp. one that is implausible
I
f truth is stranger than fiction, which is more believable—plausible forgery or implausible facts? A good story weaves in just enough mystery to exercise the imagination, and a good storyteller constructs his tale such that the mind yearns for more. Storytellers have enriched the Appalachian Mountains for years, passing on oral traditions and working their craft so as to become part of literary history. Herein authors Donald Davis, Dawn GilchristYoung, and Tommy Hays share their original stories.
I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y MANDY NEWHAM-COBB
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The Red Scooters BY D O N A L D DAV I S
When I was nine years old and my little brother, Joe, was seven years old, we both wanted red scooters for Christmas. We first spotted the scooters at Mr. Bill Cobb’s Firestone Store on Main Street in Waynesville. They were heavy metal with bright paint, solid rubber tires, and even a little brake tab to slow the rear wheel. Every single time we had a chance to talk with Santa Claus, we would both hopefully beg for the red scooters. The more we tried to talk about them at home, the more thoroughly our parents both pretended to ignore us. At the ripe age of nine, I seriously talked with Santa, taking no chances on the school gossip rumors I heard being often spread about the old fellow’s questionable identity. I had, however, noticed on my own that his memory was quite weak. He continued to repeatedly ask me my name every time I met him. Not a good sign for someone reported to know all about you, including your good and bad habits. Christmas came on the weekend that year and our last school day was mid-week. Joe and I had to wait until our mother, who taught second grade at our school, Hazelwood Elementary, finished taking down all of the classroom holiday decorations before we could leave for home. On the last day before the twoweek holiday, this seemed to delay us forever. Finally we were ready to go. It was so late in the day that we were going to stop in Waynesville and do some shopping until daddy was ready to go home from work at First National Bank. He could already be waiting for us by now.
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Mama parked beside the bank and daddy indeed joined us. What we did was more looking than shopping. Up one side of Main Street, we went with stops at Belk’s, Massie’s, and The Toggery. Then we went across the street to Turner’s Store, where we had our last chance at offering our identity to Santa Claus and to remind him of our order for red scooters. Then it was on down the east side of Main Street, where we dropped in at both Roy Parkman’s and Joe Howell’s hardware stores before making our own last stop at Eagle’s Dime Store. In the car and all headed for home, it was now dark and still not even six o’clock. Joe and I were starved. “I’m hungry,” he voiced. “Me too...how long do we have to wait for supper when we get home?” Mama acted like she ignored us, but we knew she had not when she turned to daddy and made her case. “Joe...it’s awfully late to start cooking supper at home, and, today was a long day at school. How about if we stop and have supper at Charlie’s...we are almost there.” Sure enough, Charlie Woodards’s Drive-In was just ahead on the left. We knew daddy had agreed when he rolled down his window to signal the left turn. He answered mama, “Lucille, let’s get curb service and take it home to eat...I have some work to do on the treasurer’s report for the Lions’ Club tonight.” All agreed, we pulled in on the curb service side of the restaurant and daddy tooted the horn. It was Charlie himself who came out to take our order. We had already agreed and daddy placed the order: four Charlieburgers, four orders of french fries, and four Coca-Colas.
Charlie echoed, “Four delicious Charlieburgers, four taters and four Co-colas...to go!” In no time the food was back. Mama smiled at Charlie, “That was fast!” Charlie beamed, “We knowed you was a-coming, Lucille!” He handed a brown paper bag with the burgers and fries in the car window and held out the unopened Cokes held in a row by their bottle necks between the fingers of his left hand. “How much?” daddy asked. “Well,” Charlie mused, “Depends on whether you’all got any bottles to swap.” If we had empty green Coca Cola bottles, they were worth a two-cent credit each. If we did not, he would have to charge us the two cent deposit for each of the returnable bottles. Everyone knew that. We always had bottles. Whenever there were empty Coca Cola bottles, daddy made sure that they were put into the trunk of our car. That way, whenever we happened to buy Cokes, the empties would be with us to swap for the deposit credit. Being a helpful child, I leapt into action. Without saying a word, I jumped out of the back seat of the Plymouth and headed around to the trunk. You did not need a key to open the trunk of our old car; all you had to do was turn the handle. I grasped the handle, turned it, and raised the lid. There, before my eyes, I saw in the car trunk...two brand new red scooters! “No bottles!” I almost shouted as I slammed the trunk lid as quickly as possible. By the time I was back in the car, daddy had already paid the bill and we were quickly headed home in total silence.
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Every single time we had a chance to talk with Santa Claus, we would both hopefully beg for the red scooters. The more we tried to talk about them at home, the more thoroughly our parents both pretended to ignore us. We ate our supper in profound quietness. In fact, it was quiet at our house all the way up to Christmas. Early on the morning of December twenty-fifth, Joe and I were awake. We eased out of bed and I was almost afraid to make the trip into the living room where I knew Santa had left our presents. Joe went straight in there. “Santa messed up,” Joe called back as he beat me to the Christmas tree. “No red scooters...but it’s okay. Look what we got!” Santa Claus had brought Joe a train set. It was already set up, all the way around the Christmas tree. One of the train cars had a load of logs on it, and, as the train traveled around the oval track, when that car passed over a special section of the track the logs rolled off onto a log-rack beside the track. He was happy. I was even happier. Santa had brought me a very-grown-up looking tool set. There was a hammer, a pointed saw, three screwdrivers and a brace and bit with three different wood bits. And, all the tools nested in their own neat wooden box with a carrying handle just like on a real suitcase. The tools cried out to be tested. I pulled the card table out of the closet and bored several holes of different sizes in the top of it to make sure all of the bits in the brace and bit set actually worked properly. In a little while our parents got up. They came to see what we got and to watch us play and didn’t even seem to get mad about the card table. We stopped playing long enough to have breakfast. Mama made pancakes for Christmas morning. Then we opened all the rest of the presents that needed to be opened before going out to our grandparents’ house for the rest of the day with mama’s family. When all of the presents had been opened, daddy pulled me and Joe aside. “Boys,” he spoke to us in an almost secret nearwhisper. “Did you get everything you wanted for Christmas?” Joe answered for both of us: “We got things we hadn’t even asked for!” I silently agreed. “Well,” he went on, “I’m glad to hear that you’re happy. But...I have something to tell you. “Your mother and I kept hearing you talk to Santa about
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something called ‘red scooters.’ We didn’t even know what that meant until one day we saw them at the Firestone Store. When we looked at those red scooters your mama said, ‘Oh, Joe...those things are so big! Santa Claus will never get down the chimney at our house with them.’ “So, boys...your mama and I told Santa to bring you something to surprise you, and we bought the red scooters. We’ve had them hidden in the trunk of the car! You can go out there and get them now.” To this very day, my brother Joe and I still think that was the best Christmas we ever had. We realized that, at his very best, Santa only comes through once each year. And our parents...well, they tried to come through almost every day!
