Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  Today, Bishop runs on straight roads. Meditates. Eats healthy food and reads good books, makes serious studies of nature, takes hard tramps day and night through the woods. Ironically, he says the only people he’s ever had any run-ins with were some old hippies who came here for a Rainbow Gathering a few years back; two or three with sticky fingers stole some of his hand tools. He says he’d like to distance himself from the pot-growing part of his past. But like Lester Simpson said, the reputation you gain in these hollers sticks like pine sap. And like it or not, when locals say that without moonshine and marijuana there’d be no Christmas in these hollers—and around here they say that an awful lot—one of the men they’re thinking of, one whom they’re quietly grateful for, is John Bishop. (As it turns out, Christmas may be a little lean this year after all. Old Sally Wallace has Alzheimer’s, and two days ago she just up and wandered off. Searchers have been combing the woods looking for her, uncovering a lot of pot gardens along the way.)

  There’s water boiling on the stove, and I follow John in for a cup of tea. His carefulness, his creativity, are nowhere more obvious than in this house, a modest one-story structure covered in red oak, hand-bleached to the color of beech bark, with curves and tucks that perfectly mimic the surrounding hilltop and ravines. Large trees nestle against the decks like they’re a part of the structure, as if the house was dropped from the air into a matching clearing. The floors are unstained white pine, warm and bright, and at the center of the house there’s an octagon-shaped space with big pillows on the floor and glass all around, a room soaked with light and full of trees, like an arboretum.

  When Bishop first came here, he worked every day, sixteen hours a day. “I loved it. It was like there was some pent-up drive in me, this need to work with my hands. I did everything the hard way: built the house on top of a mountain and literally dragged all the materials up, plus thousands of buckets of water. I made the place mostly out of recycled stuff, things I picked up in dumpsters or along the sides of county roads. Some of it came from an old house in Newport that was falling down—I got it for nothing. And then a fair number of poles from these woods, cut and peeled.”

  He tells me he was very much in love with the woman he came here with, that together they were tethered to this great dream, this siren song calling them to go live in the woods. At the time there was a smattering of other back-to-the-landers here from all over the country—kindred singles, couples, young families, most of them educated people who’d dropped out in the early laps of the rat race. A lot of time was spent helping one another cut wood, plant gardens, can food, put up buildings. There were birthday parties and potlucks and late nights making music with guitars and harmonicas and mandolins. But as the months went on, a lot of the newcomers felt the quiet turning heavy. The enormous effort required for the most basic tasks—washing clothes with buckets of water carried from creeks and springs, cooking without gas or electricity—started to seem less like a path than a prison. In two to five years, many of the relationships, including John’s, bent under the stress, and finally broke. The immigrants scattered like November leaves.

  Yet Bishop thrived. “You have to have a thirst for the work,” he explains, taking the tea bag from his cup and placing it carefully in the sink. “You have to be a workaholic.” He stares out the kitchen window into the forest for a long time, sipping at his tea, saying nothing. “It’s just that I’m more at peace in these woods, whether it’s by myself or with somebody I love, than anywhere else. It’s the only place I can get a sense of there not being any boundaries between me and the rest of the world.” There’s a surety, a matter-of-factness, to his remark, but maybe a stab of hurt, too—like he’s grateful for the strength of the leaning, but saddened by the cost.

  “I spend a lot of time just sort of picking a direction and heading off in the woods to see what’s there,” he says. “Every time it’s a trip of discovery. There’s always something new and incredible. Birds, bobcat, deer and bear; turkeys, raccoon and foxes, mink. And with this rain, all the fungi—over two hundred species. After all this time, I’m still learning. A lot of times I’ll go out walking in the woods in the dead of night. If I get lost, well, it’s no big deal. I know how to get myself found.”

  We finish our tea, go back out to the deck, settle into the last hour of light. Earlier we talked a little about his birth family, how his mom and dad and siblings were these aspiring professional people, flush with the trappings of success. I can’t help but wonder what they think of his life in the woods.

