Tuckasegee Osprey

[From March 2, 2011]

 While driving home along the Tuckasegee yesterday, I saw a bird that had me slamming on the brakes and grabbing my camera. The bird had its back to me, but because of its dark plumage and white head I wondered if I had come upon a bald eagle.

I snapped this picture and tried to get positioned for a better look, but the bird took flight. At that point, I discounted my first notion - that it was an eagle - and, instead, suspected it might be an osprey.

[One day later...]

I had a hunch the bird might be lingering at that same spot on the river, so this afternoon I took a spin by there. Sure enough, the bird was perched on the very same limb as it was yesterday. And this time, it was munching on a good sized fish it had plucked from the river.

National Geographic provides this information on ospreys:

Ospreys are superb fishers and indeed eat little else—fish make up some 99 percent of their diet. Because of this appetite, these birds can be found near ponds, rivers, lakes, and coastal waterways around the world. Ospreys hunt by diving to the water's surface from some 30 to 100 feet (9 to 30 meters) up. They have gripping pads on their feet to help them pluck fish from the water with their curved claws and carry them for great distances. In flight, ospreys will orient the fish headfirst to ease wind resistance.

Ospreys are sometimes confused with bald eagles, but can be identified by their white underparts. Their white heads also have a distinctive black eyestripe that goes down the side of their faces. Eagles and ospreys frequent similar habitats and sometimes battle for food. Eagles often force osprey to drop fish that they have caught and steal them in midair.

Human habitat is sometimes an aid to the osprey. The birds happily build large stick-and-sod nests on telephone poles, channel markers, and other such locations. Artificial nesting platforms are common in areas where preservationists are working to reestablish the birds. North American osprey populations became endangered in the 1950s due to chemical pollutants such as DDT, which thinned their eggshells and hampered reproduction. Ospreys have rebounded significantly in recent decades, though they remain scarce in some locales.

Most ospreys are migratory birds that breed in the north and migrate south for the winter. They lay eggs (typically three), which both parents help to incubate. Osprey eggs don't hatch all at once, but are staggered in time so that some siblings are older and more dominant. When food is scarce these stronger birds may take it all and leave their siblings to starve.



And, wouldn't you know, Mary Oliver has written a poem on the osprey:

The Osprey

This morning
an osprey
with its narrow
black-and-white face

and its cupidinous eyes
leaned down
from a leafy tree
to look into the lake – it looked

a long time, then its powerful
shoulders punched out a little
and it fell,
it rippled down

into the water -
then it rose, carrying,
in the clips of its feet,
a slim and limber

silver fish, a scrim
of red rubies
on its flashing sides.
All of this

was wonderful
to look at,
so I simply stood there,
in the blue morning,

looking.
Then I walked away.
Beauty is my work,
but not my only work -

later,
when the fish was gone forever
and the bird was miles away,
I came back
and stood on the shore, thinking -
and if you think
thinking is a mild exercise,
beware!

I mean, I was swimming for my life -
and I was thundering this way and that way
in my shirt of feathers -
and I could not resolve anything long enough

to become one thing
except this: the imaginer.
It was inescapable
as over and over it flung me,

without pause or mercy it flung me
to both sides of the beautiful water -
to both sides
of the knife.

~ Mary Oliver

The Promise of Spring

All this week, and especially today, Winter has made itself known here in the Cowees. So I began to comb through my old photos for something warm and colorful to post here.  I came across the following and it touches on topics that I ponder often, and more than ever.  My affinity with the plant world, for which I am so grateful, grows deeper and deeper with each new season.

[From February 22, 2010]

Biophilia

Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.
-Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia



By the end of next month, I’ll be out in the woods slithering around on my belly to take pictures of early spring wildflowers.

I’m looking forward to seeing my friends again. Throughout this cold winter, though, I’ve seen them in my mind’s eye. Just beneath the surface of the frozen ground, they’ve been there all along. Even on the bleakest days, the bright colors of spring are near.

Last year, I began to get serious about learning the wildflowers. I regret waiting so long. It could be a lifelong quest, no matter how long your life, and I’ve learned just enough to recognize how little I know. It’s one thing to identify individual specimens in bloom, but quite another to understand them in a fuller context.

Over the winter, I’ve considered how to botanize this year - by finding a different frame through which to view the world. I got some help with this by attending a native plant symposium over the weekend, hosted by the North Carolina Native Plant Society, Asheville Chapter. By the end of the day, I had some ideas for new perspectives on the upcoming woodland rambles. 

For now, from the symposium…

Tom Baugh, a biologist and former poetry editor of Rapid River magazine, began the day with a discussion of life on earth and our human connection to other life. Baugh shared the quote from E. O. Wilson that I used at the beginning of this post.

E. O. Wilson, a Harvard University entomologist, coined the term "biophilia" referring to our innate affinity with nature. Wilson’s hypothesis is that humans evolved as creatures deeply enmeshed with the intricacies of nature, and that we still have this affinity with nature ingrained in our genotype.

His book, Biophilia, The Human Bond with Other Species, includes essays on his own journey of understanding:

I have argued in this book that we are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought. To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.

