April in the Cove

 [From April 30, 2015]

APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding  
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  
Memory and desire, stirring  
Dull roots with spring rain.
-T. S. Eliot, from The Waste Land

He groped for a doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted country that opened somewhere below a leaf or a stone.
-Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward Angel

We do not want merely to see beauty.  We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.
-C.S. Lewis, from Transposition and Other Addresses

This month I’ve been mulling over the fact that my life is (no less than) two-thirds gone. And that is an optimistic appraisal of the prospects for my longevity. Something about the month of April encourages the contemplation of mortality. Maybe it has to do with the rapid emergence of new life from a desolate landscape. The transformation occurs so quickly in April it can remind us how our own lives hurtle forward from seed to flower to fruit and to the inevitable phase of life’s cycle, death.

Pardon me for calling death a phase, but I’m struggling to find the right words. No, death is not the aberration, the exception, the interruption that comes later on. It isn’t easy to get beyond the way life and death have been dichotomized, posed as opposites. The inseparable unity of life and death, their ongoing coexistence, has occupied human thought for a long, long time, and it remains the ultimate mystery.

April has always been a favorite month of mine, and now more than ever thanks to my fairly recent interest in wildflowers. Living in the Southern Appalachians, I could spend all day every day of the month of April searching for the rainbow of spring blooms and still have more to see. When the page turns on April, I feel the regret of knowing I missed so much. The month sped by and now it’s gone. I’m not guaranteed even one more April, and if I’m fortunate enough to experience thirty more, that seems precious few for the great joy they bring.

In the spring of 1862, Henry David Thoreau must have known it was his final April. When he died on the 6th day of May, the early flowers were still filling in the New England woods that he loved. His mourners fashioned a wreath of wild andromeda to lay upon his coffin, a humble gesture befitting the man who had said “For Joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried in it.”

An incident he mentioned in the conclusion of Walden illustrates his take on life and death:

Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

It was an April day that led Thoreau to see the coming of spring as a green fire:

The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire — “et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata”— as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame; — the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

Living here, I enjoy a front-row seat for one of the greatest conflagrations of green fire in the world. No place on the entire planet (outside of the tropics) has greater plant diversity than the Southern Appalachians. And of the many distinct plant communities one might encounter during, let’s say, a one-hour drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway, no ecological neighborhood holds more abundance than the rich cove forest.

In Exploring Southern Appalachian Forests, Stephanie Jeffries and Thomas Wentworth catalog the traits of several ecological systems. As soon as I read their description of the cove forest, I pictured one particular place not far from home:

Diverse, cathedral-like stands of stately trees tower well over 100 ft above an open understory that features a stunning diversity of herbaceous plants. Cove forest soils are generally deep, and soil moisture is abundant. The herbaceous layer is remarkable for its diversity of spring wildflowers (before canopy leaf-out), when trilliums, spring beauties, trout lily, mayapple, and many others are in full bloom. Blue cohosh, common black cohosh, wood-nettle, bland sweet cicely, and yellow mandarin are among the best herbaceous indicators of rich cove forests.

Yes, I know such a place, and the more I recalled visits there in Aprils past, the more it exerted a magnetic pull on me. The drawing card of that cove is a forest service trail leading up the hill to an impressive waterfall. But for me, the real stars are the spring flowers that line the path. There may be another short trail where you could view a larger number of different wildflowers, but if there is, I haven’t found it yet. Again this year, it was everything I remembered, and more.

Bringing along a camera sabotaged my original plan of walking the entire trail to the waterfall and back before dark. At some point in the past, I might have called myself a nature photographer. But I managed to acquire just enough proficiency to appreciate the gigantic chasm that separated me from photographers with real talent. The humbling light-bulb moment came during a workshop at the Nantahala Outdoor Center. After the instructor shared a slide show of his stunning camera work I was inspired, alright. I was inspired to pitch my Nikon into the nearby rapids of the Nantahala River.

Excellence as a wildflower photographer demands infinite patience, relentless determination, and meticulous attention to details. An expensive macro lens helps, too. Though I come up empty on all those requirements, I still enjoy toting my camera along on spring wildflower expeditions. Truth be told, I could be called a producer of “plant pornography,” zooming in for intimate closeups of the engorged reproductive parts of organisms at the peak of their procreative powers. Whew! Of course, that is precisely what the profusion of spring wildflowers is all about – a botanical sex show.

Setting aside the prurient aspects, these trips are a good opportunity to develop the most essential skill of an accomplished photographer, the ability to see. By bringing the camera, I search for the best shot, the ideal subject, the pleasing composition.  I slow down. I pay attention. I get closer to the ground. Peering through the lens I start to see things that I would have remained blind to, otherwise. I slow down. Thirty minutes is not too long to spend with one flower when you are learning what it means to see what is there.

