A MOUNTAIN EPITHET

A mountain epithet reads:

“Jacob Carpenter start colrado jul3 1888 com home Jan 1889”

His trip did not last long!

A friend of mine visited me at our mountain retreat a few years ago and gave me a used book he had found in an old book store in Florida. The book is: THE GREAT SMOKIES AND THE BLUE RIDGE by Roderick Peattie. It was published in 1944 by Vanguard Press. The author, Mr. Peattie, was a mountain lover and his book is a great description of the Smoky Mountains during the time of WWII. His writing style is quite noteworthy and entertaining, but the chapter about the mountain people in particular got my attention. He had found some old epithets and did some research about them. The point about the previously mentioned epithet was that one who has the mountains in his blood will never be able to really leave them.

Some folks have absolutely no understanding of this phenomenon!

My mountain-man buddy, Beau Brasington, and I often find ourselves sitting at “The Point” with an adult beverage and a fine cigar staring off into the serenity of the Smokies. During hours of conversations, we have never really been able to put our collective fingers on what it actually is that draws us to this place – one thing we have decided for sure is that we could never really leave for any long period of time.

Mr. Peattie has done an excellent job of capturing the thoughts that Beau and I have, so why not borrow his talent of descriptive writing (the following words are from pages 118 – 124 of his book and I have used his exact language where possible except for minor changes to update) and make an attempt to describe the “lure” of the mountains:

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Even though you are a mountaineer only by adoption, if ever you have once loved the ugliness of a small mountain village knocked up carelessly around a broad place in a bad road, you go back and back to it. And if ever you’ve gone camping or hiking in weather that would give you pneumonia if you had to be out in it in the city, you literally almost break your neck to go do the same fool thing again.

Weather somehow never seems to be a matter of slightest consideration in these camping parties. Somebody gets the idea for one – and the affair goes off with all the good and bad points of lack of planning. Everybody gathers whatever gear they think they can get away with without too much argument. The mood stays spontaneously high, but the food is apt to be uncertain. Refrigerators, grocery stores and bakeries are raided for whatever happens to be on hand. If it’s that time of year, there are roasting ears and tomatoes. It it’s later there are peaches and apples.

The crowd gathers at the store, and a harum-scarum check-up is made for whatever else might be needed. Then the party is off – in vehicles as haphazardly assembled as the other necessities. Any tired idea that nothing exciting would ever happen to you again departs speedily with the first half-mile.

You drive as far up the chosen mountain as you can, and farther than any outsider from the world of wide highways thinks possible. Finally, even the mountain driver agrees that he’s gone as far as his springs will take him, and everybody piles out, to park the car in oaks and boulders. Before you quite leave civilization altogether, some stalwart gathers up a little firewood to start the fire in case the wood gathered later is too wet or green to kindle quickly. He shoulders the load and leads the way.

Wind and mist and darkness, and mountains of white rock rising up out of the darkness. You go on climbing; clambering over an unannounced boulder in the path; by some miracle not slipping on pine needles off the narrow path down into a few thousand feet of fog before you’d hit the first treetop; coming finally to solid footing – a great rock not quite to the top. A stocky balsam, a wind-runted laurel, some huckleberries stand their ground in a crevice of the rock and the sound they make is single, lonely. But below, millions of trees are making the soft rainy noises that wind does in them when it blows the fog off leaves.

The mountain fog is not a dank fog that hangs heavy. It is swiftly moving, constantly changing – now revealing enough strange light to promise everything – the next instant wiping it out.

The fog in your face, not too cold. The smoke from the fire built is sweet to your nostrils. The night sky is stormy – but not so black, not so everlasting, not so almighty as the black peak.

Everything familiar and trite and tired is rolled up behind you some place. The world is new and raw and beautiful and there isn’t a mistake in it. You have come eagerly, needing this. You thought you had remembered. But you find you had forgotten. You had forgotten the power, the power and the peace; the uselessness of petty things. The freedom!

There are not always fogs in the heights. Sometimes the stars are near.