Among those inspired by Wilson’s eloquent argument is social ecologist Stephen Kellert who has applied biophilia to the design of buildings and communities, as described in the book Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life:

This book offers a paradigm shift in how we design and build our buildings and our communities, one that recognizes that the positive experience of natural systems and processes in our buildings and constructed landscapes is critical to human health, performance, and well-being. Biophilic design is about humanity's place in nature and the natural world's place in human society, where mutuality, respect, and enriching relationships can and should exist at all levels and should emerge as the norm rather than the exception.

Wilson and Kellert co-edited The Biophilia Hypothesis, a collection of invited papers supporting & refuting the biophilia hypothesis

Here are a few thoughts from E. O. Wilson:

The great philosophical divide in moral reasoning about the remainder of life is whether or not other species have an innate right to exist.

Biodiversity is the most information-rich part of the known universe. More organisation and complexity exists in a handful of soil than on the surfaces of all the other planets combined.

Biodiversity of a country is part of its national inheritance - the product of the deep history of the territory extending long back before the coming of man.

Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future. This spiritual craving cannot be satisfied by the colonisation of space. The other planets are inhospitable and immensely expensive to reach. The nearest stars are so far away that voyagers would need thousands of years just to report back. The true frontier for humanity is life on earth, its exploration and the transport of knowledge about it into science, art and practical affairs. Again, the qualities of life that validate the proposition are: 90% or more of species of plants, animals and micro organisms, lack even so much as a scientific name; each of the species is immensely old by human standards and has been wonderfully moulded to its environment. Life around us exceeds in complexity and beauty anything else humanity is ever likely to encounter.

The manifold ways by which human beings are tied to the remainder of life are very poorly understood, crying for new scientific enquiry and a boldness of aesthetic interpretation.

---

Wildflower photos from Spring 2009 include (from top):

Geranium maculatum

Trillium erectum

Sanguinaria canadensis

Erythronium americanum

A Year of Waterfalls (2010)

 [Back in December of 2010, I looked back on my first-time visits to various waterfalls over the preceding months.  Good times indeed!]

Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.
-Fulton Sheen

One can never visit enough waterfalls. And when I look back on the falls I discovered for the first time this year, I just regret that I didn't get around to more.


May 2
Chau-Ram Falls
This one is on Ramsey Creek just before it joins the Chauga River in Oconee County, South Carolina (at Chau-Ram Park on US 76). This was the day I went out hunting for Yellow Lady Slippers in the wild and it wound up being one of the best days of the whole year. Now I want to explore more of the Chauga, a lovely river flowing through what could be my favorite county on the planet.

September 18
Sols Creek Falls
This photo doesn't do justice to the 120-foot waterfall, reached after two-and-a-half miles of paddling across Bear Lake, which was remarkably quiet for a Saturday morning. As I came to shore below the falls, two otter-like critters came scampering over the rocks and into the water. I've come to the conclusion that they were weasels. It was a nice surprise. If anyone asks, I didn't really see this waterfall (ostensibly on private property), I didn't really take this picture. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.





September 19
Ledbetter Creek
Pick up the recently-published map of the Bartram Trail in North Carolina, and you'll see this little waterfall on the cover. The hike to this lovely spot begins next to the Nantahala River, not far from the place where William Bartram and Attakullakulla crossed paths in May 1775. If I can ever commandeer a time machine, that meeting is high on the list of events I would like to witness. In 1730, Attakullakulla was one of several Cherokee men who visited London. I'd like to imagine that Attakullakulla regaled Bartram with stories of attending a play at the Globe Theatre decades earlier. The trail to Cheoah Bald crosses Ledbetter Creek before a long, steep climb up the mountain. Just to look at the map, you don't get a sense of what a demanding hike it is (at least for the first couple of miles). Having scaled the toughest part of the trail, I regretted the necessity of turning back before reaching Bartram Falls and Cheoah Bald. It was mighty pretty up there. Maybe next year...

September 23
Warden's Falls
All things being equal, I favor accessing Panthertown Valley from the east. But from Cullowhee, it is a considerably longer drive. And really, any way into Panthertown is the right way. The monarch butterflies were making their annual migration on the day I found Warden's Falls. They were pausing at Duke's powerline right-of-way that runs through the valley.




October 3
Greenland Creek Falls
I wanted to revisit this one (another Panthertown waterfall) at a later date to capture a bit more autumn color, but it will have to wait until next year.

October 14
Skinny Dip Falls
As many times as I have passed the Looking Glass Rock Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the past 30 years, it was only this fall that I followed the short trail (across the BRP) to Skinny Dip Falls, a nice spot on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.

October 24
Chasteen Creek Cascade
This is a view looking downstream from the top of Chasteen Creek Cascades in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The trail begins at the Smokemont Campground and is as nice a walk as you'll find anywhere.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn.
-From Walking, by Henry David Thoreau
.

The Great Smokies Piscatorial Shambhala

Fishing is not an escape from life, but often a deeper immersion into it.  

– Harry Middleton

My friend, Jonathan, is the best hiking buddy a person could ask for.  If not for some arm-twisting on his part, I would have missed out on adventures at remarkable places of the Southern Appalachians - the Black Mountain Crest, to name just one. And this week, he made the necessary arrangements to get us onto another memorable trail.  