  “It’s sort of this blend of envy and curiosity and wonder. And a little bit of disappointment. On one level, they understand it perfectly. But there’s this dissonance between that understanding and the lives they lead in the suburbs—always so busy, always collecting a lot of stuff. I was the whiz kid who could have done anything, and I threw it all away.

  “My brother raised a family, has a business outside of D.C.—really seems happy. But for years he’s carried this secret wish to have a farm. Maybe because of that, he admires what I’ve done. There’s also something about how much I travel. I mean, he makes six times as much as I do, but he can’t get away for more than a week or two a year, and then it’s to the same condo on the beach. But I suppose what sells everyone is that we get along better. They all know I’m happier now than ever before.”

  The majority of people I’ve met here—farmers to faith healers, moonshiners to guerrilla pot growers—many with the most modest incomes imaginable, have this easy, comfortable air about them, something that seems woven more out of tolerance than resignation, more a matter of patience than surrender. Some families have held onto these nooks and crannies at all costs—and there were times, especially as large tracts of the forest were destroyed, when the costs became obscene. Maybe the real reward of having stayed, having tended these links to the wild game and the sang, the saw timber and lobelia and pennyroyal, was that it made for a kind of evenness in life—the reassurance needed to shore up a willingness to endure, to keep stoking old stories and music and reunions. Even the religion of the hollers seems less about finding deliverance than about celebrating ties.

  I spend my last night at the end of a rutted dirt road that twists for a mile through deep woods, finally petering out on the bank of the French Broad River. The place is totally without people, completely quiet, though on the weekends it’s clearly a party spot, one of those hidden corners where rural kids come to drink beer and smash bottles into rocks, throw up in the sand among the willows. The recent rains have picked up a million armloads of dirt from the surrounding hills and dumped them into the river, overwhelming it, turning it into what looks like a channel of coffee and cream, stirred by the cottonwood snags it’s plucked off the high banks. It has a heavy sound to it, rolling through this dark night, keeping me awake, a kind of white noise gone to black. I try to ignore it, then out of boredom, end up tracing its route in my mind, thinking of it pouring out of the hills to join the Tennessee, heading south into Alabama, finally north again, all the way through Kentucky to the Ohio River.

  But in the end, that just leaves me thinking about going. And what I really want to do is stay.

  Chapter Eight

  LEAVING EAST TENNESSEE AND MAKING for the North Woods, crossing several hundred miles of what is increasingly unforested, settled country, feels like crawling out of bed after making love to go shovel snow. For the first time on this journey, the leaving is a weight. Today even Knoxville seems overwhelming—a cluttered stream of FM and billboards and big trucks roaring westbound on I-40, leaving me shrinking in my seat like Pa Kettle on his first commute. The day after the night I reach my brother’s place, we rent a pontoon boat, park it in a quiet cove of mammoth Dale Hollow Lake, twist the lid off a mason jar full of moonshine somebody gave me back in Del Rio, and sit there for an entire afternoon. It takes all that for me to stop looking behind me, southeast toward the French Broad and Cataloochee, toward Round Mountain and Max Patch, Lester and Henry and Hillb
illy’s.

  My brother and I are the only ones left in our immediate family, parentless since our early thirties. Dad went at fifty-two, killed by his fall from that courthouse roof, Mom eight years later, from cancer, from grief. I think that’s why there’s a sense of ritual to our visits with one another, a re-anchoring of who we are, where we came from. We talk today of how surprised our parents might be at the way that little patch of woods they bought for their two kids to run around in every weekend sank in, even if that is just what they were hoping.

  “We always thought you boys needed a place to be boys,” our mother used to say. And so while our friends were back in town playing pick-up basketball at the Nuner playground and riding their bikes up Mishawaka Avenue to resupply their stock of Sweet Tarts, my brother and I were in the sticks building forts in the maples and oaks, getting into fights with sycamore fruits, slipping on our prized green waterproof boots so we could go traveling up and down the creek bottoms.