So if I am fortunate enough to capture an image worth printing, framing and hanging on the wall, that’s fine. And if not, the less tangible results are more rewarding anyhow. Ralph Waldo Emerson touched upon something like this in his eulogy of Thoreau:

His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with Nature,—and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to the Natural History Society. “Why should I? To detach the description from its connections in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and they do not wish what belongs to it.” His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with a microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.

April in the cove, crawling around on my belly to get the best camera angle on a clump of wild orchids is when the cares of “the world” fall away, and I find a bliss, a transcendent experience, that I seldom find anywhere else. Though nothing seems more certain or solid than that experience, it has an elusive quality to it. Bittersweet longing is inseparable from the joyous contentment of the moment. Only recently, I learned that this mysterious enigma is something C. S. Lewis explored throughout his writings. Over and over, he sought different ways to express the inexpressible about such moments. He wrote in The Problem of Pain:

You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw – but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported . . . All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want . . . which we shall still desire on our deathbeds . . . Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it – made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

Though we lack a word for it in English, the German term “sehnsucht” comes close to this concept. William Wordsworth’s poetry frequently reflected, or at least hinted at, the theme of sehnsucht, as in the closing lines from Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:

And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,  
Forebode not any severing of our loves!  
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;  
I only have relinquish’d one delight  
To live beneath your more habitual sway.  
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,  
Even more than when I tripp’d lightly as they;  
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day  
 Is lovely yet;  

The clouds that gather round the setting sun  
Do take a sober colouring from an eye  
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;  
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.  
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,  
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,  
To me the meanest flower that blows can give  
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Without using the word itself, C. S. Lewis offers as helpful a definition as one is liable to find for ‘sehnsucht” in Surprised by Joy:

In a sense, the central story of my life is about nothing else, it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic; and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally be called unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.

Another April ends and I regret not spending more time in the cove. I know the longing will stay with me all year, and next April the cove will draw me back again for a few moments of joy, respite from what Thoreau called the “dead dry life of society.”

As one whose life is mostly gone, I don’t claim a great stockpile of wisdom. This I have observed – we spend the first part of our lives acquiring and accumulating. We grab on to people and things as if our lives depend on it. Then, unless we’re unusually slippery truants from the school of life, we spend the rest of our years learning to let go of the people and things we grasped so tightly, as they slip away one by one by one, until we learn to let go of mortality itself.

What would it mean to let go of the desire for another April in the cove? Am I attached to that place so tightly because it teaches me, in some paradoxical way, that my own mortality is insignificant? In Lewis’s novel, Till We Have Faces, the characters have this conversation:

“I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death.” 
“Ah, Psyche,” I said, “have I made you so little happy as that?” 
“No, no no,” she said. “You don’t understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.”

Or as Lewis puts it another time:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

And that just about sums up what I learned this month, on a walk through the rich cove forest, in a place not far from here.

That is more than enough pretentious yammering from me.  Here’s another Wordsworth passage, from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey:

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Flower photos from top – 

Trillium

Smooth Solomon’s Seal

Columbine

White Violets

Maidenhair Fern

Yellow Mandarin

Silas McDowell - Visions of Mountain Agriculture

 [What better way to commence this site than with an article about Silas McDowell. I’ve been inspired by his work for more than forty years and wrote this piece for the Spring 1992 edition of Katuah Journal. McDowell lived near the Cullasaja River in Macon County in the 19th century and in innumerable letters and articles shared his own explorations of the Cowees. This will be the first of many posts featuring Silas McDowell.]

Amongst the valleys of the southern Alleghanies sometimes winter is succeeded by warm weather, which, continuing through the months of March and April, brings out vegetation rapidly, and clothes the forests in an early verdure.  This pleasant spring weather is terminated by a few days’ rain, and the clearing up is followed by cold, raking winds from the northwest, leaving the atmosphere of a pure indigo tint, through which wink bright stars, but if the wind subsides at night, the succeeding morning shows a heavy hoar frost; vegetation is utterly killed, including all manner of fruit germs, and the landscape clothed in verdure the day before now looks dark and dreary. – Silas McDowell

On the morning of April 28, 1858, Silas McDowell encountered this bleak scene when he went out to inspect his farm.  The Macon County fruit grower had spent almost thirty years establishing his orchard of 600 apple trees near the banks of the Cullasaja River. However, this late spring freeze “made nearly a clean sweep from our mountain valleys in Western North Carolina of the richest promise of a fruit crop that we have ever had.”  For anyone else, the incident would have been a crushing disappointment.  For McDowell, it was another opportunity to examine nature’s mysteries and to find a better way of farming in the mountains.  

