Editor’s Note: This is the 25th installment of an upcoming book by Tuckasegee writer Thomas Crowe. The book is a memoir about a time he spent living alone in a cabin in the woods along the Green River in WNC. The memoir, Zoro’s Field, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in April of this year.

When a naturalist is thoroughly comfortable and settled, it is time to uproot him.

— Donald Culross Peattie, “A Transplanting,” The Flowering Earth

It wasn’t long after Mac had died that the veil of protection lifted, confirming my premonitions and exposing the pristine world where I was living to the gremlins of post-industrial and mono-cultural America. Various family members appeared from across the country and soon there was talk of clear-cutting the 250-acre mountain farm as well as cutting down the old orchard in order to graze some Scottish brand of long-haired cattle. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before the sound of chainsaws and timber trucks could be heard from holler and ridge-top all across the land. While this was all going on, I raised another garden and tried to carry on, as usual.

But, as the song goes: the thrill was gone. With the changed consciousness of a younger generation and the loss of my mentors, the woods around me had taken on a different personality. Even though, in many respects, things remained little changed, the subtle and not-so-subtle differences that were occurring were enough to put me on edge. The comfort zone of wildness that I had felt for four years was gone. Instead of living in nature, I felt like I was simply living in the country — with an increasing amount of machine noise, development and unenlightened vibe. While it was true that I had been spoiled during the almost four years that I had lived next to Zoro’s field, and was living, some would say, on borrowed time, it was still hard for me to sit still and watch while what had taken years, even generations, to build in beauty and, then, protect, began falling away all around me.

Even though I was generously given the opportunity to stay on and live in the cabin that I had helped Walt Johnson build, in my mind I had already left, and so respectfully declined all offers to remain and essentially live and work the old mountain farm as a hired hand. With my mind made up, now I faced the problem of where to go and what to do. Luckily, or unluckily as the case may be, I knew a fellow on the other side of Saluda who worked as a carpenter for a young man who had a small construction business, and it wasn’t long before I was riding to work every morning (while still living in the cabin) all the way to Black Mountain where his boss was building a house and where I was now working as part of the construction crew.

Let it be said that just going back to work for someone else on a regular basis was a huge adjustment, not to mention that I was spending the better part of my days out in a world alien to my energies and more primitive values. While the people I worked with were good-hearted enough, the pace and quality of life they led and which I was surrounded by each day was a true shock to my system. I felt a little like Dersu Usala in the 1970s film of the same name about a Siberian woodsman who was brought into a Russian city for the first time to live in the apartment of a military surveyor who had befriended him, and all he (Dersu) did was sit on the floor of the living-room and stare into the window of the woodstove, watching the fire — the fire being the only thing in city life that he could relate to as a reminder of his former life. The kind of shock I was experiencing was also very much like the kind of culture shock I had experienced when re-entering the U.S. after living abroad during the years immediately following my graduation from college and before I set out for California. Then, as now, I felt very much a stranger in a strange land.

I have been back in what most people call “the real world” for more than 20 years. The “real world” of the 21st century is very different from the world and the “real work” that I did and experienced in the cabin next to Zoro’s field, and in some ways I’m still only getting used to it, if one can ever really get used to such a world that I inhabit now, with its mindlessness, its madness and machines. When I finally made my departure and said my goodbyes to my bee-loud glade, my Walden Pond, I took my culture shock and moved across town into the attic of an old wooden two-storied farmhouse owned by a family who had moved there from Indiana as a place to get away from the rat race and to start a family and a health-conscious bakery. Living with the Thomas family, I became an extended family member, and, in essence, became “Thomas Thomas.” I liked my little attic room, and the time I lived with the Thomases and their young family, as it served as a soft transition between the world I had come from and the world into which I was headed. And while the Thomases were gentle and of-the-earth, I still had a hard time acclimating and adjusting to modern life. Still with my long hair and a very long beard, I scared people on the streets of Hendersonville or Black Mountain where I worked. And their reactions to my appearance scared me.

But I think that it was mostly the noise and the pace of life that was so disturbing during those first weeks and months away from the woods. And I’m not sure, 20 years later, that I’m any more comfortable with all that. The difference may be that, now, I can tune it out, or at least pretend to. Then, I hadn’t developed the proper coping skills, and so was thrown into the midst of the world of commerce and crass materialism like a baby is thrown into deep water by its parents in order to teach it to swim. I was “new-born” in this modern world, and my thin nerve-endings were being bombarded with all manner of sensations and sensibilities on a daily basis that I had not confronted for several years. Imagine: taking a monk who had lived for most of his life in a secluded monastery in the mountains of Tibet to a Nine Inch Nails concert as his first introduction to the modern world. In a sense, this is what my re-entry into the world of 20th century America, in 1982, was like. And I was, for a very long time, depressed.

