October 13.14…..”An Old Mountain Homestead” (revisited)…..
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An Old Mountain Homestead’
From my nature journal, October 8: A luminous green and gold October afternoon. I’m climbing the steep north boundary of an old mountain homestead on the headwaters of the South Toe River deep in the highlands of Yancey County. All I have to go on is the faded crosshatch fence-lines scratched on a folded survey plat sent to me by the out-of-state landowner. It’s my job to figure out just where are the boundaries of his inherited family “farm”, how the property lies on the land, and perhaps what is its present worth in today’s market?
The only trace remaining of his great-grandfather’s boundary line is a ragged fence straggling through the woods—a few loose strands of barbed wire nailed to rotting fence posts and trees—some living, some long dead, even missing. Walking up the steep rocky slope, I see that many of the split-locust posts are gone with the passing decades. All that’s left of the old boundary line is a rusted wire hanging in the empty air, or fallen, twisted and snarled in the rocks and leaves. It’s apparent we will need a new survey, to re-establish correct boundary lines and to verify exact acreage, which often varies from the numbers stated in old deeds. Many owners religiously believe they own what the old deeds say—60 acres—which they’ve been paying taxes on all these years, when in truth they may only own 50 acres, or less. Over time, survey techniques have improved somewhat. (I wish you luck, getting reimbursed for the taxes you paid on acreage you never really owned.)
In scrambling over the forested land, I see a few scattered piles of mossy stones, left from the early years of homestead clearing, several generations back. The surface of mountain lands is covered with millenia of broken rocks: scraped and scoured by ice, fractured and tumbled by the long-plowing blade of time. Mountains are forever weathering breaking down into smaller broken pieces. The pioneers found land that had to be timbered, cleared and burned, with acres and ages of scattered stones to be gathered up. We still find rows of these ancient rocks piled into field walls, and stacked for foundations to hold the heavy sills of hand-hewn cabins, corn cribs and barns. The fields have grown back into forests; the old structures burned and rotted away.
As the first settlers saw it, the ancient forestland needed to be cut down and opened up for crops and pasture, in order to provide for their struggling mountain families. After a day of hard work breaking the land, they bedded down early on strawtick and cornshuck mattresses, by tallow candle and fireplace light. Night wind rushed through the trees. The dry cornshuck beds rustled in the primitive human darkness. Children were born at home, and wore clothes stitched from flour sacks and such. They were raised on corn-mush and pig fat, wild greens, beans and bear meat. They got by. If there was any surplus harvest, it might be taken down into the smoky settlement to barter for luxuries they couldn’t grow, make or kill. Things like fence-wire and coffee, cut nails and salt. Otherwise, they just made do.
Over time, the ragged homespun children left those secluded homesteads. They found schools and jobs, social doings in the noisy mountain settlements of clapboard buildings and muddy streets. While no one was watching, the upland pastures and hard-scrabbled “cropland” slowly returned to the ferny solitudes of deep hardwood forest. Bears gladly reclaimed their original habitat.
Today the songs of migrating warblers echo like silver chimes through the golden woods, as they had for countless autumns before the European settlers arrived, killed off the natives and claimed the land in the early 1800’s. A raven squawks a few words of October magic as he crosses a high black balsam ridge. In this year of heavy mast, acorns keep dropping, crashing through the leaves. It’s sweet music to the wild animals, this abundance of nuts drumming the forest floor, giving the fat promise of enough food to keep them warm during the long winter cold.
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Following old fence-lines/ A warm September Dusk
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Following an old Fence-line/A warm September Dusk:
(Printed in The Yancey Journal and Common Times in the column “Roaming Around Yancey”)
This luminous green and golden afternoon I have been climbing the steep boundaries of an old homestead farm on the headwaters of the South Toe River. I was following the faded cross-hatch fencelines scratched on a wrinkled survey plat the out-of-state landowner had mailed to me. But only a few loose strands of rusted barbed wire remained in the woods. Most of the fenceposts had rotted with the passing decades. We would need a new survey, to re-establish boundary lines and verify exact acreage, which often varies from the numbers given in old deeds. Over the years, survey techniques have improved somewhat.
