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 | Jan 3, 2019 | Uncategorized
The sound of the Church calling bell wafts out across the quiet countryside in the Sabbath morn. It is clear and sweet, touching the strings to the heart. The bell is old, older than anybody within the sound of its voice. The old bell is the voice of their church, never changing though pastors come and go.
It is the same in any rural community. Folks in many small towns hold to this, too. Even though their church may have electric chimes, they refuse to part with their old bell which still calls them to Sunday worship and to prayer-meeting. But for some reason, country golks have a closer affinity for their bells than city folks. Perhaps, it is because country folks pay more attention to a bell’s ring. Or maybe it’s because there’s clear listening and not a million sounds drumming their ears.
Bells in the country and in small towns, where Sunday is a quiet time, ring clear and true. Because of this, many a man can often sense the ways of the weather by the sound of the church bell. They can tell what tomorrow’s weather is going to be by the church bell’s muffled hollowness or its crisp clarity.
On a clear, cold night in the country, the sound of a church bell can be heard for miles. And on a bright, sunny Sabbath morning, the notes come floating down the valley and into the house.
There was a time in the not too distant past when the church bell was a sort of town crier. It spoke of deaths, of fire, of war and of peace. It called out if a child was lost or if somebody had been drowned. It spoke with urgency and folks stopped whatever they were doing and hurried to the church. As such times it wild clanging notes set the echoes flying.
In a lot of towns, there was a time when anybody in the community died, the church bell tolled out the number of years that person had lived.
For those who grew up with the sound of the old church bell in their ears, its tone and range engendered pride and a thing to be cherished. Somehow, it sang the heart to rest. And the sound of it, sweet and clear, never fails to touch the strings of the heart.
by bluewaters | Dec 4, 2018 | Uncategorized
When a bunch of yarn spinners gather out on the porch in that wistful time between daylight and darkness, when the peepers begin to pipe and the shadows begin to glower, the talk sooner or later gets around to corn-likker.
And, when it does – well, brother, just be sure you hold on to your credulity.
Of course, if you’re disposed to doubt, then it’s high time to either head for the loft or keep your settin’-chair as soon as one of the old timers rears back and announces: “Whatever I talk of as facts, you can count on as true as Scripture”. Then maybe he’ll launch into the story of fabulous “Aunt Tiny”, a blockadin’-woman who made likker openly in her own cabin as long as she lived and gave the revenooers fits because she weighed more than four hundred pounds and they could not squeeze her through the door.
Or about the folks way back in the Smokies who blamed bad roads for turning to blockading, arguing that corn being the only farm produce they could trade for store credit or tax money, the only way they had of getting it to market was in jugs.
Maybe one of the old timers will get around to remembering the time a preacher tried to persuade an unreconstructed 92-year-old hillsman to give up corn-likker, which caused the oldster to allow: “I ain’t goin’ on skim milk on this side waitin’ for cream on the other side, ‘cause the cows might be dry.”
Or one of the yarn-spinners might get around to telling about Quill Rose, master distiller of the Smokies, who operated whiskey stills for more than fifty years and never was indicted until he was caught making a run he had promised himself would be his last.
The talk, naturally gets around eventually to the merits of corn-likker, which, incidentally, is the most maligned stimulant in America, albeit the purest whiskey in the world. Real corn-likker, that is. The kind the old timers made.
Why, time was a mountain man turned up his nose at whiskey shipped in from outside, allowing a fellow was a plump fool to pay government rates on it when he could make his own. Besides, he considered the stuff shipped in from outside was nothing but old pop-skull. He referred to it as “pizened likker” since it was all colored up and doctored.
When a fellow made his own, double-footin’ it in a copper still from sour mash, he made it fit to drink and knew it to be as pure as spring water. Of course, old timer will tell you that real corn-liker – the pure, unadulterated mountain corn – is mostly a memory and about as scarce as hen’s-teeth.
It was corn whiskey that not only gave a man a whoop-and-a-holler but could run a gasoline engine too. As a matter of fact, many a T-model Ford in the hills ran just as good on corn-likker as on gasoline.
As late as the early 1930s, when real corn-likker was not too uncommon, the chairman of the state planning board let it be known that serious consideration was being given to burning corn-likker as a fuel in state operated vehicles.
Maybe he was being a bit facetious or green before his time but, be that as it may, he stirred up a lot of talk. And there were mountain folks ready to vouch for corn-likker as high-powered motor fuel.
The merits of corn-likker as a motor fuel came up for consideration when Capus M. Waynick was chairman of the state planning board. He got the idea after hearing a couple fellows tell about running out of gasoline up in the hills when they were miles from the nearest filling station.
Stranded on a back road, they didn’t know how they were going to get out. It was night, black night, and stormy too. Well along came a mountain man. Apprized of their situation, he said he reckoned he might be able to help them. And he took off down the road, leaving them wondering what he had in mind.
It wasn’t long until they found out. The mountain man came back lugging a gallon jug.
“Where in the world did you find that gasoline?” one of the travelers asked. “Ain’t gasoline,” the mountain man explained. “It’s corn whiskey. The pure stuff. Best you ever put a tongue to. Made it myself, and I can vouch for it. Better’n gasoline for runnin’ an engine.”
The driver, a bit skeptical, climbed into the car and stepped on the starter. There was a series of explosions, sort of like a mule trying to bust out of a barn, and then the motor began to hum. They drove that car about twenty five miles on that gallon of corn.
When Waynick heard about it, an idea began to simmer. And one day he called in a bunch of newspapermen and dropped his idea. He said the state was using more than ten million gallons of gasoline a year in its highway trucks and buses and he figured corn-likker would be cheaper and much more powerful.
Waynick pointed out that the state had no petroleum deposits then explained he had been informed that there was a surplus of corn-liker that might be used for fuel.
Chemists who were called into his office on the matter said there was no doubt about gasoline engines running on alcohol. They said that right as that very moment it was being done in Central and South America.
“Burning alcohol,” one of them said, “isn’t a pleasant smell.” Somebody else said it was a shame to waste good likker like that. But Waynick had the last word.
“I’ve been thinking for a long time,” he said, “that liquor should be in the gas tanks and not in the drivers. You know, they’ll run a lot better. The cars, I mean.”
However the state never did make the switch over from gasoline to corn-liker as a motor fuel. And as previously stated, when a bunch of yarn-spinners gather out on the cabin porch in that wistful time between daylight and darkness…
