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The eighty-four years had
passed swiftly. He had learned the habits of the Appalachian wildlife by
trodding the game trails of his mountain since boyhood. He knew the secret
hiding places of the trout that lurked in the dark pools of John’s River. Wagon
teams were a familiar part of his boyhood life. He had driven them; the big
stout Morgan horses, up the Blowing Rock Mountain with their bellies stretched
out just over the roadbed as they struggled to move the produce-filled wagon up
the steep grade. The mountains were his life. His father’s farm snuggled in a
hidden valley sequestered between the rugged peaks of their blue mountains.
Each morning as he peered out of his gabled window he could
see their jagged tops where they allowed the sky to filter through their
timbered barrier. Timber also played a large role in his life. After the farm
crops were gathered in the fall, he and his brothers cut trees on the
mountainsides and using his horses, drug the forest’s bounty of chestnuts,
maple, and hickory trees down into the valley to the waiting teamsters. They in
turn loaded the giant tree trunks onto their logging carts and transported them
to the busy sawmill in Colletsville.
Hard money came just that way, hard. The strenuous work
developed his muscular frame and provided the strength to comb the hollows and
ridges for deer and squirrels to supplement the family larder. His mother’s
flaky buttermilk biscuits helped too. And still the years passed swiftly.
Life went on pretty much the same in the hidden valleys of
the Appalachian Mountains. Prosperity in the rest of America plunged into the
depths of depression during the late twenties and thirties. Strong leaders
began to emerge around the world. The influences of Winston Churchill, Joseph
Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, and Franklin Roosevelt were beginning
to change the world’s societies. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs
included the CCC or Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC offered young
Americans hard money in return for their labor in building highways, parks, and
governmental buildings across the nation. Adventure coupled with the lure of
wages beckoned him and he joined the Corps.
He met a young city girl in Asheville. They married, her
urban ways influencing him, changing his views, and opening new vistas. But
still the mountains beckoned and on each holiday and vacation for the rest of
his life he would return to the familiar game trails of his boyhood.
I came to live with them, this highland couple, when he was
older at thirty-one winters. I grew up with them and as a boy; he and I roamed
the forests of the mountains and fished for the wily trout in John’s River.
My education consisted of learning her love of books and his
adoration of the wilderness. During the cold days of winter she read and warmed
our home and when the buds of spring arrived, he and I would tramp the forests
and wade creeks until the first snows of winter.
We hunted and roamed together for many seasons. Again the
years passed swiftly. He didn’t know it but time had grown short. He opened the
screen door and stepped from the porch and paused, savoring the freshness of a
new summer’s day. He bent over to pull the axe from the nearby chopping block
and as he did, a small blood vessel in the back of his head burst.
He lay in a hospital bed for weeks unable to move the strong
muscles on one side of his body. Each day he allowed his mind to wander the
forests of his mountains while he viewed them from the windows of his mind and
peered through the window of the hospital at the beckoning grass and trees
outside. I was with him there, from day to day.
The end was approaching. He and I both knew it. Time was
short. I began our last conversation.
“I’ll join you shortly." I said. He looked at me and waited.
“There’s got to be mountains and rivers up there. God wouldn’t leave anything
as beautiful as that out of heaven." He sort of nodded and I continued.
“You and I have
hunted and fished over a large part of this country. It has been good." We both
smiled.
“We will do more up there, you and I, with new places to
hunt." His last words to me were spoken then.
“No," He said. “No time then, we’ll be too busy praising
God." |
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