My body was as depressed as was my mind during that transition time, as I had to struggle to distance myself from my former life and lifestyle in order to stay sane. Just as separation in a love relationship causes great pain and emotional suffering, so I suffered from the loss of my relationship with my life in the woods. Every day I wanted to go back, even knowing that it wouldn’t be the same as it had been during the idyllic years. So attuned and accustomed had my mind and body become to the quiet, the calm, the slow, natural pace of things, that it was going to take a re-wiring of some sort, a make-over, in order for me to fit into the work-a-day world.

In time, I began my make-over by cutting my hair short and cutting off my beard — an act born of necessity in order to find a job. While solving one problem, this act of desperation created another: an identity crisis caused from seeing myself essentially hairless for the first time in many years. By this time, I had made my way all the way over to Jackson County after having lived in Black Mountain and then in the hills around Marshall and Mars Hill where I had been a victim of a major car accident — yet another shock to my system. While recovering from the accident, I had thrown in for a time with a renegade band of Sufis, helping to stage large healing conferences by spiritual and medical teachers from all over the world and from all religious backgrounds. This connection, too, I think, helped me, in some ways, to adjust, or if nothing else, to heal, as I participated in spiritual practices designed to help sensitive people such as myself become balanced in a brash world.

Little by little, day by day, month by month, year by year, I’ve made my way back into the “real” world. But as much as I have found a way to be functional in this world, I still think of the natural world, the world I knew there beside Zoro’s field, as the one that is real. This modern world seems little more than a dream by comparison. An illusion. Now, even though I am living in a remote farming community in the backcountry of Jackson County, I still have to get in my old pick up truck and drive many miles to shop or to send packages for my publishing business — in short, to do everything that needs to be done to stay functional. My days are spent in front of a computer, or on the phone, or in recording studios. My spare time is spent working outdoors with a chainsaw (to cut my firewood) and with a noisy gas-powered tiller (to plow my garden). The cars on old highway 281 — which used to be a dirt and gravel road — that runs in front of my 130-year-old farmhouse, go back and forth all day long, leaving only short periods of time between cars when I can hear only natural sounds, like those of the birds singing in the trees or at the bird-feeders. In short, I have become part and parcel of the industrial world.

Yes, there is a part of me that longs for my wild life in the woods. But now, at age 55, I can’t go back. Even if given the perfect opportunity, I couldn’t sustain myself in the way that I did when I was living next to and growing my food in Zoro’s field. I’ve gotten older. My body won’t do all I ask of it anymore. Just growing a small garden gets more difficult each year. A day behind the tiller leaves me exhausted for 24 hours, if not longer. A few hours lording over a chainsaw sees me the next day in the office of the local chiropractor. Hoeing a row of corn, I have to stop and rest for several minutes before I can go on to the next row. So, to think about living a self-sufficient lifestyle at this age would be pure fantasy. Even if I had the desire or the will to go back to living in the wild, my body couldn’t go there. Could no longer do the “wild work,” or Gary Snyder’s “real work.”

For years after I left the woods, I dreamed of the cabin and of the hollers and hills there, near the Green River. Only many years later did I go back to revisit the place as I began work on writing this book from diaries and notebooks I had filled during those four years. A friend had told me not to go. “You’ll only be disappointed,” he said. I wish, now, that I had listened to his advice and had left my impressions of the place in my mind’s eye, rather than going back starry-eyed and with expectations that it would all be there, the same as I had left it. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

What I encountered on that return visit was a cabin that was a disintegrating shell of its former self. Roof collapsed from a tree that had fallen on it and entered the bedroom. Door akimbo and off its hinges. Inside ravaged by animals, wind and weather. An outhouse that lay flat on its side, more useful to a snake. And Zoro’s field grown up in heavy grass and locust saplings, as if the field had never been tilled. Like Walt, Zoro and Mac, the old place and the field had succumbed to the inevitable entropy that is the engine which “drives the force,” as Dylan Thomas put it, and which, too, plays the card which inevitably trumps all others.

