Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  Lester scratches his chin, smiling at something. “Moss,” he finally says. “When I was a kid, seven or eight maybe, Hugh Bible was buying this moss, then he’d take it over to Rome Mountain and sell it. Used it to make floral arrangements, I think. Had to be log moss, now, with a bark back. When I first started pullin’ it, it was sellin’ for eighteen cents a pound.”

  He goes on for another thirty minutes, describing early teen years spent wielding chain saws with his older brother—cutting hardwood, or knocking down jack-pine stands and rolling the trees down the hills to the road. “Then we’d send one of our sisters to walk back for the truck—five or ten miles sometimes—load it up and drive it on down to the mill.”

  Sitting listening to all this, I can’t help but compare my own work life at that age, which consisted mostly of roaming the neighborhood looking for lawns to mow. The more he talks, the clearer it becomes just how well Lester understands the workings of these woods, the mechanics of the place. While he can’t read or write, he knows a lot about plant succession—when the first flush of pokeberry and raspberry will show up after a clear-cut, how long until the birch and aspen suckers start to rise. Beyond that he knows how each of those stages affects birds and animals—which ones prosper, and when, and which ones lose out. The kind of knowledge based on where to go for dinner on the table—or money for gas in the car or to pay the doctor bill. Learning ecology in order to have a better shot at a pot of ‘possum stew.

  “Ya know, speakin’ of loggin’, it’s good to keep an eye on those clear-cutters,” Lester is saying. “Sometimes the bastards don’t know when to quit. Where they’ve really screwed us is with the water. So much of it polluted. When I was a kid rivers were black as tea. People run their dogs in the Pigeon to get rid of the mange. Have athlete’s foot or somethin’ like that, the river’s where you’d go. Just eat it right off.”

  Such flinching over timber-company practices is more common in these parts than I ever expected; the old men especially seem to have no use at all for big clear-cuts, almost as if they’re suffering hangovers from the pillage they saw in the 1940s. “Don’t have much time left,” Henry, seventy-nine, told me outside the grocery store. “Just wanna enjoy it like it is.”

  Who knows? Maybe there’s even a little lingering resentment over trampling the forest lore of their Scotch, Irish, and English ancestors. Many fathers of today’s old men, for example, were very much of a mind to spare some of the bigger oaks they came across while out cutting timber, because such trees were thought to be special. Best thing you could do for the really big ones, people said, was to let them live out their allotted time. Around the turn of the century a man named Lorane Cash was out scouting trees near here for roofing material, and ended up felling a big walnut. Inside, toward the heart of the tree, he found a coil of black human hair, buried a good foot from the bark. Likely it was from the days when people thought you could cure certain diseases by boring a hole in a tree (often an oak), placing a clip of hair from the crown of your head inside and sealing it with a wooden plug. By the time the tree grows over the plug, the saying went, the disease will have disappeared.

  That gun lying on the end table in easy reach makes me slow to ask about other uses of the woods, like moonshining, but I’m going to bring it up sometime and now seems as good as any. “This isn’t something you have to answer if you don’t want to,” I tell Lester, as if he didn’t already have a pretty good understanding of that. “But I’d sure like to learn a little about the moonshine business. Kind of seems hard to talk about life in the woods without it.” For a minute, he doesn’t say anything. Then again, neither does he reach for the gun. Finally he takes a breath and crosses his legs, leans back in that old stuffed chair, like he’s settling in for a long story.

  “I was about ten. Somethin’ like that. My daddy had this old shotgun—hell, that thing kicked hard. So one day I take it and tell Mama I’m going hunting, but instead I go out to one of these stills I know about. There were two men there working it—course I knew who they were. Well, I wanted some of that moonshine to sell, and they agreed to that, but not before warning me that I’d damn sure better not be plannin’ on stealin’ it. And that’s how it started. For five dollars I’d buy half-gallon jars of pot liquor, wrap ‘em in burlap, then carry ‘em off the mountain on my back, one or two at a time. Later, I’d break ‘em down into half pints and sell those for three dollars apiece. Some to friends. Most of it to the local store.”