Good News B Y T O M M Y H AY S
“Somebody’s come back from the dead up in Bakersville.” Wilson didn’t look up from the Mitchell County Rotary Club press release he was editing to fit a hole on the obit page. Celia Sluder, the business manager and his boss, and a former Miss North Carolina, famous (had even been on Donohue) for having hurled her crown across the stage in a fit of fury for not getting everything the Jaycees had promised her, stuck her head inside his office door. “I said someone has come back from the dead. Up in Bakersville.”
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
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DECEMBER
1-14 • Festival of Trees, Unicoi State Park. 1-800-573-9659. 7-8 • Annual Christkindlmarkt – Downtown Helen, 706-878-1908. www.helenchamber.com. 7 • Deck the Halls, Unicoi State Park. 1-800-573-9659. www.GeorgiaStateParks.org. 7 • Annual Christmas Parade, Downtown Helen, 2 p.m. 706-878-2181. www.helenga.org. 7 • Annual Christmas in the Mountains Festival, 3-8 p.m., Downtown Cleveland. 706-865-5356. www.whitecountychamber.org. 7 • Annual Christmas in the Mountains Lighted Parade, 7 p.m., Downtown Cleveland. 706-865-5356. www.whitecountychamber.org.
JANUARY
11 • Hogpen Hill Climb, Unicoi State Park. Contact: Habitat for Humanity. 706-754-5313 x 201. 25 • Sautee Nacoochee Vineyards Winter Wino Carnival. 7-10 p.m. 706-878-1056. www.sauteenacoocheevineyards.com. All events subject to change. Call the White County Chamber for new or changed information. 79-59
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When he’d first arrived at the Tri County News, he’d felt out of his depth. He’d never edited a paper before, although he’d worked at little weeklies setting type, doing layout, writing articles, even taking photographs. “Jesus in Bakersville. Who knew?” he said. She stepped into his office. She wore high heels, a tight skirt and a blouse showing just enough cleavage to render any advertiser powerless. The guy who’d hired Wilson, the owner of the paper, a grim balding fellow down in South Carolina with a spooky dark paneled office who owned several sweatshop weeklies across the Carolinas and who, years after Wilson had left the paper, would stab his too young trophy wife, dispose her body in a dumpster then immolate himself in a motel room, had told Wilson that Celia was a real stem winder. Whatever that was. “You need to get up there and see about it,” she said. “The whole county is talking about it. Something about a snake bite. They say his heart stopped for several minutes, that he should be dead.” He groaned. “Not another one.” Every other week somebody was getting bit at the snake handling church outside Bakersville. He’d suspected congregants were getting bit on purpose as some sort of perverse advertising for the church. “He’s not from the church,” Celia said. “He’s retired. Use to teach at Mitchell High.” “Which is a lot more dangerous than snake handling.” “Are you going to go or not?” “I still have all these to get through.” Wilson nodded at the
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big stack of press releases needing his attention. “And I haven’t done the cutlines for the sports page yet.” “You’re always saying you want to write real stories. Now’s your chance.” She grabbed the stack of press releases off his desk. “I’ll take care of these. You get your rear end on up to Bakersville.” She snatched the Rotary Club release out of his hand. He folded his hands on his desk and sighed. She peeled a pink post-it from the inside of her wrist and handed it to him. James Woody was written in Celia’s elaborate cursive, along with a phone number and a street address. “I told Mrs. Woody you’d be there at 1:30pm.” She glanced at her watch. “Just enough time for you to grab some lunch and head on up there.” He sighed again, put on his jacket, snatched up a notebook and started to head out. “Don’t forget the camera,” Celia said, picking up the camera off his desk and handing it to him. “Be sure and take a picture and try to get him to smile. The people in your pictures always look so pained.” At the Upper Street Café, Wilson had a quick lunch of his usual vegetable soup, cornbread and sweet tea. With a little time to spare before his interview, he crossed over to Spruce Pine Savings to deposit his measly paycheck. He always made a point of saying hello to Evie, the loan officer, who he’d set up his banking account with when he’d first arrived. She was one of those girls who looked plain from one angle and pretty from another. She had freckles, intelligent eyes and a devastating mountain accent, and he’d liked her immediately and looked forward to going by the bank whenever he could think up an excuse. He’d thought about asking her to dinner but in the three months he’d been at the paper he hadn’t seemed to manage to work up the nerve. After depositing his check with the teller, he’d walked into Evie’s little glass cubicle toward the rear of the bank. “I’m going to Bakersville to interview some guy who they say came back from the dead.” “Mr. Woody,” she said “You know him?” “He was my English teacher back in the Dark Ages.” “Is he delusional?” “Wasn’t back then. In fact, he was an excellent teacher.” “Maybe he’s developed dementia or something.” “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe he came back from the dead.” She pronounced dead like deyad as if it had two syllables. He bit his lip. “Are you smilin’ at the way I talk?” she asked. “You’re the one who talks funny around here, Mr. Piedmont.” “Yes ma’am,” he said. She smiled. “What?” he asked. She just shook her head. Now! he told himself. Now is the time to ask her to dinner. But he hesitated for two seconds and her phone rang and she said she needed to take it, and he left the bank, berating himself. Who was he kidding? He was never going to ask her.