Nor do you have to climb to great heights. You can ascend the steeps of the mildest hill in sight – maybe the rise back of the village church, or by your lodge, which amounts only to a few steps. But, as the mountain woman said once when she had occasion to try to figure out all the sorry sense of the world, “A little height makes a sight of difference in the way a body sees things.” When you can get above the confusion and look to the quiet strength and calm beauty of the hills, with each going on into the next, and the next, and the next till they take on sureness and sweep – you grow somehow not afraid. It is as though you have ascended to some altitude of yourself, to some inner reserve of endurance you had forgotten about, or perhaps never knew was there.

And you can walk down a mountain road when the sky is glittering blue and the air is fresh or you can take a side road that leads by a creek with forget-me-nots along its banks – and you need not climb at all.

We know a man who, after looking the rest of the world over to the extent of two continents, came to the conclusion that the small part of the globe he would choose as his was back in the Blue Ridge in a place tourists don’t know they’ve gone through until the sign at the edge of the “town” tells them so. He has a farm he enjoys, but it doesn’t pay. He says he’s tried everything except hard work, and he’s thinking something of trying that next.

Sometimes you mourn the loss of people like that to the world of affairs. Then again, in those drained, weary moments when you stop long enough to wonder ironically just what it is you’re struggling toward – you think those others are the only sane people you know.

Perhaps it is a yearning of the mind and body for a temporary suspension of all thought and feeling that takes you back to the mountains. Over after-dinner coffee recently a man much involved and harassed with international affairs, said that when the war (WWII) was over there was just one thing he wanted to do. He wanted to sit and spit. Everyone in the room laughed, with a mixture of understanding and wistfulness

Mountains are one of the better places to sit – and spit if you wish; but at any rate to sit and stare off over a valley and not think of anything much, and have a very good time at it.

If you need people, there are people – friendly people, hospitably willing to put themselves out for you. If you like your outdoors hitched to a sport, they will show you which place in the rocky river that goes shouting and bawling and singing between the mountain cliffs is the best to send a fly flashing and pull in a big trout. Or which are the best hiking trails.

If it’s the small aesthetics that need revival, for color, there’s the squander of it from May through frost. And even in white winter twilights, there are the rose and purple peaks.

For smell, if you’ve ever known the spicy aromatic smell of the cool mountain woods – laurel and galax and teaberry and pine, and old logs with their sweetness still in them – then you can understand the utterance that came from the heart of a returned mountain man, who fervently declared, “I’d ruther be a knot on a log up hyur, than the mayor of a city down yonder.”

Mountain people come back. They get homesick for friendly faces. “I was just a lonely boy in the streets,” said another, who tried it. “Lots of faces, but none I knew. Everybody busy with themselves.”

They got homesick for the sight of the mountains. There is a poem by Lillian Mayfield Wright that tells about that. It begins:

“I think that something in a hill child dies
When he is taken to the level lands”

If they can, they come back. Especially if they have gone to the lowlands to work. It is one thing to obligingly go help somebody out – but it is quite another to work steadily for someone who gives them orders. They have never taken orders from anybody in their history, except in time of war. Ordinary servility is intolerable to them.

Moreover the idea of plugging along steadily at a job for the sole reason of getting enough money ahead to be able to quit someday, does not strike their sense of reason. It seems to them much more sensible to work, when there’s work to be done. But when a pretty day comes along, stop and enjoy it. Why strive frantically toward something ahead, when you can have it as you go along?

They come back for earnest reasons. Many of those who have gone away to school, come back to give the people at home who have not been so fortunate the advantages of what they have learned. Thus an increasing number of the teachers, doctors, nurses, dentists and preachers who are responsible for the raising of the intellectual and physical and moral standards of the mountains are of the mountains themselves. They have gone out, and have come back.

They have come back from wars – from all that war is, to the peace of the mountains.

They come back – those with their roots deep in mountain rock and earth; and those who happened once upon the mountains at some magic time or place that took quick hold upon their thoughts and upon their life.


George Goddard
May 23rd, 2009

THE ONLY THING LEFT NOT TAXABLE

I begin every morning of my life with a pot of coffee and the Marietta Daily Journal. I love to read the opinion pages in the early part of the day before my brain is cluttered with the flotsam of the day’s activities and I applaud the MDJ for including articles that support both conservative and liberal thought.

