[This is the first monthly installment of a book by Tuckasegee writer Thomas Crowe. Each month we will publish a new chapter from Crowe’s nature memoir titled Zoro’s Field, about a man’s experiences living self-sufficiently in the woods (wild).]

In 1979, I moved from northern California back to my boyhood home of Western North Carolina — to a cabin deep in the woods along the Green River in Polk County, not far from the town of Saluda. There, in this cabin — which I had helped an old mountain man named Walt Johnson build years before — I lived, for four years, a kind of Walden-like life of my own. Without electricity, without any sort of monetary income, without modern-day transportation, I lived self-sufficiently there on property that had, generations before, belonged to the Guice family and had been a working mountain farm. During these years I worked, walked the woods, and wrote in a journal about my daily activities and my thoughts on living this solitary life.

Now, some 20 years later, I find myself going back into my writings and my memories of those halcyon years lived outside of the American mainstream, and responding to the encouragement of friends and family have undertaken the task of writing a book to try and capture a life as it was lived in and of the natural world. A book in praise of a way of life in these Southern Appalachian mountains that has all but disappeared, as well as in praise of wilderness and things wild. With the 150th anniversary of the publication of Thoreau’s Walden coming up in the year 2004, the timing would seem to be right for such a book.

In monthly installments, here in the Smoky Mountain News, I will be writing chapters that chronicle my life and work in the woods of Polk County through the cycle of the four seasons, writing insightful stories that give a flare and flavor for the people and the place, and will include essays that mirror these four years from a philosophical and sometimes ideological perspective — addressing questions pertaining to the subjects of nature, community, ecological issues and nature-based spirituality. The first-person-present tense narrative, based on my journals and my memories of those years, will be the steady, foundational thread that runs through the chapters that document this sojourn into the wild world. As in Walden, there will be a weaving of perspectives, tones, and subjects, yet all of it will be based on my actual hands-on, day-to-day experiences in relation to my natural surroundings at the time.

In the installments in the coming weeks and months, there will be chapters devoted to some of the practical aspects of living self-sufficiently and alone that include: “Solitude,” “Tools,” “Digging A Root Cellar,” “Gathering Wood,” “Fishing,” “Weather,” “Food,” “The Mountain Garden,” “Garden Pests,” “Keeping Bees,” and “Making Homebrew.” On the more contemplative and philosophical side of the coin, there will be chapters on such subjects as: “Place & Home,” “Re-inhabitation,” “Simplicity,” “Mountain Language,” “Natural vs. Man-Made Time,” and “The Importance of Balance and the Environment.” Photos, taken from my back-to-the-land experience during the early 1980s, will also accompany the installment chapters, to shed something of a visual light on where I was, what I was doing, and how it looked.

Having established a frame of reference for the memories and musings on my life in the Polk County woods that will appear in these pages in the coming months, please join me, then, in my journey back, some 20 years, to a more pristine and natural life lived at a much slower pace, in my cabin next to Zoro’s field.

— Thomas Crowe • Tuckaseegee (July 2002)

Part I.

Preface

While sitting on his front porch looking out over the hills surrounding the Green River Gorge where his kin had farmed and fought the landscape and the elements for generations, and talking about “the old days,”

local legend and mountain sage Zoro Guice turned to me and said, “The best way to learn about nature and these mountains is to just go out into the woods and set down in one spot and let the nature and the teachings come to you. A man don’t need to go searching for smarts here in these hills. All he needs is a little patience. If a man goes out in the woods and just sets down in one place for long enough, all of nature’s critters and everything he needs to know will eventually pass before him like a parade.”

Just as Zoro suggested, I have planted myself in this little cabin beside his old family homestead garden field and watched as the world of Nature and its parade of weather and wildlife, like Yeats’ horsemen, pass by .... like chapters in the book of these years spent in a writer’s solitude on the edge, yet outside of, the civilized world. And here I remain.

During these years of isolation I have come to believe that we must go home again. Whether home is, quite literally, from where we are native or, elsewhere, where our place-based imagination resides. To return as “new natives” to do the work. “The real work,” as my California friend and mentor Gary Snyder says. The work that puts blisters and then smooth calluses on the hands and mind as we strive to work reciprocally and in balance and harmony with the native people and the land. The kind of work that is collected and referenced in the libraries of the lives of elder men and women, who have spent long lifetimes in one place learning and applying that knowledge to an agrarian and nature-based style of life. Knowledge taught and learned, protected and passed down, from generation to generation, bits of which are now being passed down to me, as I struggle willingly and with wonder at self-sufficiency, from a world soon to disappear.

I have come home again. Come back to the rural essences of my boyhood — where my early friends had been sons of farmers, or mill hands who grew large gardens and where I had grown up in tobacco fields and potato patches, picking beans, shucking corn and carrying water from a well ... Back to the rural mountain highlands of Western North Carolina where things are familiar, and from where I now write.

