By Tim Homan
Late June, 1986. Last trail of a four-day work trip to the North Georgia mountains taking notes for the second edition of my hiking guide. I turned into the Rich Mountain Trailhead off Stanley Creek Road just before ten, nearly two hours later than intended the night before. And very late in the morning to start a long work hike -- pushing a measuring wheel, frequently stopping to write notes -- at least 16 or 17 miles round trip.
I finished the route's longest stretch, rising along the eastern slope of Rocky Mountain before descending to the Aska Road crossing at Deep Gap, with a little over 5 miles worth of feet clicked onto the wheel's counter. I sat down for lunch, an egg biscuit I had bought in Blue Ridge in the morning, and studied the sun's westward angle. Well into the afternoon already.
I retrieved one of the two canteens I had cached at the Aska Road crossing and started back to work. A few tenths mile beyond the first narrow cove of Blue Ridge Lake, I wheeled up to gastly sight, a grotesque gauntlet I had never encountered before, or since, along a Southern Appalachian trail. A possum, a Red-tailed Hawk, a raccoon, and a striped skunk -- all dead and bedraggled, all putrid and drawing a buzz of flies -- hung in order 4 or 5 feet apart along the right side of the treadway. The necks of the mammals were all wedged and tied into the forks of overhanging branches; the buteo's taloned feet were tied with cord so that the fierce curve of its hooked beak faced the passing hiker. The lowermost tails and head of the dead fauna, probably roadkills, dangled 6 to 9 inches above my head a little more than half an arm's length away.
After processing the staged presentation for what it was -- an obvious, over-the-top warning -- I kept my eyes front, head down, and wheeled away. I noticed a narrow path leading to the right but did not slow down or turn my head to look into its entrance. I kept moving and minding my own business. I had never witnessed this kind of dead-animal display before, but I had heard about rotting-critter, skull-and-crossbones mobiles in Panama while serving as an Army MP.
I finished the route and my water at the same time. Quick and easy calculations from my wheel's clicking counter convinced me the backtrack would be nearly 9 miles long*. I was hot and tired and had a three-hour drive back home to Athens. I was out of water, but had the canteen cached at Aska Road. I didn't consider the dead-animal stop sign, at least not to the level of forming words in my mind, but I wasn't eager to place myself -- an outsider with a measuring wheel and notebook who could give police fairly precise distances to the sidepath -- in double jeopardy. The sun-angle told me it was already late in the afternoon. I decided to hitchhike back to my car and bet the measuring wheel would convince most folks I wasn't a vagabond.
The thumbing went fairly well once I had walked to a paved county road. The wheel worked. Everyone asked what it was and what I was doing with it. They asked if I worked for the government. No one made the usual wisecrack about it being a unicycle. As requested, my next to last ride dropped me off at Deep Gap so I could recover my last full canteen. My final lift let me out at the entrance of Stanley Creek Road, its entire length dirt-gravel back then.
A short wait convinced me I had better start walking. My notebook reminded me that the farmhouse with the old barn butted up against the road was a little less than 3 miles away, and the trailhead and my vehicle were about a mile further. I knew the number of homes quickly dwindled after the first mile, so I decided to walk slowly until the driveways petered out, then pick up the pace.
No one drove down the road. I stashed my measuring wheel in the brush along an easy-to-remember fenceline and began striding faster into the still-warm summer evening. Just before early dusk sidled out of the forest, I noticed the first of the old outbuildings, a small barn weathered the color of driftwood. I now knew I was about to pass the Stanley homeplace, an old farmhouse set close to the right side of the road just ahead. The fire-warden sign I had first seen in 1979 was still there.
An older couple sat relaxing on the front porch, their day's work done, awaiting dusk and the relative coolness of the fading day. I assumed they were the Stanleys, the man a direct blood descendent still farming beside his settler family's namesake stream. The gray-haired woman wore a simple cotton dress; the gray-haired man wore denim bib overalls, the country farmer's work uniform at that time. They appeared to be in their early seventies, perhaps a little older; it was hard to tell from my vantage point of thirty-five. I gave them a wave as I walked by. The heavy-set man stood up and said hello, then quickly appraised me -- a bearded, sweat-drenched stranger carrying a daypack and stout hiking stick -- before calling out in a strong and friendly voice, "young man, you look mighty hot and thirsty. Come on up, sit a spell, and drink some ice-cold lemonade."