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It was chilly and overcast as Wilson pulled out of the Lower Street parking lot and pointed his Comet, a seven-year-old college graduation present from his parents, in the direction of Bakersville. When he’d first arrived at the Tri County News, he’d felt out of his depth. He’d never edited a paper before, although he’d worked at little weeklies setting type, doing layout, writing articles, even taking photographs. He’d taken the job at the TriCounty News, because, one, they’d offered it to him, two, he’d been eager to get the heck out of Columbia which felt booby trapped with memories of his girlfriend, and three, but not least, because he’d always loved the Western North Carolina mountains. As the crow flies, Greenville or Spartanburg weren’t that far away, but the gain in altitude from the piedmont to the mountains was enough to lift Wilson into a whole different stratosphere. The cool, the mist and the lush vegetation felt otherworldly and yet familiar at the same time. And the intimacy of the geography—the coves, the valleys and the mountainsides—made him feel at home, protected even. And, over time he’d gotten the hang of the job, from collecting the news, to editing it, to putting pages together, to driving the pages down the mountain to the press in Black Mountain and then driving a van full of the finished papers reeking of ink back up the mountain. When it came down to it, he did everything but deliver the paper, which he’d also done on more than one occasion. The Woodys’ house, a neat, single-story bungalow, sat back from a creek, and a big sycamore stood off to the side. When Wilson got out of the car, the first thing he smelled was wood smoke, which settled around the house like an acrid fog. Wilson noticed a neat stack of split wood toward the back of the yard. As he walked up the gravel drive he was greeted by a couple of enthusiastic golden retrievers whose entire bodies wagged, and he walked up to the door, reporter’s notebook in hand, camera slung around his neck. He’d just stepped up onto the porch when an animated gray-haired woman, who he guessed to be in her early sixties, opened the door and waved him in. “Mrs. Woody?” “Come in, come in,” she said, as she closed to door behind him. “You’re right on time.” She started to lead him toward the back of the house. “My husband is in the kitchen.” She paused in the middle of the living room. “He would’ve met you himself but...” She lowered her voice, “…his energy hasn’t fully returned since his ordeal.” “We don’t have to do this if he’s not feeling well,” Wilson said, sensing an escape route. “Nonsense,” she said. “If there’s one thing James is always up for is visitors. Never met a stranger.” She led him into the kitchen where a tall, lean man was sitting at a table peering down his glasses at the end of his nose, reading the paper, the New York Times no less. Somehow, this wasn’t the image Wilson had had of the man who’d reportedly come back from the dead. When he saw Wilson, he folded the paper, slowly
stood and held out his hand. “Don’t get up Mr. Woody,” Wilson said. “Your wife tells me you’re not feeling well.” “I feel fine,” the man said, giving Wilson’s hand a firm shake as if to prove his vigor. “You don’t look fine,” his wife said. “You look peaked.” She turned to Wilson. “Doesn’t he look peaked?” Wilson hesitated. “Well…I have no context,” he began, although he did think Mr. Woody looked pale and drawn. “Nothing like putting the boy on the spot, Leila,” the man said. “Honestly,” Wilson said, “if now is not a good time…” “Pull up a chair.” Mr. Woody pronounced “chair” like cher. “And pay my wife no heed. She’s a worry wart. Goes with her training.” “He means I’m a nurse,” she said. “Mostly retired but every now and then I fill in at the hospital. Have you had lunch? I could whip you up a BLT in no time.” “I’ve already eaten, thanks,” Wilson said, sitting at the kitchen table, which was covered with checked oil cloth. “What about a cup of coffee? No newspaperman worth his salt can turn down a cup of coffee.” Before he could say anything she’d already set a steaming mug on the table in front of Wilson, along with a creamer and sugar bowl. “Thank you,” he said, pouring cream into this coffee and stirring it. He took a sip, set the cup back down, then took his pen out of his shirt pocket and opened his notebook. “Celia tells me you had a near-death experience, Mr. Woody,” he said. “Perhaps involving a snake bite?” And that was all it took. Mr. Woody leaned forward in his chair, set his hands flat on the table and started into his story. Mrs. Woody sat down with them. As Wilson soon realized, the two of them must’ve told this story together dozens of times by now. “It was a Sunday night,” Mr. Woody said. “I’d been watching
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a program on PBS about the Mayan Indians. I noticed the house was getting a little chilly and realized the woodstove had gone out. So I went out back to the woodpile.” “Went out there in the pitch black dark,” Mrs. Woody said, “without so much as a flashlight. I’ve been warning him for years.” “Anyhow,” Mr. Woody said, “I picked up an armful of wood but as I was walking back to the house, one of the pieces shifted, then wrapped around my arm and I felt something like needles dig into my wrist. I slung the snake, along with the rest of the wood, out into the yard. Then I went back inside and told Leila I’d been bit.” “He said it like he might say he’d gotten a splinter or stubbed his toe,” Mrs. Woody said. “I told him we needed to go to down to the hospital but he wouldn’t listen.” “I poured a little hydrogen peroxide over it,” Mr. Woody said, “and went back to watching my program.” Mrs. Woody said she called their doctor anyway and he told her she ought to take her husband to the ER immediately just in case. The doctor also asked if they knew what kind of snake it was, which sent Mr. Woody out into the yard with a flashlight, but he couldn’t find the snake. Wilson took notes as fast as he could, the story seeming to flow out of the couple. “On the way to Spruce Pine he tells me to pull over at the Hilltop Mart for his Atlantic Monthly,” Mrs. Woody said. “They get it in for me special,” said Mr. Woody. “At first, I refused to pull over but he put up a fuss and I finally I gave in.” “If I was going to spend half the night sitting in the ER I wanted something to read,” Mr. Woody said. But he said that while his wife was in the store his legs began tingling and then went numb and by the time they reached the hospital he was having trouble getting his breath. They rushed him into the hospital on a stretcher. “Of course they wouldn’t let me follow him into the ER room,” Mrs. Woody said. She said that not much time had passed when she’d heard “code four” announced over the intercom and every available nurse and doctor scrambled into his room. “I knew he’d gone into cardiac arrest,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “And I sat there and sat there, waiting for some news.” “How long did his heart stop?” Wilson asked. “Six minutes,” Mr. Woody said. “An eternity,” said Mrs. Woody. “Any longer they say I would’ve had brain damage,” said Mr. Woody, “even if I had managed to live.” The couple looked at each other with a clear-eyed knowing that left Wilson feeling awed and a little unnerved. “Do you remember anything from the time you were out?” Wilson asked. “I do,” Mr. Woody said. Mrs. Woody was shaking her head. “Don’t James.” “The boy asked.” He turned to Wilson. “I met Jesus.” Mrs. Woody groaned and Wilson thought, Oh boy, here we go. It always always has to come back to Jesus with these mountain people, even the educated ones. Mr. Woody leaned toward Wilson and lowered his voice. “I
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found myself alone in a dark theater watching that old movie “All That Jazz,” about Bob Fosse, the dance choreographer. Anyway, about halfway through the movie, a guy sits down beside me. He has a beard, Birkenstocks, faded jeans and a Life Is Good Tshirt. He offered me his popcorn and I noticed that whenever I took a handful the bucket magically filled back up. The same with the Diet Coke he shared. His cup never emptied. And the longer we sat there, the more I became aware of what a calming presence he had about him. Eventually, I felt all my worries just melt away. And, you know, I’d forgotten what a good movie “All That Jazz” was.” “And you believe the man in the movie theater was Jesus?” Wilson asked. Mr. Woody shrugged. “No doubt in my mind.” “Please, don’t print this part about Jesus,” Mrs. Woody said. “We’re Unitarians and if this gets around.” Wilson returned to the office but was too busy with cutlines and writing up some last-minute obits to work on the story till after he’d left the office and gone home. He’d rented a little oneroom apartment connected by a breezeway to a ranch style house owned by a kind woman who taught at Mitchell County Community College. The house sat below the main highway, screened by thick woods, on the other side was a big picture window that opened out onto a view of a valley and a mountain beyond. That night he sat down at his typewriter with his notes, and between bites of a Swiss cheese sandwich on white bread and sips of hot tea, typed up Mr. Woody’s story. When he reached the part about Mr. Woody’s vision or dream or whatever it was, he decided to go ahead and write it. It was part of the story. He didn’t finish until nearly one in the morning. He read it over one last time but when he got to the part about Mr. Woody meeting Jesus, he wondered if he’d put it in just because Mrs. Woody had asked him to leave it out. He wondered too if not only people might laugh at Mr. Woody but if they might laugh at the paper for printing such a story. Finally, he cut the Jesus section, very carefully retyping that page without Mr. Woody’s account of sharing popcorn with Jesus. After he was done, and he’d checked and rechecked the story, he got ready for bed. But he couldn’t sleep so he put on a Christmas record he’d just bought at the little record store on Lower Street and laid in the dark, with his hands behind his head, looking out at the starry stillness and listening to Emmy Lou Harris sing lonely strains of Silent Night. Two days later, when the paper was delivered around town, his phone started ringing off the hook from people calling him to compliment him on the story about Mr. Woody. “I told you it’d be a good story,” Celia had said, having come into his office with reports of several churches calling her to place big ads, which he thought was a little odd. “From now on,” she said, “you should listen to your business manager.” At lunch, he was sitting in a booth at the Upper Street Diner, eating his usual vegetable soup and cornbread, when he looked up and Evie was standing over him. He’d seen her come in the diner sometimes but she was always with women from the bank. Now she appeared to be alone. “Mind if I join you?” she said.
