HOW TO LIVE

That should be an arresting title for anyone to read today on this day of No Labor. Several summers ago, when we were vacationing near Highlands, North Carolina, I found a book about the life of Montaigne entitled How to Live in a bookstore there. This morning, when folks on The Mountain at Sewanee are preparing for cook-outs, “grilling” (rather than “having a barbecue” as we say in Louisiana), I woke up thinking about this book and about how much I loved the art of essay writing. Montaigne was, of course, the Renaissance giant in this genre, but when I was enjoying North Carolina one hot summer, he seemed to especially “speak to my condition” as the Quakers say. 

So, instead of planning a cook-out or even a cook-in, or doing Monday chores, I sat down to read How to Live or A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell whose work is billed as a book “in one question and twenty attempts at an answer.” Although the chapter titles in this volume differ from some of Montaigne’s other free-floating pieces; e.g. “Of Smells,” ‘Of Thumbs,” “How our Mind Hinders Itself,” ”Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes,” he manages to impart weightier life guides in 107 essays but he doesn’t really try to teach readers anything. Author Bakewell says that he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they did. And therein lies his charm.

So this Labor Day, I again open the book mentioned above and begin to ponder some question/answer type subjects contained in Ms. Bakewell’s book. Here’re a few chapter titles that set me to pondering:

Q. How to Live? A. Don’t Worry About Death

Q. How to Live? A. Pay Attention

Q.How to Live? A. Question Everything

Q. How to Live? A. Keep A Private Room Behind the Shop (Or, as Virginia Woolf advises: Get A Room of Your Own)

Q. How to Live? A. Live Temperately

Q. How to Live? A. Guard Your Humanity.

Q. How to Live? A. Do a Good Job But Not Too Good A Job

Q. How to Live? (And I love this one) A. Philosophize Only By Accident (And I predict that Facebook would lose a lot of its writers if they followed this path.)

Q. How to Live? A. Give Up Control

Q. How to Live? A. Be Ordinary and Imperfect

These questions and answers were only some of the Questions/Answers in this illuminating volume, but a reading of the essays made me less likely to engage in any labor this holiday when one of the questions is: “How to Live? A. Wake From the Sleep of Habit.”

TRAINS, BLUEWAY TRAILS, AND “THE LITTLE PEOPLE”

Great Smoky Mountains Railroad

I’m writing a book of poetry about trains, and a few days ago, my botanist friend Vickie Sullivan and I traveled to western North Carolina and bought a ticket on the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad that departs from Bryson City, North Carolina and returns the same day. The drive from Sewanee along the scenic trail through Nantahala River country is a winding one, and on a Sunday afternoon, it’s a slow drive due to rafters and kayakers making their way to the Ocoee River. Despite the congestion, I always feel uplifted when we enter western North Carolina and I see the looming Great Smokies.

During the trip, we followed the Blueway Trail at the edge of the Smoky Mountain National Park — Little Tennessee, Nantahala, Oconaluftee, and Tuckasegee Rivers that flow into Fontana Lake, and I kept wishing for my old fly rod to do some backcasting. However, I’m sure that my limbs are no longer able to maneuver a float trip. 

We took the only train excursion offered the day after we arrived — the Nantahala Gorge Excursion — and saw much of the territory we’d been through five or six times during visits to western North Carolina. However, we got a closer look at Fontana Lake and traveled on the sky-high Fontana Trestle Bridge. The excursion that sounded like a well-traveled one was the “Shine and Dine Moonshine Experience” and was listed as the priciest experience on the schedule. True to its name, moonshine is the beverage featured during the train ride.

Our train ride was a unique adventure, but I’d been hoping to make the excursion that featured Dillsboro and the Cowee Tunnel filmed in the movie, The Fugitive. As this excursion wasn’t offered, we drove to Dillsboro and further to Silva the day following our train ride. Silva, a small town in the Plott Balsam Mountains, has become famous as a site filmed in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and for scenes from the movie Deliverance. Of course, we wandered into the City Lights Bookstore where I discovered further information about the Cherokee Little People after I’d found a book entitled The Cherokee Little People Were Real by Mary A. Joyce in a Bryson City Bookstore. 