He didn't have to ask twice; the mountain valley was still hot and humid, and I had guzzled the last of my cached quart more than a mile back. I walked the few paces to the porch, shook his work-callused hand, and sat in the proffered rocking chair, the best seat. He introduced himself as Garfield Stanley and his wife as Froney.
After I answered their questions, one answer leading to another, Mrs. Stanley admonished me against hitchhiking in a gentle motherly way. I grinned and replied, "If I hadn't hitchhiked, if I hadn't trusted strangers, I wouldn't be on your porch drinking all this wonderful cold lemonade, and besides that, inviting a stranger with a big stick up to your porch isn't exactly playing it safe." She smiled and pointed to her husband. "This country mouse is no fool. We knew you were a hiker before we invited you up to our porch. Garfield was standing beside the barn when you, a bearded man wearing a ballcap, slowed your vehicle as you passed through here around ten this morning. He ran some errands in Blue Ridge this afternoon and came back on Rock Creek Road. He saw your Subaru at the trailhead about two hours ago. We knew you were a hiker, and men who spend their days walking in the woods with a notebook, like the one on your pack over there, are not men to fear when they come to your front porch."
I steered the conversation to the mountains, the wonderful view from their front porch, and his pioneering family. He told me his kin folks had settled the valley early, back before the Civil War. Mr. Stanley told me his great-grandfather, Rickles Stanley, migrated from North Carolina to the Georgia mountains in 1842. He married Jane Hughes, and they had eleven mountaineer children. Rickles built a two-room log cabin a little more than half a mile further east in the valley. The cabin was still standing.
Garfield Stanley was born and raised at his parent's homeplace near Fall Branch Falls less than half a mile further west in the Stanley Creek valley. The area is forest service property now; I had hiked the short path to the falls earlier in the year. Family stories told of wolves howling and panthers screaming and bears fattening like hogs on the chestnut mast that poured down upon the Earth every year. Stanley men were killed, essentially hunted down and murdered, because they did not want to fight against the Union during the Civil War.
While Mr. Stanley talked about the old days -- chestnut blossoms whitening the woods every spring before the blight, bad roads, deep snows, the cutting of the forests, people walking miles to pick up their mail at his home -- I drank and drank most of a big pitcher of lemonade at their insistence. After forty minutes of conversation and ice-cold lemonade, he gave me a ride as stars began to light up the night sky.
Mr. Stanley pulled up to my hand-me-down clunker at another family place-name natural feature: Stanley Gap. Before I shut the door of his very old Chevy sedan, I told him about the lineup of dead animals hanging alongside the Rich Mountain Trail near the lake. I told him about the sidepath and what I suspected was going on there in the woods, then waited for his reply. He agreed with my assessment. Mr. Stanley said he had never encountered a warning string of carcasses, but had heard of their existence. He said it was common knowledge that there were plenty of well-cultivated marijuana patches growing in the national forest. "You know how it is, some folks are always looking for a way to make easy money, legal or not, without having to work hard. Around here, most everyone knows who the pot growers are. When you see a boy who hasn't done an honest lick of work for a good while riding around in a fancy new pickup, showing off, you know he's a criminal of some sort, most likely a dope grower or dope dealer."
Before leaving, I asked Mr. Stanley about the life he had lived in this small Mountain South valley in the land of his ancestors. I explained my reasons for asking. He answered my questions thoughtfully, honestly. He started out by saying that he had been born in a time and place where life's expectations were limited, probably close to rock bottom compared to now. He had grown up with no expectations of traveling the world in peace time, or even traveling out west to the mountainous country across the Mississippi. So the fact that he had not traveled out west, to Yosemite or Yellowstone, chafed hardly at all.
After World War II, he had seriously considered selling the farm and moving to a city to work a factory job. But he could not and would not break those ties gently holding him in place. He could not give up all that he had, all that he knew, and all that he was to live among strangers for more money but less of everything else he valued. "I made the right decision … for me."
Though he was small-farm poor, he was rich in time, rich in forest service land to roam, and rich in the freedom to work without hurry or worry. He was lucky. He could begin and end his work for the day at the hours of his choosing. And when he was finished for the day, whether it was early in the afternoon or nearly dark, he could sit on the porch or beside Stanley Creek and take his rest in peace. Best of all, he had the time, freedom, and desire to enjoy the beauty of the mountains as the seasons rolled round and round.