As I write these words, I think of Emerson. I remember when I was really not much more than a boy, reading his essay “Nature,” in which he says:

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone let him look at the stars! In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth.”

Emerson’s ideas come back to haunt me, these days, as I stand at rest in my garden field leaning on my hoe, or as I prepare the fire to cook my evening meal. And I wonder if it wasn’t these same lines that drove Thoreau, also, into the woods! In this sense, Emerson has been an inspiration and catalyst to us both — a torch light and helping hand to Thoreau’s two years spent on Walden Pond, and an appetent and muse to these years I have labored and slept in my little mountain cabin by Zoro’s field — trying to complete what Thoreau started almost one-hundred-and-fifty years ago and to take his experience of the body and its toil of work and reflections deeper into the heart and soul of the woods ... in amongst the big trees and dark hollers of the natural world and the world of the human spirit. To live twice the time he did at the edge of Walden Pond — to give myself a realistic opportunity to take the Walden experience and the life of relative seclusion a step further, two full seasonal cycles deeper into the heart and spirit of self-sufficiency and simple-living, into the soul of the wild. To discover, first-hand, the path to a greater sense of self-confidence and to replace an unnatural, urbane psychological fear with a common sense familiarity based on observation, all the while, living at the speed of life. [Note: By “familiar,” I mean recognizing and knowing ourselves and excelling in an environment in which we are truly, profoundly aware of our surroundings. One can not naturally and easily excel when constantly in sideways motion and trouble-shooting mode, trying to find one’s way out of the predicament of being in new territory and therefore, being lost. This applies directly to the idea of living in nature or in one place for a long time and knowing that place well.]

After years of wandering this continent and others, I have returned to this small cabin in the woods — where I live along the Green River near the great granite geologic confluence known as “the Blue Wall” and the North Carolina-South Carolina border. For almost four years, with the gift of a roof over my head, a small woodstove, and enough cleared land to garden, this has been my home.

My physical year has consisted of, firstly, nine months of laboring with and in the earth. Sewing seeds. Stewarding the wild and domestic life in a small ecosystem that is my sustenance. Harvesting and “laying by” food and firewood for the winter ... This being the work of living in the wild from March through November.

With the onset of cold weather late in the fall, I find that I am more than ready for the three months of “hard labor” within the confines of the cabin and the walls of the mind. Months that nurture reading, writing, pondering (what the mountain people refer to as “studying”), and walking the woods ... to let thoughts and ideas settle like the rich “lees” in an old mountain jug of scuppernong wine. To allow “mental gravity” to lodge into a place of calm understanding. The winter months, therefore, have been a time of exploring the wild world of image, symbol and metaphor as well as the genesis of imagined speech and inquiries into what my Cherokee friends call The Great Mystery.

Then, with the first signs of green and red buds on the trees and vines in late March — and exhausted from mind work, and with my body calling out for exercise and attention — I have, year after year, emerged from my small mountain cabin, with hoe in hand. Drawn again (like to a siren’s song) to the dirt. “Poems on the back of a hoe ...” my friend Jack Hirschman wrote to me recently from San Francisco in reference to new poems I had sent him from the woods. Poems that reflect and mirror a voice that has found its wisdom in the nine-and-three month annual calendrical cycle of letting the body and the mind live freely and simply at nature’s pace. A memory dance that my body and my mind play here in the wild Polk County woods and its subterranean world of silence that is not only familiar, but genetic; is lyrical, is song.

As I sit here writing these words, it seems to me as if I’ve been here my whole life — such is the way time has stood still for me these past four years, stretching out to meet the seasons ... one at a time, until life has become almost timeless and everything seems to merge into a larger, seamless kind of “clock.” A clock that never ticks, yet whose hands keep on turning.

Like the old scripture says: “to every season, turn, turn, turn ...” Now, the years seem more like days were when living in the world of machines and commerce, and days expand quietly and slowly into gentle years. Here in these woods, living at the pace of nature has slowed life down from a horserace to a stroll. From a rush to a ripple on the wind. What a difference this is! What a change it has made in my overall perspective of things and on my state of mind!

Here, the deer and the dove go about their business at the same speed. Neither weary of the other’s close proximity, they seem content to share the same space — neither possessive nor greedy for the right to food or a quiet place to graze and sleep. Watching them, I have tried to learn the hospitality of their ways. Their acceptance of one another. Their willingness to share. How much we humans can learn from our wilder neighbors! There are lessons for us in everything they do. In this, we would often do better to use a little less of this expanded brain of ours and act according to the dictates of our cellular memory. Let the wildness of our distant beginnings guide us as we make our way through life and the world around us. At least these are my thoughts as I make my way through the days that make up the seasons of each year and the necessary, yet gratifying, work that fills these days and that has, in this small green universe of plants and animals, been my life as I have lived here next to Zoro’s field.