by
Tim Homan
In the mid-to-late 1970s, when I began exploring the mountains of North Georgia, written directions to trailheads were often short, cryptic, and inaccurate. In general, directions, trailhead signage, and parking areas were all primitive by today's standards. Back then, a trail was often more difficult to find than to follow. In part, those problems led to my decision to write a guide that would include easily understood and accurate directions to the trailheads.
To that end, I began walking all of the official forest paths for the first edition of my first hiking guide. But I had to find them first. Again and again, throughout 1979 and 1980, I had trouble following what directions there were, most of them written from memory and guesswork rather than from actual road signs and mileage readings. And when I couldn't locate a trailhead after a few tries, I would often stop to ask directions from the people who lived along the paved roads leading to the dirt-gravel forest service roads, or in the pockets of private property within the purchase boundary of the Chattahoochee National Forest. I quickly learned three things about the highlanders who gave me directions: they were friendly and willing to help; they, especially the old-timers, could often recall the contours of the land for miles around with an uncanny accuracy that comes only from long and intimate familiarity; and they frequently included colorful and inventive language in their descriptions.
In Georgia's share of the Mountain South the people, whether in country stores or in their front yards, generally invited the stimulus of conversation, even from an outsider asking directions. They stopped loading coke machines; they shut off their lawnmowers; they motioned me up to their porches. They often shot the breeze about the weather or something else innocuous and unlikely to cause disagreement either before or after the business of directions.
One older woman, after providing the best directions she could, asked me-a bearded flatlander from the Piedmont-if I wanted to see her garden. After a five-minute tour of her pole beans and squash, eggplants, okra, and sweet corn, she gave me a ripe cantaloupe to eat on the trail. Several other times when I asked directions from folks who were working in their gardens, they offered me some tomatoes to take home before I left. Not one person was ever rude, mean, or even dismissive. But, in the interest of honesty, I never stopped at a trashy mobile home with a pit bulldog tied up outside either. During those two years I never came face to face with author Bill Bryson's Cyclops, that malignant "Deliverance" stereotype he exploits as arrogant humor and presumed superiority to willing urban readers, especially northerners. In fact, whether on dirt road or remote trail, I remained as safe from human harm as an angel inside the eye of a hurricane.
Since their surroundings have never been sequences of city blocks, street signs, and stoplights, it was only natural that the directions provided by the hill folks included the common features of the mountains: hollows, branches, creeks, bottoms, knobs, ridges, slopes, and the like. Sometimes the old men would weave a running narrative, braiding personal and natural history into the directions. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe they just wove the directions into their stories. The best one I ever wrote in my notebook went like this:
You take this road here past a hollow full of pole-timber poplar on your right; I remember when there were big trees down in there, but that hollow's been cut twice since then. Turn left onto the first dirt road past the rainbow-crowned oak in Crowder's field, then drop down and cross Corbin Creek-it's named after my great-grandfather on my mama's side. There's a deep swimming hole just upstream from the bridge, and there's good-sized native trout in there too. I've caught many a supper there. After you cross the bridge, follow the rise onto the sunset slope of Chestnut Lead. Way down the first hollow is my folk's old homeplace; it's government land now, nothing left but an old stacked-rock chimney and corner stones. I killed my first black bear, a big male, down in there when I was fourteen years old in 1921. I had to fetch my father and older brother to help me haul him out of the woods. I remember when the chestnuts up on the lead first started dying of the fungus blight in the forties. That disease was a damnation; the forest and the wildlife have never been the same since.
After you drop down to the toe of the mountain, turn toward the sunrise onto the very next road you come to. It's another forest service road, got a forest service number, but we call it Miller Gap Road. Take that track uphill a good piece to Miller Gap; it's probably a good 3 or 4 miles. Miller's the second gap you come to. The trail you're looking for runs off into the woods to the right of the road in the gap; there's a pull-off big enough for a couple of cars there. Back in the depression, when I was about your age, I hunted squirrel and turkey along the hogback where you're going to hike.
Say, what's your name? Do I know any of your kinfolk?
At first, I listened through the conceit of my smugness toward grammatically backward ways. But the cumulative evidence of the linguistic richness of mountain speech, nearly as rich as a north-facing cove, soon pried my preconceptions out of their pigeon holes. I found I greatly enjoyed listening to the mountain people, the grayer the great-grandfather the better. Many of the old-timers were masters at language: first rate storytellers with impeccable timing and razor wit. They sprinkled their anecdotes with novel country sayings and language I liked, language straight from the "hill'n holler" land. They were the first to tell me how to walk through " roughs"-mountain land ribbed with narrow spurs and furrowed with hollows "so steep that, going down, you'll want hobnails in the seat of your pants"-and about woollyheads, laurel hells, laurel slicks, or just plain slicks and hells-their words for extensive entanglements of heath shrubs, mostly rhododendron and mountain laurel.