I thanked him again for the lemonade and for the ride to the family gap. On the way home I realized that Mr. Stanley's hospitality had been a most welcome counterweight for the day's affront. His uncommon kindness and a couple of quarts of lemonade had erased the bad taste from the day and had raised his side of the scale above the other: the graphic threat of violence, a most crude and calculated unkindness on a public-land trail.
October, a few months later, final afternoon of a three-day trip. Working on directions, I had driven toward Stanley Gap from the west on Rock Creek Road. As I passed through the small farm, I spotted Mr. Stanley sitting on the gate of an old wooden wagon next to a similarly thick-set, middle-aged man who shared his facial features. The size of the pile of unshucked ears in the wagon behind the men meant they had started working early when the air was cool and the grass was still wet with dew. They had spent the morning harvesting corn by hand from their dark-soiled bottomland field. They had made steady, unhurried work of it, taking breaks when they were ready -- no piecework stress, no time clock, no overbearing boss.
A cold front had shouldered through during the night, towing low humidity, a clear blue sky, and a far-reaching clarity in its wake. The mountain's long ridgeline and the steep slant of its forested slope were colorful with the flaming reds and soft yellows of a Southern Highland autumn. And now in the early afternoon, Mr. Stanley and the man I assumed was his son were eating lunch and chatting in cloudless sunshine. At that moment they looked content, comfortable with their lives, at peace with their place on Earth, their work, and the beauty of the day. I stopped and stared at the autumn landscape and the companionable ease of the two men at rest. I tried to take it all in, tried to hold the image -- the sight and symbol of the moment -- tight in my mind's eye.
Over the years, I continued to drive by the old farm when I was hiking near Blue Ridge or passing through the general area heading to mountains further north. I would make a side trip just to check on the place, as if its continuance had some bearing on my well-being. The Stanleys abandoned their yearly corn crop and planted pasture grass instead. Since there was no fencing for livestock, the grass had probably been sown for hay cuttings. Stanley Creek Road had become paved right up to the mountain farm, but remained dirt-gravel for some miles to the west. I never saw Mr. and Mrs. Stanley, Garfield and Froney, or the man I assumed was their son again. But the farm always looked well tended and worked, a cared-for continuity that had become an envious and wayfaring stranger's vicarious roots.
In late March of 2012, while on my way to a short trip to the Cohutta Wilderness, I decided to make a spur-of-the-moment detour to the Stanley place. I hadn't visited the old farm since driving and road-walking the Benton MacKaye Trail along Stanley Creek Road in 2002 and 2003. I knew the land and buildings might be dramatically changed, the farm house flattened and gone, but felt compelled to go anyway.
I drove Aska Road over the Elisha Stanley bridge in a light rain, turned onto Stanley Creek Road, followed the paved two-track as it wound its curving way to the west. I parked in front of a real estate sign advertising land for sale. The agents were from an outfit in Atlanta. The sign was one of those large ones depicting a formerly intact property divided into lined plats of various shapes and acreages. The "Stanley Tract, 50.9 acres," was being broken up into four parcels -- the largest 30.51 acres, the smallest 2.5. Two were labeled as sold; two were still for sale.
The old Stanley place stood as a symbol of a way of life and making a living rapidly vanishing from the land. Over the decades I had witnessed the transformation in the valleys of the southern mountains: empty homes standing silent and unkempt -- fields in front, forest up the slope in back -- as former small rural farms were being carved up into platted tracts.
The house was empty, holes punched in the front windows by thrown rocks, the evidence lying just inside. Someone had helped himself to the front door. The house looked smaller and the porch, which ran the length of the front and wrapped around the left side, seemed narrower than I remembered. The kitchen was small and lacked the amenities and style that come standard in today's middle-class homes. The house looked shabby and forlorn in the lowering sky gone darker gray with mist. It had been a simple, small, inexpensive home even back then -- shingled sides, tinned roof -- that had now outlived its usefulness, its marketability. It was now a hindrance, good only for a day's wage for the men who would bulldoze it down and haul it away.