I haven’t been able to determine whether these Little People were real but the Cherokee Indians say that when they arrived in the southeastern U.S., a group of people they called the Little People lived underground and came out only at night, tended gardens and returned underground after harvesting their produce. The sun rays were too harsh for them so they constructed cities underground and came out of their caves to work by moonlight. For that reason, the Cherokee also called them “The Moon People." They had red whiskers, squinty eyes, and were hardly four feet tall. According to old-timers and farmers, the flood of 1940 exposed an artifact with a leprechaun-like face known as “Lead Head” that features one of the Little People. The Little People’s tunnels are said to have been found in Cullowhee on the site of Western Carolina University but several historians report that these tunnels and artifacts were covered up and university buildings were constructed over them.

We skirted the Western Carolina University campus but didn’t make any archaeological digs while there, although I would have liked a glimpse of the mysterious coin with a strange face on each side called “Lead Head” — a face that has Dr. Spock ears and a large nose resembling an Irish leprechaun.

The Little People are no longer alive, according to most researchers but the Cherokee remember stories about them and report that they influenced the way Cherokees learned to live in the mountains. They were so missed that the Cherokee came up with the idea of the Little People Spirit People. These spirits can be helpful but they are also mischievous. Cherokees say that the Little People brought the news of Jesus to them, telling them about his life and his crucifixion. They say that when the Little People heard about Jesus’ death, they wept and wherever their tears fell to the ground, they transformed into fairy crosses which are the unique cross-shaped gems found in the southern Appalachians.

In one of the books, I discovered entitled Living Stories of the Cherokee by Barbara R. Duncan, the author relates that the Little People don’t die. “They’re like spirits,/and they (the Cherokees) could implore them to come,/and there are some who have seen them./Now you can’t see them /unless they want you to see them./And if you see them,/there’s something going to happen/whether good or bad,/either way…and you can hear them, you know,/in different ways, walking and, you know,/they are not mischievous/they are protectors.”

Train photograph by Victoria Sullivan

TRAIN TREK

Cowan Railroad Museum, photograph by Victoria Sullivan

Trains have always fascinated me, and one of the activities on my bucket list is a ride on the Orient Express. Many of my poems have featured trains and train depots, subjects about which I thought of writing and photographing until I discovered a book already published about train rides, dinner trains, museums, and depots entitled Tourist Trains Guidebook that I found in Bryson, North Carolina, site of the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad. This railroad was created from a portion of Southern Railway’s Branch and hugs the Tuckaseegee and Nantahala Rivers, ascends a mountain at Red Marble Gap, and zooms out over a 700-foot trestle at Fontana Lake.

Closer to home is the Cowan Railroad Museum in Cowan, Tennessee that I tried to visit today, a place that houses photographs, relics, and memorabilia from the steam age in a century-old depot. Vickie photographed the exterior of the historic depot for this blog, but I've never been inside and won’t be able to visit until May when it re-opens. I’ve learned that there are displays of figures in period costumes, model trains, and 1,000 interesting items for first-time visitors. I’ll have to schedule a May tour, but meanwhile, today, I could hear the trains “whooing” as we lunched in the Fiesta Mexican Restaurant beside the rails, across the way from the Cowan Museum. I was grateful for the scant sunlight and a diversion from illness.

This afternoon, as I write, I look at the end poem in Just Passing Through, a volume that contains some of my train poems, and I feel even more strongly about the lines in the end "snippet" entitled “End Times” that I wrote in 2007. The single verse actually describes a dismayed reaction to tribal quarrels I’ve observed that still persist in certain “corners” today.

      END TIMES
Not burned to death
or frozen to death
but warred to death,
the planet excelling in hate,
a desperation to own too many corners,
saying too little about love,
Lewis’s explication of agape
falling on truculent ears
that listen to a different drummer —
the rumble of cannon.