Scattered piles of stones were left from the early years of clearing, several generations back. But while no one was watching, the children had moved away; upland pastures and hard-worked rocky ‘cropland’ had returned to the ferny solitudes of deep forest—the natural habitat of the high country for numberless millenia.
Working and walking in the mountains in all seasons is a joy, discovering new things and people, plants and animals, along with familiar ones viewed in different shadows and light. I relish bits of the history of each property in its passage on an invisible time-chain of various owners, the long migration of humans wandering through these timeless mountains. A trace of old forest road climbs high into a deep hollow to a pile of fallen chimney stones; a scant path traipses out to a spring gurgling fresh from beneath the roots of a giant Sugar Maple. Autumn’s first tiny warblers go twittering through the yellowing birches. Far above the treetops a Raven croarks! as she soars over the high black ridge of Balsam Fir.
But today as usual it’s also good—to come down from the rugged slopes and kick off the tired boots. The day’s last lights die down like flames along the blue rim of western mountains. The air is pungent with smoke drifting from my cooking fire of Red Oak embers, the dripped meat grease smoldering. Finally I sit down, breathe deep restful breaths of the cooling air, watching September’s amber radiance lifting softly from the land. Like a brief and beautiful acquaintance, another day of life has slipped quietly down the trail behind us.
Through the rosy twilight, silhouettes of little bats dip and wheel silently, consuming hundreds of mosquitoes each hour. I watch a fat half-scoop of Vanilla moon float through the deepening blue. Like an orchestra tuning for its evening concert, choruses of insects fill the dusk with the sweet night music of early fall, vibrating into the shadowy forest depths. Having lived but one season in the sun, many adult insects will die when the night dews crystallize into frost. Untold billions of them will replenish the hungering autumnal earth.
A quarter mile up the road, a neighbor’s old Redbone howls a music of such dark beauty—a primal sound echoing and lost in the sombering mountain hollows. The hound’s is a lonesome, soulful sound, haunting our civilized bones, hearkening back to a time when men were hunters—dragging in bloody and exhausted from the mountains with their panting dogs, fresh wild meat killed and gutted. A strong woman would cook it on the fire, to fill her large family’s gnawing bellies.
If sounds have color, the hound’s low wailing is a dusky maroon, painting the moonlit halls of an autumn night. Those long, hearty notes recall something of raw blood-lust, of tooth and fang and claw, the thrill of a chase through the night forest, the kill that briefly quelled our beleaguering hungers—for food, and for conquest of the overwhelming wilderness.
What strange currents course through our veins, as individuals and as a culture. Our fascination and (relatively recent) reverence for wildness flows against our bristling irrational fears and ignorance of it. For several centuries we have easily justified (and gratified) a persistent need to dominate and “develop” the wild lands, irrevocably.
That tamed dog’s dirge-like howl—it tries to stir something buried deeply in us, now all but utterly lost. The Redbone’s mournful music is a gutteral requiem to the vanished ways of a much harder but simpler, more sane life. It wakens vital connections between our own kind, and the furtive creatures who keep their delicate lives in the remaining vulnerable wilderness.
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Cicada Days, Screech Owl Nights
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August Butterfly on a stone
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Riverside meadow, wild Clematis
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Tiger Swallowtail
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Cicada Days, Screech-Owl Nights……Late August, 2011
(Published in the Yancey Journal and Common Times, August 24, 2011)
These dwindling latesummer mountain days, each morning the closest star (the one we call ‘the sun’) rises a minute or two later, over the eastern trees. Through empty space the tilted earth is always turning, whirling like a top (though we can not feel it) and leaning—toward the sun or away from it, giving us seasons: warmth and chill, shadows and radiance. Plants and animals respond in wise and beautiful ways to the growing or diminishing light. Already there is a yellowing in the leaves. Along roadsides and rivers, Buckeyes have been coloring shades of orange since late July. Birds are mostly silent now, compared with their mating jubilations those noisy mornings in spring and early summer. The fledgling broods have been raised. Countless thousands of them will be leaving in the next month or two, as they have through many centuries of turning light, winging south across the mountains to avoid the coming chill and lack of food.