Across the dirt-gravel two-track, the fields and forests looked essentially the same as they had a decade ago. Much longer than wide, the fields filled the fertile bottomland from Stanley Creek Road close to Stanley Creek. The Stanleys had left a forested buffer to help keep the creek clear and cold enough for trout. Across the rock-bedded stream, the north-facing slope of Dogwood Knob rises to its highpoint at the modest elevation of 2,943 feet. Gray puffs of rain mist clung to the lower slopes; the crest was a veiled outline of darker gray. I thanked Mr. Stanley for his kindness and example, as I always did when I was there, then drove away toward the rest of the long weekend in the Cohuttas.
In early February of 2019, I made one last pilgrimage to the past, to the old Stanley place. While in the area, I spoke at length with Ralph Stanley, a great nephew who knew Garfield Stanley quite well. By way of further introduction, I told him the story of my dead-animal and lemonade day in greater detail than I had over the phone.
I didn't have to ask my first question. When I finished my story, he told me Garfield's behavior -- inviting a complete stranger up to the porch for conversation and lemonade -- was totally in character and typical of his great uncle, who, despite being "small-farm poor," was a kind and generous man. A man who, when he was strong and able, was always willing to help people out.
Ralph Stanley told me a great many things about his Stanley-family heritage. Some of the information verified what Garfield had told me on his porch; other facts were new to me. Garfield and his son, Coleman, built chimneys to augment their meager income from the farm. Like many rural people of her generation, Froney worked a large vegetable garden until she was well up in her seventies. Much to my surprise, I learned that both Garfield and Froney had faces that lied about their age. Mr. Stanley had been a very young looking eighty-five and Mrs. Stanley a young looking eighty-two when they invited me up to their porch in the early summer of 1986.
The Rickles Stanley homeplace, the 1842 cabin cared for by a family unrelated to the Stanleys, was still standing in 2019.
The idyllic scene of father and son sitting on the wagon against the background of Southern Appalachian autumn resonated with me for good reason. Both sets of my immigrant grandparents hauled their hopes and dreams and sparse belongings to boats bound for America. My parents left their hometown for opportunity and prosperity. I left my hometown because the countryside was a right-angle grid of row-crop corn and soybeans, the land's remnant wildness tethered to fence rows and river bottoms, most of its life and beauty put to the plow. In 1986 I felt utterly rootless, no strong ties or loyalty to any landscape or community, one foot always on the threshold, the other never taking the next step across, mind always restless and wondering if somewhere else -- out in the Rocky Mountain west or up in the northwoods -- would be a better fit.
Garfield Stanley was born belonging. He learned the legendry of his ancestors along with his ABCs. Mr. Stanley lived his entire allotment of days in a single small Southern Appalachian valley closely connected to his kin and local community. He lived with a profound and enduring sense of place, a strong attachment to the land where his ancestors lived and worked and died. His years spun round and round to the work and beauty of his Mountain South landscape: its pulses and rhythms, its seasons and cycles of planting and harvesting, birthing and butchering. The pastel blush of bud break on the mountain, wildflowers announcing another resurrection of color and life every spring. The half-death of hardwood autumn ripening to a climax of color before release and fall.
The Stanley's unexpected kindness, their long relationship with family and land, and their scenic farm with its clear stream and mountain right out their door helped create a nostalgia for a life I had never known. I had imagined such a life, at least the attachment-to-landscape part, but only in the vague yearnings of daydream.
Today, Page and I have lived on our land -- forested land with trails, literally the back forty -- for twenty-eight years. And I now know, of course, that I had idealized Mr. Stanley's life-long connection to place, and overly romanticized living on rural land out in the country. Some days all I see is work that needs to be done when I drive up our road. But there are other days, more and more days as I grow older, that after the pleasant fatigue of physical labor I sit by the creek and watch the water curl white over a low ledge. I sit there in silence save birdsong and creek music. And on good days, too rare still, the hamster wheel of constant work and worry and striving slows its whirring to full stop. The door creaks open and all the dreads to come and all the pressures to see and do now -- before it's too late -- stop their spinning and spill out. Leaving me, now an old gray-bearded man, at peace under the trees beside the stream. I feel my attachment to this ancient piece of Earth grow a little more. Maybe, just maybe, if I work at it, I might sink roots through topsoil yet.
