Child of the Woods

by Susi Gott Séguret

  It was getting dark and Robin had never used an axe before. The first stroke cut right into the arch of Tim’s foot, and he was rushed off to the nearest hospital, fifty miles away, to have twelve stitches.

  Next visit, we were taking turns mowing the lawn with a little push-mower (the kind with two wheels, a handle, and a rolling blade). Robin was pulling the mower uphill, and Tim decided to help her by pushing from behind. Oops! His thumb got caught in the blade and came out dripping with blood, and he was rushed off the hospital for more stitches.

  Last time she came to visit, my parents had just been given care of a pedigreed Tennessee Walking horse for the summer while its master did some traveling. He was a jet-black, high-stepping, sleek ball of fire, and his peculiarity was that he never walked, despite his title—he ran headlong everywhere he went, for all the world as if the hounds were after him. His name was Mississippi, and like the river, he was dark and mysterious. My mother was a horsey woman, but she had long since abandoned the hope of calming him down enough to actually ride.

  Enter Robin.

  Picture the scene: My parents are up in the garden doing the spring planting, beyond vision and earshot. Another girl from down on the creek has come up to play with us for the day. Come five o’clock, when she is supposed to be home, she decides she’d like to stay an hour longer. Her grandmother’s house is a mile and a half away and we have no phone.

  Question is: How do we let the grandmother know?

  Robin volunteers. She will ride Mississippi down the creek and relay the message. And, so as not to lose any more than necessary of the extra hour together, she sets herself a time limit. In five minutes she promises to be back, after shouting the change of plans across the grandmother’s front yard.

  The rest of us are stationed by the clock. Hoofs go tearing out of the yard and Robin is off like a shot. We are proud of our fearless friend; no one else would attempt such a deed as this. Three minutes by the clock, and we hear Robin’s voice calling out. What? Back this soon?

  Then we see her, limping along the road, a subdued Mississippi tethered by the bridle. He is coated with white lather and has a huge gash in his massive shoulder. It looks like a tear in velvet, except for the brilliant red flesh that has been exposed. Robin’s leg and left side are similarly bereft of any skin they once claimed, and sand has rubbed into the open sores.

  “We fell,” Robin explains, when she gets close enough—on the bridge on the way back, which was slippery from the recent rains. “Is the horse all right?” She is only anxious for her friend and hasn’t even noticed that half her skin is missing.

  Mother and Daddy come running to the rescue. To hell with the horse; is the girl all right? (Her parents are coming to pick her up tomorrow.) They wash out her wounds with soap and warm water after hosing out the grit with the garden nozzle, and pour hydrogen peroxide all over them and cover them with gauze bandages. Robin asks for a pencil to bite so that she won’t scream. She doesn’t make a sound, but the pencil is broken to bits by the time the last bandage is on.

  She tells her parents, when they arrive, that she was attacked by a mountain lion.

  College

  We lost touch with Robin for years after that. Not because of the incident with the horse, but because her grandmother in Hot Springs died, and her parents had no further reason to make summer excursions down from D.C.

  When, at seventeen, I went off to college, I chose a small liberal arts school hidden away in the Swannanoas, attracted by its focus on work, the environment and the individual, and by the abundance of music all around. And who should I run into my first day on campus? Robin!

  Together, we decided that college was more about expanding one’s lifestyle than expanding the brain, and we set about learning to play pool and Space Invaders, and slow-dancing with the characters that inhabited the student center after hours. We went skinny-dipping in the campus pond, borrowed cars to go out for pizza and donuts, and afterwards we pulled all-nighters next to the Coke and candy machine, trying to catch up on the reading that we had neglected during the day.

  My grades went from top three in the class, down to only slightly above average. But that was okay with me; I had always envied the average, and wished I didn’t stand out so much among my classmates. I had found out the hard way that making good grades is not the best thing for your social status. And I wanted to learn how it felt to blend in, for once in my life.