Several years ago, I was trying to identify the most remote section of the Smokies.  I had a large map and a small saucer.  After sliding the saucer around on the map for a minute, I found one spot where it did not touch any roads.  And that was in the middle of Hazel Creek.  Park as close as you can to Hazel Creek, find a trailhead, and then...good luck hiking to Hazel Creek and returning to your car in one day. 

The alternative is to cross Fontana Lake by boat and proceed up the Hazel Creek arm of the lake.  I tried that in a kayak once and it took me a couple of hours to get there.  I had time enough to explore the remains of Proctor, a town built to handle the timber and copper ore extracted from the Hazel Creek watershed.  After construction of Fontana Dam during World War II, most of Proctor was inundated.  

On my prior visit, I had lunch near a hilltop cemetery and enjoyed the company of some other kayakers I'd met on the way.  But the day was not long enough for me to go past Proctor and hike any distance up Hazel Creek.  So, after lunch, I hurried to the lake shore at the mouth of Hazel Creek and paddled back to Cable Cove.  

This week brought a long-awaited return to Hazel Creek, a day-hike made feasible by taking a shuttle from Fontana Marina.  On a big motorized boat, the crossing takes less than 15 minutes.  We disembarked at 8:30 AM with the understanding that the shuttle would pick us up at 3:00 PM.  A lack of punctuality would have severe consequences.  There was no time to waste for the trek up Hazel and then to the end of the Bone Valley Trail followed by the return trip along the same route, about 15 miles in all.  That's not an unreasonable distance to cover in six and a half hours, but hourly water breaks, a leisurely lunch, and meanders to mysterious century-old structures were out of the question.  

The need for speed did nothing to lessen the excitement of exploring the area.  As soon as we jumped off the boat, we saw footprints, very large footprints, of bears that had been ambling along the water's edge not long before our arrival, and we wondered if there would be more ursine encounters along the way.

Most long hikes in the Smokies involve an arduous gain in elevation.  Hazel Creek is a notable exception.  The trail alongside the creek is smooth and wide with a very gradual climb.  Long ago, it accommodated a rail line for transporting timber and ore.  

The overall ambience of Hazel reminded me a bit of Noland Creek or Deep Creek.  But this was distinctly different.  The trail seemed bigger, the creek seemed bigger, the flat terrain bordering the creek seemed bigger.  And compared to Deep Creek, which attracts hundreds or even thousands of visitors daily, Hazel Creek was pristine and quiet.  We hiked all day without seeing another soul, which is unusual in the National Park.

Hazel Creek holds a certain mystique.  I knew that already, though I'd never experienced it myself.  The allure is especially powerful for fly fishing enthusiasts.  There might not be another trout stream in the Southeast that rivals the legendary draw of Hazel Creek.   Part of the credit goes to two outdoorsmen who could wield an ink pen as deftly as a fly rod.

Horace Kephart (1862-1931) was a St. Louis librarian with a passion for camping and hunting.  In 1904 he moved to Western North Carolina and began to explore the Smokies: 

When I went south into the mountains I was seeking a Back of Beyond.... I wanted to enjoy a free life in the open air, the thrill of exploring new ground, the joys of the chase, and the man’s game of matching my woodcraft against the forces of nature...

He was methodical in selecting a place to settle:

I took a topographic map and picked out on it, by means of the contour lines and the blank space showing no settlement, what seemed to be the wildest part of these regions; and there I went....I picked out the upper settlement of Hazel Creek, far up under the lee of those Smoky Mountains ...scant two miles from the post-office of Medlin, there was a copper mine, long disused on account of litigation, and I got permission to occupy one of its abandoned cabins....

From his base camp on Hazel Creek, Kephart got acquainted with the mountains and the mountaineers, wrote numerous articles for hunting and fishing magazines and collected stories for "Our Southern Highlanders" (1913), a classic volume of Smokies lore.

Harry Middleton (1949-1993) was an outdoors columnist for Southern Living magazine in the 1980s.  He had a passion for fly fishing and made frequent trips to Hazel Creek.  His 1991 book, "On the Spine of Time" recounts adventures in the Smokies and remains a book beloved by many anglers and other readers.

After many days fishing Hazel Creek, Middleton shared a lesson learned:

Trout are excellent company, creatures of noble and admirable and perplexing qualities, much like human beings only more honest and sincere.  They are totally unpredictable and therefore totally bewitching, at once brutal, beautiful, suspicious, graceful, and powerful, fastidious and wary, cautious and aggressive.  Raw instinct burns like electric current through their cold, wild flesh.  There is a charming snobbery about mountain trout, a stubbornness that is absolutely unbending.  Their needs are specific rather than arbitrary and capricious.  They know nothing of compromise.  Life means moving water, fast water, clean water, water rich in prey and with at least a measure of wildness, meaning a solitude free of the whirl of cities and civilization....

Our hike through the wildness became an even more immersive experience after turning up the Bone Valley Trail.  At one point, the trail led to the edge of the creek.  

Any possibilities to rock hop the 20 foot distance to the other side?  No, not at all. For the first crossing I took off my boots and socks.  The water was so cold on my feet that I could feel my sinuses open up.  After another stream crossing or two, I grew impatient with taking off and putting on my footwear, and remembered that leather and wool will dry out...eventually.