I have been back only once since that initial return to the cabin and the woods I haunted those many years ago down in Polk County, and what I saw on the last trip was a horror almost beyond reckoning, yet, at the same time, so indicative of the nature of the beast we call “progress” and the way of the world now in its post-millennium phase. Not only has the cabin been torn down and razed, but Zoro’s field, rhubarb and all, has been replaced with a mud and gravel lot and a large metal building which is used to store large earth-moving equipment. Bull-dozers, backhoes, dump trucks and ditch-witches. So much out of place is this building, painted a gaudy orange color, and so out of context with everything else around it, that it is not only surreal, it is the stuff of nightmares, of sadistic dreams. “They‘ve paved paradise/and put up a parking lot,” words in a song from the 1960s came to mind as I stood there looking at this monstrosity where broccoli and brussels sprouts, cauliflower and corn had once grown. As I brushed aside the tears that were rolling down my cheeks, I was truly wishing I had not come back, this time. This image would, now, remain with me as part of my memory of the place and my time in the woods. Would that I had only listened to the wise advise of my friend before my first return to my old Howard Gap Road haunt a few years ago. And now, by returning again, I’d only rubbed salt into that wound.

Although the air quality here in the mountains has gotten worse and the housing developments more invasive, my life, these days, here in Tuckaseegee, is a good one. This place, too, has its own natural beauty, even with the constant traffic on 281 that rushes by the house at 60 miles an hour, and the house-shaking sound of blackhawk helicopters that fly low overhead using the river basin as practice for their inane games. While I live very much in the technological present, there are a few things that I’ve brought with me from my life in Polk County and which have continued to be part and parcel of my day-to-day life for the past 25 years. I have continued to use a woodstove and to heat with wood. I have fed the birds through all seasons with a series of birdfeeders and with a variety of seeds. I continue to work with the Cherokee over on the reservation in various ways and regarding a variety of cultural issues. I have grown a good-sized garden every year, growing enough food to more than supplement diet and income. And I still don’t wear a watch!

Perhaps the biggest difference from my days living alone in the wild, is that, now, I enjoy a life shared with a woman I love and with whom I share many passions and interests, and who, too, loves nature and the wild world. On this little farm, I live in the world of the here-and-now, which, while it may sound O-so-very-Zen, is really the only time there is. This is something that I learned from Zoro and from living next to Zoro’s field. There is no future and there is no past. There is only the moment we are consciously living in — which is a part of the singularity of all other moments. I live in that moment, extended, here along the Tuckaseegee River in the Little Canada watershed, trying as best I can to be steward to my behavior, this place, and the conservation values I have come to hold dear. Over the years, I have become involved in various cultural and environmental activist organizations in this bioregion and I speak out, expressing my views, by writing letters or editorials to regional newspapers and by writing articles for magazines — taking what I have learned from my years in Zoro’s field and applying those lessons to the present and in the larger world of western North Carolina, and beyond.

Looking back, now, I’m thinking that Thomas Wolfe may have been right, after all, and that you can’t go home again. In some ways, Zoro’s field will always be home to me. Those years were the most informative and profound of my life. But I can’t go back to Zoro’s field. This farm in Tuckaseegee is, now, my home. Instead of pining away for my halcyon years in Polk County, I simply write about them, hoping they will entertain or nurture others who have been less fortunate than I in experiencing such a life. Every day I pray for a conversion experience deep in the psychic structure of the human population that will be a catalyst for the healing of the natural world. I’m afraid that anything short of this won’t get the environmental conservation job done. May these words be a start, along with those of my naturalist writer friends, toward the restoration of beauty as an innately-embraced value in the human psyche. And, in turn, may the rivers flow and may the flowers bloom. And may it continue ....



MAY IT CONTINUE

May the brown earth and the green leaves

thrive in color and in grace.

May it continue.

May the clear air and the cumulocirrus clouds

be there in the sky and in each breath, always.

May it continue.

May the water made of sweet minerals and salt

in small streams and large rivers

flow forever and forever flow to the seas.

May it continue.

May the sun shine warm and bright

and the moon give light at night — shining from shook foil.

May it continue.

May the beautiful birds of Hawaii and

the luminous parrots of Peru fly far and fast

and may their number grow.

May it continue.

May the deer and the elk, the antelope and the ibis

move and migrate, leap and lope across plain

and wooded plateau.

May it continue.

May the whale and the dolphin and the manatee

swim deep in dark oceans and lagoons and sing.

May it continue.

May the elephants forever in families roam,

trunk to tail, trumpeting bliss.

May it continue.

May waves of warm frost linger in bush and blaze

that puts fire in the peat of loam.

And let lick cry from ripe vine.

May it continue.

May the rose climb through

the cold murmur of morning dirt.

May dark mulch coax tendrils from sleep.

May it continue.

May wild words come flying on green coils and

may juice in rock rustle with blue moss

in the sound of song.

May it continue.

Thomas Rain Crowe
Tuckaseegee, NC February, 2004