Occasionally, when I went camping for four or five days at a stretch, I sought out men with long memories to ask directions I didn't need, a conversation starter that primed the pump for my questions about the regional forests before chestnut blight and industrial logging. The men recalled huge trees, recognizable as individuals from a distance, that served as landmarks: living waypoints during walks in the big woods without compass or GPS. They remembered chestnuts 8 and even 10 feet in diameter at the base, mountain trees of an almost unimaginable size today-more a mythological symbol of former fertility than a future possibility. They reminisced about the richness of north-facing coves, where "the land smiled at its own magic show" of spring wildflowers quilting winter's brown thatch with bright and welcome color; of high, overarching fountains of great green-domed trees; of cold, clean streams "clear as the dew on your windowsill, so clear you could count the spines on a trout's fin while looking at its shadow."
I heard the land and its lost glories in their voices as the old men described the Southern Appalachian forests, former refuge for the largest trees in mountainous eastern North America, felled in their youth or early manhood. They told me of white pines, 4-feet thick and rising in spear-straight splendor, towering above the hardwoods on the slopes; 500-year-old hemlocks standing dark and silent sentinel over the streams, shading them summer and winter; stands of massive tuliptrees in the coves, their living gray columns rising with slow and steady taper, their straight and soaring symmetry free of branches for the first 80 feet; wide-crowned white oaks, 4 to 6 feet in diameter, dominating the canopy in the bottoms; chestnuts whitening the ridgetop woods with their spring blooms, and showering the forest floor with their fattening and nutritous mast every year without fail-a benevolent manna from the queen of the eastern forest.
Some of the people I asked directions from-again, especially the graybeards-utilized two systems of distance measurement. They sometimes even combined the two in the same few sentences. One set was the standard system based upon miles; the other employed folk measurements much more vague and antiquated than accurate or systematic. I wrote down these Mountain South terms and, since I was recording mileages anyway, often noted how far a "piece" or a "fer piece" turned out to be. Based upon the folks I talked to, an admittedly small and much older than average sample, I compiled five alternative units of Appalachian distance. The shortest measure I ever heard was tater chunk, as in "you're real close, it's just another tater chunk down the road." Following tater chunk in progression were yonder, hoot and a holler, a piece, and a fer piece.
This system was based upon Southern Highlander culture, subtleties of hand gestures and head nods, and assumed familiarity with the mountains. At first, nonstandard directions were problematic for me: a man raised on straight yards and flat miles in the right-angle, corn-row country of central Illinois. But the more I listened and watched and measured, the more I began to have an intuitive feel for the variable distance of a piece. Although these classifications were nowhere close to systematic, ten tater chunks did not equal one yonder, there were rules and intricacies that helped the terms become both more flexible and accurate than you might expect. The first rule was that only tater chunk and hoot and a holler had plurals: a couple of tater chunks down the road, two hoots and a holler (never a hoot and two hollers). I never heard anyone say two yonders, three pieces, or four fer pieces. It wasn't done while I was listening.
A measured mile is just a mile whether you walk it, drive it, or make arm gestures and head nods while you're talking about it. But a piece and a fer piece expand and contract with the situation; they have fluid parameters, low and high ranges, an easy piece or a good piece. A walked piece is shorter than a driven one. After you learn the nuances of gesture and voice, the low and high ranges of a piece accompanied with the correct sequence of natural features are about all you need to find your way. Before long, you can drive the correct distance-whether it is a piece or 2.6 miles-to the right trailhead on the first pass. And when you get there you think, yeah, that old mountain man was dead on, it was about a hoot and a holler downhill from the gap.
During those two years I did much of my hiking on weekdays, so most of the people who gave me directions were farmers, second-shift workers, retirees, or store clerks and their customers. Most of the folks I found outside on tractors, porches, or in gardens were over fifty, many over seventy. The majority gave me directions in approximate miles, which were often wildly inaccurate. But the others-the old hands who had learned the land's language through the soles of their shoes, the upthrust and forested terrain a ready map in their minds-often used informal distance measurements lingering from before hurry came to the hollows.