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“Not at all,” he said. And she slid in across from him. She set the folded paper on the table in such a way that Wilson’s article was face up, showing the shadowy overexposed flash picture he’d taken of Mr. Woody who sat at his kitchen table awkwardly pointing to the snake bite which was too small to see. The old man appeared to be performing some bizarre sign language, all the time looking shyly up at the camera. “Very nice piece,” Evie said. “I thought you captured Mr. Woody beautifully. I really loved the part about him meeting Jesus.” Wilson nearly spit out his soup. “What are you talking about?” “The part about him finding himself at a movie with Jesus. That was my favorite part.” Wilson snatched up the paper and read through the story and toward the end he found the very section he was a hundred percent sure he’d cut. He’d even checked it again the next morning before he’d given it to the typesetter. No one had seen the Jesus account except him yet there it was. “I didn’t put that in there,” Wilson said, “I know I didn’t.” “I believe you,” Evie said. “So how…?” Wilson held up his hand to the article. Evie shrugged. Then she reached over, broke off a piece of his cornbread and ate it.
Where the Sun Is Now BY DAW N G I LC H R I ST-YOU N G
After the last day, whatsoever is not Heaven, is Hell; Hee that then shall be where the sun is now, (if he be not in heaven) shall be as farre from heaven as if hee were where the Center of the earth is now... . — John Donne, Sermon No. 10 Zeno was trying to remember what the minister had said in church the week before. He was talking about Jesus, and what Jesus said about his neighbor, and if your neighbor asks for a coat to also give him your cloak. And he wondered what a cloak was. And he wondered if his mom and little brother, George, were his neighbors because they lived closer to him and Eldred and Bobbie than anybody else. Or had lived closer to him. And he was still trying to reconcile that in his head with what he had heard Eldred say about the people that took drugs and drank too much liquor and camped at the river, that, “some people just needed killin’.” And he was thinking hard, but he couldn’t
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decide which was right between the two extremes of his mother deserving his coat because she was his neighbor or just needing killing because she was among those dopers who camped by the river. Part of him knew, realistically, that this was a moot question because she was dead now anyway, but part of him worried that wherever she was, she should have had a cloak, or at least his coat. It was his eighth birthday, and it had been two weeks since his mother was hit by a driver who swore to the sheriff’s deputies, the numerous volunteer firemen, and the unnecessary EMTs, that one of the little boys who was with her had pushed her in front of his car. No one believed the driver, and Zeno, the little boy who had pushed her, wondered if the sound that her skull made when she hit the pavement about twenty feet in front of the car had been like the sound he heard when he crushed the possum’s head with a rock, (it was necessary—he couldn’t get the possum loose without getting bit), the hen’s feathers still clinging to the dried blood around its mouth from before it entrapped itself in the chicken wire. By the way his mother’s head looked, like the possum’s, he had known she was dead. His eighth birthday went unnoticed both by himself as well as by the older man and woman with whom he lived, Eldred and Bobbie, the couple to whom his mother and father had swapped him for a sum of money he didn’t know. When he was absent from school, which was often, he spent his time working in the fields for Eldred and trying to figure out how much they gave for him. The day his mother died was one of the rare times he was out of school and not doing chores required by Eldred. If Zeno was not tagging the cattle’s ears to keep the flies and ticks off, or shoveling out stalls, or ploughing with the mule (but not allowed to use the tractor), or milking, then he was doing whatever Bobbie couldn’t get to in their several vegetable gardens and corn fields. Eldred and Bobbie worked every bit as hard as he did and harder, but they could never stay caught up, not with the store they had somebody run for them, and that on top of the farm. On the day his mother was struck by the car, he had listened to a conversation that Bobbie, standing on the porch steps, had with his mother out in the yard. His mother gestured towards where he stood behind Bobbie. “Zeno’s needing to come with me... ‘cause Daddy’s been bad sick. I know you heard.” She stopped talking for a second, frowned, and swatted a mosquito clinging to a thin vein on her wrist, then continued, “They’s been hospice people in and out of the house and they stop in at yours and Dred’s store ever’ now and again to pick up paper towels and witch hazel —and that’s since June. They say it don’t look like he’ll get better.” Bobbie’s responses varied between direct and curt or rambling and tangential. The tangent was always a list of what lay ahead of her. It came from her knowing that tasks came first. Her endless work was not a source of complaint for her, just a given. The given on this day was squeezed under her freckly left arm— a bushel basket, and in her right hand the straw hat, sweat stains creeping high up on its brim, that she always wore outside . “Afore supper, I’ll get two more bushels of Silver Queen, get them froze, and they’s still enough beans coming in that I might pickle us some beans and corn. The south pasture’s orchard still