We had eight creek crossings, four up and the same four coming back.  But maybe it was even more, and I simply lost count. It was good to experience the water, either barefoot or in wet boots.  Harry Middleton insists that trout from Hazel Creek taste better than any others because of the water.  And I would defer to Harry on such matters.

I don't naturally have the temperament to be a fly fisherman, which is all the more reason to learn.  I wonder if I could find my proper place in the choreography of fly and fish, dancing on the water, casting and playing the line to bring it to life.  What a place for such reverie!

It is easy to recognize what Horace and Harry found here on Hazel Creek.  

From my backpack, I pulled out a paperback copy of "On a Spine of Time" and declaimed one of Harry's lyrical passages: 

It was a good day along the creek.  Just before noon, the sky turned black as wet coal and it snowed hard for hours, a great whirlwind of snow, and still I fished.  Snow was soon piled up on the backs of dark, smooth stones, and the sudden cold, the unexpected turn of weather, stirred me as much as it did the trout.  I had almost forgotten how much fun it is to fish the high country in a good snowstorm.

I don't think I'll ever forget how much fun it is to be on Hazel Creek, snowstorm or not.  After hiking past what remains of Proctor, we got back to the lake shore with time to spare.  And just a few minutes later, our shuttle appeared from far down the lake, a welcome sight!

Captain gave us the news that the weather had been blustery on the lake and at the marina, and that Newfound Gap Road was shut down because of high wind and falling temperatures ahead of the precipitation.  GSMNP officials were encouraging  visitors to leave the Park.

That was surprising news, considering how pleasant had been the weather along the creek all day - barely a breeze, mild temperatures, overcast skies and no rain.  Ideal hiking weather.  How could the weather be so agreeable on Hazel Creek, while conditions were deteriorating everywhere else? 

I came to the conclusion that it really is Shangri-la.  And I know that Horace Kephart and Harry Middleton and a host of dedicated fly fishermen would agree.   

Butterflies of the Mountains

 [From November 3,  2008]

With the turning of the seasons, I suppose we've seen the last of the butterflies until next spring. From what I observed this year, and from what others mentioned to me, butterflies were unusually abundant. Here are a few of my favorite shots from the past couple of years.

The butterfly is a flying flower,

The flower a tethered butterfly.

~Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

~Nathaniel Hawthorne

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

~Chuang Tzu

This great purple butterfly,

In the prison of my hands,

Has a learning in his eye

Not a poor fool understands.

~William Butler Yeats, "Another Song of a Fool"

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are. We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them. It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it. Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

~Rabindranath Tagore

"A Way I Know"

 

Cullasaja River, October 2015

From The French Broad Hustler, April 23, 1908

The Cullasaja
(By Charlotte Young)

I wish you knew a way I know
   Along the Cullasaja.
There, everything to quietness
   And happy thoughts persuade you.

The river sings its own wild song
   Around the rocky turnings,
There honey-suckles light the banks
   With red and yellow burnings.

Along the cliffs the ferns uncurl,
   And trails the pink arbutus,
And here the wood thrush lilts a song
   As sweet as any flute is.

I wish you knew a way I know
   By dreaming flowers and river,
The little cares that hurt you so
   Would float away forever.

--Charlotte Young  [1878-1985]

Tsatugi Afternoon

 [From October 24, 2008]

Call me greedy, but I’m getting to the point where I don’t want to talk about my favorite places in the mountains. Some things are best kept secret, lest throngs of visitors descend upon them. But at the risk of contributing to that traffic in some tiny way, I can’t resist talking about the Chattooga River.

I’ve not had a particularly successful season of fall photography. When the pictures turn out "blah" I can always resort to my standard, "The light just wasn’t quite right that day." That’s a lot easier than acknowledging my creative and technical deficiencies. So, on this rainy October afternoon, I decided to go for as close to a sure thing as I know: the Bullpen bridge across the Chattooga River. I arrived there under my favorite lighting conditions, a steady drizzle, and commenced to shooting. (Apologies to my poor mistreated Nikon.)

The Chattooga is gorgeous any time of year. The Chattooga has a spirit to it that I won’t even attempt to describe. And the recorded history of the Chattooga is endlessly fascinating.

Intending to pluck out some tidbit of Chattooga lore to accompany these photos, I turned to James Mooney and what I have touted (ad nauseum) as the most indispensable book ever written about the place we inhabit, his Myths of the Cherokee.

Once again, Mooney came through, with his reference to Tsatugi as the name commonly written Chattooga or Chatuga. Mooney offered possible Cherokee derivations:

From words signifying respectively "he drank by sips," from gatugia…or "he has crossed the stream and come out on upon the other side," from gatugi.


But according to Mooney, Tsatugi was a name of foreign origin, specifically from the Creeks who laid claim to at least a portion of the Chattooga River during the first half of the eighteenth century. More often than not, the Cherokees contested the claims of the Creeks in North Georgia and Western North Carolina:

The ordinary condition between the two tribes was one of hostility, with occasional intervals of good will.


Mooney listed several place names reflecting the former presence of Creeks, among them Coweeta, Tomatola, Coosa, and Chattooga. All this time I had never thought that Chattooga, or those other names, might be anything other than Cherokee.