Those people grew up in an isolated region paced to foot tread or horse trot. They knew distances from the slow measure of the land. Before motorized transport and odometers came to the mountains, a mile afoot or on horseback was much more the sense and feel and rhythm of a mile than the codified distance. And, of course, an unmeasured mile varied with the weather, the steepness of the grade, fatigue, etc. Back when many of my informants were growing up, one person's mile was different than another's. And since unmeasured miles are arbitrary, there really wasn't much difference between a piece accompanied with a natural-feature narrative and roughly estimated mileage. Directions with guesstimated mileage and no accompanying landmarks were often the worst.
Late in the second summer, I ascended a long trail beside a clear, cold, cascading stream: trout water. Around noon, I asked a slender and slightly stooped fisherman if he knew the general location of a lunker hemlock another hiker had described as "humongous." Knee deep in current weaving around water-worn boulders, he squared up to me and said, "I know exactly where that tree is; I've been walking or wading past it for forty years. The hemlock you're looking for is to the right where the creek turkey tracks." And that was all he said. He didn't point his finger or fly rod; he just nodded upstream with a slight twist of his neck.
I had never heard turkey tracks used as a directional verb before, but I knew exactly what he meant. A turkey track shows the imprint of the big bird's three toes, long and prominently splayed. With those two words, he had told me that three runs of water were going to flow together at one spot. Since I was heading upstream, I would be walking toward the spread of the splay. After a little more than a mile I came to the fisherman's eight-word signpost: a side stream poured in on the right, and the creek braided around a flood-wracked island on the left. Three fast-moving runs of mountain water flowed into one another in the approximate pattern of a turkey track. The primal-growth hemlock, large enough to lead my imagination to those forests that live in the memories of old men, loomed just upslope to the right.
The stranger's eight-word directions-"to the right where the creek turkey tracks"-proved to be creative, accurate, and wonderfully fitting for the setting: wild language sprung right up from the ground. I had never heard directions with as much economy and coupling to the land and its life as the fisherman had just tossed off the top of his head without hem or haw.
I had never given any thought to the relationship between wild land and language, the living connections between the rest of nature and human culture. And I had never thought about what happens to the possibilities of language when an ecosystem-wide mosaic of wetlands, tamarack bogs, ponds, prairies and prairie potholes, oak savannahs and bottomland forests is converted to a cultural artifact. Or about what happens to language when the land is no longer home to legend, where wildness and mystery, adventure and challenge, are now relegated to the pages of corn-genre science fiction novels.
I had known that the flat and fertile landscape around my boyhood home, an industrial city ringed with newer suburbs, was geographically boring, biologically impoverished, and tame beyond redemption since I was a boy scout. On one of my earliest camping trips, the Troop 132 scoutmasters drove us from our meeting-place church and dropped us off on the outskirts of town. When we cleared the last of the neighborhood houses, we entered the country: the great agricultural plains, right-angle-turn roads surrounding four-cornered fields of corn. We walked double file down the paved roads through a land made monocultural and geometrical with the gridwork and gear meshings of agribusiness. The grain of the land, its natural contours and curves, had been transformed to fit the grid. Even the bends in the small streams were inconvenient. The natural physics of their flows were pulled taut, ditched to run with the linear passivity of a straitjacket either parallel or perpendicular to the rows, a component of the commercial network.
After we had zigzagged 4 or 5 miles to the north, we reached the designated farm, the one with a wind-break planting of pines. We unshouldered our canvas packs and pitched our canvas tents in the aisles between the conifers. It was useless to pretend we were modern-day Daniel Boones, camped in the deep woods. The only deere around snorted diesel exhaust and tracked their passage with rubber tread.
Decades later, I found a quotation from John Muir in the introduction to his book: A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. In a letter to a friend he had written, "We will go to Decatur, Illinois, thence northward through wide prairies, botanizing a few weeks by the way." Nearly a century before our road-walk (June, 1867), Muir had deliberately traveled from Indianapolis to Decatur to go tramping where he pleased in the northern Illinois prairies. He had wandered through tallgrass prairies I had never known about as a boy. And those prairies were once wide enough for several weeks of botanizing and worth mentioning in a letter. As he wrote after his excursion, "I was eager to see Illinois prairies on my way home (to Wisconsin), so we went to Decatur, near the center of the State, thence north."
Around my hometown, native prairie plants took refuge in rural cemeteries, the tag ends of an ecosystem protected from the living by the dead. Wildness worth the word had long been lopped from the land, neutered. The central Illinois night could no longer muster a single wild howl or caterwaul. The last of the harmless wildlife was leashed to hedgerows and river bottoms. Nearly everything that had given the land life, beauty, and distinctive feature had been wiped off the map and put to the plow. The native landscape and its biological heritage had been erased, obliterated, become a ghost land long ago lost to the collective memory. A ghost land whose former life and language is now interred to the dark indoor existence of museums and herbariums, of old books and brittle maps.