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has some apples I might git ‘afore they rot. I reckon on my lonesome I can do it if I take a run and go at it. So’s you can take Zeno with ye and George down to see your daddy, but make sure Dred’s alright with it.” She paused, and his mother opened her mouth, but Bobbie interrupted before she could speak. “Now I ain’t asking ye to tell me. But Eldred, he’ll need to know. He seen your car down to the pull off spot Friday night, and he wondered what you’d done with little George, so be ready for him to ask ye. Come to think of it, ye better offer him an answer afore he even asks.” She paused, then put her hat on. “He’s down to the store but said he’d be back in a few minutes.” He remembered Bobbie’s nearly cropped black and grey hair was already glistening that morning from where she had been standing over huge pots of apples taken from the ones he had picked earlier in August and stored in bins in the cellar. She cooked them down into apple sauce or strained them into jellies, and sweat was now running down out of her scalp, causing her to wipe her eyes every few minutes. September was hot. His mother had her hand over her eyes to block the light, and in the shadow of her hand he could only see her nose and the hole that her mouth was without teeth, but her tongue was moving in it. The tongue was saying to Bobbie something about him. “Zeno needs to go. Dred oughta understand about my daddy, and he done told me four or five times afore I ever let you take Zeno last year, he told me that if Zeno worked good, I might
His eighth birthday went unnoticed both by himself as well as by the older man and woman with whom he lived, Eldred and Bobbie, the couple to whom his mother and father had swapped him for a sum of money he didn’t know. have him back every once in a while ... this is the first time since before daddy took sick that I asked.” Bobbie adjusted the hat on her head. A long ago cast off of Dred’s, it was a little too big and slid over her damp hair to rest lightly on the tops of her ears. “I’m just saying it’d be smart to wait and ask Dred first. He’s got more to do than me, only stopped this morning because he was needing mineral oil. Two of the cows got in some Jimson weed just before you come up in the yard… so his frame of mind ain’t the best, and I wouldn’t cross him much myself.” His mother frowned again, but then gave in. “Well, I need to go right now since I’m walking and hope to get there while daddy’s still awake. They say he does better mornings and I think he’s more hisself that time of day. Least he was last time I was there. I’ll leave Zeno since you think I ought to. I don’t want Eldred mad.”
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 5
Bobbie pushed the hat upwards with the back of her hand. “Just go on and take him. I’ll let Dred know what’s happening.” Afterwards, as they walked towards the dirt road that turned off to where his grandfather lived, his mother’s trailer behind it that she’d fixed up some with the money Dred and Bobbie gave his parents when they traded Zeno, he thought about his mother and his four year old brother George still living down in that trailer without him, and Pudd’n’ or some other man’s stuff back in the room next to the bed where the pallet had been that he had once shared with George. As they walked, George had told him, in his limited way, that he didn’t sleep on the pallet any more, that he slept on the couch now and got to watch the color TV all night while their mother was back in that room with Pudd’n’, maybe. Or when she was partying with somebody down at the river pulloff, maybe even with their father, Fermin, when he was back from the tunnels in Atlanta and not drunk in town or with the woman he stayed with sometimes. Their mother wasn’t listening to make any corrections, and George was often confused, but he conveyed enough to paint a picture that filled Zeno with longing, and then with feelings he didn’t recognize but that came up like tears and then like when he was sick at his stomach. But he didn’t cry or throw up. George motioned towards the ditch they were walking alongside, “A dead dawg.” Zeno looked down in the ditch filled with blackberry brambles that ran alongside the blind curves and short straights on the two-lane road. He could see a greyish shape down among them and made out not a dog, but a small coyote, road kill hit
recently enough that there were still flies swarming over it. He thought about his mother getting paid for him, he thought about George watching TV all night while she was with the ones that just needed killin’ down at the river, and he thought about her giving in, being willing to leave him there to kneel by a cow on its side with its gutt swelled and Dred cussing at him to hold its head up and its mouth open so Dred could force the mineral oil down. And he thought about the coolness of his grandfather’s living room, of the back porch under the deep shade of the oak, of the locked freezer that sometimes would be unlocked with a box of ice cream sandwiches in it on a little shelf above the brown wax paper packages marked “spare ribs” and “tenderloin” and “jowl,” that sometimes the blood had seeped through. He thought of fat, grubby George sitting on the back steps biting into an ice cream sandwich while his mama sat by her daddy and he, Zeno, had to help Dred move the cow to a dry stall and then move it again if it lived and shat all that poison out that the mineral oil was for, and whether it lived or died, he’d have to shovel up the shit and whatever else came out of it that could be everywhere. He heard the car coming and could tell it was heading up the straight stretch, probably one of the summer people that always drove fast on the straights and then had to hit their brakes right in the middle of a curve. He thought about the coyote. He saw the blind shade on that part of the road, the kind where you’re unsuspecting because there’s no transition from the bright morning sunlight to the darkness that’s about to encompass you, and he saw George was looking down into the ditch for any dessicated blackberries that might still be clinging to their thorny stems. Over her shoulder, his mother said to him, “Zeno, take ahold of George’s hand.” And it was easy, with his natural bulk and the strength he was already building up from the work he did, it seemed, all the time that he wasn’t in school or sleeping, to shove his mother, always slight of build from smoking and natural wiriness, into the path of the car as it rounded the curve.
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To read “Where the Sun Is Now” in it’s entirety, visit smliv.com.
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DISCOVER DISCOVER
MORE MORE
Layers Layers of of comfort comfort and and style. style.
