The show ends fast when a steel-colored sheet of cloud comes out of the woods to the west at a fast walk and begins drawing over the Patch. As it crosses the far side, it turns sharply downward, hugging the steep slope—first in tattered shreds, then swelling to a heavy blanket—until I’m standing beside an enormous river and waterfall of clouds pouring off the edge of the Patch and down the side of the mountain. Minutes later it’s completely engulfed me, but for one small, pie-shaped window through which I can see a lone farmhouse miles away in a distant bottom, lit by a full shaft of sunlight, and then that too is gone.
Where five minutes earlier I could look into next week, now I can barely see the moment; visibility is down to two hundred feet, then one hundred, then fifty. I can smell the moisture as it breaks across my face. One last time the clouds rip open to reveal a sunlit grove of oak trees far below, and then all goes gray for good. Nothing now but a tiny, bleak patch of grass and wildflowers robbed of their color. It’s all I can do to find the main trail again and make my way back into the woods—back along those stretches of trail strewn with rhododendron blossoms, past the chestnut stumps too big for two people to put their arms around, back to Round Mountain.
Time in the big woods is marked not so much by where the sun hangs in the sky as by the cast of shadows, by which layers of the canopy are lit, by the sound of afternoon thunder and the stir of leaves when warm valley air rushes up the sides of the mountains. Night fades to day and day to night with less fanfare here, and yet when darkness does come, it’s absolute.
Back at camp, late in the evening, folksinger Stan Rogers comes on the radio, live from Halifax, Nova Scotia, so I grab my harmonica, sprawl out on the floor of the van, and play out a couple of tunes with him while the wind tosses a few raindrops through the open door. Even though full darkness is just a breath away, the rhododendron blossoms are still visible. Pretty soon the lightning bugs start cruising, thousands of them, running through the dark past the rhododendron blossoms, like tiny space ships shuttling back and forth between a cluster of pale moons.
Gene, at the grocery store in Del Rio, has told me I should stop in and visit with Henry Johnson—“a fella who knows these woods”—so in the morning between hikes I call his house, talk to his wife, and she tells me to come by in the evening, about dark, when Henry gets in from the fields. He’s a brawny farmer with a thick, muscled chest and shoulders, and hands as big as the melons he grows. But despite his size, there’s an easy grace to his movements, like someone who just got off the dance floor after a long waltz and hasn’t quite given up the music. His shirt and coveralls hang loose, worn and smudged from another long day in the melon fields, but his face is among the calmest I’ve seen—bright, rested eyes, wrinkled at the corners, pooled above a thick white beard—kind of a Kenny Rogers meets Moses. We sit in old stuffed chairs in the basement of a simple house, piles of laundry around us, arrowheads plucked from the fields, then fastened to boards and hung on the cinderblock walls, and here and there, beautiful handmade quilts.
At first, Henry sits askew from me, turning his head sideways to make eye contact. But as the night goes on—as we get deeper into our talk of the woods—his body adjusts until he’s on the edge of the worn cushion of his chair, facing full into the conversation, recalling tales of Grandpa building log barns by ax and of finding sang roots the size of his massive thumbs; of being a kid helping his daddy strip bark from chestnut oaks and cart it down to the road, where it was loaded into trucks and taken to the leather tannery in Newport. In time, Henry’s wife Betty joins us, a round, shy woman, as well as their son John, and before long it seems like a family huddle, full of great conversation about going to the woods and coming back with blackberries for jam, huckleberries to serve up with dumplings. “Oh, ya have-ta try that,” Mrs. Johnson tells me soberly—about the virtues of pennyroyal tea.
When I finally get up to leave around eleven, Mrs. Johnson hands me three buckeyes—“They’ll bring you luck,” she says—and then Henry and John follow me out to the van, stopping first at the back of a pickup truck loaded with melons to offer me two massive Superstar cantaloupes. The moon is nearly full, and clouds skate across the face of it like ghosts dancing; the air is warm and sticky, sweet with the smell of earth. We shake hands again, agree to meet up the holler on Saturday night at Hillbilly’s—“a real experience if you’re kin to music,” they assure me—and then I’m gone, driving again, back up the twisted road through the thick hardwood forests of Round Mountain.
