Hillbillies by Intention (2001)

Hillbillies by IntentionMarch, 2001

“A human community must exert a kind of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place.”

Wendell Berry



Amtrack's Crescent pulled into Philadelphia's 30th Street Station right on time at 4:50 PM, and my son Nate, 9, and I boarded her bound for Greenville, South Carolina. It was the day after school let out for the summer, and we were bound for Country Dick's cabin in the Smokies for a salamander hunt. Nate loves salamanders. Before we moved to the city, his mom and I had lived for many years deep in the woods in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. We built a log cabin from trees I had cut one winter up on the high ridge between the lakes, just as my great-grandfather Philo had done nearby after the Civil War. We spent many years there, before work had called me to Harrisburg, PA. But we kept the old place, and brought Nate there for the first time the spring he was born, when he was just three weeks old.

Below the cabin is a stream, and when we go back to our homestead in the summers Nate and his best buddy Ian are down in that ravine as they have been from the time that they could walk, flipping over rocks to find the salamanders beneath. In the evenings, we go up to the farm pond and they catch frogs, just like I did when I was a kid. Now we were going to take the train to find salamanders at Country Dick's. We were going to see the mountains, and we were going to take an overnight train.

So I pulled my son away from his usual city amusements; cartoons and computer games and city parks, and we boarded a Pullman car for Greenville. A couple of family trips in Pullman cars are happy memories of my own childhood. I remember lying in the top bunk, looking out the little window at the small towns passing in the night, of the rhythmic clicking of the wheels as our long train sped down the track. I wanted him to know that too. Who knows how long there will still be such trains? Our friendly porter showed us to our room, and Nate sprung like a monkey up onto the top bunk as the train pulled out and headed south. Down below I unpacked my guitar and sang train songs; "The City of New Orleans," of course, and "Daddy What's A Train," an old Utah Phillips favorite:


"Daddy what's a train?
Is it something I can ride?
Does it carry lots of grownup folks
And little kids inside?
Is it bigger than our house?
Well how can I explain,
When my little boy he asks me
'Daddy what's a train?'"


The train sped along on its modern clickless rails. We had dinner in the dining car, and fell asleep to the lonesome whistle of the engine ahead, barreling through the night through the Virginia hills.


Country Dick

I had heard that Country Dick had moved up to the mountains, and I resolved to visit him. He and his wife Lori had finally had enough of what Mencken had called "snivilization." They sold their house in Knoxville and moved up to their little summer cabin high in a notch of the Great Smoky Mountains. They moved far, far, up: far from the nearest store, far from the nearest paved road, up where the mountain people lived as they had lived for generations. Setting their modern habits aside, Dick and Lori took up the way of living of what city folk called hillbillies. Despite the effort, they did so with a great sense of relief.

Back at New College in Sarasota in the mid-sixties, Dick had arrived at that eclectic place standing out by his southern country drawl, his apparent calm and personableness and how he set you at ease with his warm, relaxed style. He stood out there, far from his origins, and that is how he got his name. Early on in philosophy class one day he mispronounced Nietzsche, calling him "Nizke,[sp]" like the football player. Some New Yorker put his arm around his shoulder and corrected him. "Man, we're going to have to call you Country Dick from now on," he kidded him. And the name stuck.

Despite the six AM arrival of our train - Country had gotten up at three AM to make the two-hour trip down to meet us - he was there as we stepped off with his usual warm smile, and a thermos of coffee under the pickup seat. We headed up through the dawn mists through Asheville and then into the corkscrew roads of the mountains, pulling through deep green forest hollows and around grassy mountaintop "balds," turning left and right down unmarked washboard mountain roads, past tiny "patches" of fields and ramshackle houses, splashing through the trickles of innumerable springs flowing out of hillsides, until we finally arrived at that little collection of farms known as "Max Patch," after the high mountain "bald" in whose lee it nestled.

As we pulled up the dogs roused themselves from holding down the railingless cabin porch and ran over to sniff us over and greet us. Dick and Lori's log cabin sat on the edge of a steep field overlooking a steep-sided valley known as 'Boomer Den,' after the boomers (squirrels) that had once made their homes there. Sitting on the swing seat on the porch, you could see the high ridge of the Smokies off to the West, and other named peaks to the East. The almost complete silence of the surroundings was broken only by the hummingbirds that "buzz-bombed" you on the way to their syrup feeders. There was not even airplane noise overhead.


Spring Lizards, Healing Plants, and Neighborliness

Country Dick had written us that the Smokies had one of the biggest concentrations of salamanders in North America. “It’s one of the largest sections of biomass in these mountains,” he had written me. Even more tantalizingly, one of the myriad species crawling around in these mountain springs - hence the local term “spring lizards” - was the hellbender, the biggest spring lizard of them all. “They are a foot long,” Country had written. “Fifteen inches,” Nate sagely corrected. “Anyway,” Country Dick wrote, “down here they call them allegheny alligators.” Dumping our bags into the cabin and waving hi to Lori, we pulled on our boots and headed out into the lush woods, looking for springs and spring lizards.