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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
I-240, I-240, Exit 7 828.298.5080 Asheville-Mall.com Asheville-Mall.com
Junction 129 & 321, Mary Maryville ville 865.982.3613 865.982.36 13 FoothillsMall.com F oothillsMall.com
c ro s swo rd :
ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN
Answers can be found on page 71. By Myles Mellor • ilovecrosswords.com MARGARET HESTER PHOTO
Across
1 Cut of meat along the side of the head 3 Groups that form “circles” 9 Text checker, for short 10 Tribe that named the Great Smoky Mountains “Sha-co-naqe” 12 Story suitable for a knitting group? 13 Roman 6 14 Like many salads 15 “Big fish” tale 18 Behind schedule 21 River that formed a border for the old Cherokee Nation lands 22 “And I Love ___” 24 Numero ___, top dog 26 Grammy winning Bluegrass singers, _____ Rangers (2 words)
29 Storyteller at Mystery Hill in Blowing Rock, N.C. Wayne _____ 34 Ending for ballad and mountain 36 Tavern order 37 Squeal (on) 38 History of a word 39 __ Eliot (poet)
Down
1 Ray Hicks was a master teller of these Appalachian-based stories (2 words) 2 Gardener’s problem plants 4 Name before married 5 Mental flash 6 Request from a chef (2 words) 7 Environmentally friendly sack 8 Interlaced, of fabrics WWW.SMLIV.COM
11 Young goat 15 Great ____ Mountains, named after the mist or blue haze 16 Kind of deer 17 “Hold it right there!” 19 Reputed to be a great day for fishing on the Davidson River 20 Helm heading, abbr. 22 Near gospel like song from 26 across 23 Celebrity who knits, Julia _____ 25 __ ed piece 27 Cry of a crow 28 Opposite of paleo29 Guitar with four strings, for short 30 Stately tree 31 Rock’s ___ Speedwagon 32 Classified ad abbreviation 33 Like some martinis 35 “Dig in!” 67
d i re cto r y :
SELECT LODGING THE WAYNESVILLE INN GOLF RESORT & SPA This resort has been welcoming visitors to the mountains with southern hospitality since the 1920s. Traditional resort amenities include historic and mountain view lodging, 27 holes of championship golf, restaurant and tavern, plus outdoor event space and pro shop. The location provides convenience to shopping, skiing, fishing, hiking and more. 176 Country Club Dr. • Waynesville, NC 800.627.6250 • thewaynesvilleinn.com
acres and looks as though we are out in the country with mountains and hills surrounding us, but we are less than five minutes from the Barter Theatre, Virginia Creeper Trail, shopping areas, local attractions, and some of the best restaurants in the country. Decorated with beautiful antiques originally purchased in the 1940s. Some of our rooms having been decorated with the French Country style or with a Victorian style. Abingdon, VA 276.628.6263 • blacksfortinn.com
HEMLOCK INN
BOYD MOUNTAIN LOG CABINS AND CHRISTMAS TREE FARM
This historic inn, set just off Main Street in downtown Blowing Rock, is only steps from shopping, restaurants and event activities. Eighteen unique rooms, including suites with fully-equipped kitchens. All rooms are non-smoking. Rooms feature private baths, cable TV, air conditioning, phone services, microwave ovens, refrigerators and WiFi. Take away the unnecessary stress and time spent planning your vacation by taking advantage of a variety of packages offered throughout the year. Downtown Blowing Rock, N.C. 828.295.7987 • hemlockinn.net
Featured in 2011 Southern Living Best Weekend Getaways . Enjoy a peaceful country setting in charming authentic log cabins, 1—4 bedrooms, located on 130 beautiful acres. Full kitchens, wood burning fireplaces, Wifi, & A/C. The cabins overlook the Smoky Mountains, our Fraser Fir Christmas tree farm, 3 stocked fishing ponds ,flower and vegetable gardens. Hiking trails to the top of Boyd Mountain, volleyball, basketball and badminton, swimming hole in the creek, sledding in the winter. Open every season. Waynesville, N.C. 828-926-1575 • boydmountain.com
SMOKETREE LODGE
CABINS AT SEVEN FOXES
Smoketree’s cozy atmosphere and prime location allows its visitors the choice of enjoying the peace and solitude of the Blue Ridge Mountains or the opportunity of partaking in the many activities available in the High Country! 11914 NC Hwy. 105 S. • Banner Elk, NC 800.422.1880 • smoketree-lodge.com
Five beautifully appointed cabins nestled in the Land of Waterfalls in Lake Toxaway, NC. Guests rated 5 stars on TripAdvisor. Open year ‘round; pet friendly. Lake Toxaway, N.C. 828.877.6333 • sevenfoxes.com
BLACK’S FORT INN BED & BREAKFAST Black’s Fort Inn Bed & Breakfast - designed for privacy, relaxation and convenience. Located on a little over nine
THE SWAG COUNTRY INN Chosen by readers of Conde Nast Traveler magazine as the #2 Best Small Hotel in the Unites States, the secluded hideaway itself consists of 250 private acres. The main lodge and cabins,
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Summerfield Inn 101 Valley St. NW Abingdon, VA 24210
In Olde Abingdon d & A pp cte
ed rov
stay@summerfieldinn.com Janice & Jim Cowan Resident Owners/Innkeepers
Inspe
A Place to Pause at 5,000 Feet
www.Summerfieldinn.com 800-668-5905 A Gem Waiting To Be Discovered Accepting Reservations for our 33rd Season, Opening April 27, 2014
Waynesville, N.C. • 800.789.7672 • TheSwag.com All-inclusive accommodations and fine dining • 30 miles west of Asheville 68
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
• • • • • • •
Circa 1920 Home Historic District Walk to Barter In-Room Baths Whirlpools - Robes Air Conditioned Gourmet Breakfast
• • • • • • •
Large Guestrooms Superb Amenities HS Wireless Internet Phone - Cable TV Gardens & Walkways Corporate Rates Barter Packages
consisting of 15 rooms, are built of 17th and 18th century hand hewn logs and local field stone. Join us for our 30th season to experience just how remote, rustic, refined and remarkable it can be at 5,000 feet. 3 gourmet meals are served daily, with turn down service each evening. Waynesville, N.C. 800.789.7672 • theswag.com
A Blowing Rock Tradition
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NANTAHALA VILLAGE
OAK HILL ON LOVE LANE BED AND BREAKFAST Awarded Best in the South by BedandBreakfast.com, Oak Hill on Love Lane features “The service and amenities of a fine hotel in the quiet comfort of a B&B.” Each luxuriously appointed room in this historic 19th century home is equipped with hypo-allergenic bedding, fine linens, fireplaces, flat screen TVs, private en-suite baths and wireless internet access. Enjoy 24-hour access to the Butler Pantry, daily maid service, nightly turn-down service and a full 3-course gourmet breakfast. Within walking distance of historic downtown Waynesville. 244 Love Ln. • Waynesville, N.C. 888.608.7037 • oakhillonlovelane.com
THE LODGE & LOFT AT SHOJI
Located on nine pastoral acres and designed for privacy and relaxation, we’re less than five minutes from the Barter Theatre, Virginia Creeper Trail, shopping, dining and most everything else that historic Abingdon, Virginia has to offer.
Discover the magic of the Blue Ridge Mtns. Walk to downtown shopping and dining Easy driving to many area attractions 18 uniquely designed and decorated rooms
828-295-7987 www.HemlockInn.net 134 Morris Street Blowing Rock, NC
ABINGDON, VA • (276) 628-6263 79-34
Smoketree Lodge
Unique & private accommodations for 2 to 6 people. 10 minutes from downtown Asheville, N.C., and 2,500 feet above stress level. Asheville, N.C. 828.299.0999 • shojiretreats.com
SUMMERFIELD INN Be pampered with sumptuous breakfasts, beautiful gardens, high speed wireless, chocolates, green lodging and more. Located in the historic district, Summerfield Inn is the perfect home base for exploring all that Abingdon, Va. has to offer. 101 Valley St. NW • Abingdon, VA 800.668.5905 • summerfieldinn.com
BlacksFortInn.com
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Nantahala Village offers a variety of lodging, restaurants, and activities within minutes of Bryson City, the Nantahala Gorge, Fontana Lake and other area attractions. 828-488-9000 • nantahalavillage.com
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Overlooking the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains. 112 Guest Rooms, 2 Restaurants, Spa, and 27 holes of Championship Golf. Perfect for Vacations, Meetings, and Weddings.