I finished the route's longest stretch, rising along the eastern slope of Rocky Mountain before descending to the Aska Road crossing at Deep Gap, with a little over 5 miles worth of feet clicked onto the wheel's counter. I sat down for lunch, an egg biscuit I had bought in Blue Ridge in the morning, and studied the sun's westward angle. Well into the afternoon already.
I retrieved one of the two canteens I had cached at the Aska Road crossing and started back to work. A few tenths mile beyond the first narrow cove of Blue Ridge Lake, I wheeled up to gastly sight, a grotesque gauntlet I had never encountered before, or since, along a Southern Appalachian trail. A possum, a Red-tailed Hawk, a raccoon, and a striped skunk -- all dead and bedraggled, all putrid and drawing a buzz of flies -- hung in order 4 or 5 feet apart along the right side of the treadway. The necks of the mammals were all wedged and tied into the forks of overhanging branches; the buteo's taloned feet were tied with cord so that the fierce curve of its hooked beak faced the passing hiker. The lowermost tails and head of the dead fauna, probably roadkills, dangled 6 to 9 inches above my head a little more than half an arm's length away.
After processing the staged presentation for what it was -- an obvious, over-the-top warning -- I kept my eyes front, head down, and wheeled away. I noticed a narrow path leading to the right but did not slow down or turn my head to look into its entrance. I kept moving and minding my own business. I had never witnessed this kind of dead-animal display before, but I had heard about rotting-critter, skull-and-crossbones mobiles in Panama while serving as an Army MP.
I finished the route and my water at the same time. Quick and easy calculations from my wheel's clicking counter convinced me the backtrack would be nearly 9 miles long*. I was hot and tired and had a three-hour drive back home to Athens. I was out of water, but had the canteen cached at Aska Road. I didn't consider the dead-animal stop sign, at least not to the level of forming words in my mind, but I wasn't eager to place myself -- an outsider with a measuring wheel and notebook who could give police fairly precise distances to the sidepath -- in double jeopardy. The sun-angle told me it was already late in the afternoon. I decided to hitchhike back to my car and bet the measuring wheel would convince most folks I wasn't a vagabond.
The thumbing went fairly well once I had walked to a paved county road. The wheel worked. Everyone asked what it was and what I was doing with it. They asked if I worked for the government. No one made the usual wisecrack about it being a unicycle. As requested, my next to last ride dropped me off at Deep Gap so I could recover my last full canteen. My final lift let me out at the entrance of Stanley Creek Road, its entire length dirt-gravel back then.
A short wait convinced me I had better start walking. My notebook reminded me that the farmhouse with the old barn butted up against the road was a little less than 3 miles away, and the trailhead and my vehicle were about a mile further. I knew the number of homes quickly dwindled after the first mile, so I decided to walk slowly until the driveways petered out, then pick up the pace.
No one drove down the road. I stashed my measuring wheel in the brush along an easy-to-remember fenceline and began striding faster into the still-warm summer evening. Just before early dusk sidled out of the forest, I noticed the first of the old outbuildings, a small barn weathered the color of driftwood. I now knew I was about to pass the Stanley homeplace, an old farmhouse set close to the right side of the road just ahead. The fire-warden sign I had first seen in 1979 was still there.
An older couple sat relaxing on the front porch, their day's work done, awaiting dusk and the relative coolness of the fading day. I assumed they were the Stanleys, the man a direct blood descendent still farming beside his settler family's namesake stream. The gray-haired woman wore a simple cotton dress; the gray-haired man wore denim bib overalls, the country farmer's work uniform at that time. They appeared to be in their early seventies, perhaps a little older; it was hard to tell from my vantage point of thirty-five. I gave them a wave as I walked by. The heavy-set man stood up and said hello, then quickly appraised me -- a bearded, sweat-drenched stranger carrying a daypack and stout hiking stick -- before calling out in a strong and friendly voice, "young man, you look mighty hot and thirsty. Come on up, sit a spell, and drink some ice-cold lemonade."
He didn't have to ask twice; the mountain valley was still hot and humid, and I had guzzled the last of my cached quart more than a mile back. I walked the few paces to the porch, shook his work-callused hand, and sat in the proffered rocking chair, the best seat. He introduced himself as Garfield Stanley and his wife as Froney.