So much for today’s toponymy lesson. While perusing this topic, I discovered another bit of Chattooga trivia. In June 2002, some Atlantans travelling the Chattooga made a remarkable discovery. An odd-shaped log protruding from the riverbank was, in fact, a 32-foot long dugout canoe constructed in the Cherokee style, but with metal tools. Carbon dating of the yellow pine canoe suggests it was crafted around 1760. The ancient canoe is on display at the Oconee Heritage Center in Walhalla, South Carolina. Now that I’ve learned about the old canoe, it’s gone straight to the top of my list of things to see in Walhalla.

The Ghosts of Straight Fork

[From October 19, 2009] 

Straight Fork, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, October 2009

Among the many eye-witness accounts of the giants of the Appalachian forest, this one, written by Henry Seidel Canby and published in Harper's in 1916, is one of my favorites:

We rode up Straight Fork through a sun-spangled grove of chestnuts, then left the trail to Cataloochee, splashed noisily across green water, burst horse and man through a screen of rhododendron, and entered the dark forest. It was an open forest beneath its high roof. The eye went freely once we were past the door of rhododendron, and at first, in intervals of guiding our scrambling horses, we looked vainly for the poplars. Hemlock shafts, oak bolls aplenty; and then on the upper slope I saw the first, a smooth tower, its head lost above the leafage, and beyond another, and below in the hemlocks a group of four, like cathedral piers beyond the pillars of a nave.

We rode to the first in view. Twenty-one feet in circumference, it rose massively for seventy feet perhaps without a branch; how much above one could not tell in that forest. For as in the redwood groves of California, so here, the eye can seldom take in a whole tree when in its forest setting, the camera never. Indeed, the habit of the great poplar is curiously like that of the giant sequoia. Like the sequoia it rises above lesser neighbors, and flings from the capital of its great trunk a crown of heavy limbs that turn and lift nobly above the forest roof. From an opposing hillside you can pick out these crowns of light-green foliage above the oaks and chestnuts, just as across a Sierra canon one sees the sequoias lift above spruce and fir. Only these two trees, in my experience, have this regal habit. And if the sequoia is vaster, it is less graceful.

Deciduous Cascades, or the Falls of Fall

 [From October 1, 2009]

It is often forgotten that [dictionaries] are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.
-Jorge Luis Borges, Prologue to "El otro, el mismo."

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
-Salman Rushdie


Thurston Hatcher Falls

Pardon my imprecision. I should have known the difference between waterfalls and cascades. A cascade of water doesn’t leave the surface of the rock, while a waterfall does. At least, that's how I heard it explained this week.

CASCADE. A lovely word. With a slightly better grasp of its meaning I began to consider its origin. Perhaps it was a compound of two roots, cas + cade, and if so, what did they mean?

But I was wrong. The English word cascade dates back to 1641, from the Italian word cascata, which was derived from the Latin verb cadere, “to fall.”

I found this information at the Online Etymology Dictionary.
http://www.etymonline.com/abbr.php

Digging a little deeper at that site, I learned that our word fall came from the Old English feallan. As a name for the season, it is short for fall of the leaf (1545).

Fall, in the sense of a waterfall or cascade, dates from 1579. Most of the figurative senses of fall developed in the Middle English: to fall asleep (1393), to fall in love (1530), to be reduced, such as a fall in temperature (1658).

Deciduous plants are the botanical show-offs of fall and the word deciduous is closely related to cascade.

Deciduous, as a reference to trees, dates from 1778. The word came from the Latin decidere “to fall off” which was a compound of de- “down” and cadere “to fall.” And so, when we speak of deciduous trees and cascading water, both words can be traced back to that same Latin root, cadere.


Flat Creek (Heintooga)

Such are the crooked paths on which my curiosity sends me. While using this website, I became curious about who created it, and was delighted to learn the story of Douglas Harper:

I began this project after I looked one day for a free dictionary of word origins online and found that there was none. You could subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary for $550 a year. There were free dictionaries with definitions, some lists of slang words and their sources, and some sites that listed a few dozen of the strangest etymologies of English words. But there was no comprehensive public list of the words we use every day -- words like the and day -- that told what they used to be before we got them.

For some reason no university has seen fit to shackle its graduate students to the cyber-mill, grinding out an online etymology dictionary. So I decided to do it for them. I also did this to increase my understanding of the language, and its ancestors and relatives. As a writer and editor with an amateur's passion for linguistics, I took this as a joy ride more than drudgery. And I know so much more useless trivia than I did when I started (applaud is related to explode; three people can have a dialogue; and if anyone calls you feisty, slug him).

Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant 600 or 2,000 years ago. Think of it like looking at pictures of your friends' parents when they were your age. People will continue to use words as they will, finding new or wider meanings for old words and coining new ones to fit new situations. In fact, this list is a testimony to that process.


Chattooga at Bullpen

I suspect there’s a name for the subgenre of autobiography devoted to the author’s background of books and reading, but I don’t know what it is. I do know that Douglas Harper shares a terrific example of that form:

http://www.etymonline.com/columns/bio.htm

For a reader who loves words and loves reading the words of a writer who loves words, Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary warrants a leisurely visit.

