A Friend and A Truck

A longtime friend of mine just moved on from these parts.... to the other side of the world, literally. We’d been tight 30-plus years, since we first wandered into here from opposite directions. At this writing, don’t really know if or when I’ll see him again. You learn with age nothing’s certain but the passage of time, and that’s limited.

Earlier in my life I might have saddened over such a departure but I’m older now and take all things in stride. In his case, he left as soon as his draining divorce was finalized. He needed to reinvent himself after a suffocating relationship. At least that’s how I see it: like so many in broken marriages he suffered real pain, at the same time loving that person and situation which was also the root of his grief. I did all a friend can do, listen and help talk him through some of the rougher spots.

At the beginning of our friendship we spent many miles and hours arguing our respective views of the world. The thing we most shared was a love of the outdoors, and constantly discovering its myriad fancies with long hikes through the countryside.
We were friends enough to agree to disagree on a whole range of issues, from politics to science to religion. I remember with a smile how he, a scientist, chided me once for allowing the possibility a perpetual motion machine could be built.

We had our last hike a few days before he left, on a large tract of nearby public land he had not visited before. Had he not left, we would have returned there again and again. We still may, if his journey points back this way.

In leaving, he shed this old life like a snake sheds its skin. In that complete break he wanted to make he gave me the truck which has served him so well for years. A little rusted and banged up but better than mine.

And to give someone a working truck in the country— I guess that’s as true a gesture of friendship as one can make.

Beyond their dreams....

I’m just back from watching the swearing in of our 44th president, Barack Obama. It’s a proud day for me as an American,. I also take some vicarious pride in this truly historic event for some long at rest in these Tennessee hills.

At the heart of our house is a one room log cabin once the home to a family of freed slaves. The cabin has an earlier history, reputed to have served as a toll house when the road outside our door was the main highway through the area. In my own research, though, the earliest deed I could find is for purchase of the this property by Stephen Sellars, colored a few years after the Civil War

I know from census records, before the war the same Stephen was slave to a Sellars family in the area, and that from 1870 onward, the Sellars family, with as many as seven children, made their home in this humble cabin. In fact, they named one of their daughters “America,” perhaps reflecting family pride in the country which struck their chains for freedom. On the hill near my office, within 100 yards of where I sit, there is an old black cemetery. Most gravestones are mere slate slabs set upright in the ground, but of the few carved with dates, several mark the birth of people born into slavery.


As I headed down the hill to vote for President Obama last November, I thought of all sleeping there, and what such a day and opportunity would have meant. Seated by those cabin walls watching our new President take his oath this morning my thoughts returned to them again, and all their years of suffering, endurance and hope had finally wrought., Here was a moment certainly beyond their dreams, but a dream fulfilled for all who recognize the basic dignity of all.


So in their memory, our flag proudly hangs today on the cabin wall they once recognized as home, to greet and remind wall who pass this way how far we’ve come as Americans.

That time of year...

The sun’s trying to break through today, a balmy but warm afternoon with the temperature pushing 70.

The past four days, fog lingered in the hills and hollers, day into night into day. Everything assumed an eeriness, the ever present suggestion of phantoms in the woods.

Just before that we had two days of relentless rain, seven inches or so, leading into an unpredicted snowfall of three inches, gone by afternoon.

Next, another blast of of cold to welcome winter’s arrival, and Christmas next week. Seems a little less Christmasy this year, with people worried about work and all.

The mantle in our living room, from from it’s early days as a one room cabin, holds the happy scars of hundreds of Christmas stockings from the past century and a half or so. Anxious little kids grown up and gone back home to their maker. It’s our place now, but the suggestions of their Christmas mornings hang about that space, adding as much of the holiday cheer as the garlands, decorations and lights now about the place.

Joe Brown,who was a child in the house during the depression, told how happy he was to get a n orange, some nuts and candy and a toy or two, and what great Christmases that made. When we bought the place and opened the attic, we found a marble pinball game he received from an older brother and wife who’d left home for the promise of better jobs away from here. He made my kids a model of the kind of home made plane, a few scraps of wood and rubber bands, he received another year.

He’s gone now, but his Christmas memories, they’re part of our house, too.

Fall's Harvest and Invasion

Fall is long and warm in the hills this year. Though some were predicting a dearth of colors, due to a prolonged dry spell in late summer, the season has again come on in all its glory. I’m looking out now at a landscape ablaze with reds and orange, yellows and fading greens.

What’s most noteworthy about this fall, however, is the bountiful harvest of nuts and fruits. The limbs of apple and pear trees in the area seem overburdened. I’ve never seen as many walnuts on the black walnut in our yard. I’ve already raked a full season’s worth and as many, if not more, still cling to the branches.

Theories run all directions on why this is so. Some say the bountiful harvest is nature’s way of protecting itself against a pending harsh winter. By spring we’ll know if there’s truth to that. The other notion holds the abundance of fruit and nuts is survival instinct at work in the forest. The drought of last year, its lingering effect and the prolonged dry period of this summer, have no doubt stressed the trees, Here in the ridge several long-standing hickories and oaks succumbed to the lack of water by late August. Under such conditions, proponents hold, trees go into overproduction of seeds as a way of ensuring their survival.