  The last episode I remember with Robin was on the night the world was predicted to end (by some time-honored sage—Edgar Cayce, perhaps; I’ve forgotten now). We were determined, if tomorrow was really in jeopardy, not to miss any of today.

  And that included the night. No sleep would be possible. We wandered down by the Swannanoa River, pacing the archaeological dig where Cherokee relics were being excavated. We climbed up in the loft of the college garden shed (built during a log-hewing workshop conducted by my father), and sat among the onions, savoring the darkness. Then we climbed into the limbs of the two tall elms that flanked our dormitory and sang all the songs we could think of until the day (which wasn’t supposed to appear) broke. Having succeeded in our vigil, we curled up in sleeping bags in the dorm lounge and slept through our morning classes.

  I haven’t seen Robin in a decade or more. But I heard she just got married. I wonder if she has any kids on the way, who will bring toads in the house on a summer’s eve? Or play marbles with curled-up centipedes? Or come home with half their skin scraped off?

  I wonder if one of them will carry on the name of disaster…

  A Waterfall Shower

  Have you ever taken a shower under a waterfall? If not, it’s worth trying at least once in your life, and you’ll probably do everything you can to make it more than once after the initial experience.

  It helps to be really hot. Ideally, it is summertime when you’re reading this; otherwise, you’ll have to wrap yourself up in a quilt and quickly down a hot toddy next to a roaring fire and do some good imagining. Maybe you’ve been out mowing the lawn, and there are lots of bugs in the air and they’re tangled in your hair, and sticking to the sweat running down your legs. Your curls are welded to your forehead and you’re longing to get out of your shoes and drink a long, cold, icy glass of water.

  Or perhaps you’ve been driving the car for unending hot hours of interstate and the air flying in through the open window scorches your skin, but you would die of suffocation if you rolled the window up, and when you finally get off the interstate it is rush hour and you hit every traffic light in town, and then when you reach your destination somebody has drunk all the cold beer in the refrigerator and has forgotten to buy more.

  Or perhaps you have been hiking all day in the mountains at a high altitude, and the trail was rocky and your feet hurt where they have been bruised by the roughness of the stones, and you have blisters because your hiking boots have not yet adjusted to your feet, and your nose is peeling, and you finished the water in your canteen long ago, and you are starting to feel like the trail will never end.

  It is then that you run across the mountain waterfall. At first, you think you are hallucinating when you hear the rush of water in the distance. Then, you wonder if a sudden wind has come up (though even that would be welcome). But then, as you draw nearer, you recognize the joyful sound of water tumbling over and over itself in its haste to reach the bottom. And you draw on your last atom of energy and hasten your step toward the sound, and you feel the spray in your face, and you drop your knapsack and tear off your shoes. Your shorts and shirt quickly follow, and your underwear makes a nice finale to the little cairn marking the route for fellow hikers.

  But nothing matters any more except the splash of cool water that draws you in like a magnet. A few steps on rocks that wobble but don’t quite give way, and you plunge yourself under that jet stream that has been singing its siren song.

  And your breath stops. The world stops. Your vision is crystal clear like the water, and you hear the clack-cl
ack of the jet stream as it pounds the rocks all around you and pummels sense into your head. You feel like you’ve been under the hand of King Midas, frozen to gold and unable to move. You’re a block of solid ice.

  At length, some miracle pushes you out from under the spell and your skin is immediately on fire. And you are prancing, your veins running hot like lava, and you are ready to climb Mount Everest, run the Olympic triathlon, jump the Grand Canyon.

  But instead you plunge back into the waterfall until you feel yourself transformed into ice again. And when you emerge, your adrenaline recommences pumping; only this time you are a little bit more sober and you set your sights for the nearest mountain.

  And finally, after the third plunge, you are ready for the trail back home.

  Our Waterfall

  We have such a waterfall on my parents’ land, a source of magic regeneration when the days are too humid for hope. When we have bent double for hours over acres of corn, unwinding morning glories from each individual plant to keep it from being strangled, or when we have been planting the field, pushing kernel after kernel from a freezer box with a stick (not touching the kernels because they have been coated with creosote to keep the crows from eating them), we manage to keep going only because we know there will be respite when we have worked long enough.