After I answered their questions, one answer leading to another, Mrs. Stanley admonished me against hitchhiking in a gentle motherly way. I grinned and replied, "If I hadn't hitchhiked, if I hadn't trusted strangers, I wouldn't be on your porch drinking all this wonderful cold lemonade, and besides that, inviting a stranger with a big stick up to your porch isn't exactly playing it safe." She smiled and pointed to her husband. "This country mouse is no fool. We knew you were a hiker before we invited you up to our porch. Garfield was standing beside the barn when you, a bearded man wearing a ballcap, slowed your vehicle as you passed through here around ten this morning. He ran some errands in Blue Ridge this afternoon and came back on Rock Creek Road. He saw your Subaru at the trailhead about two hours ago. We knew you were a hiker, and men who spend their days walking in the woods with a notebook, like the one on your pack over there, are not men to fear when they come to your front porch."
I steered the conversation to the mountains, the wonderful view from their front porch, and his pioneering family. He told me his kin folks had settled the valley early, back before the Civil War. Mr. Stanley told me his great-grandfather, Rickles Stanley, migrated from North Carolina to the Georgia mountains in 1842. He married Jane Hughes, and they had eleven mountaineer children. Rickles built a two-room log cabin a little more than half a mile further east in the valley. The cabin was still standing.
Garfield Stanley was born and raised at his parent's homeplace near Fall Branch Falls less than half a mile further west in the Stanley Creek valley. The area is forest service property now; I had hiked the short path to the falls earlier in the year. Family stories told of wolves howling and panthers screaming and bears fattening like hogs on the chestnut mast that poured down upon the Earth every year. Stanley men were killed, essentially hunted down and murdered, because they did not want to fight against the Union during the Civil War.
While Mr. Stanley talked about the old days -- chestnut blossoms whitening the woods every spring before the blight, bad roads, deep snows, the cutting of the forests, people walking miles to pick up their mail at his home -- I drank and drank most of a big pitcher of lemonade at their insistence. After forty minutes of conversation and ice-cold lemonade, he gave me a ride as stars began to light up the night sky.
Mr. Stanley pulled up to my hand-me-down clunker at another family place-name natural feature: Stanley Gap. Before I shut the door of his very old Chevy sedan, I told him about the lineup of dead animals hanging alongside the Rich Mountain Trail near the lake. I told him about the sidepath and what I suspected was going on there in the woods, then waited for his reply. He agreed with my assessment. Mr. Stanley said he had never encountered a warning string of carcasses, but had heard of their existence. He said it was common knowledge that there were plenty of well-cultivated marijuana patches growing in the national forest. "You know how it is, some folks are always looking for a way to make easy money, legal or not, without having to work hard. Around here, most everyone knows who the pot growers are. When you see a boy who hasn't done an honest lick of work for a good while riding around in a fancy new pickup, showing off, you know he's a criminal of some sort, most likely a dope grower or dope dealer."
Before leaving, I asked Mr. Stanley about the life he had lived in this small Mountain South valley in the land of his ancestors. I explained my reasons for asking. He answered my questions thoughtfully, honestly. He started out by saying that he had been born in a time and place where life's expectations were limited, probably close to rock bottom compared to now. He had grown up with no expectations of traveling the world in peace time, or even traveling out west to the mountainous country across the Mississippi. So the fact that he had not traveled out west, to Yosemite or Yellowstone, chafed hardly at all.
After World War II, he had seriously considered selling the farm and moving to a city to work a factory job. But he could not and would not break those ties gently holding him in place. He could not give up all that he had, all that he knew, and all that he was to live among strangers for more money but less of everything else he valued. "I made the right decision … for me."
Though he was small-farm poor, he was rich in time, rich in forest service land to roam, and rich in the freedom to work without hurry or worry. He was lucky. He could begin and end his work for the day at the hours of his choosing. And when he was finished for the day, whether it was early in the afternoon or nearly dark, he could sit on the porch or beside Stanley Creek and take his rest in peace. Best of all, he had the time, freedom, and desire to enjoy the beauty of the mountains as the seasons rolled round and round.
