Circumstances not of my own making brought me from one spectacular,
mountainous state to another. Settling into North Carolina's
Piedmont, the maps pointed me westward to the Appalachians, unique on
Earth. Nowhere have I seen it better described than here, by Sheila
Turnage(1).
How did the Appalachians come to be here? The Cherokee, who have
lived here for thousands of years, say that one day long ago, the
Great Buzzard swooped low over the new earth. His wings brushed
the impressionable earth, creating the mountain ranges that rise
and fall, and then fade into sky. Geologists envision a wilder
scenario.
About 450 million years ago, a migrating continental fragment
collided with an underwater land mass, sending layers of earth
thousands of feet thick skidding over the lip of the raw North
American continent. The earth folded and creased, bellowed and
roared, pushing the Appalachians to their feet. Below the
surface, superheated rock changed the continent's very blood.
The land rose, dipped to become an ocean bed, and rose
again. Twice more over the next 250 million years land masses
collided, pushing up mountains taller than today's Alps. Over the
next 200 million years, time softened the mountains'
edges. Freezing water sheered boulders and mountainsides, tree
roots split stones, and spring rains swirled away tons of pebbles
of sand.(1)
We made our second family foray into the mountains mid-lockdown in
2020, venturing upwards towards Grandfather Mountain, a gorgeous
escape from the Piedmont under a late-summer sky that offered long
vistas over the rumpled landscape. The hanging bridge that you queue
to walk over towards the pinnacle is a bit of a lark, built at great
expense for no real purpose it would seem, but it's an amazing walk --
more amazing to consider what its wooden, suspended predecessor must
have felt like as it swayed beneath your feet. There, surrounded by
spruce and hemlock around and below you, the mountains are gorgeous
and intriguing and still relatively wild.
That fall I reread a favorite book, _Cold Mountain_ by Charles
Frasier. I'd first read it in Nicaragua in 1999 and it was so good
that I did something I've never done before or after with another
book: as I reached the last page, I turned back to the beginning and
went immediately through it a second time. And there I made a fun
connection: the goat woman that Inman meets on his walk back to Cold
Mountain lived somewhere in that valley. It's a long section but
here's a bit of it:
The brush and bracken grew thick in the footway, and the ground
seemed to be healing over, so that in some near future the way
would not even remain as a scar. For several miles it mostly
wound its way through a forest of immense hemlocks, and the fog
lay among them so thick that their green boughs were
hidden. ... They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on
great slabs of rock. ... Blue patches of sky opened above him,
and Inman craned his head back to look at them. ... Then he
looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the lower world
was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. A river gorge --
apparently the one he had climbed out of -- stretched blue and
purple beneath him ... -- Has that mountain got a name? he said.
--Tanawha, the woman said. The Indians called it that. Inman
looked at the big grandfather mountain and then he looked beyond
it to the lesser mountains as they faded off into the southwest
horizon, bathed in faint smoky haze. Waves of mountains. For all
the evidence the eye told, they were endless. The grey
overlapping humps of the farthest peaks distinguished themselves
only as slightly darker values of the pale grey air.(2)
It's hard to describe, but standing in the cool air, overlooking those
immense forests, some sort of magic flowed through my veins. I believe
perhaps it still does.
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1] North Carolina, Sheila Turnage; Photography by Jim Hargan. Compass
American Guides: North Carolina, Third edition (2003).
2] Cold Mountain, Charles Frasier. Grove Atlantic, 1997.
