Country Roads
“…All my memories,
gather round her,
Miner’s lady,
stranger to blue water.
Dark and dusty,
painted on the sky,
Misty taste of
moonshine, teardrops in my eyes.
Country roads,
take me home,
To the place I
belong.
West Virginia,
mountain mama.
Take me home, country
roads…”
Bill Danhoff &
John Denver (From “Country Roads”)
Coming through the gorges yesterday,
memories flooded back. Seeing the sluice my daddy helped build so long ago,
when the Ocoee was populated only by black bears and bedraggled Civilian
Conservation Corps men, happy to have work, is the beginning of a memory train
for me. I can almost see them up there on that ledge high above a rushing
river, hacking out rock with pickaxes to make the surface flat. Now, one sees a
super-highway of orange rafts and rubber kayaks holding soaked and sunburned white
folks in full life-vests careening down white water, screaming like they do on
a roller coaster. Far too many for safety, half of them in the icy cold water,
trying like mad to hang onto slick mossy rocks. I hear my grandmother’s voice
saying, “There’s no fool like an old fool!”
The gorges are still home to me, and
the roads are still winding and treacherous even after the 1996 Olympics
brought a widening to ease congestion. There is only so much that can be wedged
between a solid rock face and a wild river. The Ocoee, the Nantahala, the Hiwassee,
the Valley, and hundreds of tributaries and creeks make the mountains of
western North Carolina, not blue water, but white. It’s the beautiful birthplace
of old souls, and fiddle music. And it is, and will always be, my resting
place.
I had the pleasure of hearing John
Denver sing Country Roads in a small restaurant in Colorado Springs when I was
a young and impressionable. I thought it was the most beautiful song I had ever
heard, even though he got the name of the state wrong. I have traveled through West Virginia
too, and it is beautiful and mostly poor like the Western North Carolina I
remember. But these mountains have changed. They are no longer the “Appalachia”
of my day—now they are bourgeois-bohemian, artsy-fartsy, and full of Birkenstocks.
Progress.
This terrain, this natural beauty will always bring out the native in me, as it does in others. The energy of ancient mountains holds the new and the old together and protects them from their own ignorance. Orange rafts and Merrell Blaze Sieves may have replaced truck innertubes, cut-off jeans, and gypsy-tops, but it’s the same call of the wild that animates them. When we honor the wild within, we return to our natural state, and all becomes well with the world.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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