When I reach the campground, the first thing I do is grab a knife and one of those melons, haul them out to the picnic table and slice the fruit open. It’s sharp and sweet and when I take a bite the juice fills my mouth, runs down my chin, and I don’t stop until I’ve excavated the entire half down to the thin, bitter green of the rind. I cover the other half with some plastic wrap and slip it in the cooler—breakfast for tomorrow—crawl into bed, fall asleep to the sound of nothing at all.
Chapter Seven
IF I HADN’T ALREADY LOST my heart to the woods of east Tennessee, I would have lost it again tonight, Saturday, at the end of a long drive on a web of dirt roads, hopscotching past hand-painted signs with big blue arrows pointing me ever on to the foot of Laurel Mountain, and Hillbilly’s. I park on the grass, along with at least fifty or sixty other cars, walk across a patch of open ground below a modest house wrapped in tar paper and to the base of a grand run of forest, to some hundred and fifty folding chairs set up in the open air, facing a small wooden stage where six musicians who live nearby—five from the same family—are plucking and singing great licks of bluegrass, every now and then someone climbing up from the audience to belt out a song or two about some lost darlin’ or a homesick tale about missing the sweet hills of Tennessee. Between the stage and the chairs, eighty-year-old men in overalls and six-year-old kids, middle-aged women in cotton dresses, and teenagers too, are all crowded together, spilling out a hearty mix of buck dancing and flat foot, every kick sending tiny clouds of cornmeal and grits flying up from the wooden floor. Nearby is a food stand with hamburgers and hot dogs—Betty Johnson is back there running the grill—as well as fried pies, moon pies, and ice cream. Behind the concessions are two plywood outhouses, each with a hillbilly of the appropriate sex painted on the door.
The name “Hillbilly” was for years the CB handle of Paul Stinson, the owner and creator of this special brand of good time. Paul tells me it all got started several years ago, when God took him up on a promise Paul had made to turn his life around if only the Lord would deliver him from a terrible six-month stint in the hospital, battered by chronic lung disease and the effects of a serious drinking problem…if only He’d let him sit on this tiny porch for one more year just to look at Laurel Mountain. That was six years ago. God kept His part of the bargain, and sure enough, Paul did too, building this stage as a place for his neighbors to come have some good clean fun on Saturday nights. There’s no booze here, of course, and during the five hours I’m here, I spot only two guys swigging out of a jar off in the shadows of the parking lot, being incredibly secretive about it, knowing full well that Paul would kick them out if he saw it.
After being hauled out to the dance floor several times and making it clear to just about everyone how not to go about buck dancing, I hide out in the shadows for a while to catch my breath. Arlis is next to me, a thin, seventy-something man who moved away from these hollers to Cleveland some thirty-five years ago to find work, but like about everyone else who did the same thing, still comes back every chance he gets. “I just feel more at home down here,” he admits. “People here, they got thick bark.” In his younger days Arlis was a woodcutter. Far from being wistful about it, though, he recalls the time with a look on his face like someone who just swallowed a June bug, going on about how his daddy put him to the crosscut saw when he was just ten years old and then worked him every damn day until he dropped. He hated it so much that at fifteen he ran away from home, lied about his age to get into t
he army, didn’t come back for three years.
After a time, Frank joins us, another old cutter from way back, and before long the two of them are telling me about the finer points of sawing. “The balance is the thing,” Arlis is saying. “It’s a rocking motion, and the guy dragging the blade back has to be willing to pull up, and then push down as he moves it forward again. If you don’t lift up when you’re dragging back, it damn near kills the guy you’re sawin’ with.” Of course, they say, as tough as it was, the saw is nothing next to working all day with an ax. Over the course of an hour I hear plenty more: how often you need to sharpen a saw if you’re cutting oak or hickory as opposed to white pine or poplar (twice a day versus once every two days); that hitting a hemlock knot is like trying to saw through glass; about how the military guys came into these hills during the war and marked all the big yellow poplars they could find, then hired the men to cut them so they could turn them into props for airplanes. And finally, how it takes two people to drink moonshine—one holds a shotgun to your head to get you to take a drink, and then you trade off.