On several trips to the West, I became enchanted with a historic train that runs through the desert from Santa Fe, New Mexico along the spur to the city of Lamy. The train I saw was a working freight train, and I wrote about it in ”The Santa Fe Is,” in Just Passing Through, the chapbook mentioned above:

    THE SANTA FE IS
No covert traveler,
the train boils through High Desert,
red, blue, and yellow freight cars,
imperatives on the landscape
traveling everywhere.
In the pinpoint of my eye,
miniature boxes of color
fret empty plains,
make me aware of destinations,
distant mountains.
We pass small stations
snoring at track side
while the bright colored cars sway
on miles and miles of track
like ants relocating,
good times left behind,
mirages passed,
a lonely figure waving
from the engine window,
face turned toward
an indifferent there going on forever…

PEACH PILGRIMAGE

In the third verse of “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee, the poet writes: “…to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into/the round jubilance of peach,” a verse that The Writer’s Almanac advises readers to enjoy “with a juicy, delectable, gold glowing farmer’s market peach in hand…”

Such delectables are often difficult to find in local markets, but for three years we have followed the tip of our good friend Kathy Hamman and traveled across the border into Alabama to get our supply of this fruit each summer. Crow Mountain Orchards in Fackler, Alabama is only an hour’s drive from our base here at Sewanee, Tennessee and is a closer destination than orchards in Georgia, South Carolina and Hill Country, Texas that produce some of the most delicious peaches in the nation (although I’ve heard that the orchards in the middle of California gold country are close rivals). 

Crow Mountain Orchards are owned by Bob and Carol Deutscher who cultivated the orchards of peaches, nectarines, apples, pears, berries, and cherries on 150 acres at a 1700 ft. elevation during the 70’s. They advertise that although most orchards in the southeastern U.S. had shortages of peaches this year, Crow Mountain peaches have produced a gracious plenty. 

We traveled to the distribution offices of the peach orchard following a description that appeared on their web site, making “16 turns before reaching AL Rt. 79 from Winchester,” that took us from the Winchester valley to Bear Hollow Mt. Wildlife Area. Along the way, we passed the Wall of Jericho, four Holiness churches, dense forests, and roadsides with abundant Queen’s Lace that had escaped the mowers. The turn-off onto Rt. 39 from Rt. 33 does boast a Crow Mountain sign, which only appears at that point, and we were prepared for the route into the “boonies” where the orchards are located.

Dark clouds hung over us as we entered a market filled with customers from states surrounding the Alabama site. Although the owners’ daughter was busy ringing up sales, I began to question her.

“What’s the name of the variety of peaches I’m buying?” Signs advertised numbers only.

“I really don’t know,” she confessed. My 88-year old father still works seven days a week in the orchards, and he’s planted so many varieties, we’ve lost track of the names.”

I picked up a carton of what I know to be “juicy, delectable, gold glowing farmer’s market peaches,” passing over the pears that appeared to be fruit that would make good preserves. The memory of my grandmother standing over a stove making pear preserves during Louisiana summers without air conditioning is engraved in my memory! When she died, we discovered pantry shelves filled with pear and fig preserves without dates marked on the rusting lids. All that hot work for uneaten fruit! Actually, I think that “putting up preserves,” as 20th-century cooks called the process, meant that you were a thrifty homemaker and a good cook, a reputation that women of that era coveted.

As we left the Crow Mountain market, dark clouds opened up, and we went home through a heavy rainfall that cleared when we reached the valley. Because of the rainfall we were unable to get photos of the peach orchards, which are picked daily, according to Deutscher’s daughter, but did manage a shot of this beautiful fruit before we began to devour it. No doubt about it —Crow Mountain peaches rank right up there with the over 130 million Georgia peaches produced last year. However, in my opinion, the ones that surpass all others are produced somewhere in South Carolina and marketed near the border of the Outer Banks of North Carolina where an entourage of the Sullivan family and I spent a week in a vacation home, making peach cobbler several nights in a row.