  Lester made thirty to fifty dollars a week right from the start, but he says that in order to cover his tracks, he also helped out on local farms, earning seventy-five cents an hour. Later he worked with one of his relatives who had a still, pushing a wheelbarrow three miles through the woods—sugar going in, pot liquor coming out. No surprise he was the first of his age to buy a car—a 1966 Plymouth Fury—though a few weeks later he got to drinking the product, wrecked the Fury at the top of Bell Mountain. “Had a brand new battery in it, so I pulled it out and carried it all the way back down that mountain.” His next rig was a ‘46 International, with rails on the bed, which he used to start bootlegging for real. “Makin’ five hundred a week and not killin’ myself. Hell. You can believe this or not, but for a while my main supplier was a sheriff. Was a time that feller had a dozen stills goin’ at once.”

  Lester is remarkably patient with my questions, and I’ve got a lot of them. In fact, it strikes me he’s awfully concerned I get this right. “Where you set up a still in the woods has to do with the water—you’ve got to taste it careful and make sure it’s good for makin’ liquor. I’ll tell you now there are dirty moonshiners out there. You know what that is? No? Well, it’s doin’ things like dumpin’ old car batteries in to make the mash work off faster. You can make moonshine four times as fast doing that, turnin’ it in a couple days instead of two weeks, but that’s the shit that makes people go blind. I even know guys who put their wives’ dirty panties in—you know, they think the yeast will help. Another trick goes on all the time is to use baby oil; some add that to make the stuff bead, same as it would with a high alcohol content. Good moonshine looks like teardrops slidin’ down the glass.”

  Just outside is the sound of a car door slamming shut. Images of ATF agents are flashing through my head, though I’m imagining them as guys with fedoras and tommy guns, like Elliot Ness and The Untouchables. “Must be the day for company,” Darla says, and I follow a couple of paces behind them out to the porch for a look. Walking toward us in the distance is a three-hundred-pound man in a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt, barefoot, moving at the pace of a mud turtle, picking every step as if the driveway were lined with glass. His beard is neatly trimmed, leaving him looking like Pavarotti gone off to join the Hell’s Angels.

  “Where’s your shoes, Jim?” Lester yells out, but Jim’s too busy scowling to reply. “Jim was in Vietnam,” Lester tells me in a low voice. “His legs are all fucked up.” By the time he reaches the porch Jim seems near collapse, and Darla, thoroughly dwarfed by the guy, takes his arm and ushers him into the living room, where he settles onto the old green couch. “This here’s Gary,” Lester tells him. “He’s writin’ a book on the woods.”

  “Most beautiful woods in the world,” says Jim. “And I’ve seen a lot of the world.”

  He tells Lester the Jehovah’s Witnesses came by his place again last week, that this time it was three big guys, and he and Lester start laughing like hell. Darla rolls her eyes. Lester sees my confused look and jumps in to explain. Seems a month ago he was sitting out on his porch pulling on a big joint when a guy and two women from Jehovah’s Witness came up to do a little proselytizing, which took a bit of courage, considering Lester was sitting there buck-naked. Well, they didn’t get twenty words out before Lester stands up, claims to be the devil himself, then lets it be known he’s looking for a woman to carry his wild child. At which point the Witnesses apologize for the interruption, make a hasty retreat, head on down the road toward Lester’s Aunt Sally’s house
. Inspired by his success, Lester heads off through the woods at full clip, sneaks in the back of Sally’s place and opens the front door, wearing only that big grin on his face, right as the Witnesses are walking onto the front porch. “Haven’t seen ‘em in this holler since,” Lester says proudly, like it was community service in capital letters.

  The four of us make small talk for a while. Suddenly Darla catches a sign from Lester, gets up and asks me if I’d like to go out with her to see some of the herbs they use for doctorin’. Lester and Jim, it would appear, have a little business to tend to. Outside, Darla talks of being fourteen and not being able to wait until school was out so she could run to the woods.

  “I’d find a few wild apples or somethin’ to eat and then climb up in a birch tree and stay there for hours, sometimes past dinner. And when I got thirsty, I knew where every good spring was to get a drink. Mama worried about me sometimes, but that was just me.”