McDowell had deliberately selected a sheltered valley for his orchard.  Only a settler too poor to buy bottom land would have tried to grow fruit high on the mountainsides.  And yet, on this April morning, McDowell realized his mistake.  While his own trees “seemed as if clothed in a black pall,” he observed on the mountains looming over his orchard a broad horizontal band of vegetation left unscathed by the freeze.    

Around 1780, Thomas Jefferson had witnessed similar temperature inversions in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia. He reported, “I have known frosts so severe as to kill the hiccory trees round about Monticello, and yet not injure the tender fruit blossoms then in bloom on the top and higher parts of the mountain.”  Silas McDowell understood that this was more than simply a quirk of topography and climate.  He suspected that thermal belts could be the secret to successful fruit production in mountainous areas.  

By the summer of 1858 he wrote that “all description of fruit trees which have the good fortune to be located in this vernal region, are now bending beneath a heavy crop of fruit.”  He began to promote the value of this zone for fruit growers and contributed a report to the United States Agricultural Reports for 1861.  In his article on the “belt of no frost” McDowell explained:

The beautiful phenomenon of the ‘Verdant Zone’ or ‘Thermal Belt’ exhibits itself upon our mountain sides, commencing about three hundred feet vertical height above the valleys, and traversing them in a perfectly horizontal line throughout their entire length like a vast green ribbon upon a black ground.

Born in South Carolina in 1795, McDowell moved to Asheville in his youth for training as a tailor.  He practiced his trade in Charleston and Morganton before settling in Macon County’s Cullasaja Valley, where he gained renown as a fruit grower, amateur naturalist and story teller.  His articles on the mountains were published in popular magazines and caught the attention of leading botanists, who sought his help in finding rare plants of the Southern Appalachians.  When a visiting scientist asked which college he had attended, McDowell pointed to the hills surrounding his farm and replied, “These wild mountains are the only college at which my name has ever been entered as a student!”  In a tribute to Silas McDowell, T. F. Glenn remembered him as modest and unassuming, and also:

…intuitive, impulsive and passionate.  His companionship with nature was a marked feature of his character. His glowing imagination imparted to the most trivial objects beauty and sublimity.  By a native force of genius, by dint of fiery energy of will, by persistent application, he surmounted obstacles. 

McDowell’s tenacious efforts to raise winter keeping apples had earned him a reputation among southern fruit growers even before the thermal belt episode. When McDowell and his bride, Elizabeth, moved to Macon County in 1830 they brought a baby’s cradle filled with small apple trees from her grandfather’s orchard near Asheville.  Being especially fond of winter apples, McDowell chose varieties recommended by northern pomologists.  His results were like those of other southern growers:

I made a complete failure, for when my trees began to bear fruit, it matured and fell from the tree long before the proper time, and though they were an excellent collection of Autumn Apples, there was not a good Winter keeper amongst them.

For fifteen years, McDowell struggled to raise winter keepers. Then, the editor of a farm paper in Athens, Georgia suggested that he take grafts from native seedling apples.  McDowell followed James Carmack’s advice and searched the hills around his home for fruit stock.  He found what he had been looking for:

Amongst old Cherokee seedling Apple trees – as well as other Southern seedlings, I have succeeded in conferring on Southern Pomology a list of names of Winter Apples, which both as to their highly aromatic taste, as well as late winter keeping qualities, cannot be excelled by as many varieties of Winter Apples in the United States.  

His catalog of new apples featured the Carmack, Nickajack, Bullasage, Mavereck Winter Sweet, Royal Pearmam, Hoover, Golden Pippin, Buff, Kingrussett and Neverfail.  “None but late keepers in the list,” McDowell noted with delight.  In 1870, William Saunders with the Agriculture Department concluded, “There is not a doubt about it, the finest winter apples in America are grown on these mountain lands.”  McDowell could take much of the credit.

McDowell, always concerned with the region’s economy, believed that vineyards established within the thermal belt could be a mainstay of mountain agriculture.  “The Grape,” McDowell predicted:

…will never fail to yield to the husbandman a rich and abundant crop of its luscious and heart-cheering fruit; and had the vine locomotion, corporal and mental sense, I would bid it to ‘Tarry not in all the plains; but flee to the mountains for its life,’ and take refuge under the protection of the Thermal Stratum!

Much as he had in his quest for winter apples, McDowell explored the mountains to find superior varieties of grapes.  He speculated on the potential of hybridizing some of the specimens:

We cannot well command our risibles when, in fancy, we anticipate the aspect of that monster Grape that will be produced by the hybridal cross betwixt the Hon. A. G. Semmes’s eight pound bunches and the Mammoth Grape Prof. C. D. Smith and ourself measured yesterday, the single berries of which girted three and a quarter inches round.

