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