a mountain baptism

last week i took a lightning-tour trip to the mountains of western north carolina, escorting my grandmother to an annual celebration of the Land Trust for the Little Tennesse. i spent my one day in the cowee and tellico valleys, pausing as i always do to wash my face in tellico creek, where my grandmother played as a child and whose power ran the family mill.

the friend i was with, on our way back to the car, asked, "do you get any time to be out in the woods when you're at home?" good question, i said. not really. sometimes up in the redwoods, but i'm usually focused on myself and my bike, not the woods.

to ease the transition back into my mostly-paved current town (there is a creek that goes through my backyard, but it's completely channelized so its song is hard to hear), i'm reading Charles Frazier's first book, thirteen moons (he's the guy who wrote that book cold mountain that became a movie), which takes place in these mountains. cherokee country, nantahala, the place of the noonday sun.

very few white people lived back in these remote mountains, and they were mostly misfits self-exiled to the woods and falling into only two categories, drunks and preachers. the latter category included actual ministers and missionaries and also all manner of backwoods social reformers, philosophers, and political theorists, men who came walking through the door with their eyes vibrating from the energy of their frequently crackpot beliefs, hardly waiting to state their names and shake your hand before launching straight into reforming your opinions on the Holy Trinity, the Apocrypha, the Whig Party, or paper currency.

i recognize a fair bit of myself in this description. maybe this means i belong in the mountains. i hold, too, the idea that i/we could use a bit of balancing out, of listening better. kate wolf sings about her grandfather "not wanting to say any more than he thought would be heard." i think that value is shared by Cherokee culture, and perhaps by the mountains themselves.