The guy who lives below me recently clear-cut the side of the mountain above his doublewide. Last year he burned and poisoned the kudzu, along with every other plant on the same mountainside. Part of me is furious, even livid, that he would seemingly cavalierly destroy a piece of land, once wooded, that I have to drive by every day.

But another part of me struggles to understand his reasons, and what lies behind them, and that part of me attempts being philosophical and open to his side of the story because this is where we both live. When the bulldozers stopped me as I headed out early this afternoon, I asked a guy whose chainsaw was quiet for the moment why my neighbor was clearcutting.

“I reckon ’cause he’s afraid these trees ’ould fall on his house” is the sensible response I get. And I think, maybe so, although most of these trees were far enough away from his home that only an avalanche of Rocky Mountain proportions could have taken them to where he lives.

More philosophically, I think we do things to the land for a couple of reasons - to assert that we were here, that is, to make some kind of mark, or because we need money and the land in some way can provide it. But I want to believe his motivation is well intentioned, and so I try to puzzle it all out. I don’t know my neighbor, except to wave in the unusual event that we pass each other on the dirt road that leads to our homes. I think he works nights, because there’s no vehicle at his trailer when I drive by at 6:30 a.m., but his truck is there when I return around 4:30, and is always gone if I run or walk by much later in the evening. I’d never know he’s there at all, except that he does target practicing, sometimes with an automatic that sounds like a machine gun.

He has stickers in the back windows of his trailer that are clearly visible from the road, kid stickers, animals and toys, that some child or children put there before they left, because there are no kids there now. So I think, maybe he’s like I am. Maybe cutting down the trees is his way of saying “I’m here. I matter.” Maybe cutting all the trees is a diversion from what really troubles him, like writing this about him is both a way for me to say “I’m here, and I matter,” as well as a way I can work through what he’s doing and be diverted from my own troubles, all in one fell swoop. He chainsaws and bulldozes and target practices, and I write this and stare out my window toward the Balsams.

We both have stories that can be gleaned between these lines. Mine is that I want to be OK with what he’s doing, with what a Milan Kundera character calls “the uglification of the world.” For a long time I’ve identified with that character’s grief over what people do to landscapes. But in the past few years, perhaps because I must do so in order to survive, I’ve begun working toward an openness in seeing other people’s relationships to the land where we live. To recognize only the validity of my perspective, an aesthete’s perspective, is to be narrow and judgmental, even elitist, in not attempting to understand the ethos which lies beneath the decisions other people make. Perhaps what creates in me the need to straddle this fence between two worlds - that of the , well, redneck, and that of the, well, treehugger - is the fact that I live in both worlds, worlds which increasingly seem about to go to war with each other.

My background is Appalachian. Most of my growing up was done in these mountains in a trailer just above N.C. 19 as you enter the Nantahala Gorge. My father, like most people from here, did and does whatever it takes to make a living, and that has included getting rock off our family’s land, by hand, and selling it to developers in Florida, to building houses for the Highlands/Cashiers wealthy, to dynamiting gaping holes in the sides of fragile mountains in order to remove and sell the much sought after building stone. So my line, as far back as I know, is that of the stringy, tenacious survivor - Appalachian, hard-scrabble, self-reliant.

But that’s only one side of that coin. By nature, I am an environmentalist. As a child, I mourned the fallen trees my father cut for our firewood even as I looked forward to the fires in which my mother would prepare cornbread and pinto beans in Dutch ovens when the electricity went off, which it frequently did. And I was broken hearted over the trees ripped and flung out of the earth, left jagged and splintered, by the blasts of dynamite that also thrilled me with their power and provided us with the money that bought my books, school clothes, art supplies, and eventually, the little Ford Fiesta I left home at 18, to marry someone not as typically Appalachian as I was. So I am a hybrid in every positive and negative sense of the term.

To insure my hybrid status, I went away from my childhood home, returning to teach at a local high school three years ago. It has probably been the teaching at this high school - the high school I attended as a student, and where I never quite fit - that has enabled me, or maybe forced me, to believe that there are sides to a story that are never heard, maybe never articulated, and that to see only one side is indeed unfair and elitist. The sides of the story that aren’t heard are not only the ones written in the dirt by a lonely man who has friends with bulldozers, but are also the ones written between the lines of notebook paper in the work done by my students, and which represent, I think, even more clearly, what is left of Appalachian culture, the remnants of which lie too deep to be properly articulated.