WRITER’S PILGRIMAGE

Each time we travel to Asheville, North Carolina, where the artistic life abounds, I feel as though I'm  on a writer’s pilgrimage because I inevitably end up visiting the homes of deceased writers. This week, I again stayed at a hotel next door to “The Old Kentucky Home,” the Asheville home in which American author Thomas Wolfe grew up. I toured it for the fourth time! During this tour, I learned more about the 1998 fire that destroyed much of the large yellow frame home that provided the characters and background for Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, and I purchased a video that showcased the six-year restoration, which cost $2.4 million dollars. Right now, the home needs a new coat of paint, and I put a small donation in a box reserved for the $35,000 needed to provide several coats of yellow paint.

Thomas Wolfe’s mother, Julia Wolfe, cashed in on the real estate boom of the early 1900’s in the “Land of the Sky,” as Asheville was then called and bought the sprawling yellow house, described as “Queen Anne architecture," in 1906. She left W.O. Wolfe, her husband, in his home on nearby Woodfin Street and took her youngest son, Tom, with her to the Old Kentucky Home on Spruce St. Thomas Wolfe disliked living in the home because Julia made it into a boarding house, eventually expanding it to include 18 sleeping rooms, and Wolfe had to move from room to room almost nightly to accommodate strangers who lodged at The Old Kentucky Home. Wolfe later described himself as a “vagabond since I was seven – with two roofs and no home.” He escaped the boarding house and Asheville to attend the University of North Carolina and under the tutelage of Edwin Greenlaw, an English professor at the university (actually my distant cousin), he began writing apace, later developing a passion for playwriting.

After attending Harvard, Wolfe taught a few years at New York University, then traveled to London where he wrote most of his bulky novel, Look Homeward Angel. After enraging the townspeople of Asheville with his thinly-disguised autobiographical novel that contained more than 200 local characters, he stayed away from Asheville for eight years until the furor died out, quipping that “You can’t go home again but there are other places and you can go there.”

On the same day as the visit to Wolfe’s boyhood home, we traveled south, arriving in Flat Rock, North Carolina to tour “Connemara,” the farm to which Carl Sandburg moved when he was 67. Carl Sandburg, poet, biographer, author of American folk tales, and collector of folk songs, completed more than one-third of his works while living at Connemara atop Glassy Mountain. He had moved there to find the seclusion necessary for writing, as well as to have ample pastureland for Mrs. Sandburg’s goat herd. At this writer’s retreat, Sandburg spent most of the night writing and slept late, but he ate dinner with his large family and recited from his writings at the dinner table, his youngest children restlessly enduring sonorous recitations for sometimes an hour.

Connemara was a large home filled with Sandburg’s library of 14,000 books and old periodicals (he subscribed to over fifty periodicals). The Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site has the distinction of being the first park to honor a poet. Connemara sits at the top of a 0.3 mile trail and climbs 100 feet – the height of a ten-story building – and I was winded when we finally reached the summit. Goats still inhabit the area and are relatives of Lilian Sandburg’s original herd. They are Toggenburgs, Saanens, and Nubians, and children who visit with their parents are allowed to make friends with them. At one time, Lilian Sandburg’s goats numbered over 200, and helpers milked 50-80 does twice a day. Mrs. Sandburg gained fame for her dairy goats and for her work improving the herd’s bloodlines and production of milk. Her goat milk and cheese were sold throughout North Carolina.

I was impressed with the video of an interview between Edward Murrow and Carl Sandburg and came away pondering Sandburg’s answer to the question: “What is the worst word in the English language?” Sandburg promptly replied: “Exclusive.” Sandburg’s answer reflects his life as a lecturer who deplored the exploitation of workers and child labor. He also received honors from the NAACP for coverage of the 1919 Chicago race riots and worked to achieve social justice, and garnered the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1940 and in Poetry in 1951.

The last night in Asheville ended on a real “hoop-la,” an event in a downtown Asheville park where hula hoopers, ages three to sixty, danced to T.O.U.C.H. Samadi, an electronic trance dance experience that is popular with those in a program called “Asheville Hoops.” Hoop dancing is touted as a way to exercise and relax emotionally, and the movement to electronic music supposedly transports the hula hoopers to a fourth level of consciousness. The young man in the foreground of Vickie Sullivan's video seemed to be a good example of one who had reached this level.