by bluewaters | Dec 20, 2017 | Uncategorized
You don’t have to be a Methuselah, though it helps, to recall some of the many callings that been lost to our new, fast paced world. But here in the heart of the Smoky Mountains, it is just a little easier to imagine a time that consisted of hand cut nails, a homemade shoe last, a coffee mill, an ox-yoke and a grindstone.
It was only yesterday or maybe it just seems that way to the old timers, the small town milliner was still making hats for the ladies. Like so many of the lost occupations, that business could not compete with mass production.
One of the most welcome characters was the traveling medicine man. But he, too, like the aviation barnstormer, has passed on. Neither the peddler nor the scissors-sharpener, both very familiar figures, come around anymore. Gone too are the lightning rod salesman, the liveryman, the streetcar conductor and the Western Union messenger boy on his bicycle. There is no longer a place for the lamp lighter and the chimney sweep.
In a mechanized and motorized world there is no longer a place for the cartwright, the wheelwright and the wainwright. They have been retired along with the local gunsmith and tinsmith. The old time cobbler who went from house to house has gone the way of the tanner and his tanbark mill.
The great lumber boom of the 19th century brought on a great cry for axmen and well as men skilled in the use of the cross cut saw. But the age of speed killed off the ax specialist. And the maker of ox-yokes had to turn to another occupation when timber started moving by rail and truck.
The harness-maker, who turned out his trappings by hand, fell the victim of the machine and the horseless carriage. The iceman found himself out of a job with the advent of the home freezer.
Right now many an occupation will be obsolete tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. And they will take their place along with cobbler and chimney sweep in the world of yesterday.
by bluewaters | Dec 12, 2017 | Uncategorized
Now comes the time to hang the kissing bough with its mistletoe from the ceiling of the living room. Old timers say that if a girl with marrying on her mind wanted to be wed in the coming year she must be kissed under the mistletoe at Christmas time. In the day, many a boy and girl sealed their vows with a kiss under the mistletoe bough. This ritual betokened happiness, good fortune, long life and fertility.
Yesteryear, there was a lot of maneuvering that went on among the young folk to get their true love under the mistletoe for a kiss. The correct procedure, now rarely observed, was that as the young man kissed a girl under the mistletoe he plucked a berry and that when the last berry was gone there should be no more kissing. Nowadays, the old custom of kissing under the mistletoe serves as an excuse for young people…and some not so young, to get a kiss with the least trouble.
Mistletoe has always grown in profusion in our mountains. And this year there is a bumper crop that has an unusual amount of waxy white berries. The tops of the oaks back out in the hills are lavish with mistletoe.
In addition to serving a kissing ritual, mistletoe once was regarded highly by practitioners of folk medicine. Mountaineers believed that an infusion prepared from the leaves and twigs of mistletoe would relieve spasms, cure sterility, control epilepsy and act against poisons. Modern research has disclosed that the active principle of mistletoe not only relieves hypertensions but is valuable in treating nervous disorders. In the realm of folk medicine, mistletoe was called allheal. A potion from the berries was given to man, woman and beast to make them fruitful. It also had the reputation for alleviating the ills of old age.
Most of the customs and magic associated with mistletoe were fetched over from the Old Country by the folks who settled these mountains. And from the earliest times it was regarded as mysterious and sacred by the Cherokee.
And now that Christmas is almost here there will be many a kiss under the mistletoe before it is over…just you wait and see!
by bluewaters | Dec 6, 2017 | Uncategorized
There is a sense of wilderness isolation here in our cove on this deep winter’s day. All of yesterday is lost beneath the snow that fell during the night. It has smoothed and gentled all the scars and blemishes of the cove, leaving an untouched world of purity and innocence.
There is no rutted road to travel, no trodden way for the eye to follow. The only sign of life is the blue smoke curling up from the chimney of a distant neighbor’s house where foot long tags of ice are hanging from the eaves.
Every crag is a gentle curve. Evergreens are freshly freighted from the skies. The boxwoods along the edge of the porch look like giant marshmallows. The pines on the hillsides are bowed under their white frosting.
There is a deep abiding silence, like the soul soothing quiet of a cathedral, broken now and then by sounds from afar that come clear and close. A dog barks into the frosty air on the ridge and talks to his kind in another cove. Song sparrows and cardinals chatter over weed seed uncovered.
