Twenty-five years ago this month, Elizabeth and I and the three kids moved into a small cove just west of Bryson City that’s surrounded on three sides by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We still live there. It’s a magical place.

Until very recently, the only way to reach the cove in a vehicle was via a ford on lower Lands Creek just above our property line. For years we simply parked our truck on the far side of the ford and walked home via a footlog. We were all surefooted critters back then. When the handrail rotted away, we didn’t even bother to replace it. (OK, so I did slip and fall in the creek from time to time ... didn’t hurt much.)

Coming home via a footlog over a creek in the dark or by moonlight is the only real way to come home. These days the property above ours is being developed. The owner rightly surmised that potential customers - mostly folks from urban areas - wouldn’t want to drive their fancy, low-slung vehicles across a creek to their rental cabins; so, he installed a large metal tile and diverted the creek through it and the roadway over it.

Presto! - in one day a creek ford that had been used by humans for perhaps 10,000 years (give or take a year or so) disappeared. I’m referring, of course, to the earliest Indians who preceded the Cherokees in these mountains. To my knowledge, neither the early Indians nor the pre-historic Cherokees ever bothered to make footbridges of any sort. Keep it simple ... just wade across. I don’t blame my neighbor one whit; if I suddenly went into the rental cabin business, why I’d probably start installing tiles in the creek, too. Still, I miss driving my truck across the creek and hearing the rushing water up close and personal. And I miss crossing the creek on a footlog that my son, Bert, and I put in place when he was a boy.

Haven’t you noticed? The times they are a-changing, which means I’m not getting any younger. I don’t care. I’m still having fun ... and part of the fun is having things like footlogs and fords and a son to think about. And it’s even more fun when you get to write about stuff like that. Here we go.

“Nostalgic reminders of the past keep popping up back in the lonesome hills of slow ticking clocks where dirt roads meander into hidden coves and high valleys,” reminisced John Parris in a piece titled “Footlogs and Fords” collected in his Mountain Bred (1967). Parris was writing about the footlogs and fords that one can to this day observe and navigate in Cataloochee Valley, a remote area in the present-day Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “This is one of the few places left in the mountains where a man can still cross a creek on a hickory log or ford a stream,” he continued. “But many an old-timer remembers when footlogs and fords were as much a part of any mountain journey as today’s traffic lights and cloverleafs.

“Back in grandpa’s day, a ford was always good for a stop and a drink for dobbin. Many a young swain in the horse-and-buggy era found the middle of a ford particularly advantageous as an unbeatable spot for wrestling a buss and a hug from his jusem-sweet. A girl either gave in or got out and waded. And the story’s yet to come out of the first one that waded home.

“Most country roads back then followed the banks of a stream, and at every bend there was a fording place. Some of the roads were such that they crossed and recrossed the streams every hundred yards. Back at the turn of the century there were 26 fords within six or seven miles along the road up the East Fork of the Pigeon. And it was almost as bad on the West Fork where there were ten fords between Canton and Sunburst.

“Those fords were deep and rocky. The horses at times seemed about to disappear. The water would run over the sides of the wagon-box when the wheels sank into a hole on one side or mounted a rock on the other.

“And when it came to footlogs - well, some of them were like walking a wire over Niagara Falls. But for the most part they spanned the streams in the low, narrow places, usually above or below the ford. And usually the log was the hewn trunk of a large, tough oak or hickory tree. Each end of the footlog was planted well into the earth or held down by a crosspiece or a boulder.

“Some of them had ‘hand poles’ at intervals to keep a body from slipping when the log was wet or covered with ice or snow. But there were those that offered no support and a man who had heisted the little brown jug just once too many might as well ignore the footlog and wade across.

“Those old footlogs gave growing boys an opportunity to show off. They did everything from hopping across on one foot to walking them on their hands.

“For some reason most of the schools back then were built along a stream that had to be crossed on a footlog. This presented quite a hazard when the new teacher arrived to take up school. Sooner or later the boys would get around to greasing the log. Then they would hide in the bushes to watch the fun of the master flying heels over head into the creek.

“But that is all in the past. For the footlog has all but disappeared from the mountain scene. So has the ford in the creek.”

We had a lot of adventures in the old ford above our place. Nothing like having the engine conk out in January when the truck was in the middle of the creek. As I write this, one of the most interesting of our creek-crossing episodes comes to mind. I’d completely forgotten about it until just now.

Back in the early 1980s, we had a little Ford Courier truck that had the spare tire mounted underneath its rear end. To get the spare you had to run a metal rod through a small hole under the bumper and then plug the end of the notched rod into a socket. This allowed you to crank the tire attachment mechanism in reverse and thereby lower the tire for use. Accessing the spare tire on that vehicle could be tricky in good weather on dry land. One day as Bert and I were coming home the truck decided to kill its engine and have a flat tire at the same time smackdab in the middle of the ford. (You’ve noticed that some trucks have minds of their own, haven’t you?) It was raining cats and dogs and the creek was rising. We couldn’t push the truck out because it wouldn’t roll over the rocky bed of the creek with a flat tire. And we weren’t trifling enough to simply leave it in the creek, although I will admit to considering that option. It was difficult enough getting the rod through the hole under the bumper, but engaging it in the submerged socket up under the truck was all but impossible. We tried and tried and tried ... nothing worked.

Finally, I got Bert to hold the rod in place while I held my breath and went down under the water on the good tire’s side. After several failed attempts, I submerged myself for a third time and was finally able — more by luck than anything else — to slip the rod notch into the socket with my hand, thereby enabling Bert to lower the spare.

The story doesn’t end there, of course. Have you ever tried to jack up a truck and then change a flat tire in the middle of a creek? Have you ever had your truck washed off a jack by a raging torrent of water? Let’s just say that it took awhile to fix that flat, push the truck out of the ford, dry it out and get it started again. It seems pretty amusing, in retrospect.

One of the most vivid moments in my life occurred at that ford not very many years ago. Elizabeth and I knew by their occasional late night squalls that we had wildcats living in the cliffs above our home. But for over 20 years we never actually saw one. Late one evening - almost dark - I was approaching the creek when I saw a wildcat perched on one of the large boulders just above the ford. He was watching something on the bank and had his back turned to me. I suppose the sound of the rushing water helped mask the sound of the truck. I braked and watched him for a moment before he sensed my presence and turned and looked at me with huge, luminous eyes. Those eyes transfixed me. I was looking into the pure, untainted, non-caring soul of the wilderness. Then, without any apparent effort, he levitated and glided downstream over the ford at least three above the water ... came down softly on another large boulder about 10 feet away ... gathered himself with ease once again and bounded another 10 feet up onto the far bank ... and then he was gone as completely as if he had never existed. But, he still exists. I can still feel the power of that gaze, and I can still see him gliding over the ford as if in slow motion. The footlog’s gone now. So’s the ford. Memories remain.

(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., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com)

 

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