  After a dozen years as a traveling salesman, Jim says he’s decided to give up the road, go full-time into a landscaping business he’s been building for nine months. He’s more excited than I’ve seen him in years, talking on about the Foster holly and redbuds to be had from the wholesalers in McMinnville, about little old ladies buying day lilies from his plant stand on the bypass, about how somebody’s actually growing palm trees outdoors in Quebec, Tennessee. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been trying to gather up those places we roamed as kids. And now my brother, in his own way, seems to be circling back too, settling on those ten years spent on that lot with no house, helping plant blue spruce and gingko and myrtle, red maple and cardinal bush.

  When I finally head north again, I find myself hopscotching from woods to woods, first through the sweetgum and hickory and hornbeam of the Big South Fork, past salmon-colored groves of river birch along the Cumberland, through small towns with names like Black Oak and Pine Knot and Greenwood. Past lands that Daniel Boone found covered in walnut and poplar, oak and hickory and sycamore, some measuring an incredible ten feet across and a hundred and fifty feet tall. Everywhere I look, there are beautiful little streams, and while these days they’re as untroubled as sleeping children, a hundred years ago they were straddled everywhere with splash dams, built to catch and pool the heavy rains of spring, which in turn allowed men to float the hardwood logs they’d cut and piled along the steep banks during the previous winter. And then the dams were blasted away, sending the trees careening at breakneck speeds to the next pool—on and on, through as many as twenty dams, eventually reaching a bigger stretch of water, where they were chained into giant rafts. And finally, the best part: those rafts of logs boarded by small crews of the craziest damn river cowboys in American history—“raft devils,” they were called—hired to keep an eye on things by riding on the backs of the logs, which during the early miles, at least on the Upper Cumberland, meant going through a series of roiling rapids that sometimes broke the rafts apart, sending the devils diving off their splintering ships into the torrents and swimming for their lives. Down and down into deeper, more swollen waters, sometimes covering a hundred and fifty miles of river in five or six days, usually with little or no chance for sleep.

  Happily, the roads I choose are leading me back to Appalachia, in and around the Daniel Boone National Forest. To places I vaguely remember passing through years ago on our way south out of Indiana. For my mother, who was a fierce champion of the clipped lawn, scrubbed kids, and lunch-meat-at-noon crowd, this was a sad, disturbing place. A world that seemed little changed from the one she heard described when she was a kid back in the 1930s, when the government told of how in this slice of Kentucky only six percent of the people had running water, and only half that number had bathrooms; of how the annual cash income varied from between $40 to $280 a year. Later on, maybe squirming at the thought that it could seem so little changed, in the end I think she took the views from these back roads—the broken-down cars in the yards and the worn-out couches on leaning porches—and used them to strike a reassuring conclusion: that the only real problem here was a lack of gumption.

  Then again, at the time I wasn’t listening too close. All I knew was that these people had one striking advantage over the rest of us: Within arm’s reach of nearly every front door we passed, there were woods and great reaches of twisted hills, cliffs and caves and fast-stepping rivers beyond the counting. I was hopelessly kidlike in thinking that the wonders of this landscape must somehow get people through, though in fact the woods did at least make an impossible life possible, if only barely. There were hardwoods to build with and sell. There was game to hunt, fruit and medicinals to gather, fish to take from the rivers.

  Eventually, the idea of saving the people of Appalachia rooted in my own generation. And who could argue against the need for health-care programs in a land where fifty percent of the women suffered from some kind of chronic illness, or for better schooling in a place with fifty-percent illiteracy? Yet I’m not sure we weren’t driven by the same old underlying assumptions—that the poor of Appalachia needed help not so they could become more comfortable as hill folk, but so they could become more like us. Forget the rusting car parts and leaning porches. It was hard, especially for those of us busy embracing the inherent good of the open road, to even imagine the fierce desire in many Appalachian people to keep their feet planted heel-to-heel with family, preferably on the same ground where they were born. I couldn’t fathom a culture where it was the exception to “get shoes” and wander from home, and even if you did, to almost always feel the need to come back.