Colors of October

 [From October 10, 2009]

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf's a flower.
- Albert Camus


Near Beech Gap, October 2009

All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it . . . bearing them all away to the green fields in the South.
- Laura Ingalls Wilder

Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change.
- Edwin Way Teale

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
- George Eliot


Looking Glass Rock, October 2009

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
- Mark Twain

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
- Samuel Butler

Under the Hiccory Tree

[From October 3, 2010]

If we had lived here during the hunter-gatherer days, then we would have been paying closer attention.

I’ve been thinking about this while taking short strolls on the mountain where I live.



At the very top is a secluded spot where I go to sit and listen sometimes. A large hickory tree stands tall there, and this weekend, I collected a few hickory nuts that had fallen from the tree. Hickory nuts have a delicious flavor.  However, the tiny nutmeat morsels hide inside stubborn shells.

If we had lived here during the hunter-gatherer days, then we would have known where all the productive hickory trees stood and visited them often, to get there before the small animals building their winter stores.

And we would have likely spent hours cracking out enough hickory nuts to amount to a handful.

When he traveled upriver from present-day Augusta, Georgia on his trip through the Southeast, William Bartram observed the Creeks processing great quantities of hickory nuts:

We then passed over large, rich savannas, or natural meadows, wide-spreading cane swamps, and frequently old Indian settlements, now deserted and overgrown with forests. These are always on or near the banks of rivers, or great swamps, the artificial mounts and terraces elevating them above the surrounding groves. I observed in the ancient cultivated fields:

1. Diospyros; [Persimmon, Diospyros virginiana]
2. Gleditsia triacanthos; [Honey Locust]
3. Prunus chicasau; [Chickasaw Plum, Prunus angustifolia]
4. Callicarpa; [French Mulberry, Callicarpa americana]
5. Moras rubra; [Red Mulberry, Morus rubra]
6. Juglans exaltata; [Shell-barked Hickory]
7. Juglans nigra, [Black walnut]

which inform us that these trees were cultivated by the ancients on account of their fruit as being wholesome and nourishing food. Though these are natives of the forest, yet they thrive better, and are more fruitful in cultivated plantations, and the fruit is in great estimation with the present generation of Indians, particularly Juglans exaltata, commonly called shell-barked hiccory. The Creeks store up the last in their towns. I have seen above an hundred bushels of these nuts belonging to one family. They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid; this, they call by a name which signifies hiccory milk; it is as sweet and rich as fresh cream, and is an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially homony and corn cakes.

In his 1873 book, Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Charles Colcock Jones described the stone implements used to crack hickories and other nuts:

We have thus, at some length, referred to the use of nuts as an article of food among the Southern Indians, because we hence derive the meaning and employment of these cup-shaped cavities. In our judgment these relics are simply the stones upon which the Indians cracked their nuts. Their cavities are so located that one, two, three, four, five, and sometimes more nuts could be cracked at a single blow delivered by means of the circular, flat crushing-stone so common, and so often found in direct connection with the rude articles now under consideration.

The cups are just large enough to hold a hickory-nut or a walnut in proper position so that, when struck, its pieces would be prevented from being widely scattered. Particularly do the soap-stones indicate the impressions left by the convex surfaces of the harder nuts. Upon some of them the depressions seem to have been caused simply by repeatedly cracking the nuts upon the same spot so that in time a concavity was produced corresponding to the half of the spherical or spheroidal nut. Such is the most natural explanation we can offer with regard to the use of these stones.

On Kuwahi

This evening, I was listening to Richard Powers' 2021 novel, Bewilderment.  Chapter 13 includes an account of a bear jam in the Smokies.  With his description of a disturbing encounter between humans and bears, Powers offers multiple perspectives on "Civilization" and "The Wild."  And my mind immediately turned to another story, from the same corner of the Smokies, a mysterious space somewhere between (and beyond) humans and bears and civilization and the wild...

[From October 4, 2009]

Because it is not seen, some people think the lake has dried up long ago. But this is not true.

-James Mooney


Sunset, and cold west winds, at Kuwahi

Anyone attuned to such things can tell there’s a special quality about the place called Kuwahi. The people who were here before us said the bears had a townhouse under this mountain, where they would hold a dance before retiring for the winter.

The chief of the bear tribe, the White Bear, resided here. Nearby is Atagahi, the enchanted lake, where wounded bears would go to bathe and heal. The way to Atagahi is so difficult only the animals know how to reach it.

With spiritual vision sharpened by prayer and fasting, a person might see the lake at daybreak, a shallow sheet of purple water fed by springs from the high cliffs. All kinds of fish and reptiles swim through the water while great flocks of ducks and pigeons fly overhead. Around the shores, bear tracks cross in every direction.

Go any place on this planet where bears have lived and you will find old stories, old stories that tell of humans transforming into bears and bears transforming into humans. The belief, ancient and universal, is that bears and people are closely related.



The Smokies, long ago, were home to the Ani-Tsaguhi people. One boy from this clan would leave home every morning and spend his days wandering the mountains. After a while, he stopped eating at home and spent a longer and longer time in the woods each day.

When his parents noticed long brown hair growing all over his body, they asked why he preferred the woods.

“I find plenty to eat there, and it is better than the corn and beans we have in the settlements, and pretty soon I am going into the woods to stay all the time.”

His parents begged him not to leave. He was determined, though, and invited his parents to come along, since there was plenty to eat without having to work for it.