  And when we are harvesting the corn, breaking it ear by ear from the stalk, often cut by the sharp blades of corn leaves or stung by a pack saddle (an odious caterpillar with spines and a chocolate-brown saddle marking his back, just the size of a segment of the finger, blending in perfectly with the color of the cornstalks)…even then, we know that the hot August sun will give way to the cool green wetness at the end of the day.

  On the way back from the fields, we follow the creek—down to a high flat spot by a tunnel cave Tim and I used to explore. There the land falls away and the water leaps down between two large rocks onto a rock slide below, before slithering on out of sight. We drape our clothing on a hemlock bough and inch down a mossy ledge hung with rhododendron, our bare feet finding the way through the dark foliage that protects the water catapulting out.

  On another rock ledge is hidden a bottle of liquid peppermint soap and a rough sponge. The peppermint soap stings our skin almost as much as the icy massage we get when we step under the falls, but oh! It feels good when we wrench ourselves back out, careful not to slip and slide down the mossy rocks that stretch into the depths below.

  I once met a couple who had built their house on the side of a rock cliff, a gentle waterfall cascading down just behind it. From their bathroom window you could step out onto a rock ledge and under the cascade, and then back into your warm tub if you desired. That’s aliveness and luxury combined in the highest sense.

  Heaven on earth—a waterfall and a hot tub.

  Old Time Religion

  “Gimme that old-time religion,

  Gimme that old-time religion,

  Gimme that old-time religion,

  It’s good enough for me.”

  When my parents first moved into Shelton Laurel, they were invited to sing in the Baptist Church—provided they bring the banjo along, of course.

  Hymns being a large part of the repertoire of mountain music, it was no problem to come up with songs like “I’ll Fly Away,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Somebody Touched Me,” and even a rousing spiritual sung to the tune of “Mountain Dew.” One of the region’s best guitar flat-pickers was part of the Baptist Church too, and, although he had laid down the playing of secular tunes, he put all the punch and fire he had into the picking of the hymns.

  This formula of Sunday entertainment continued until the preacher started jumping up and down and pointing at my parents, shouting out that they must be saved or perish forever in hellfire and damnation. At that time my parents quietly dropped out of the weekly ritual, to observe the day of rest in their own way.

  It was a pattern among many of the mountain men to sow their wild oats well when they were boys, and then settle down and “get religion” in their ripe old age, ensuring themselves entrance to the Pearly Gates when they should die. Many of our neighbors had made moonshine, raced up and down the creek at night in their souped-up cars, gotten in fights, maybe even killed a man or two, and served their time in the pen (the penitentiary). When they were free again and had gotten “all that foolishness” out of their system, they married and had a nice family, went to revivals, got saved, and preached the gospel to anybody who would listen. They also had some pretty savory stories to tell, if you could ever get them off the gospel.

  One such neighbor was a tall, lean man with a wife at least three times his size. He’d joke with Daddy (after the first round of religious patter was spent), “Yeah, I got several women in one skin…and she’s all mine!”

  When we had electricity brought up to our house, after years of canning food and trimming lamp wicks, Daddy bought a refrigerator from this couple. When he asked the wife to whom he should make out the check, she replied, “Why, hit don’t matter, Pete; what’s his is mine ’n’ what’s mine is mine, too!”

  The husband, who was standing by with his hands plunged into his overall pockets, chuckled and added, “Yeah, Pete, when we got married hit was for better or worse. She couldn’-a done no better, ’n’ I couldn’-a done no worse!”

  Daddy heard a good share of this couple’s humor when he built a log house for them, replacing the faded pink house trailer that had been their home for years. The lanky husband was especially endowed with a gift for sly commentary. When Daddy showed him how to hew a log, splitting a pencil line down the middle, leaving half of it on the log and taking half off with the broad axe, the old man said, “Why, I don’t know if I could split a hair, Pete, but I sure could split a bunch of ’em!”

