|
Hikes, books spotlight mountains
The Appalachian Mountains, including our own Plott Balsams, Blue Ridge and Great Smokies, offer scenery that can take your breath away and stories and songs that are just as gripping.
Listening to Madison County balladeer and storyteller Sheila Kay Adams read from her new novel (My Old True Love) at City Lights Tuesday night (June 22) brought that fact home just as surely as the news release we received offering hikes to Andrews Bald in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
It’s been at least 20 years since I’ve been to that bald, but I still remember its beauty and peacefulness.
Adams, on the other hand, was not talking about the spectacular scenery of the area near her home as she read passages from her novel, set against the backdrop of the Civil War and based on stories handed down through her family.
“I’ve heard ‘Aunt Arty’ stories all my life,” she said of the character who narrates the book. Adams also sang one of the “murder love songs” that she learned while growing up in Madison County.
The same gorgeous natural features that draw thousands of visitors yearly to GSMNP and the Blue Ridge Parkway served to isolate early mountain settlers, producing a wealth of stories and music, as Adams demonstrated to a packed gallery Tuesday night.
Another new book, which was dropped off at the Cafe by Sylva storyteller and artist Gary Carden, is a more scholarly treatise that illustrates through photograhs the amazing beauty of the entire Appalachian region and documents the singular culture it produced.
Titled The Appalachians, which could refer to either the mountains or the people, the book will serve as a companion piece to an upcoming PBS four-part documentary, Carden said.
Included in its pages are two of Carden’s essays and several of his paintings. The volume also features a chapter by former Western Carolina history professor Gordon McKinney (now in the Appalachian Studies Department at Berea College) and country music legend Johnny Cash.
“This book will be the definitive work on Appalachian Culture,” Carden said last week.
Not yet in wide distribution, copies of the book are available through Carden; for additional information, e-mail him at GCarden498@aol.com.
And for those who want a firsthand look at Appalachian scenery as the first settlers to these hills saw it, the GSMNP hikes to the high-elevation, grassy Andrews Bald will take place on three Sundays: June 27, July 25 and Aug. 8. The walks will depart from the Clingman’s Dome parking area at 1 p.m., and hike participants should meet the ranger at the bulletin board, which is located at the west end of the parking area.
One of the few remaining high elevation grassy balds in the Smoky Mountains, at 5,820 feet Andrews is the highest of the balds in the park and is the most accessible. Andrews Bald is especially popular during the blooming displays of flame azaleas, which occur in late June and early July and will likely still be in bloom during this Sunday’s hike.
Scientists are still unsure as to the origins of the balds in southern Appalachia, but do know they were historically used for summer grazing of livestock. Although the forest has reclaimed some of the balds and has reduced the size of others since the creation of the Park in the 1930s, Andrews is one of two grassy balds that the Park maintains at their current sizes.
The round-trip hike is 3.6 miles with an elevation change of less than 800 feet. Participants will return to the parking area at their own pace. Those interested in the hikes can obtain more information by calling the Oconaluftee Visitors Center at 497-1904
As Adams and her husband, Jim, prepared to play three tunes on the hammered dulcimer and banjo Tuesday, she told a story that linked the books and the hikes. She said she was “collecting” names for one of the tunes they were going to perform. Though she had learned the melody as Chinquapin, she said she has also heard it called by several other names, including Too Young to Marry and Broken Stovepipe.
That reminded me of the way I accumulated plant names when I first came to Jackson County. As a botany student at WCU, I was learning the scientific, or Latin, names; meanwhile, as a resident of Canada community, I was learning what people who lived there called those plants.
The flame azaleas that park officials predict will be in bloom during the Sunday hike to Andrews Bald, Rhododendron calendulaceum, are called “honeysuckle” by old-timers. The shrub is a member of the heath family, one of our most well-represented (and most confusing) vegetative groups. When someone who grew up in Canada says “laurel,” they are usually talking about Rhododendron maximum, a broad-leafed evergreen that sports pale pink flowers in mid-July rather than Kalmia latifolia (in bloom now) that has smaller, cup-shaped flowers and is commonly called mountain laurel in wildflower books. If they mean the showier purple rhododendron (Rhododendron catawbiense) that blooms in profusion in late May and early June up on the Blue Ridge Parkway, they say “purple laurel.”
There were dozens of other examples: witch hazel was “beadwood,” mountain laurel was “ivy,” silverbell was “box elder” and sweetshrub was “bubby,” just to mention a few nicknames that I’ve never seen in a book.
Our mountains are a unique area, full of interesting, self-sufficient, creative people like Sheila Kay Adams and Gary Carden, and showy plants like the various rhododendrons. It’s good that we have the books to capture the stories of the people and the park to remind us of the beauty and majesty of the land.
|