I sit quietly and read the ancient holy words for thirty minutes or so, sipping strong coffee, watching and thinking, listening to the day awaken. It is my favorite time of day, regardless of the season, seeing life rise again out of darkness. Many of these latesummer mornings begin under a damp blanket of fog, as earth’s moisture condenses in the cooler morning air. The last several days have begun quite refreshingly, temperatures in the fifties. Such relief, after another unusually hot summer.
I’m off to look at a mountain property on upper Doe Bag, secluded high above the Double Island community. One of the joys of my work is driving the back roads of our beautifully varied county: from Cabbage Patch to Flat Top, headwater springs of Indian Creek to the confluence of North and South Toe rivers, and further downstream where they pick up the cooler Cane waters, forming the wild Nolichucky—crashing over boulders down that steep-walled Lost Cove gorge into flatland Tennessee. Some of the most picturesque scenes in Yancey are not the better known ones. It is a lifelong joy—discovering new places and people, revisiting familiar ones rich with the memories of earlier seasons, younger light.
This morning I park on the side of the quiet mountain road, and listen a few minutes. By ten o’clock the trees are already singing with cicadas in the hot sunlight, a sound like coiled rattlesnakes. Growing up, I heard them called ‘Jar Flies’. I’m not certain why. Nearly impossible–to catch one in a jar. (and who would want to?). We rarely see them, as they mostly remain high in the summer trees, singing that sibilant drone the very stones might sing, sizzling in the sun, perhaps something about the end of time….
From the emerald shadows of a wooded cove echoes the haunting latesummer song of another creature very few ever see—the reclusive Blackbilled Cuckoo, sometimes called “Rain Crow” by country folk. Its hollow repetitious one-note lament always sounds far off, softly whimpering, not unlike a panting wounded dog. Old folks said the Rain Crow’s plaintive song foretold rain later in the day. But I’ve listened for many summers, entranced by that hypnotic chant, and many days no rain falls. “Oh well”, as Chief Dan George said dryly in the movie The Little Big Man “sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
These latesummer days backroad fencerows are dazzling with a chaos of wildflowers, briers and butterflies. Just to name two of our many late-season blossoms: the soft blue Chicory that closes it sky-colored blooms by mid-day, whose bitter taproot was roasted and ground as a coffee substitute during the early wars when coffee was hard to get. And the tall heathery Joe Pye Weed is one of our favorites, named for an itinerant Native American herb doctor of the 1700’s.
One of the singular joys of latesummer is the host of night sounds, the cacophony of music trilled by a thousand insects in the warm darkness. And in the last week or so I’ve begun hearing the quavering songs of young Screech Owls, crying like ghosts in the orchard trees. Their eerie whinnying is both beautiful, and a bit frightful, evoking a sense of wonder with a childlike sort of shuddering goose-flesh fear. Just two evenings ago I was standing under the hazy stars, listening to this little owl’s enchanting music at the woods’ edge. I am always quietly thrilled with the sweet mysteries of the sound. It is easy to feel how indigenous cultures ascribed dreadful forebodings to the songs of owls: dark music moaning Who?—these fierce flying predators with large eyes that pierce the night. They descend swiftly on silent wings, curved talons opening to seize helpless creatures in the thin light of stars.
Suddenly the whole southwest sky flashes and flickers violet with large sheets of far lightning, too distant for thunder. Perhaps we will wake later in the night, the sound and smell of warm rain falling on the leaves.
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“Latesummer”, by Jonas Girard
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Ruach 333, by Quilla 