The father and mother considered his offer and consulted the headmen of the clan. At council, it was decided the whole clan would go since scarcity had been the result of their hard labor up until that time.

After fasting seven days and nights, the Ani-Tsaguhi left their settlement for the mountains with the boy leading the way.

The people of the other towns learned of this and rushed to dissuade the clan from going into the woods to live. Messengers who found them observed the Ani-Tsaguhi were already growing hair like that of animals because they had abstained from human food for seven days.



The clan refused to turn back. “Hereafter we shall be called bears, and when you yourselves are hungry come into the woods and call us and we shall come to give you our own flesh. You need not be afraid to kill us for we shall live always.”

They taught the messengers the songs with which to call them, and the groups parted ways, After returning a short distance down the mountain, the messengers looked back and saw a drove of bears going into the woods.

(With credit to James Mooney)

Beware the Bitter Buffalo Nut

I saw a small patch of these just the other day...

[From August 14, 2008]

While hiking recently near the Chattooga River and again at Panthertown Valley, I saw a large shrub that would have been inconspicuous except for the many pear-shaped fruits hanging from its limbs. To be more accurate, I’d say the fruits bore a resemblance to green figs in size and shape, though I knew they weren’t figs. This was one I didn’t recognize and my plant books weren’t much help. But a plant-savvy friend advised me it was a buffalo nut (Pyrularia pubera).

I’m glad that I had resisted the temptation to pick one of the fruits and bite into it. The buffalo nut is a poisonous plant, toxic when taken in large quantities, though just tasting the seed causes severe irritation of the mouth. Early colonists observed the bison and elk (then present in the Eastern woodlands) eating the fruits in winter, hence the common names buffalo nut or elk nut were applied to the plant. Other names included oil nut, mother-in-law nut, rabbitwood, mountain coconut, crazy nut, and Cherokee salve. The nut is actually a brown marble-sized nut inside the green pear-shaped drupe.

George Ellison has written a detailed natural history of the buffalo nut, with references to the early botanists' investigations of the plant. The Cherokees used the plant to make a salve for treating sores. An oil extracted from the nut was a potential source of lamp oil.

Growing at scattered sites throughout the Southern Appalachians, the buffalo nut is a member of the sandalwood family, and like many plants in that family is a parasite. The roots of the buffalo nut latch on to a host plant and obtain nutrients and water from the root system of the host. The buffalo nut can parasitize a great number of native tree species. In particular, it has been associated with a tree that has disappeared from our forests, the chestnut, and another tree that is rapidly disappearing, the hemlock. But given its ability to thrive as a parasite, it will likely continue to hold a place in the understory of old disturbed forest sites throughout the Appalachians…

…pretty to look at, but not something you’d want to taste.

Robbing the Land of its Memory

 [From August 27, 2007]

"Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future." The Ministry of Truth, in George Orwell’s 1984.

After a long day’s ride down the Valley River Valley, nothing hits the spot like a bottle of Moet’s Champagne. 

That’s what one old geologist would tell you. 

During the summer of 1837 George Featherstonhaugh meandered around the mountains of Western North Carolina. On the morning of August 26, he left Franklin and took a difficult trail across the Nantahalas. Eventually he reached the Valley River Valley near present-day Andrews:

At sunset we stopped at a very indifferent place called Whitakers about thirty-two miles from Franklin. Here we got a very humble supper, about which I was less anxious than to get a mattrass to myself. The setting in of night always brings its anxieties on this point to me, my travelling companions were more sympathetic, and seemed to prefer "turning in" in pairs.

Featherstonhaugh awoke the next day and continued down the Valley River:

August 27.--A most beautiful morning found me at early dawn dipping water out of the stream to make my ablution saperto cielo, preparatory to a very scrubby breakfast. The method the Indians adopt of taking fish in this stream is a very destructive one. They cut a channel parallel to the stream, and damming this last up, turn the water into the new channel, seizing all the fish that are left in the shallow pools of the old bed. We continued our course S.W. down the valley on the right bank of the stream, the valley enlarging to a mile of rich bottom land surrounded by lofty and picturesque hills covered with fine woods.

This was the Paradise of the Cherokees, their wigwams being built on graceful knolls rising above the level of the river bottom, each of them having its patch of Indian corn with indigenous beans climbing to the top of each plant, and squashes and pumpkins growing on the ground. The valley now contracted as we advanced, but contained a great many thousand acres of the most fertile land. Any thing much more beautiful than this fine scene can scarcely be imagined; two noble lines of mountains enclosing a fertile valley with a lovely stream running through it. The whole vale has formerly been a lake.

I’ve read Featherstonhaugh’s account several times in the past without giving much thought to his statement that the whole valley had formerly been a lake. Featherstonhaugh was a geologist and it may be that any student of geology would recognize that the valley had contained a lake many thousands of year ago. I just don’t know, and my cursory research on the matter hasn’t provided an answer.

"The whole vale has formerly been a lake." Did he hear this from the same sources that told of Spanish gold mines in the mountains? Unfortunately, Featherstonhaugh left no other clues to explain the remark.