As one who is losing interest in television news and the edited sound-bites, I see no purpose realized in having two people, whose images are placed side-by-side, barking their positions at each other as the moderator attempts to intervene and allows one or the other to have the “last word”! There is no debate – just shouting! Why not have each state his or her position and then attempt to show how that position is logical – at least that would cause the viewers to think!

In my years of reading, I have realized that our country’s citizens are consumed with a group mentality. Most folks tend to identify with a group ( blacks, whites, gays, straights, religious, non-religious, right to lifers and pro-lifers and etc.) and it seems that identifying oneself as an individual thinker is a relic of the past. Each group claims its legal or moral rights and then shouts those claims at each other either on television or in the print media.

Here is a thought to consider.

If one considers he has a right to commit a specific act, he should ask himself if his claim to that right is legal or moral. Dr. R.C. Sproull recently commented about legal versus moral rights and his words caused me to think.

If it is a legal claim, consider this! There was a time in this country when blacks were legally considered to be three-fifths of a person. It was legal to keep women and blacks from voting. If a white person boarded a bus and there was a black person sitting in the front, it was legal to force the black person to the rear of that bus. I could go on and one about our laws that made specific heinous acts LEGAL, but thank goodness, we the people had the common sense to CHANGE those laws – because they were WRONG! So it only logically follows that we should all realize that laws can be wrong.

Next, if it is a moral claim, then where does one get the “moral” right. Our Declaration of Independence informs us that, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights …”!
I am amazed that today, very few people believe in a Creator, so from whence do these “moral” rights arise? Why do folks claim a “moral” right when they have no idea of the origin of that right?

If the "rights" that many are so quick to claim are not really based on any legal or moral certainty - then are we not all barbarians?

So, the next time someone writes about their rights – stop for a second and have another sip of coffee. Think! It is about the only thing left that isn’t taxable.

RIGHT WING RADICAL

A few weeks ago, Janet Napolitano, director of homeland security, made a comment about the danger of our young men and women coming home from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq becoming involved with right wing extremist groups. She concluded that since they were trained in warfare, they could certainly be dangerous to the progressive thought to which she has subscribed and erroneously assumes that most Americans have subscribed to also.

Her comments first enraged me but after a little thought I just decided to vomit! How in the world did our country come to this?

This directed my thoughts to my father, Ed Goddard! According to this lady’s “progressive” and “superior” thought process, my deceased father would be classified as a right-wing radical.

Edward McCoy Goddard fell to this earth just a couple of years shy of 1920 ( February 7, 1918) and his first cries as new human being echoed through the winter cold of the middle Georgia town of Reynolds, Georgia. He was the second-born to George and Lucy Goddard.

Ed quickly grew up to be a strapping young lad who enjoyed life and spent a lot of time with his parents who instilled into him a joy of the outdoors – especially hunting and fishing. His father was an expert in both of these concerns and young Ed quickly followed suit.








After high school, Big Ed (or “Foots” to his friends) attended and graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia with a Bachelors degree in Psychology and his resulting employment sent him to south Florida on business. During his time in Fort Myers, Florida, Big Ed met and quickly fell in love with Naia Gonzalez, who was a receptionist for the local newspaper. He instantly knew that he wanted to spend his life with her. Naia’s mother, Mabel, had been widowed at a young age so Naia basically grew up without a father. Because of this, Mabel was not delighted with the idea of Big Ed’s marrying her daughter and carrying her off to wedded bliss in the middle Georgia sun, but as the years progressed, Mabel became Big Ed’s most passionate supporter – in other words – she worshipped the ground he walked on!




After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Ed joined the Navy and went off to serve his country. His first son, Mac, was born a few months later and his family was with him during part of his training period. After a short while, however, Ed had to depart for the South Pacific on his ship and had to leave his family behind. During shore leave a few years later, his only daughter, Kikky, was conceived but he did not get to see her for a while. One can only imagine how much Big Ed longed to see his family, but especially his daughter, Kikky, whom he had never laid eyes upon. Imagine this young navy lieutenant’s thoughts on the evening before April 1, 1945 when he was given top secret information about the Invasion of Okinawa that was to begin the next morning.