Off beyond our little cove, with vast views of the Snowbird Mountains, is a world that clamors for attention. But here, on this deep winter’s day, is a simple world of snow and shadow and sound, a delight to the wearied eye, soothing to the ear. It stands isolated and wild, an island of solitude.
At first glance, it is a trackless haven. But a walk outside proves that even the wildness of snow has it tracks. Here and there are the tiny tracks of birds, the larger mincing tracks of squirrel. From under an old hemlock a series of solitary tracks, heavy on the forefeet, light on the rear, move in circles around about…a rabbit has made them.
The lake is laced with ice, the needle tatting of winter’s nimble fingers. The deep prints of our boots are the only human tracks in the white world of the cove’s mouth. The gleaming cloud of our breath is white and shimmering.
Broad purple pools of shadow lie in every hollow. A half hearted sun cuts a minor arc across the leaden sky and then is gone.
The dusk deepens and darkness comes on. We retrace our steps through the snow. The fire in the lodge is a bed of coals, but a couple sticks of wood and the flames dance again. Then it is mid-evening and the moonlight casts ink-black shadows on the snow.
And in our little cove, blanketed in white, there is a sense of wilderness isolation.
by bluewaters | Dec 1, 2017 | Uncategorized
December in the hills is a sprig of berry bright holly, a spray of galax, and bouquet of mystic mistletoe. It is the raucous cry and flashing wing of a bluejay in a naked woodland and the thunder of grouse exploding from the brush.
It’s firelight and starlight. It’s the season of long nights. It’s winter talk around the hearth, the cry of a fiddle. It’s a lonesome tune – “On top of old Smoky, all covered with snow…”
It’s an old man with memories and a young man with dreams. It’s an old woman with snow in her hair and a young girl with stars in her eyes.
December is a time when the darkness deepens and the winter closes in.
It’s icy knuckles at the door and frost pictures on the windows. It’s an open world that invites the foot to roam and the eye to see. It’s a sky with the look of cold skim milk. It’s a country road at night with lantern light throwing golden splashes on the snow.
It’s a little church in the pines glowing with candlelight and happy voices singing once more old songs of Holy Night.
It’s the magic of awakening to a mountain world white with snow. It’s snow turning ragged balsams into giant tinsel cones and draping proud hemlocks in formal gowns. It’s clouds all ragged and wispy and weird. It’s the wind playing hide and seek along the fence rows and across the meadow and among the fireclad hills.
December is laughter and full hearts and the glad hubbub of company coming.
December in the hills is all these things and more.
by bluewaters | Nov 16, 2017 | Uncategorized
To the north loom the Snowbird Mountains, green wooded and thicketed with laurel and back of them nestles the valley of Cheoah, which is to say, “Otter Place”. From here in the valley of Konehete – “the Long Place” – a winding dirt track climbs toward the sky to breach the mountain barrier and yoke together in a historic way the towns of Andrews and Robbinsville.
The road is little known and seldom traveled, yet every foot of its twelve miles is history haunted. It was born not as a highway of hope and promise, but as a road of banishment. Soldiers with bayoneted rifles drove an uprooted people over it on a tragic march into exile 178 years ago.
For the dispossessed Cherokee Indians of Cheoah Valley it was the first dozen miles of the long and bitter “Trail of Tears” to an alien land beyond the Mississippi. The old road whispered to the moccasined feet of the aging Chief Junaluska on his flight from Oklahoma and exile to sanctuary or death – he didn’t know which – from his beloved homeland.
William H. Thomas, the white trader who saved the mountain Cherokee from extinction, ran pack trains over the route to supply his trading posts at Robbinsville and Murphy. With the fall of the Cherokee Nation, settlers nursed their wagons over it to take up land grants in Cheoah Valley and farm the rich earth that had been the Cherokees’ from time out of memory.
For years after, the road echoed to the sound of creaking wagons and the hollow thud of hoof beats. But then came new and better roads and the old one sank into disuse, a horse and buggy thoroughfare outmoded by the gasoline age.
Today, the old track is a U.S. Forest Service road. Some six miles of it runs through the Nantahala National Forest. Originally it was a military road and nothing more. It was built by the soldiers of Gen. Winfield Scott to remove the Cherokees from the Cheoah Valley in 1838 on the first leg of their march into exile.