After the Civil War, McDowell continued to write on agricultural topics, presided over the Fruit Growers Association and pleaded for extension of the Western North Carolina Railroad. He was constantly learning more – from natural phenomena, the culture of the Cherokees and the latest farm journals.  In his judgment, the climate and terrain of the mountains did not have to be obstacles to successful farming.  Instead, the unique character of the mountains could support a distinctive form of agriculture.

Diversity was one aspect of the mountain agriculture he envisioned:

Dairying, grape culture, bee culture, sheep husbandry supplemented by a woolen cloth factory.  Are these the only items of new industries our mountain section is capable of? 

He went on to suggest one more:  

I have recently learned that a man studied Fish culture, constructed him a three-acre pond near the city of Atlanta, Ga., and then from Florida procured a can of eggs of the Scaly Trout species. 

After hatching the eggs and raising the fish to maturity, the man realized an income of fifteen thousand dollars in one year.  Wanting to attempt a similar venture with mountain trout, McDowell had a small pond built amid a grove of oaks near his home:

Their feed will consist of the waste from the kitchen and table, with all small animals that come my way, chopped up fine, supplemented by a lazy cat, in an emergency.  There is nothing but the lack of a pure stream and vim to hinder any man having a mountain farm, to do the same thing, and have a fat trout for breakfast every day the year through.

     McDowell lived long enough to see the impact of extractive industries on the mountain environment.  When Western North Carolina’s first corundum mine opened near McDowell’s farm in 1871, he turned a disaster into a blessing.  Thirty years before, a flood had swept across the best portion of his farm, “a fertile bottom-field of about 50 acres.”  McDowell described the damage. “I found that field, on which I expected to make forty bushels of corn to the acre, to be a miniature Sahara of white sand, and would no longer pay the expense of resetting and keeping up the fences.”

The field had remained in this condition until the coming of the corundum mine, which was polluting the Cullasaja River.  “As the mine was worked by means of a hose-pipe, a red stream of clay and water came running down the mountain’s side defiling our beautiful river and chasing away the fish.”  It occurred to McDowell that he could protect the river and reclaim his field at the same time:

Thanks to Sir Samuel Baker for his suggestions in relation to redeeming some of the African deserts by sitting them with the muddy waters of the Nile.   And I forthwith applied to Col. Jenks, who controlled the mine, for leave to run a ditch down the mountain from the mine to my sands – a distance of three-fourths of a mile. The next thing I did, was to throw up a dike on the river side of the bottom, to hold on the sands the muddy waters until they are absorbed – a thing not hard to do, as the sands swallow them up very fast and ‘thirst for more.’  The water of my ditch performs the carrying service of ten dump carts, and does the thing for nothing and we may add, loads itself.  This enterprise I view as my last act in life’s drama, and I feel ambitious to do the thing well, and make my best bow to my fellow-farmers as the curtain drops.   

Silas McDowell died in 1879.  His life work, promoting agricultural practices appropriate to the region, endures. McDowell brought curiosity, ingenuity, perseverance and humor to the task, qualities that would enhance any efforts to renew mountain agriculture as we approach the 21st century.

Welcome!

 

Sunset on the Cowees, viewed from Richland Balsam, 2009

Having hiked and explored most of the mountain ranges in Western North Carolina, I can attest to the fact that different ranges have different personalities. Whether picking blueberries in the Great Balsams, climbing the lofty Crest Trail in the Black Mountains, or enjoying the long-range views from the grassy balds of the Roans, I’m aware that each location has distinct characteristics. Often, a photo can distill the essence of a range, especially the three ranges that I’ve just mentioned.

Sometimes, it is easy to find the words to describe a mountain range and how it is unlike the next. More often, though, the less charismatic ranges conceal their personalities. After inhabiting a patch of land in the Cowee Mountains for several decades, I still strive to understand and communicate just what makes them the Cowees, besides their geographic position dividing the waters of the Little Tennessee from the Tuckasegee.

After all these years, I still don’t have many answers, but I do feel the need to continue asking, “What is the heart of the Cowees?” So, that ongoing effort will be one aspect of this website.

But that’s not all. I have journals and notes from many travels throughout the Southern Appalachians and beyond. This will be a site to compile those accounts and to indulge my other research interests, such as the ethnogenesis of native people in the region, place names, agriculture, panther sightings past and present, wildflower photography, vanished places, vintage postcards, old maps, utopian schemes and much more.

My research has led me to many obscure documents from the past five hundred years that shed light on the southern mountains and the Southeast in general. I intend to feature extended passages from some of those accounts. Tourism promoters and history professors have their own way of spinning the story of these mountains, and I hope to counterbalance some of their unfortunate excesses, one story at a time. Perhaps, in a small way, I can share the joy I have experienced in my explorations of the land and the historical record.