In an archaeological study of the Valley River Valley, Trawick Ward observed the valley’s modern farmers growing corn and soybeans and hay:

Obviously this environment represents a drastic alteration of prehistoric conditions by modern man. Prior to these modifications, areas within the valley floor that were subject to intermittent flooding were most likely ensconced by willows, cottonwoods, sycamores, silver maple, boxelder, and sugarberry…From ethnohistoric accounts and the archaeological record, it is evident that the animals occupying these habitats were not only plentiful but also varied, including some species that are locally extinct, e.g. elk, wolf, mountain lion, and bison.

But, alas, no word on any possible lake. Ward studied the Valley River floodplain in the 1970s after construction had begun on a new route for Highway 19-129 between Andrews and Murphy. Ward and his fellow researchers identified 23 sites that were partially or wholly within the highway right-of-way. The sites represented human occupation from the Early Archaic through the Late Woodland Period. 

Before detailed archaeological surveys could be completed, though, road builders disturbed or destroyed or paved over all of the sites, spanning an area 160 feet wide and fifteen miles long.

Thirty years ago, Trawick Ward watched the evidence of ancient civilizations bulldozed away in the name of progress. One hundred seventy years ago today, George Featherstonhaugh traveled the same route and witnessed the preparations for the impending removal of the Cherokees:

Leaving the river, we met in a defile, at no great distance, a company of mounted Franklin volunteers moving to the mouth of the Nantayáyhlay, a part of the North Carolina State troops employed in a surveillance over the Cherokees until their evacuation of the country should take place. They would have been perfectly in character in the uplands beyond Terracina, on the road to Naples, for I never saw any fellows in my life that came so thoroughly up to the notion entertained of banditti. …

About 2 P.M., we ascended a hill to Fort Butler [near Murphy], a temporary camp with a block-house built for the State troops upon this occasion: from hence we rode a mile to Hunter's, a tavern kept by a person of that name who had been long in the Cherokee country; it was most beautifully situated upon an eminence commanding a view of the Hiwassee, gracefully winding through the hills, and of the lovely country around. There was a clever little hut in a retired part of the garden belonging to this house, and beds being placed in it, it was assigned to us exclusively, so that we had some prospect of comfort. Perceiving some ladies in the house, one of whom was the wife of an officer of the United States army, we made our toilette rather more carefully.

The dinner was excellent, good soup, and a fine large trout from the river. We seemed restored to civilization, an idea that lost nothing by the introduction of a capital bottle of champagne, of which Hunter had brought a basket from Augusta, thinking the officers of the State troops would not sneeze at it; but either the price or something about it did not please them, and there Monsieur Moet was likely to have remained for some time "unknowing and unknown" but for our appearance. As it is not every day that Moet's champagne, and in the finest order, can be drank on the banks of the Hiwassee, in the Cherokee country, we formed the virtuous resolution of appropriating the whole basket to ourselves, and lost no time in putting a taboo upon it.

I don’t know how ceremoniously George Featherstonhaugh lifted a glass, but he could have dedicated this old Irish toast to any who would rob the land of its memory:

May you have the hindsight to know where you've been,
The foresight to know where you are going,
And the insight to know when you have gone too far.

George William Featherstonhaugh was a geologist and linguist who traveled through the mountains of Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina and compiled A Canoe Voyage up the Minnay Sotor based on his diaries.

Woodland Mysteries

 [From August 25, 2010]

A walk through the woods this time of year yields some interesting sights.



For instance, this fungus on a tree trunk resembles wet noodles…or mucous membrane.

I wish I could tell you what it is.

One pretty, but rather unassuming, wildflower from this past weekend also has me mystified. The feature that caught my attention was the spiral arrangement of the blooms running up the stem.

You might not know this, but in the Northern Hemisphere, such blooms always run in a clockwise pattern. If you go wildflowering south of the equator, however, you’ll see that any spiral of blooms runs in a counter-clockwise pattern.

Amazing, eh?

But back to the weekend mystery flower. I’ve decided that it is some type of goldenrod (Solidago genus). It is not what I picture when I think of goldenrod. Here's the typical goldenrod:

This large specimen from my pasture is the Common Goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis). Or at least I think it is. Upon researching the possible identity of my spiraling goldenrod, a much smaller plant, I considered and then ruled out some possibilities like the Roan Mountain Goldenrod (S. roanensis) and the Blue-stemmed Goldenrod (S. caesia).

At times like this, I really need to move beyond the wildflower guides and start using a key to help with identification. Maybe next year.

By the way, I was only joking about the clockwise and counter-clockwise arrangement of blooms…in a lame attempt at some wildflower humor. On this subject, I did find a reference to an article by H. A. Allard, The Ratios of Clockwise and Counterclockwise Spirality Observed in the Phyllotaxy of Some Wild Plants, (Castanea, The Journal of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Club, March 1951). http://www.jstor.org/pss/4031467

That’s certainly one citation to add to my library list and perhaps I’ll pick up a copy of the article this week. Comparing Allard’s information with some of my texts on sacred geometry sounds like an evening’s entertainment to me.

Concerning the spiral goldenrod, I felt a little better about my trouble identifying the plant after finding this note in Gray's Manual of Botany:

Solidago is one of our most difficult genera. Natural hybridization frequently occurs. For proper study, full specimens, showing subterranean parts and basal leaves as well as the whole flowering stem, are essential.

.