by bluewaters | Mar 11, 2019 | Uncategorized
Hillside cultivation is no easy matter, and hilltop farming is not much better. The natural difficulties that beset Western North Carolina hill farmer are the source of much humor and exaggeration; however, the story of the cliff-top farm, where the fields were reached by ladders and the mule and plow were hoisted by block and tackle up the cliff, is no myth. Slightly exaggerated is the story of the motorist on a narrow valley road who, perceiving a great commotion and a cloud of dust ahead, pulled to one side and stopped his car. As the cloud settled and a gnarled figure emerged rubbing his elbow and beating the dust from his denim jeans with a tattered hat, the startled traveler inquired:
“What in the world happened?”
In a tone of plaintive disgust the dusty one replied:
“That’s the third time I’ve fell outen that danged cornfield this mornin’ and I’ve still got seven rows to grub.”
by bluewaters | Mar 4, 2019 | Uncategorized
This story illustrates the life among the mountaineers in Western North Carolina, at no great distance in the past:
A doctor in a small town was called about four o’clock in the morning to go about fifteen miles out into the mountains to see a sick woman. About a third of the way, his old mare that he was driving suddenly stopped still and refused to budge. He looked and saw that there was something in the road but couldn’t make it out. He took a lantern; got out of the buggy; walked along by the old mare holding the reins until he got to the bridle. There he saw a dead possum. He knew that all of that blood couldn’t come from a wound to the head so he turned the possum over and examined it and found that it had five bullet holes entirely through it. He threw the possum out of the road, got back in the buggy and drove on.
Not far off he came to a settlement of mountaineers. They were all standing around in groups, evidently excited about something but saying very little above whispers or low conversation. Knowing that he could find nothing from them, he drove on. He came to a second settlement a mile or so away. The same condition existed there. The people were standing around listlessly. Women with milk pails had put their pails down and were hanging on the fences having very little to say and only in low tones of voice. When he reached the third settlement he had to go through a field. It had bars to the fence. As he was about to get out of the buggy and lower the bars, a mountaineer stepped forward and said, “Wait a minute, Doc. I’ll take down them bars for you and put ‘em back up when you get through.” As he passed through, the mountaineer said, “Just a minute, Doc,” and coming up to the side of the buggy, he inquired in a low tone of voice, “Is you heerd about any shooting?”
“No! Why?”
“Well, one of our fellers was in the Gap when he seed a light in front of him in the road and he hailed it and he didn’t get no answer, so he shot. He emptied his pistol and din’t hear nothing running off, so he was afraid he killed somebody.”
The doctor replied, “He did. It was a possum and he put all five of those bullets through that possum’s body.”
An hour later he came back after his visit to the sick woman and at all of the three settlements everything was normal and stirring and busy. The grapevine telegraph had worked both ways.
by bluewaters | Feb 27, 2019 | Uncategorized
Although only incidentally raconteurs and fablers, travelers and naturalists like William Bartram and John James Audubon testify to the thin line that separates nature lore from folklore. For, like the early chroniclers, they dealt in a truth that was stranger than fiction or “fiction in excellent disguise,” especially as the marvels of natural and “unnatural” history strain both credibility and credulity.
Similarly the narrator of yarns and tall tales has “seen a heap of strange thing” in his time; and they grow “curiouser and curiouser” with the telling, as facts are stretched into invented and exaggerated instances.
“Artistic liars” may be divided into two classes: those who boast of their own prowess and exploits; and those who elaborate on rumors and the erroneous perceptions of another person, preferably “a person who is not known directly to the narrator, but who is well known to a close friend” – thus disarming skepticism.
As the type and symbol of the “unnatural” natural history tall tale beloved by the liar of the second class, one may take the joint “snake”. This is not a snake but a degenerate, legless lizard, which can escape its enemies with the loss of its tails and later acquire another by regeneration. “A careless or excitable observer, having killed a joint snake with a stick and of course, having broken off the tail in doing so, goes back and sees the dismembered tail wriggling in the grass, whereupon he rushes off to tell that he saw the severed tail making an effort to find the body.”
Hence stories dealing with frantic attempts of disjointed snakes to put themselves together again and to find substitutes for missing parts.
From these hills there comes a story of the woman who say a joint snake while killing her lone rooster for the inevitable preacher’s visit. She hacked the snake to pieces and threw them into the pig pen. While the family and the preacher were eating the noonday meal, a rooster started crowing. On investigation she found that the joint snake had tried to gather itself together again and, not finding its own head, had put on the rooster’s head and was crowing fit to kill.
by bluewaters | Feb 21, 2019 | Uncategorized
The phrase “stop and smell the flowers” must have been coined by a hiker. When you’re hiking, stopping and smelling the flowers comes easy. After all, no one ever accused hikers of participating in an adrenaline sport. The pace is just way too slow to increase that adrenaline flow.