I realized as never before that my childhood home's language of landscape-of its native life and former natural features-was pinched and impoverished compared to the robust language of the Southern Highlands, where despite multiple insults and ongoing assaults, much of the publicly owned land remains an ecologically complex botanical paradise. Here the ancient orogeny still rises in sensuous, water-weathered forms of the Earth's own making, still draws its own misty breath. In the Southern Appalachians, away from dirt roads and power lines, an honest and hardheaded wildness still clings to the highcountry. This heaved up and buckled terrain still stirs the imagination and enriches the language.
In Highland Dixie, where mountain ranges both define and express the landscape, language is still closely linked to the region's steep topography and world-class, temperate-zone diversity. Here the land still lives with its legendry. Almost all of the physical features except the dammed rivers have survived in recognizable form. Most of the publicly owned mountains remain the same from the macro-view. From a mile away, the Blue Ridge still shapes the high horizon with forested curves the Cherokee knew. And for the most part, the plant-and-animal place names remain relevant, still connect a wild geography to the same language.
Buckeyes still leaf-out first in Big Buckeye Coves. The pleasant scent of balsam-a fragrant gift from the last glaciation-perfumes the summit of Richland Balsam. Stands of Table Mountain pine tell the story of former burns on Firescald Ridge. Black bears continue to track their claim to the Earth on Big Beartrail Ridge. Graceful ferocity may yet leap out of the shadows on Lion Mountain. The terrain is still steep and rugged enough to rip your pants along Tearbritches Creek. And Jeffrey Hell remains a no-man's land of thicket-growth heath: "a big bother of jungled up branches" just as tangled and daunting as the day Jeffrey died down in there.
While most of the older mountain people could use and understand both of their distance systems in the late 1970s, I still know and really understand only one system. I grew up smug and sure that feet and Fahrenheit were unassailably standard. But now that I am a geezer myself, my cultural security blanket is being ripped in a losing tug of war. I am increasingly told by the rest of the world-and my own government and young friends on occasion-that my feet and pounds and miles are antiquated, backwards and nonstandard. Read the memo, get with the program old man.
I haven't stopped to ask directions in the mountains for forty years. I suspect much of the old, colorful language-archaic and laughably nonstandard to most-has been spun through the blander, homogenized from the hills. But the next time I ask, I hope I can still find an old-timer who knows the language of the land, who still possesses that elemental bond between eye and foot and Earth, not a newcomer who tries to find the appropriate app on a smart phone, or someone who tells me to travel 3.7 kilometers before turning left at the resort where all the roofs are red.
Note
The old-timer who told me to "take this road here past a hollow full of pole-timber poplar" was referring to a stand of still-young tuliptrees, also known as yellow poplar and tulip poplar. Liriodendron tulipifera is not a poplar; this tall, straight broadleaf belongs to the Magnolia family. Tulip magnolia would be a more accurate and descriptive name for this native species, which is one of the largest and most distinctive trees in eastern North America.
With the demise of the American chestnut as a mature tree, the tuliptree now wears the crown for the overall largest tree in the Appalachian Mountains. I have read reliable reports of modern-day tuliptrees raising their canopies to the impressive heights of 170 to 190 feet. I have no doubt that the tallest specimens graced the Southern Appalachian forests with yardstick-straight, light-gray trunks that soared 190 to 205 feet into the sky before industrialized logging.
Frontier journals often recounted cold, rainy nights when entire families, and sometimes even a horse, kept dry in the hollow of a huge eastern tree, usually a sycamore or tuliptree. In his book, A New Voyage To Carolina, John Lawson attests to the bigness of the tuliptree. Lawson began his voyage from Charleston in today's South Carolina on December 28, 1700:
The Tulip-Trees, which are, by the Planters, called Poplars … grow to a prodigious Bigness. … I have been informed of a Tulip-Tree, that was ten Foot Diameter; and another, wherein a lusty Man had his Bed and Household Furniture, and lived in it, till his Labor got him a more fashionable Mansion.
In the mid-1990s, I measured a great-girthed tuliptree in North Carolina's Nantahala National Forest. This giant-known as the Wasilik Poplar then, but dead now-measured a prodigious Bigness of 26 feet 5 inches in circumference at dbh.
