MOUNTAIN MAGIC with ANN HITE

MOUNTAIN MAGIC with ANN HITE

Hiking Magic

I have more than my granny’s storytelling gene. When I finish writing a book, especially one that took a lot out of me, I need nature, the substance of peace, of creation. Granny was the same way. Even when her arthritis got the best of her joints, she would sit on her porch swing, silent. “Don’t bother me. I’m gathering wool.” She would say to me as a child.

Two weeks ago, I finished a book that I had worked on for years. Wool-gathering was high on my list. My husband, Jack, and I hooked up the camper and headed for the mountains, off the grid. No phone service, no electricity, no air conditioning, nothing. This would be my home for five days deep in the heart of Southern Appalachia. My soul’s home.

I’m not the only writer that loves unplugging, searching for the peace of the land. Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize winner of the novel “Overstory,” lives so far up in the mountains he can’t get internet. His days are spent writing and hiking. When he needs to do interviews or conduct business, he comes off his mountain into the world of technology. Something about this appeals to my need for solitude. To my need to write and create.

In the camper at night, I fell asleep to the sounds of two owls calling back and forth in the trees. The stars were brighter than I could ever remember. Each morning, I woke to birds calling in the dusky gray light of dawn. I wrote in my notebook as deer walked around outside my window. A new character was whispering in my ear. Would I have heard her in my busy life at home? A five minute walk from our camper door was a beautiful path that wound its way through a valley. There was a feeling I was walking in the footsteps of mountain folk before me. Not a car could be heard. When the valley view opened, I stopped in my place. The shadows playing against the mountain sides made me yearn for something I still can’t put a name to. This was the ultimate art, a living oil painting. A writer and photographer’s dream.

As we moved along this 12.5 mile path, we came upon a couple in their eighties. They were from Maine. Jack and I talked with them about the area, their home, our home, and the beauty of our country in general. The part of me used to staying on task, not wasting time, hated I was standing around talking. But something calming, almost nurturing, flowed through me. I needed this pace, this life. We made promises to visit them in Maine when Jack retired next year. Why not? I have always wanted to visit Maine.

Around Jack’s neck was one of his tools of trade, his beloved DSLR camera. In my backpack was my notebook and pen in case the character whispered to me some more. We hiked beside large fields of wildflowers in full bloom, bees dancing from one to another. We came to a church built in 1820, where I stopped to read the names on the gravestones in the cemetery out back.

“I got kin buried here in this place.” A man with a long gray beard, wearing a cap that said Vietnam Veteran on it stood close by.

We talked about moonshining in our families’ pasts. How plants like Sang (ginseng) were magic. How Sang only revealed itself to those that were worthy to hunt it—that’s a whole other column. He told me he made the best peach cobbler brandy in Appalachia and assured me I wouldn’t get a bit drunk unless I ate one of the peaches. There we stood in this old cemetery as if we had known each other all our lives. As if our families were neighbors. That’s how it is with mountain folk. I always feel I’m coming home when I find myself in Appalachia.

“Young lady, I don’t take anything the doctors try to give me for pain. I use yarrow and catnip. It’s the best. My granny taught me that. I stick to the old ways.”

I thought of the jar of moonshine in the cabinet under the kitchen sink at Granny’s. How she took homemade peppermint sticks and dissolved them in the shine. When I had a bad cough or croup, she gave me a serving spoon full of this and I didn’t cough again.

After telling my new friend goodbye, Jack and I cut off the well-traveled path up a steep trail. At the top was a large tree covered and surrounded by American flags. This was called the Pearl Harbor tree. Written on the flags were the names of veterans and the wars they served in. The Pearl Harbor tree was planted by a mountain main in his front yard when his two sons went to fight in WWII. He placed rich black dirt in an old Model T tire rim and put the sapling there. Folks from Appalachia save everything.

The tree grew so big the rim broke but still remains partially around the trunk of the tree today. This memorial is somewhat of a secret off the beaten path in the mountains.

Back on the main hiking trail, a large dragonfly landed on my chest, remaining there for quite a bit, looking at me. Granny would have said it was a messenger, telling me something important, and I should watch and listen for the reveal.

We have so much to distract us these days how can we see these messengers? What would happen if we could just be still and quiet?

That hike taught me so much. Like how most bears want no more to do with us than we want to do with them. Yes, we came upon a bear more than once. Yes, I was afraid. How the taste of cold water chilled in a mountain stream tastes better than any beverage. How most places have a deep history we are unaware of, that people lived and died, their stories embedded in the very ground where we walk. How Holy exists in a simple hike through a mountain valley.

This is the stuff my ancestors knew. They lived hardscrabble lives filled with joy, sadness, poverty, and complete abundance.

And that my friends is mountain magic at its purest.