I thanked him again for the lemonade and for the ride to the family gap. On the way home I realized that Mr. Stanley's hospitality had been a most welcome counterweight for the day's affront. His uncommon kindness and a couple of quarts of lemonade had erased the bad taste from the day and had raised his side of the scale above the other: the graphic threat of violence, a most crude and calculated unkindness on a public-land trail.
October, a few months later, final afternoon of a three-day trip. Working on directions, I had driven toward Stanley Gap from the west on Rock Creek Road. As I passed through the small farm, I spotted Mr. Stanley sitting on the gate of an old wooden wagon next to a similarly thick-set, middle-aged man who shared his facial features. The size of the pile of unshucked ears in the wagon behind the men meant they had started working early when the air was cool and the grass was still wet with dew. They had spent the morning harvesting corn by hand from their dark-soiled bottomland field. They had made steady, unhurried work of it, taking breaks when they were ready -- no piecework stress, no time clock, no overbearing boss.
A cold front had shouldered through during the night, towing low humidity, a clear blue sky, and a far-reaching clarity in its wake. The mountain's long ridgeline and the steep slant of its forested slope were colorful with the flaming reds and soft yellows of a Southern Highland autumn. And now in the early afternoon, Mr. Stanley and the man I assumed was his son were eating lunch and chatting in cloudless sunshine. At that moment they looked content, comfortable with their lives, at peace with their place on Earth, their work, and the beauty of the day. I stopped and stared at the autumn landscape and the companionable ease of the two men at rest. I tried to take it all in, tried to hold the image -- the sight and symbol of the moment -- tight in my mind's eye.
Over the years, I continued to drive by the old farm when I was hiking near Blue Ridge or passing through the general area heading to mountains further north. I would make a side trip just to check on the place, as if its continuance had some bearing on my well-being. The Stanleys abandoned their yearly corn crop and planted pasture grass instead. Since there was no fencing for livestock, the grass had probably been sown for hay cuttings. Stanley Creek Road had become paved right up to the mountain farm, but remained dirt-gravel for some miles to the west. I never saw Mr. and Mrs. Stanley, Garfield and Froney, or the man I assumed was their son again. But the farm always looked well tended and worked, a cared-for continuity that had become an envious and wayfaring stranger's vicarious roots.
In late March of 2012, while on my way to a short trip to the Cohutta Wilderness, I decided to make a spur-of-the-moment detour to the Stanley place. I hadn't visited the old farm since driving and road-walking the Benton MacKaye Trail along Stanley Creek Road in 2002 and 2003. I knew the land and buildings might be dramatically changed, the farm house flattened and gone, but felt compelled to go anyway.
I drove Aska Road over the Elisha Stanley bridge in a light rain, turned onto Stanley Creek Road, followed the paved two-track as it wound its curving way to the west. I parked in front of a real estate sign advertising land for sale. The agents were from an outfit in Atlanta. The sign was one of those large ones depicting a formerly intact property divided into lined plats of various shapes and acreages. The "Stanley Tract, 50.9 acres," was being broken up into four parcels -- the largest 30.51 acres, the smallest 2.5. Two were labeled as sold; two were still for sale.
The old Stanley place stood as a symbol of a way of life and making a living rapidly vanishing from the land. Over the decades I had witnessed the transformation in the valleys of the southern mountains: empty homes standing silent and unkempt -- fields in front, forest up the slope in back -- as former small rural farms were being carved up into platted tracts.
The house was empty, holes punched in the front windows by thrown rocks, the evidence lying just inside. Someone had helped himself to the front door. The house looked smaller and the porch, which ran the length of the front and wrapped around the left side, seemed narrower than I remembered. The kitchen was small and lacked the amenities and style that come standard in today's middle-class homes. The house looked shabby and forlorn in the lowering sky gone darker gray with mist. It had been a simple, small, inexpensive home even back then -- shingled sides, tinned roof -- that had now outlived its usefulness, its marketability. It was now a hindrance, good only for a day's wage for the men who would bulldoze it down and haul it away.
Across the dirt-gravel two-track, the fields and forests looked essentially the same as they had a decade ago. Much longer than wide, the fields filled the fertile bottomland from Stanley Creek Road close to Stanley Creek. The Stanleys had left a forested buffer to help keep the creek clear and cold enough for trout. Across the rock-bedded stream, the north-facing slope of Dogwood Knob rises to its highpoint at the modest elevation of 2,943 feet. Gray puffs of rain mist clung to the lower slopes; the crest was a veiled outline of darker gray. I thanked Mr. Stanley for his kindness and example, as I always did when I was there, then drove away toward the rest of the long weekend in the Cohuttas.