Young James Tatham was hired by Gen. Scott to lay out the route between what are now Andrews and Robbinsville. Tatham, who had a keen eye and a sense for contour, surveyed it and staked it out without compass or instrument. The soldiers, following his line, hacked it out of a virgin wilderness, where their axes mocked a silence as old as Adam.
Gen. Scott built a stockade in Cheoah Valley which he named Fort Montgomery (later to become Robbinsville). Into it he herded some 500 Cherokee men, women and children. Among them were George, the chief of Otter Town; Sweetwater, the beloved old man of Cheoah; Culsutee, a medicine man; Crying Bear, the renowned hunter, who had helped Andrew Jackson defeat the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. When the last of the Cherokees had been rounded up, the soldiers moved them out over the Snowbird Mountains, first to Fort Delaney, which is now Andrews, and then onto Fort Butler, which is now Murphy.
In October of 1838, they began the 1,200 mile trek to Oklahoma and into exile – a trek that lasted six long, bitter months.
There is a sign at the entrance to the road that says:
“Tatham Gap Road – A part of the Trail of Tears. Originally built about 1838 to remove the Cherokee Indians to Oklahoma”
A short distance from the sign, on a hill above Robbinsville’s main street, is the grave of Chief Junaluska who came back from exile over the old road to find sanctuary in his beloved mountains. Four years after his return, in 1847, the state of North Carolina by special act of the legislature made him a citizen and gave him 337 acres of land in Cheoah Valley and $100 in cash as a reward for his services at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. He died in 1858.
The historic old road gets little traffic these days. Yet, for those who seek out the back roads for peaceful wandering, it is a gem in all seasons – in spring when dogwood, azaleas and laurel bloom in the darkening places; in summer when the world is green; in the fall when the trees hang out their battle flags; and in winter when snow blankets the Snowbirds.
It’s the kind of unique dirt track that should be left with the memories and ghosts of the past.
by bluewaters | Nov 8, 2017 | Uncategorized
Out in the Country, where folks live close to the soil, November is a time to rest and be thankful.
October has slipped away on feet of thistledown, and November now comes rustling down the mountain.
The autumn color ebbs, and the season turns from gold to gray.
And November is many things…
It is a time for sitting around the hearth fire and a time for walking down a country road in the starlight.
It’s a breath of apple cider, a gleam from a possum-hunter’s lantern, the belling of fox-hounds in the mid-watches of the night.
It’s a season of wind and rain, front and rime, and sometimes snow.
Its willows going from green to golden bronze.
It’s pumpkin in the pie and thoughts turning to mincemeat.
It’s a time for pulling up a rocking chair before the fire and a time for cracking nuts on the hearth.
It’s a time when the blue smell of wood smoke haunts the air and a time when violet twilight casts shadows over the cove.
It’s Indian summer sighing in the trees and snowy breath on every breeze.
It’s a cow-bell tinkling as the herd comes home and the lonesome, lonely crow of a rooster.
It’s grouse exploding underfoot and rocketing into a thicket.
It’s a wild turkey gobbling in the brush on a high hill.
It’s a squirrel with bushy tail and shoe-button eye standing on the trunk of an oak like a carved statue
It’s a rabbit hippety-hopping through the sere grass.
It’s the wind running its fingers through a field of broom-sedge.
Its holly and mountain ash, berry bright and firelight gay.
Its apples in the cellar, dried fruit in the pantry.
It’s a jug of molasses, a jar of sourwood honey, a crock of homemade kraut.
It’s a bouquet of dried onions above the kitchen stove, strings of red peppers, pods of okra, strips of dried pumpkin.
It’s a harvest of striped gourds and rainbow-colored ears of Indian corn.
It’s a candy roaster and green polka-dotted squash.
Its pumpkin whiskey and persimmon brandy, apple cider and fox grape wine.
It’s the smell of frost ripened maypops and gingerbread fresh from the oven.
It’s parched corn with butter and salt.
Its apple butter and pumpkin butter.
November is naked woods and meadows brown and sere.
Its frosty knuckles rapping at the door.
It’s a groundhog sniffing the wind and scurrying back to his den to sleep until spring.
It’s the creek whispering and the hemlock crooning.
It’s a fiddle tune and a homespun ballad.
It’s corncob tales around a stove at the country store.
But most of all, November out in the country is a time to rest and be thankful.