Here was this big ‘ole country boy from Georgia with a wife, a young son and an infant daughter whom he had not seen who had just been told that as many as 85% to 90% of the brave Americans would be killed during the initial invasion of the beaches of Okinawa. Because Okinawa was only 340 miles from mainland Japan, they could expect that the Japanese would pull out all stops to block the success of this invasion. This last ditch effort of the emperor worshipers would be their most aggressive even compared to their previous efforts to stop other allied amphibious assaults. Big Ed piloted one of the landing crafts that took the marines to the island. Upon his first trip to shore, he was sure that he would not make it back alive. HE WENT ANYWAY – THIS RIGHT WING RADICAL!

Fortunately, things did not happen as expected. They landed without a shot being fired at them because the Japanese had fortified themselves in the mountains. It was a beautiful day and was truly a respite before the hell that was to follow a couple of days later and for a few months more. Between April 1st and June 23rd, it has been estimated that hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of this fighting. Two of Ed’s boyhood friends were in this assault and were killed in the fighting that followed. After the war, Ed, in his occupation as a funeral director, had the funerals for his friends. For the record: the allies (mostly U.S.) suffered over 50 thousand casualties and over 12 thousand deaths. The Japanese lost 100,000 troops and approximately one-fourth of the civilian population of Okinawa was killed as a result of this battle. The total number of deaths was somewhere between 200 to 300 thousand people.

After the atomic bombs were dropped in Japan, the Allied forces knew that no invasion of Japan would have to take place. Big Ed’s ship (the Mendocina) returned to the United States after a short while and Big Ed, the Right-Wing Radical, came back home to be with his family and friends and to get back to everyday life. I have all the letters that my father sent my mother from the war and every single one of them is signed, “all my love, all my life”! He meant what he wrote because they stayed married until my mother’s death on August 9, 1993 – 53 years! Ed died on January 9th, 1994 – of a broken heart!

During his time back in Reynolds, Ed was a pillar of the community as he went into the family business (grocery store and funeral home) with his father. He and Naia had 4 children: Mac, Kikky and after the war they were blessed with the births of George (me) in 1952 and Bruce in 1955.





Ed, the right wing radical, taught me how to hunt, fish and how to work. He told me that the world did not owe me a damn thing and that I would have to take care of myself. I never got an “allowance” but I was free to make all the money I wished bagging groceries at the family grocery store. He did not force me into the funeral business but introduced it to me – I went into pharmacy. He took me to “the country” with him when he went to work on some of the wells that he had installed for local families. Included in these families were kids who attended school with me that were not nearly as fortunate as I had been – he showed me that I should be thankful for my many blessings. He showed me how to be a friend to people! He showed me that being big and strong was a gift to me to be used as a source of protection for my loved ones and not for abuse. He showed me how to be a father and the proper use of a thundering velvet hand. He taught me how to take care of those the Lord had entrusted to me but mostly he showed me the richness of a life that is filled with laughter and the joy of being surrounded by family and friends. He showed me the value and meaning added to life by hard work. He taught me that life is a lot bigger than me – a lot bigger. He showed me what the fervent prayers of a big man can bring about. In his profession as a funeral director, he was truly a “mask for God” and instilled into me the desire to be a mask also.

I was in the second grade when my grandmother – his mother, Lucy, died! I remember vividly the scene of Big Ed, this rock of a man, sitting next to her casket and crying inconsolably for hours. I learned that day that mothers are pretty special, because I had never seen my father cry.

Because of his love for his mother, Big Ed did everything in his power so that we could have the kind of relationship with our mother the he enjoyed with his! He created the conditions needed for all of his kids to have the joy of a nurturing and loving mother

It worked! When my mother died in August of 1993, I cried inconsolably for hours also!

I do not know a thing about Janet Napolitano and have no desire to learn. She is totally clueless as far as I am concerned but of this one fact I am eternally grateful - she is not my mother!

On this Mothers’ Day in 2009, I thank the God of the Universe that He saw fit before time began to make Ed and Naia Goddard my parents. I am thankful that Ed Goddard was a Right-Wing Radical who created the family of which I was fortunate to be a part and I hope that I will always be a Right-Wing Radical also.






To my own family I would like to conclude with, “all my love, all my life”!

Happy Mothers’ Day!