  Of course on Sunday nobody worked because they were all in church. All except for the younger generation, who were out sowing their wild oats.

  And in evening time, the neighbors might gather in somebody’s garage—or down at the local store—to sing more hymns together. Even Old Man Hic stopped in sometimes, and I can still hear his voice raised above all the others:

  “Glory, glory, glory, somebody teched me,

  Glory, glory, glory, somebody teched me,

  Glory, glory, glory, somebody teched me,

  Must-a been the hand of the Lord!”

  Nails

  “See my nails?”

  I had painted them alternately with bloodroot and pokeberry juice, and I thought they were splendid. Mother took one horrified look at the bright orange and purple splashes that adorned the ends of my fingers and shook her head in dismay. She didn’t approve of fingernail polish, even if it was squeezed out of the wilds.

  But since all the girls at grade school were sporting a delicate shade of rosy pink on their fingertips, I’d had a yearning to follow suit, if just for one day. So off I went, in search of the many-petaled white bloodroot flowers which grew daintily mixed in with anemones on woodland slopes, singing and throwing sticks for Tawny—our faithful collie-shepherd—and followed by a couple of the latest feline additions to the family.

  By the spring at the top of our property was the best place to look, and there I found them by the hundreds, seasoned with trillium and jack-in-the-pulpit. Down into the rich black leafy soil I dug with my fingers until I felt a root and pulled it out. It looked like a strange carved figure, like a piece of ginger root, or ginseng. And it was bleeding profusely where I had broken it, leaving behind a tiny stub in the ground. The stem bled, too, if you picked the flower, but it was only a pale yellowish-orange, while the root yielded an orange that was almost on fire like the sunset.

  The difference between the two shades was like the difference between the yolks of a town and a country egg. Indians and early settlers extracted a dye from the bloodroot to tint their white oak splits or their wool, and to decorate their baskets and rugs. The outside hull of the black walnut provided a nice complementary dye of a deep coffee-brown.

>   I preferred the pokeberry for contrast, as it was flamboyant like the bloodroot. With my first prize wrapped up in my pocket, I set off farther up the mountain to the ridge that overlooks Hic’s cabin. After crossing the barbed wire fence, I went through a long tunnel of shade trees, stepping carefully (because the cows had been there), and found myself in the wide-open pasture that looks in one direction towards the Tennessee border, where the Appalachian Trail traces the peaks whose names are familiar and homely: the Big Butt, the Big Bald, the Big Knob. In the other direction, on a clear day, you can see the Great Smokies, rising up in quilted layers of hazy blue.

  Here the tall poke weeds stretch their purple limbs up at all angles, like the wings of some giant eagle seen from the underside. This network of veins is hung heavy with luscious clumps of berries, and it was their juice which I sought for my disguise. I would have been tempted to devour them, like hot summer grapes, only I knew they were poisonous, as are the leaves of the plant (unless cooked).

  “Poke salat” is a mountain specialty, in which the foliage of the poke weed is gathered young, twice boiled and the water drained off, then fried in bacon drippings, and served with cracklings on the side. Even after the boilings it retains a delightful bitterness which, enrobed in the hog fat, coats and cuts the tongue pleasurably on the way down. I couldn’t get enough, but the season for the tender leaves is very short and, after a few meals, I would have to wait until next year to savor that bittergreen again.

  Another springtime specialty, one which I appreciated less, was stinging nettles. These vindictive weeds must be gathered with rubber gloves to protect the hands, washed five or six times to get the worms out (at least some creatures find them a delicacy!) and then—in my mother’s fashion—boiled just until the sting is out of them, and eaten with a little butter and salt. I always thought the texture of the wilted leaves was like algae (having had much experience with such sludge from playing in frog ponds), but the worst part in trying to swallow the murky mess was the surprising number of worms that had survived the five washings. I would see their little white bodies as I turned over a forkful, or, to my horror, I would crunch on their heads if I hadn’t looked over my portion carefully enough.