Like many, I am an aficionado of the high vistas that abound here in the Smokies region. Accordingly, like many, I am also interested in the firetowers that sit atop numerous peaks throughout the region.

The wildfires that raged throughout these mountains a month or so ago reminded me of Pearly Kirkland, an old-time firetower dispatcher I visited years ago in the late 1980s at his home way down in the South Skeena community of Macon County. Pearly was a very interesting man, so I made notes. We’ll get to some of his firetower stories in a while.

Lots of folks like to study those molded relief maps of the region ... the ones that show the upraised contours of the mountain ranges. Some have even pieced together the maps for the Smokies area or even the entire Southern Blue Ridge Province from southwestern Virginia to north Georgia as wall-hangings, making it possible to contemplate in miniature the glorious terrain we call home.

It’s pleasurable to sit in an easy chair on a rainy day and ponder the way the ridges join ... or meditate as to how they might have looked before eons of erosion wore them down into their present configuration. Even more rewarding is a venture to a local vista for a panoramic look-see at the real thing.

In one sense, of course, high vistas are places that enable us to rise above our everyday humdrum existence and take in grand scenery, even when we don’t know exactly what we’re looking at. As one writer aptly phrased it, “There’s wonder and delight up there ... elbow room for the soul ... all you have to do is suspend judgment and analysis long enough simply to be there, on the mountain, experiencing it.”

Well, no one would want to fail to take in the beauty, but we also shouldn’t forget that Blue Ridge vistas are windows that allow us to see and comprehend more truly. A little “analysis” from time to time won’t hurt.

From late fall into early spring, before foliage softens the landscape and summer’s heat brings up shrouding mists, you can observe the bare bones of the land and come to a fuller understanding of the exact lay of the land. From a strategically located vista in your particular section of the Blue Ridge, you will be able to observe just where the major ranges abut and how the peaks, spurs, gaps, upland valleys, streams, rock cliffs, gorges, grassy balds, and other topographical features fall into place. You will come away with a more precise notion of your place in the world.

For that reason I have always envied firetower wardens and talked with them whenever possible. To a man (and woman) they have always presented themselves as down-to-earth sorts who do not romanticize their work in the least bit. I suspect, however, that more than one of them is, in reality, a closet romantic.

When I heard about Pearly Kirkland, I called him up and asked for a visit to which readily agreed. South Skeenah is located — along with the adjacent communities of North and Middle Skeenah — several miles south of Franklin.

In case you’re wondering about the place name, I’ll fill you in on what I found. According to the North Carolina Gazetteer, the name Skeenah “is said to be an Indian word meaning ‘Abode of Satan,’” which hardly seems an apt description of the lovely rolling countryside.

How Pearly, a Swain County native who was 88 when I visited him, came to live down in South Skeenah is a story that’s closely interwoven with his experiences as a longtime firetower dispatcher at three high-elevation sites in Western North Carolina. On that bright autumn day over a decade ago, as the memories slowly flooded his mind, Pearly relaxed on his front porch, talking and laughing about the old days “up on the mountain at the top of the world.”

“I was born on Chambers Creek in what now is the park,” he told me. “My father, Albert, was from Bear Creek and my mother, Dolly, was from Bone Valley on Hazel Creek, both places being in the Smokies in what is now the park. I went to the Chambers Creek School, which was a church house, but I was mainly interested in the outdoors, in hunting and fishing and walking around.

“Jack, one of my brothers, became park ranger at Forney Creek and that’s how I got into the firetower business. I’d been a logger at $1.50 a day, 75 cents of which went for board, so I agreed to go up and be lookout from the tower at High Rocks, which is on Welch Ridge between Hazel and Forney creeks. You can see all the south end of the North Carolina side of the Smokies from there and into the Nantahalas.

“I walked up to the tower from Chambers Creek and lived up in the thing. What did I eat? Why I just ate rough rations — whatever was easy to fix because I had to carry the food up with me on my back on a pretty steep trail. I’d stay there the fire season until it got wet enough to come down.

“That’s where I picked up the habit of talking to myself. No one else up there except the bears, so I just got to talking to myself about this and that. I still talk with myself about the same things. Never have broke that habit. You get pretty much lonely in a tower during a long dry spell of nobody to talk to.

“The bears was a bother up there at High Rocks. Scared me some. They would come and break the windows out trying to get in. So we put up wooden shutters.

“I was at High Rocks for about three and a half years or so, beginning in the early 1940s, as I remember. The last time I was up at the tower was when they were flooding Lake Fontana. When I came down from the tower the lake was flooded and everybody had left Chambers Creek, which was along the north shore.

“Why my wife and family had up and moved and I didn’t even know where I lived! It took me awhile to find out they were down here in Skeenah, which is where we’ve been ever since. My wife, Hattie, was a Woody from Forney Creek. She died three years ago. We raised seven children.

“Then I was several years at Albert Mountain here in Macon County between Bearpen Gap and the head of Hurricane Creek. That was where I got my biggest scare. A storm came up that was awful. Lightning was everywhere and constant.

“It was kindly eerie. Oh my gosh, I’m not exaggerating, the bolts would strike the tower and balls of fire just flowed down the wires that grounded the tower. They lit up everything like pure daylight.

“From Albert Mountain the forest service moved me as dispatcher over to the tower at Cowee Bald, which is located in Macon County near where it corners with Jackson and Swain in the Big Laurel country. I was 10 years at Cowee, which I liked best because it was easiest to get to.

“Did I like it up there in those towers? Why no, I didn’t. It was lonely with no family and nobody to talk with. To me it was just a job. When I went up to High Rocks it was hard times and firetower work was a way to make some money and support your family. That’s all. No, sir, I don’t recollect anything romantic about it whatsoever.”

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

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