  Darla is one of five daughters, all but one brought into this world by the hand of a rather celebrated midwife of the hollers, known as Granny Nichols. She’s both amazed and saddened by the women friends she’s made over the past few years who have absolutely no hands-on knowledge of the woods—says most of them don’t have a clue to what to gather when their kids have a cold or the flu, that some have never even picked poke salad greens for dinner. It’s a mystery to her why someone would be willing to live with such a handicap.

  “This here’s catnip,” she says, proudly fingering the leaves from a huge bundle hanging on the porch wall. “Now before doctors’ medicine come out, it was used for babies. Like a baby had the fever or the hives or somethin’, they’d boil this tea. Then they’d take and sweeten it and give it to the baby just as hot as it could be drunk. As soon as he drank the last drop of tea, they’d put that baby to bed, and it would sweat that fever out. Shoot, if I have the flu or somethin’ I’ll boil up a patch of it—I’ve often sat here before goin’ to bed and drunk half a gallon. And it’ll make you sleep—it’s about like taking sleeping pills. Won’t have no crazy dreams or nothin’.”

  As we walk along, what I saw on my way in as patches of weeds now turn into pharmacies. Yellow root for ulcers and goldenseal for mouth sores. Mint for sore muscles and gas pains. Lobelia for asthma and coughs, pennyroyal to induce menstruation and as an insect repellent. “This here’s rattlesnake master,” Darla says. “Say an animal gets snakebit, dig that root up and mash it up, and put it in something it’ll eat. When he eats it, it’ll run that poison right out of ‘im. Uh, you might wanna watch where you’re walkin’,” she says, pointing right at my feet. “Lots of copperheads right there.”

  She says if I really want to learn about how to use the plants of the woods, I should find one of the last of the old Cherokee medicine men still living up in the hills over toward North Carolina. “They’s the only ones left that still know the old ways,” she says sadly. “You’d need lots of time, though—there’s just a few, and it’s tough to get them to talk. Ya can’t come right out and ask because as likely as not they’ll say they don’t know what you mean. After a while, though, could be they’d come around.”

  When I get ready to leave Lester tells me I really need to meet up with him again tonight, and we’ll go over to this local whorehouse, see Brenda, and man, Brenda will do things us Montana boys have never even thought about. “It’s kinda rough,” he admits, “but you stick close by me and you’ll be fine,” and he pats the gun beside his chair. It’s nice of him to offer and all, and I’m sure it’d be the trip of a lifetime, but in truth about the last place in the world I want to end up is in a whorehouse in a dry county, trying to watch my backside, with Lester hovering somewhere nearby slamming down moonshine. I tell him I’m planning to be out on the trail tonight, which is true, and he gives me this sad, thoughtful stare, a look of pity, really, as if he’s thinking that, as wonderful as the woods are, it’s a lost man who’d choose them over Brenda.

  America’s woods have long been harbor to people who come in shapes that don’t quite fit in the square, measured holes the rest of us have wangled our lives into. People used to say that was one of the true blessings of the frontier forest—that it had places like army forts and logging camps, where ruffians could go to work off a little of the vinegar that so irritated the rest of society. And while there’s no more frontier, clearly there are still wind-blasted, chalky barrens in the Southwest fit to cradle a few thousand desert rats, patches of woods in the Rockies and Midwest and South for the boys who like to play with guns, and in the Appalachians, secluded hollers that can keep more secrets than even people like Lester can spin out in the course of a lifetime.

  I’m spending nights alone in the woods on Round Mountain, just west of the high, wooded border of east Tennessee and North Carolina, in the heart of the southern Appalachians. Rain has been falling off and on for the past twenty-four hours; I can hear each wave approach as drops battering the distant leaf canopy, then running toward camp across the forest on the tops of the yellow birch and hemlock and American chestnut—falling on the whorls of umbrella magnolia, on tulip trees and witch hazel and sweet gum. At times it seems like the upper branches of the trees are all that keep the clouds from swallowing up the world. Yet for all the moisture, the country holds it well. The water seeps into six inches of dead leaves, down to bathe the roots, finally into the water table, giving rise to countless creeks and springs. Instead of my usual wake-up ritual of sticking my head in a creek, this morning I strip down to a pair of shorts and stand out on the top of the picnic table in the pouring rain—face to the sky, arms outstretched, pausing every so often to slake sheets of cool water from my hair and arms and legs.