Most of the students I teach have ancestral lines that go much further than mine into this area of southern Appalachia. Typically, my students are poor, at least relatively speaking. Only a few of them have traveled. And for nearly all, the culture of their grandparents, the fierce law-unto-themselves self-sufficiency of the Appalachian farmer is part of a nearly dead past. What remains is the suspiciousness, insularity, and defensiveness that only sometimes allows a glimpse into the tenacious (and sometimes pugnacious) independence from which it sprang. But it is this occasional glimpse, this reading between the lines, that enables me to see the story and the culture which lie behind the insularity and defensiveness.

The boys who miss school because it is bear season, or turkey season, or deer season, or who are absent because they were out “runnin’ the dogs,” the girls who write in their journals about ripping around on four wheelers in muddy driveways, the boys and girls, Cherokee and white, who believed Al Gore was the next best thing to the antichrist “because he wanted to take our guns away” - all of these students, mostly unwittingly, bear witness to the fact that there is still a seed of Appalachian culture that exists here. Perhaps, as my husband believes, it is the worst part of the culture contained within that seed, but it is still a seed, in my mind, which sprang from something good and that is still a reminder of that same good. Even if that seed’s germination is only seen in sports considered by many as barbaric, even if it does not fit someone else’s view of healthy teenage recreation, even if it comes across as fundamentally defensive and, yes, paranoid, there is still within that germination a story worth hearing because it is a human story, of which Willa Cather said there are only a few. And I would add to that, therefore, they must all be valued.

So what’s the story I see hidden between the lines of notebook paper and the subconscious motivations of my students and my neighbor? Between the lines of a fierce insularity and a willed ignorance is a belief in the rights of individuals to live life as best they can, by their own lights, and to determine their own outcomes, whether that be as high school dropouts in a trailer park, as hunters, as loggers, or as high school English teachers still making mostly vain attempts to get some peace of mind. I am a hybrid. I see stories and dying cultures behind actions, even ugly actions, and I am wishy-washy and lukewarm in my passions because of what I see. I think I understand those relatively new arrivals who come here because of the beauty and who stay in hopes of enjoying that beauty and helping to prolong it. And I think I understand those who have been here for a very, very long time and who try to make their lives better with the income from the casino in Cherokee. I also think I understand my own people as well, those who have not been here as long as the Cherokee, whose ancestors horribly mistreated the Cherokee, and have themselves learned to survive by depending upon a resourcefulness that has little room for aesthetics or compassion, and which is, at worst, defensive and destructive, and is, at best, misunderstood. It is to the legacy of these ancestors, the ancestors I share with my students and my neighbor, that I return as I listen to the uneasy quiet left behind as the bulldozers and chainsaws cease their work a mile away from where I write.

Is my neighbor wise? Well, he must think so. According to the guy with whom I talked, my neighbor envisioned the tall tulip poplars crashing down on his aluminum roof, and responded with foresight by having them removed. He is struggling to demonstrate his right to run his own life, as well as exhibiting the peculiar idea of land ownership and stewardship (or lack thereof) we inherited from our literally dirt poor ancestors, fresh off the ships from the Highland clearances and the potato famine. I, on the other hand, struggle not to despise what is ugly, struggle not to wish him erosion problems, gully washer rains with neither tree roots nor kudzu to hold back mudslides of mythic proportion and destructive power far worse than the crash of a poplar. I struggle to see his story, his side of things, to wish him tall grasses blown gently by breezes on the slopes above his home, grasses which, along with his lifelike targets and collection of weapons, will be enticement enough so that next time the children who left the stickers will stay longer, stay for good.

Whatever his reason, I want to respect it. His lifestyle and that of many of my students is unappealing to me, but I do see behind them just one more version of the deep and ancient human desire to say something that is heard, whether with words or with bulldozers, whether destructive or creative.

The spring peepers at the pond above his house are singing their equally ancient songs as I finish writing this. I hope he can hear them as he heads out to his third-shift job. I wish I could hear them better.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young can be reached at YoungEricyoung@cs.com)

 

Back to Top
The Smoky Mountain News