  For a generation willing to pack up and move across the country for nothing more than a shot at a good job, it was incredible to conceive of an attitude then common in the hills—that to take work elsewhere, no matter what the pay, was a kind of personal failure. We missed the fact that coal mining (which even at its peak in Kentucky never employed more than one in ten local residents) or working at sawmills that were giving too many people annoying “hand-to-mouth” work, robbing a person of his ability to live life on his own terms. Only a fool would trade a free life for the chance to store up goods. And besides, as one Appalachian storyteller put it: “Hit’s a lot easier to make the things you need than to make the money to buy them.”

  The southern reaches of Indiana north of the Ohio River are still wrapped in forests vast and rich enough to lay easy claim to the imagination: oak and maple running thick across the shoulders of the hill country, white pine standing toe-to-toe against the chalk-colored nips and tucks of the limestone hollows, sumac and fireweed nuzzling the open twists of the country roads. In the damp places of the forest are clusters of wild petunias and bee balm, the latter with shocking red blooms, faithfully tended by hummingbirds; and in the grassy openings, buckets of pale lavender bluets. From State Route 135, I can look past crumpled barns and outbuildings and conjure up huddles of young Kickapoo men, readying to hunt, invoking the spirits of the deer around an autumn fire. Or Shawnee women, coming back to gather rose hips in the warm, dry days of the blackberry moon.

  The imagination game gets even easier in places where the road climbs the ridge lines, offering soaring vistas. From those places dance fleeting notions of that time long before European contact, a time, archaeologists say, when there was a sudden, inexplicable flowering of pottery, agriculture, and religion—the so-called “Woodland Period.” Priests from the Fort Ancient societies standing each morning high above the Ohio River atop great earthen temple mounds, welcoming up the sun. The clans of the Delaware, who for a thousand years preserved the stories of their culture with sign-words painted on shaved sticks, one of which describes this region as a tree-laden paradise, where all kept peace with each other.

  And then later, the French trappers—coureurs de bois, forest vagabonds. And of course the great warriors like Tecumseh, living and dying on the breath of a dream that there would one day be an inviolable Indian nation, stretching from the chestnut-covered hills of Kentuc
ky to the dark spruce-fir forests of southern Canada. Even the first settlers who came to this part of Indiana were astonished by the wealth of the woods. “Hell,” joked an old-timer I shared a cup of coffee with in Madison, “when my people got here, a squirrel could visit every tree in the state and never touch the ground.” Entire cultures, blooming and fading like orchids from the forest floor.

  Today much of the change travelers see as they move north through Indiana comes down to a matter of geology. By the time you cross State Road 40 outside of Indianapolis—the old National Highway—you’re in pancake land, the earth filed flat some twenty thousand years ago by the grind of a glacier, the same slip of ice that turned this into such incredibly productive farmland. A gift from God, the farmers will tell you. Lots of logging and a few well-placed drainage tiles, and presto, central Indiana was on its way to becoming the golden buckle of the Midwest corn belt. It’s handsome country, especially in a time when the state’s open spaces are being eaten up like watermelon at the Marion Country Fair.

  Yet at the same time, there’s something disquieting, disappointing, in the precision of the lines, the fruit of a movement that began in the 1970s, when farmers were told in no uncertain terms to get big or get out. The lack of windmills and woodlots, cattail marshes, hedgerows and a dozen other hiccups on the horizon leaves an impression of extreme orderliness. Control. When in fact for all the chemicals and genetics, this farming thing is yet a tenuous give-and-take, a brave dance on a wet floor.

  Fifty miles south of the Michigan border, at the Tri-County Wildlife Management Area, I catch my first sight of home. A loose, unconnected hodgepodge of tangled tracts with ponds and marshes and woods, among the very last things natural to be saved near the resort development of Lake Wawasee. The people living nearby don’t seem to give the place much notice—except for the teenagers, of course, who have a fondness for parking at the fishing access points and drinking beer, for driving down the dirt roads and taking potshots at signs. When I was eleven, this was the edge of the known world—a place my brother and I would routinely explore by walking some eight miles one way from that piece of woods our parents bought for the family, spending the afternoon mapping it all in our heads, walking back in time for dinner.