  Most of the trees near my camp are middle-aged, the canopies of the largest towering some sixty to eighty feet above the mountain, the lion’s share of the stand open enough to wander through at will. The trunks wear patchy, threadbare coats of lichen the color of olives and chalk, and along the streams the ground is wrapped in cushions of moss—the kind hunters used to stuff into cotton sacks for pillows. The air smells like ginger and pepper and bags of peat. After three days I still can’t get over the profusion of life on these ridge tops, in this jumble of hollows and stream cuts and glades. Here almost every month is wrapped in some new leaf or blossom, the blush of plants striking the passing of the year as surely as a clock chimes the hours of a day. Spring beauty in February. Sourwood and mountain myrtle in June. August with its bee balm and monkshood and turtlehead. Witch hazel from November through January.

  At the moment, though, best of all are the rhododendron, still in full bloom. Now that the catawba and dogwood have come and gone, this is the last truly outrageous flower of the season. At the end of the day, long after the rest of the woods has grown dark and murky, these cream-and-cerise blooms are still visible—glowing on the hillsides and ridge lines like nightlights. They coax imagination down the hills and into their tangled thickets, into the kind of woody knots that have been favorite hiding places for moonshiners in Appalachia for some two hundred years. “You best be careful snooping around in those woods,” said Charlotte, the beautician at Helen’s Hair Fashions in Newport. “That goes double if you’ve got out-of-state plates.”

  Early in the afternoon the clouds break and the rain gives up. I grab my day pack, toss in some bread and cheese, amble off up the Appalachian Trail through woodland gardens of strawberry, withe rod, jewelweed, heal all, blackberries, and the scarlet blush of bee balm. Beyond Lemon Gap are places where the path tunnels through massive, ten-foot-high thickets of rhododendron, some of which are losing their blossoms, leaving me to walk through the arbors on a thin film of ivory petals. Even better are the countless chestnut stumps—enormous granddaddy trees that were long ago victims of chestnut blight, then later of the ax and saw, yet even today refuse to give themselves up to the soil. Willy Walker’s grandfather, ninety-seven now, tells of there being so many chestnuts in the fall they’d roll down the hills and pile against logs and int
o small slumps in the ground, leaving him to collect them with a grain scoop. Some of the older men in Del Rio have told me of cutting these giants back in the thirties, after the blight hit, using two-man crosscut saws—felling them, slicing them into sixteen-foot lengths, then dragging them with teams of horses down to the road to load onto big flatbed trucks. “You could never fit but three of ‘em on a trailer,” Jess explained. “That’s how big they was.”

  Of course the loss of chestnuts left the American woods poorer from an aesthetic sense, wiping out much of that trollish, druids cape feel. But more important to the people in these hollers was that the death of the chestnut trees meant the loss of an important part of their subsistence. For one thing, during the Depression most people around here boiled and baked, sliced and diced chestnuts every day and every way to round out their meals. Even worse was that in losing these groves, families could no longer turn out their pigs and let them fatten on chestnuts and then collect them for slaughter in the fall. After the blight, hogs were kept only by those few people lucky enough to be able to feed them, leaving more empty space on the dinner plates than ever before.

  After some five miles I arrive on a treeless, broad-shouldered upland draped in a summer shawl of red clover, buttercups, highbush blueberry, butter-and-eggs, and great sweeps of yarrow. “Max Patch,” they call this place. Once a chestnut forest, cut out and turned into a sheep ranch, now an extraordinary, wind-blasted summit from which the world falls away to the east in wave after wave of timber disappearing into a distant haze. Hopewell Ridge and Betsy Gap and Dogged Knob, Farmer Mountain and Little Sandy Mush Bald. Settled-looking mountains, all soft shoulders and melted meringue, cut here and there by bowls and hollows filled with trees, sunlit and sweating like so many terrariums, giving rise to an incredible variety of plants, some found nowhere else in the world. A tenacious, mysterious run of country, much of it just sixty or seventy years from the saw and already full of life, full of texture.