Slow enough to watch the growing flowers in spring. From the earliest part of the season, as soon as the lawns get green, wildflowers start to grow and bloom. It seems that everywhere you turn in the woods and mountains of Maine different varieties pop up almost daily.
Learning to identify flowers can be a way to measure the passage of the season. It’s as easy as buying a field guide and packing it with you on a hike. Most guides are organized by color. The best ones have full color plates and most include some scientific info and a glossary of terms. But you don’t need to know all those to enjoy the wildflowers in Maine.
After a few hiking seasons you start to see a pattern to the wildflower blooms. The earlier varieties are small and white, the most common color of wildflowers. One variety of those early blooming flowers is called “Quaker Ladies”: bluets that cover fields, and cleared spots near trailheads and roadsides. Only a few inches high, these clumps of white to pale blue, four-petal flowers show up around the first week in May. They are a sure sign that more flowers will bloom soon.
In the woods, painted trilliums start to grow almost as soon as the snow melts. The 6-to-8-inch flower blooms from about the first of this month to mid-May and lasts into June. They grow from the forest floor up to an elevation of about 2,200 feet. I’ve found them on Pleasant Pond Mountain in Caratunk in full bloom next to a patch of late snow. They’re one of the showiest spring flowers with a distinctive blossom of three upturned white petals with pink or purple streaks.
Soon after the trilliums bloom, the wood sorrel starts to flower. Wood sorrel is easy to identify. Its leaves are the shape of a shamrock. The flowers are small on this common low-growing plant of about 3 inches. The color of the five-petal blossom varies from white to pink. It grows in carpets in places along the forest floor along streams and up to elevations of around 3,000 feet.
So many flowers bloom in May it seems that they all flower at once. Look for pink lady slippers, sometimes called moccasin flowers, in low areas in shaded moist soil. They are one of the tallest early blooming plants, anywhere from 6- to 24-inches high.
Blue bead lily is another tall plant that seems to flower as soon as it reaches its height of 6 to 18 inches. It too likes moist, shaded areas on the forest floor. Blue beads are more recognizable after their flowers drop in late June. The plant forms one or two dark blue berries on top of its stalk. But in May the showy plant blooms with two trumpet-shaped, inch-long, yellow blossoms.
One of the smallest relatives of the dogwood tree is bunchberry, a ground-hugging plant that forms white blossoms that imitate flowers. The flowers are actually leaf bracts, a type of modified leaf that hides the real flower in the middle of the blossom. Bunchberry drops the leaf bracts around mid-summer, and a clump of orange berries appears in the middle of the plant, giving it the bunchberry name.
A lot of the common names for wildflowers are derived from their shape. One of those, the starflower, couldn’t be called a more appropriate name. The small white flowers grow in pairs on a stalk only a few inches high. The flowers are shaped like a star with seven to eight white petals. Usually they appear in the same locations as wood sorrel. They start to bloom late this month into July.
Not all the early blooming plants are small. Mountain laurel grows to about 5- to 10-feet high, like a shrub, with rhododendron shaped leaves and white clusters of blossoms. The plant grows in clumps along mountain tops below treeline. A similar plant, sheep laurel, looks a lot like mountain laurel; only its flowers are pink. It is found everywhere from streams to mountain tops.
Some plants aren’t just for viewing. Some, like Labrador tea, which is also shrub height, provides food for animals. Moose’s favorite browse is Labrador tea, and its white flowers can be found around ponds, in spruce forests, and up to 3,500 feet in high elevation bogs.
These are just a few of the types of early blooming flowers you’ll find along Maine’s trails. By taking the time to “smell the flowers,” you find that a hike is often about more than taking in the view. It’s sometimes about taking as long as you can along the way to the view. A hike doesn’t have to be about reaching the summit at all if you take the time to smell the flowers.
by bluewaters | Feb 13, 2019 | Uncategorized
Perhaps more than other wildlife, the trout’s tenuous survival the Smoky Mountains can be traced back to the effects of man’s activities on the environment. Since trout only live in pure, cold water, they are highly sensitive to excessive silt loads, increased water temperatures and lowered oxygen levels. When improperly conducted, practices such as logging, agriculture, residential development and dam and highway construction can effectively destroy many trout-producing habitats. At the same time, a growing number of anglers adds to the pressure on the remaining populations.
The “eastern brook trout” is the only species of the salmon and trout family native to the southern Appalachians. Though called a trout since its discovery by early European settlers, it is actually a char. Biologists believe the brook trout first arrived in the southern Appalachians during the Pleistocene Epoch, which began about 1.8 million years ago and ended about 11,000 years ago. Prior to then, it occurred in the region from New Jersey north to the Hudson Bay. Aided by the cold climate created by advancing and retreating glaciers, the brook trout found a new home in the southern Appalachians.