11914 Hwy. 105 S. Banner Elk NC 28604
828-963-6505 Smoketree-Lodge.com Managed by Vacation Resorts International WWW.SMLIV.COM
800.627.6250 | TheWaynesvilleInn.com 176 COUNTRY CLUB DRIVE | WAYNESVILLE, N.C. 69
ca le n d a r :
UPCOMING
December Dickens Festival
DONATED PHOTO
If you’re looking for that quaint, Dickensian charm without all the bothersome Dickensian workhouses and poverty and such, look no further than Asheville’s Biltmore Village for the annual Dickens Festival, now in its 25th year. The main stage will be filled with musicians, choral groups, singers, dancers, and Montford Park Players. This year, the festival will feature more than 300 performers who, after their stage segments, will rove throughout the Village entertaining on the streets and in the shops and restaurants. Friday and Saturday evenings will feature main stage concerts for the entire family. Shops will stay open both evenings until 7 p.m. with many of the shopkeepers dressed in Victorian-era garb, and there’ll be horse-drawn rides through the tree-lined Village streets all day Saturday and Sunday. Chestnuts roasted on an open fire by chestnut roaster Sakshi Gentenbein will be available next to the main stage. Dec. 6-8, Historic Biltmore Village, Asheville, N.C. biltmorevillage.com or 828.274.8788.
Mountain Wine Country Wine, weekends, mountains, holidays—all great on their own, but better as the ingredients for a delightful winter getaway in north Georgia. Snag a passport at any of the participating wineries and receive a Mountain Wine Country glass. Bring the glass to one of the 14 participating wineries during the special three-day event, as each is offering a special experience to its holiday weekend visitors. The passport also brings discounts at some area restaurants and hotels. This weekend fete is in its second year of offering a cozy way to sample the local vintners in a small-town holiday atmosphere. Dec. 6-8, Various locations around north Georgia. mountainwinecountry.com or 706.623.8463.
SANTA CLAUS AT CHIMNEY ROCK How is Santa able to climb down millions of chimneys around the world in a single night? (Stick with us, it’s not a joke). He practices, of course. Come marvel at Santa’s daredevil “training” antics as he practices chimney scaling at Chimney Rock. Meet Santa and Mrs. Claus, enjoy live holiday music, complimentary hot cocoa, cookies and kids’ activities and see a few live animals. Dec. 7 and 14, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Chimney Rock, N.C. chimneyrockpark.com.
shout out to the 80-year-old institution in the last issue, you can now see one of the most wellattended plays in the theatre’s history—the story of Ralphie and the joy of a childhood Christmas. Running multiple weekly shows through Dec. 29, The Barter Theatre, 127 West Main Street, Abingdon, Va. bartertheatre.com or 276.628.3991.
January
DONATED
Lake Lure Polar Plunge
“A Christmas Story” at The Barter Theatre As any avid watcher of the annual “A Christmas Story” marathon can attest, it’s surely on its way to supplanting “Miracle on 34th Street” as the holiday film of choice for a generation of children (and certainly did nothing but boost the sales of Red Ryder BB guns). Now the iconic tale of love, desire, and figuring out what one really wants is returning to the stage at The Barter Theatre. After reading our
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If you’d like to start your new year off with a shiver on Jan. 1, join the masses for the 6th Annual Polar Plunge at Lake Lure, N.C. It’s a frenzied celebration of the ability to cast off the shackles of every selfpreservational instinct and rushing headlong into icy waters in whatever garb feels the most appropriate. The frigid lake splash certainly is a spectacle, with folks in just their unmentionables, dudes with guts spilling over their bikinis, some fully clothed, some in outrageous costumes, even one or two in kilts and hats. It’s usually in support of a good cause, and of course, the celebration of being alive enough to feel so darn cold for yet another year. info@hickorynutchamber.org or 828.625.2725.
Winterfest In addition to a cannonball into ice water, Blowing Rock, N.C.’s, three-day Winterfest bonanza features a
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
chili cook-off, a pancake breakfast, wine tasting, concerts, hayrides, ice carving demos, and a whole lot more. It’s a great way to pull back from the postholiday winter doldrums and tide oneself over until festival season starts again. Plus, there’s fun for the whole family—there’s even a dog show. So follow the festival’s motto—don’t hibernate, celebrate! Jan. 23-26, Downtown Blowing Rock, N.C. blowingrockwinterfest.com or 828.295.7851.
Symphony of the Mountains The Symphony of the Mountains has been producing quality orchestral music since 1946, and a few times each year they lend the stage to Voices of the Mountains, the symphony’s
The Voices of the Mountains choral ensemble will perform with the Symphony of the Mountains in Bristol, Tenn. DONATED PHOTO
accompanying choral ensemble, for a full-bodied musical experience. This year’s Voices of the Mountains concert, wittily entitled From Bach to the Future, will be accompanied by a chamber orchestra and will explore music from Johann Sebastian Bach as well as Johann Christoph Friedrich, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach and the satirical Peter Schickele as P.D.Q. Bach. All of the music is tuneful and entertaining, yet unique in character to each composer. Jan. 25, 7:30 to 9 p.m., Paramount Center for the Arts, 518 State St., Bristol, Tenn. symphonyofthemountains.org or 423.392.8423.
February Smoky Mountain Gospel Jubilee If you love gospel music, what better way to show your affection than spending the day of love listening to it, so go ahead and make plans now to attend Smoky Mountain Gospel Jubilee held at Country Tonite in Pigeon Forge. Enjoy the sounds of that good ole gospel music from old favorites and newcomers spread over a two-day gospel celebration. Feb. 13-14, Country Tonite Theatre, 129 Showplace Boulevard, Pigeon Forge, Tenn. countrytonitepf.com or 865.453.2003.
Smokies. With a lineup of legendary country-western musicians, cowboy storytelling, delicious culinary fare right off the chuckwagon, and even a cowboy church service, you’ll be ready to don your Stetson, strap on your chaps and ride off into the sunset into a wilder place and time. The four-day festival, now in its 14th year, is a part of Winterfest, a conglomeration of winter happenings in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Feb. 19-23, LeConte Center at Pigeon Forge, 2986 Teaster Lane, Pigeon Forge, Tenn. mypigeonforge.com or info@mypigeonforge.com.