The truth is, the only thing as good as the music and the dancing are the stories, enough to fill up a whole holler. Stories about moonshine and Granny Nichols, about running away from home, even about church. “The more churches ya have,” says one old-timer, “the more split apart people get. The less they stand together. You grow a little marijuana or make some moonshine here in these woods, somebody turns you in, it’s always somebody from another church. No gettin’ on together.”
That talk, in turn, leads someone else to mention Roy Wilbert, a faith healer I sat with for part of an afternoon talking about God, right after finishing my lessons with Lester Simpson about making moonshine. “Funny thing about Roy,” George is telling me. “Friend of mine was over to his place helpin’ out with some chores, and Roy was there, out in the yard, sayin’ his mornin’ prayers. He was loud about it—it wasn’t like my friend was listenin’ on purpose, understand. Anyway, somebody had given Roy a bunch of turkeys, and they’d caught somethin’ and were dying off right and left. So Roy’s prayin’ his thank-yous to the Lord, sayin’ how grateful he was for all His blessings. ‘You’ve given me so much, God,’ he’s a sayin’, all proper like. ‘This fine life and this here house and family, and I do so thank You. You blessed me with these turkeys, too. Course You should know they weren’t worth a damn, they’s all dyin’ off faster than I can count.’”
Farmers and implement salesmen and housewives and old railroad men; grocers and attorneys and professors, even a mailman. Shy kids and fat kids, little girls in dresses with their hair tied in bows, great grandmas and grandpas, all here tonight, all at home. I’ve seen family reunions with a lot less of the familiar. Among the crowd there’re several Vietnam veterans, including one of the band members, who with thirty-five fellow paratroopers jumped smack into a minefield. Says he got torn up awfully bad but at least ended up living to tell about it—the only one of twelve to survive. Another man is in a wheelchair, paralyzed in the same war, neighbor to a couple I’m spending the night with. “Don’t be surprised if you hear shooting across the road around dawn,” they’ll tell me later. Jerry’s fond of his target practice.
So many shot-up, banged-up vets in these hollers, so many men counting on the solitude of these wooded hills.
There’s one more person I’ve been wanting to meet before leaving east Tennessee, and finally, about the time I’m thinking it won’t happen, I get my chance. John Bishop and I are sitting outside his home high on a hill, side by side in lawn chairs, on a deck that seems to be floating in the trees. From here most of the world lies downhill, across a crumpled mix of wooded dips and holes and ravines, all clad either in creeping shadows or the kind of late-afternoon light that looks like it’s been run through a smear of honey. A scarlet tanager lets out blurry warbles from the branch of a nearby oak. A stone’s throw to the east, in the next holler, is where some seventy years ago a young teacher by the name of Catherine Marshall came to teach the children of the hill folk—an encounter Hollywood resurrected a couple of years ago in a television movie called Christy. Some of the old-timers around here still seem offended at how the studio depicted kids in that show: soiled and smudged. “Mind now,” as one woman told me, clearly upset, “it never did cost us nothin’ for soap.”
The last time young Americans were overcome by the rosy notion of moving back to the land was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More than a few, like John Bishop, ended up right here in these green, long-forgotten hills of North Carolina and Tennessee. Bishop had a Ph.D. in physiological psychology from Berkeley under his belt, and had already tucked away a banner year of post-doctoral work at Yale, studying monkeys and cats to map how behavioral response patterns are organized in the brain. The long and short of it was that although he was awfully good at that, it wasn’t giving him much satisfaction. One night a friend caught his ear and filled it with her own special brand of sweet tales from the road, of recent wanderings and adventures in Morocco and southern Europe. Not long afterward, to the complete shock and dismay of his colleagues at Yale, Bishop bade farewell to the hallowed halls and set off for rural Spain.