The brook trout’s security in the unspoiled mountain wilderness gradually changed with the influx of European settlers in the 1800s. Records from the 1870s note the presence of healthy populations of eastern brook trout in the upper Chattooga River. Land use practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries forced the brook trout to retreat to the state’s most remote headwaters.
Fortunately, the trout’s decline did not pass unnoticed. The rainbow trout from the Western US and the brown trout from Europe were imported. These introductions had both positive and negative implications. On one hand, brown and rainbow trout were arguably able to occupy warmer water temperatures in the degraded habitat, and extend farther downstream of historic brook trout habitat. Therefore, these introductions likely increased available natural trout waters, alerted conservationists to protect the trout’s habitat and helped create the vast southern Appalachian trout resource anglers enjoy today. On the other hand, the introduction of non-native trout resulted in the displacement of brook trout from their native range in many cases.
With the help of a supportive public over the years, the trout resource and trout fishing have been preserved. Trout management is defined as any activity having a positive impact on the well being of the trout resource, such as habitat protection and management, population management, regulations, stocking and research. Habitat preservation is the foundation of successful trout management. Every mile of natural stream lost to impoundments, every degree that habitat alteration increases water temperature and every activity that increases the silt load in streams means less habitat and fewer trout. Through public education and outreach, habitat protection and restoration, and population monitoring and management, trout managers are trying to reverse errors of the past.
Approximately fourteen mountain streams are stocked on a regular basis with catchable sized (9-12 inch) trout from March through June and again during October and November. Additional backcountry streams are stocked less frequently (seasonally) to maintain good trout fishing. These streams are typically located in remote settings. Water temperatures in receiving waterbodies and available fish largely influence stocking during July through September. Over 300,000 catchables are distributed under this program annually along with as many as 100,000 fingerlings.
by bluewaters | Jan 14, 2019 | Uncategorized
When a mountain man says something is “not worth shucks” he means it is poor or worthless. And when it comes to choosing a terse exclamation to express his disgust, regret or impatience he more than likely will settle for “Aw, shucks!” All of which is an outrage and downright unfair.
For corn shucks, be they green or dried, are far from worthless. Folks have been depended on them for a multitude of uses ever since man shucked the first ear of corn.
Many a pioneer mountain woman used shucks to stuff a bed tick or braid a collar for the mule. And a mat woven of corn shucks is as good as doormat for muddy boots as it was at the old cabin door.
Even folks who exclaim n one breath that something’s not worth shucks will admit in the next that they are mighty useful. Strangely enough, they can’t explain how or why the word came to denote something poor or worthless.
Artisans have taken mountain traditions in shuckery to supplement their income. It’s become quite a profitable mountain craft.
Corn shuck dolls, probably first thought by an isolated mountain mother, are a popular item at any craft fair. Mountain crafts workers have also turned out napkin rings, bracelets, hat bands, flowers, and small fruits and vegetables, all in color, from corn shucks. In addition, corn shucks are pressed out and made into lampshades, trays, work baskets, shopping bags, and pocketbooks.
The corn shuck hat goes back to pioneer days and to the pinching times of the Civil War.
When the Yankees blockade cut off the supply of bonnets and the materials to fashion bonnets, Southern women turned to corn shucks and straw.
“Our women,” said Zeb Vance, North Carolina’s wartime governor, “took the bright straw of wheat, oats and rye and the husk of corn ears, rich in the beauteous coloring of silver and old gold, and with deft fingers wove for themselves all manner of hear-gear, as charming as any which ever came from the shops of France or Italy, the natural earthly home of artistic beauty. As to the effects produced,” he said in a lecture in Boston, “I beg to assure the inexperienced in my audience that in gazing upon Southern girls thus arrayed from top to toe in homemade striped cottons, set off by corn shuck bonnets, the work of their own hands, I have felt all the usual symptoms of a violent attack – the increased action of the heart, shortness of breath and that general felling of ‘all-overishness’, as strong and irresistible as could have been superinduced by any other possible female get-up.”
Incidentally, during the Civil War, the original Blue Backs of the Confederacy – so called in opposition to the Green Backs of the Union – became known as Shucks, a name sufficiently significantly of their worthless repute as a circulating medium.
In pioneer days, husks were sometimes twisted into ropes and used as bed cords, and both horse and mule collars were made from them. Most old-timers contend, however, that while a dollar’s worth of shuck collar was good enough for an ordinary plow mule a sturdier collar was desirable for heavier work. And while bridles and horse collars are no longer turned out of shucks, shuckery as a craft has branched out far and wide since pioneer days.
All of which is a contradiction to them saying that something is not worth shucks.