In early February of 2019, I made one last pilgrimage to the past, to the old Stanley place. While in the area, I spoke at length with Ralph Stanley, a great nephew who knew Garfield Stanley quite well. By way of further introduction, I told him the story of my dead-animal and lemonade day in greater detail than I had over the phone.
I didn't have to ask my first question. When I finished my story, he told me Garfield's behavior -- inviting a complete stranger up to the porch for conversation and lemonade -- was totally in character and typical of his great uncle, who, despite being "small-farm poor," was a kind and generous man. A man who, when he was strong and able, was always willing to help people out.
Ralph Stanley told me a great many things about his Stanley-family heritage. Some of the information verified what Garfield had told me on his porch; other facts were new to me. Garfield and his son, Coleman, built chimneys to augment their meager income from the farm. Like many rural people of her generation, Froney worked a large vegetable garden until she was well up in her seventies. Much to my surprise, I learned that both Garfield and Froney had faces that lied about their age. Mr. Stanley had been a very young looking eighty-five and Mrs. Stanley a young looking eighty-two when they invited me up to their porch in the early summer of 1986.
The Rickles Stanley homeplace, the 1842 cabin cared for by a family unrelated to the Stanleys, was still standing in 2019.
The idyllic scene of father and son sitting on the wagon against the background of Southern Appalachian autumn resonated with me for good reason. Both sets of my immigrant grandparents hauled their hopes and dreams and sparse belongings to boats bound for America. My parents left their hometown for opportunity and prosperity. I left my hometown because the countryside was a right-angle grid of row-crop corn and soybeans, the land's remnant wildness tethered to fence rows and river bottoms, most of its life and beauty put to the plow. In 1986 I felt utterly rootless, no strong ties or loyalty to any landscape or community, one foot always on the threshold, the other never taking the next step across, mind always restless and wondering if somewhere else -- out in the Rocky Mountain west or up in the northwoods -- would be a better fit.
Garfield Stanley was born belonging. He learned the legendry of his ancestors along with his ABCs. Mr. Stanley lived his entire allotment of days in a single small Southern Appalachian valley closely connected to his kin and local community. He lived with a profound and enduring sense of place, a strong attachment to the land where his ancestors lived and worked and died. His years spun round and round to the work and beauty of his Mountain South landscape: its pulses and rhythms, its seasons and cycles of planting and harvesting, birthing and butchering. The pastel blush of bud break on the mountain, wildflowers announcing another resurrection of color and life every spring. The half-death of hardwood autumn ripening to a climax of color before release and fall.
The Stanley's unexpected kindness, their long relationship with family and land, and their scenic farm with its clear stream and mountain right out their door helped create a nostalgia for a life I had never known. I had imagined such a life, at least the attachment-to-landscape part, but only in the vague yearnings of daydream.
Today, Page and I have lived on our land -- forested land with trails, literally the back forty -- for twenty-eight years. And I now know, of course, that I had idealized Mr. Stanley's life-long connection to place, and overly romanticized living on rural land out in the country. Some days all I see is work that needs to be done when I drive up our road. But there are other days, more and more days as I grow older, that after the pleasant fatigue of physical labor I sit by the creek and watch the water curl white over a low ledge. I sit there in silence save birdsong and creek music. And on good days, too rare still, the hamster wheel of constant work and worry and striving slows its whirring to full stop. The door creaks open and all the dreads to come and all the pressures to see and do now -- before it's too late -- stop their spinning and spill out. Leaving me, now an old gray-bearded man, at peace under the trees beside the stream. I feel my attachment to this ancient piece of Earth grow a little more. Maybe, just maybe, if I work at it, I might sink roots through topsoil yet.
*The Rich Mountain Trail measured 8.8 miles in 1986. By 1997 Rich Mountain's treadway no longer existed by that name. The 5-mile Stanley Gap Trail leads hikers from its namesake saddle to its northeastern end at Deep Gap off Aska Road. Across Aska Road, part of the Green Mountain Trail system piggy-backed on the old Rich Mountain track toward Blue Ridge Lake.