Whatever the case, the harvest is ours to enjoy. With the abundance of apples, a friend retrieved a borrowed cider mill from 12 years in storage, and hired my son. The novice cidermeisters spent a couple of days mashing and pressing bushels of apples into gallons of fresh juice. I’ve never tasted better, and have a bucket of apple mash fermenting in a half hearted attempt to make some jack.

They’ve had to shut down the cider mill for a while with arrival of what has become one of the autumns most unwelcome events: invasion of the Asian ladybugs. Now out in full force, buzzing clouds everywhere in the afternoon sun, leaving a trail of orange stench on windows and doors, and on your hands should you try to brush one off. Were just one to fall into the vat get pressed with the cider, they fear the batch would be ruined.

I read these ladybugs were first brought to the U.S. in a government effort to control aphids. But without any natural controls in place, the Asian variety proliferated, becoming a seasonal nuisance all the way north. That’s what I heard, anyway.....another well intended government cure.

Rings of Things

No wonder there’s so many legends and superstitions about them: You’re out in the woods or walking a field and suddenly you come upon a circular ring or arc of mushrooms, so deliberately placed. so obviously planned.

Wherever you encounter a fairy ring, they always catch your eye.

I glimpsed this one while driving down the road and had to stop take a picture. I’ve stumbled upon these rings in different places in the past, always startled by the pattern. And I’ve found them, then returned a few hours later to find no trace of it. Mushrooms can be like that.

However, if you look closely at the picture you can trace a pretty well defined green circle beneath all the mushrooms. That suggests semi-permanence; once established thecircle expands as it grows, kind of like the rings of a tree, only in this case the further from center you move the older the ring.

Or you can find one ring, then never see another one in that particular spot again.

There's mystery to it which bred all types of superstitions. People once believe the fairy ring marked the gate to the world of the little people, the place where witches gathered or elves danced, a space one could never answer without dire consequence.

We know better, The celebrated fairy ring may hold less magic for us, but it’s still an infrequent marvel of nature.

Short Mountain

There’s a landmark here called Short Mountain. It dominates the landscape all the way to Nashville, an isolated remnant of the Cumberland Plateau. You can’t miss it, especially at night as several cell towers flash along its summit.

Been hiking there for years. At the very top there’s a series of rock bluffs and large boulders. It’s a dramatic setting but s short and easy hike along a well worn trail. The rock is sandstone with breaks of deposits of ocean-rounded stones you’ll find some days at the shore. How many millions of years since they tossed in the surf?

Around one turn there’s a long rock shelter still a popular campsite. I’ve found arrowheads there over the years, and there’s an emblem pecked into the wall identifying two men who mined millstones from the bluff in 1806. How they got them off the mountain is a mystery to me.

A few years ago, on one of our hikes there, we came across what appeared to be an ancient pictograph of the form of a man scratched into the rocks. It was worn away, the entire summit is a kind of sandstone, and covered with a pale green mold. Still it looked to me like it could be centuries old. Some fool has scratched over it with a newer, cruder stick figure, defacing what could have been the genuine article. Lost.

At any rate, we all took the grandkids on the hike through the bluffs, taking pictures in the very settings where I took pictures of my kids 20-25 years ago. The same rocks were there, nothing had changed. To their tiny eyes it must have seemed we were hiking among mountains as they scrambled to climb to the top of the same rocks which once challenged their father and uncles, when they were that small.

Over the years there’s been talk of making the place a state park. It should be, or at least a natural area for everyone to enjoy. There’s no trespassing signs along the road, but we were assured by a group of horseback riders riding the trail it was OK to hike as long as we didn’t get over on the property of the Bible camp which claims one side of the mountain. Still, it's a pocket of Tennessee's native beauty which should be open and inviting to all.

Tranquility Base

We first moved here around this time, might have been this very week, more than 30 years ago. Many of the things which so amazed us then are now routine parts of our lives: the nightly drone of the cicadas and katydid; the graceful flight of the hawks and buzzards as they ride the thermal waves ever higher; the coolness of the shade as respite from the sun; the seemingly endless shades with which green can define the forest, and the chill of the night by where the frost line stops as it works its way up the slope.

We know the calls of the tanager and bluebird now, the lonesome call of the whippoorwill on a moonlit night, the bark of the fox, and have never forgotten the shrill cry of a bobcat our first night in the house.

The hills are all familiar to me now, I’ve hiked every one, explored the valleys, recognize where the fog gathers as the creek runs through the lowest points. I know the trees, the succession of plants, the flowers of spring, then summer and fall. The neighbors are familiar whether friend or foe, and I know just as well the bends and dips of the road, where it rises and where it falls away.

I’ve learned the history of the place, can recall the names of many who lived here in their own time, trace the lines of the plow, tell the story of the battle, and where to find traces of the Indians who once roamed the land without ever claiming to own it.

For all I’ve seen, and learned, and everywhere I’ve been I’ve just never gotten over the marvel of the place, our own little tranquility base in the Tennessee hills.

And I greet each day, and enter each night, with thanks in my heart to the One for leading us here.