March Mark Twain Tonight!
PHOTO COURTESY OF RICHARD CALMES PHOTOGRAPHY
APPALACHIAN BALLET COMPANY
If you’ve never grown up, or just wish you hadn’t, In 1959, nearly 50 years after his death, Mark Twain took you can join those forever Lost Boys, past the to an off-Broadway stage second star to the right, and straight on ‘til and dazzled audiences with morning. The Appalachian Ballet Company, the his characteristic vim and region’s only dedicated ballet company, will biting witticisms. Fifty-nine years and more than 2,000 stage two performances of “Peter Pan,” a balletic performances later, Hal interpretation of the author J.M. Barrie’s iconic Holbrook, the man behind and imaginative world of happiness-fueled flight, the man, is still bringing clock-eating alligators, hook-handed pirates and Twain uncannily to life. For a the eternal nature of a youthful spirit. It’s a final single night, he’ll put on his one-man show, “Mark Twain show capping the company’s annual threeTonight!”, bringing the program season, and a great opportunity for an Huckleberry Finn author to outing that combines nostalgia, culture, and fun East Tennessee. It’s a show for a variety of ages. March 14 at 7 p.m. and that’s won acclaim from the Associated Press, Time March 15 at 2 p.m., Clayton Center for the Arts, Magazine, The New York Maryville College, Maryville, Tenn. Times, The New Yorker, and appalachianballet.com or 865.982.8463. the list of luminary fans goes on. Holbrook is busy with other projects most of the time on TV, film and stage, but takes a bit of time to travel the show around each year. He spent five years researching the prolific and much-loved humorist and decades honing the performance, so this one-show presentation is a rare chance to see two legends in a single oneman show. March 8, 8 p.m., Ronald And Lynda Nutt Theatre, Puzzle is on page 67. Maryville, Tenn. claytonartscenter.com or 865.981.8590.
Crossword answers
1964…The Tribute 1964...The Tribute has been thrilling audiences all over the globe for over 30 years, with homages to those legendary mop tops, The Beatles. They are hailed by critics and fans alike—Rolling Stone gushed over them like teenage girls—and now they’re headed to Western Carolina University for a concert to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. It’s a one-night-only gig, so be sure not to miss this legendary tribute to genuine rock legends. Feb. 9, 5 p.m., John W. Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, N.C. wcu.edu/bardoartscenter or 828.227.2479.
Saddle Up! Saddle Up! gives every aspiring cowgirl or cowboy the chance to taste the Old West right here in the
Dahlonega Literary Festival The Dahlonega Literary Festival is an annual celebration of books in Downtown Dahlonega, and the festival continues to grow and become more and more entertaining as the years go on. Each year the festival presents a slate of invited authors representing a variety of genres sharing their ideas and experiences in various programs. Also, a number of regional authors (ranging from hyperlocal to other areas of the Southeast) come to interact with festival attendees and sell their books. As the festival draws closer, authors will be announced on the festival website. March 7-9, Downtown Dahlonega, Ga. literaryfestival.org or 706.867.0120.
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MOUNTAIN VIEWS
A story worth telling B Y M AT T PAY N E
M
y grandmother was a woman for whom a simple trip to the grocery store oftentimes turned into a Homeric journey. After her death, I struggled to narrow down her life’s stories canonical collection to only two or three that truly immortalized her to share at her memorial. It was a nearly impossible task. My grandmother always inspired me to live a full life, to look deeper into things, so it was at her urging that I set about tracking down the family overseas who helped rescue my grandfather in World War II. The Japanese captured my grandfather, a Navy seaman, in the Philippine Islands. He escaped and hid out in the jungle, falling deathly ill. An indigenous tribe came to his rescue, and there in the rudimentary village where no one spoke English he was nursed back to health. He was named a godfather to one of the village children. He was recaptured and narrowly escaped execution once again before being liberated from the confines of a dank, tiny prison cell in Manila. An intense investigation by way of Facebook and an old letter from the villager who rescued my grandfather eventually led to a trip to the Philippines where I met Eugenio Torres, whose grandfather had rescued mine. Tears welled up in my otherwise tough grandmother’s eyes upon my return, when I told her that the story had come full circle as Torres asked me to be his daughter’s godfather, as my grandfather had been godfather to Torres’ father. My grandmother had plenty of fight in her too. While she was a fancy woman who liked to drink bourbon from a crystal glass, she also cherished sitting on her Michigan porch with a BB gun shooting squirrels off of her birdfeeder. When our family had a marshmallow fight, she would put up a wicked battle. When we had monkey slingshot contests, even at 87, she was determined to win. When she got pulled over one day on her way to church and the officer arrived at her window, she simply informed him that she had no time to wait for him to write a ticket. She was running late…And with that, off she went. Whenever I told stories about my grandmother, my friends would simply shake their heads—the stories weren’t good because I was good at telling them but because the story of her life was one that was always worth telling.
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Standing to address the church full of people that had come to bid her farewell, I was struck by the thought that while I had stories of her life that I wanted to share, so too, did everyone else that was there. We spent the rest of the day telling stories and in telling them—the good, the bad, the heartbreaking and the heartwarming—she rose above it all, immortal. A legend. A story worth telling and a woman I was proud to call my grandmother.
Whenever I told stories about my grandmother, my friends would simply shake their heads—the stories weren’t good because I was good at telling them but because the story of her life was one that was always worth telling.
SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 6
MANDY NEWHAM-COBB ILLUSTRATION
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Th e Pinnacle Ach ievem ent. The Virginian, an acclaimed 538-acre private country club community in the rolling hills of Southwestern Virginia, is about to unveil its newest neighborhood. Named Grandview, it consists of 30 carefully contoured homesites overlooking the 9th and 18th holes of the Tom Fazio championship golf course. The name is apt because each homesite provides spectacular view corridors of meadows, forests, fairways and the faraway Appalachian Mountains. This mature, successful community, named as one of the ďŹ nest and best planned in America, is already home to more than 100 families residing in charming estate homes. Talented architects and planners have been working on Grandview for several years, assuring its homes will be the pinnacle achievements in this distinguished community. Outside the gates of The Virginian are the historic towns of Abingdon and Bristol, the scenic Appalachian Trail and an unhurried, uncrowded and unparalleled living environment. We invite your inquiry.
A private golf club community of 250 homesites on 538 acres of some of the most breathtaking highlands in North America. Homesites from $70,000, resale homes from $500,000. Void where prohibited by law, including New York and New Jersey.
thevirginian.com 22512 Clubhouse Ridge Bristol, Virginia 24202 276.645.7050