“There were hordes of people on the road then,” he says, looking a little homesick at the memory of it. “Travelers from all over the world. I rented a farm for a year, raised a big garden, felt like a king. There was a strong sense of local culture there. We learned from the peasants how to adapt to the place. I got a glimpse of what a self-sustained local community might feel like, and I liked it. I decided that was how I wanted to live.”
So on returning to the United States in 1971, Bishop hit the road on a quest for a piece of land. Forest, he was thinking. One that might give him some of the flush he’d had as a kid growing up in the woods of northeast Connecticut. They started in California, he and a woman companion, but it was way too expensive. From there to Arizona and New Mexico, where he says bad feelings between the hippies and the locals were running high. Then on to Arkansas, and finally here to east Tennessee. “I can’t tell you how right this place felt,” he adds, leaning forward in the chair to catch my eye. “Some of it had to do with the fact that there was a long-established culture here. It’s changed a lot now, but even twenty years ago, people were still farming with mules, still growing most of their own food. Nearly everyone got life from this forest—they were related to it, familiar with every part of it.”
“But those tensions you found in New Mexico and Arizona,” I say. “The stress between the locals and the hippies. That didn’t happen here?”
“It wasn’t like that at all. The old-timers got a kick out of the idea of these rich kids with educations coming here, throwing the big life aside and coming to a place like this. I’m sure they thought we were kind of crazy—predicted most of us wouldn’t last, and they were right. But they were always warm to us, supportive. Even now, a total stranger, they’ll invite you into the house, serve you a meal, ask you to spend the night. Everybody I knew back in those early days had some local contact or neighbor down the road that was a fount of helpful information.”
When his daughter had a nasty plantar wart, it was Darla Simpson’s daddy, the healer, who cured it—put his hand on it, Bishop recalls, offered some kind of incantation, told her it would disappear in a couple of days, and it did. It was Granny Nichols who midwifed the birth of his son, who’s turning eighteen this year.
“It was a tough birth,” he says, sighing, shaking his head at the memory. “Eight hours of labor from the time his head first appeared. All night long Granny worked the birth canal and I pushed, carefully, right where she told me to. Slowly, together we worked him out. When it was over, my wife was so wrecked I had to turn her over in bed—she couldn’t move. That was about eight in the morning, and I remember Granny going out and fixing this big breakfast for everybody—for me, her family, maybe six or seven other women who were there about to give birth. Then she went out and did her regular chores, like nothing
had happened. Charged us fifteen dollars. It was always fifteen dollars, whether you were there for a day or a week.”
John is as loyal to his mountain-folk neighbors as anyone I’ve met—humbled by their talents, inspired by their willingness to give. Yet some twenty-five years ago, Bishop gave something to them—something in truth he’d rather forget about, but that some of them prize like few other things plucked from the world at large.
Late last night, just before I left Hillbilly’s, four old men stood in a half-circle, hands in their coveralls, telling me about having to leave these woods in the 1940s and early 1950s, how they and their friends went north to Cincinnati and Detroit, Cleveland and Indianapolis, taking jobs in factories because the woods were plundered and there was no work in Appalachia. Just in describing those years, they wore the kind of suffering, downcast looks most of us might reserve for talking about a long hitch in prison. It wasn’t that they were country bumpkins afraid of the big city, afraid of change, but more that they had an honest-to-God ache for this place, a yearning for home and family that ran so bone-deep it nearly crippled them. In listening to them I found myself envious, wishing I could love a place that much. Some of them finally made it back, and of those, several concluded what their kin had decided decades before, during the Depression: that they’d do what they had to do to stay on this land. And if that meant a slice of the outlaw life, then so be it.
By the time John Bishop arrived, people had been growing marijuana in these woods for years. But it was a primitive effort: Set out a bunch of plants in spring, whack them down in August and bale them like so much hay, toss everything into a bag and sell it for ten or twenty bucks a pound. But Bishop came from California, where pot was tended like the royal tea roses. During his first couple of years in the hollers he shared some of that knowledge, discreetly, with two or three locals. Pretty soon an awful lot of people—some young, some well into their nineties—were growing better and better pot, hiding it in east-west slashes in the forest.
Through the Woods Page 10