While Nate turned over countless rocks reaching for lizards, Dick and I looked about the woods. Like all of his neighbors, the woods were his home, and he knew a large number of plants and their medicinal uses. Those that he didn’t know, his wife Lori did. They grew wild ginseng, sought-after by the Japanese for its potency, in these woods, and they gathered others that Lori had learned from her mother. There was blue cohash for female troubles, and others I had only faintly heard of. When we became tired and started to feel hunger pangs after long hiking, still far from home and our noon-time dinner, Dick paused by a serrated-leaf, waist-high plant with a distinctive purple stem. “This here is spignet,” he told us, busy exposing a lateral root with a pocketknife, “but some people call it spikenard. I never heard of it before I moved up here. Here,” he offered, scraping the dirt off a three-inch section of root he had cut. “Chew on this. It takes care of being hungry and thirsty and tired.” I chewed the slightly bitter-tasting root, swallowing the astringent juice and spitting out the fibrous pulp. We walked on, and in a little while I noticed that in fact my hunger pains had gone away, and I no longer felt fatigued at all. We walked along the trail with renewed energy, as if we had been chewing coca leaf up in the Andes. Here, so much of what people needed, I mused, was under their feet.

We pushed our way through the woods from spring to spring, eyes out for snakes, as Nate unearthed salamanders, bugs, and the occasional squirming orange mudpuppy. Nate would be on them like a cat on a mouse, diving full length along the stream-bottoms after them. “That Nate is all boy,” Dick observed approvingly, leaning against the rail of a footbridge.”

Later, a farmer hoeing his "tater patch’ observed about the same thing, watching Nate wade after frogs in his farm pond. ” I began to see the true differentness of these mountain people. Unlike most of modern America, the mountain folk really like children. They seem to enjoy them rather than to feel inconvenienced by them. Marcus leaned on his hoe and looked approvingly down at Nate splashing intently around the margins of his pond. “We can use boys like that in these mountains,” he volunteered. Nate reminded him, it was clear, of himself when he was young. Nowadays, Country told me later, everybody has nephews and nieces and grandchildren who come up to visit from the cities who want only to know about cable tv and computer games, which don’t exist here. I felt relieved and grateful to see that Nate was not among them.

I think of the children who I see in my practice who have been referred by schools pressing for ritalin and counselling. I am reminded of my child psychiatrist friend Normand up in the Canadian Maritimes, who observes that up in Newfoundland they don’t have any attention deficit disorder and hyperkinesis among children. “Up there, they just run around in the woods,” he observed. “People don’t think anything is wrong with them". In the modern world, it seems to me, there is very little tolerance of genuine manhood or womanhood, and very little tolerance for differentness. Up here, there was tolerance of everything except government.

The thing I noticed in countless interactions with Country Dick’s neighbors was how they had time for and interest in each other. Nobody would think of passing each other with a wave on their way to do some work; everyone always paused for a long conversation about the crops, and the weather, and, in our case, the best place to find spring lizards. It was not just children who they liked; they liked each other. Except for living in a commune in the early seventies, Dick and Lori told me, this was the only time that they had really felt part of a community in their adult lives. If you visited “Grandma” down the road, you weren’t bid “hello,” but just “get you a plate,” motioning to the wood cookstove always simmering with beans and corn and potatoes and cornbread, to be served with jars of relishes on the kitchen table. If you came by to visit someone, to stay less than an hour would be unforgivably abrupt.

The love of these hill folk for children and the time and interest they took in each other had more in common with third-world people than in their fellow Americans. I was reminded of our Eritrean neighbors in Harrisburg, whose son Binium is Nate's daily playmate. Binium's family became Nate's second family, and ours Binium's. When these hospitable Eritrean's invited you for coffee they invited you to a ritual. First they roast the beans on the stove, bringing the pan out for the guests to smell. They take it back to the kitchen and pulverize it into powder with a mortar and pestle. Then they bring out a tray with demitasse cups and a special urn, from which the coffee is poured over spoonfuls of sugar. You talk, and drink, and then another dense urn would is stirred up in the kitchen. You talk some more. To take one’s leave before the coffee is brewed a traditional three times is to be most un-Eritrean.

Stepping foot on these mountains is to feel the pace of life to drop back to a slow idle. And I recollected the current thinking of anthropologists that prehistoric peoples, like remaining primitive peoples today, had an enormous amount of time to simply be around each other. The necessitities of living simply took much less time and effort than they do today. People would sit around the fire and pull vermin out of each other’s hair, a form of elemental caring that Diane Fossey reported seeing among chimpanzees. Here in these hills, with their shacks and old pickups, their gardens and tater patches and the abundant woods, people lived a more loving and mutually caring life than in the busy flatlands below, from where I had come. I fell into bed each night and slept as if I had fallen into the bottom of a well; Nate barely made it to dinner before passing out exhausted on the couch.

Although Dick and Lori were raised near these mountains, neither of them were products of these high patches and deep glens. But it had beckoned to them more and more powerfully over they years. Dick had run far from the mountains for many years, said that he never conceived of coming back anywhere near here. He was lead singer in a rock band that traveled North America and Canada in an old bus, playing at any joint that offered another booking. He had worked construction and the usual hard jobs of the wanderer. Finally he settled down with Lori and worked a job as a writer for the government at Oak Ridge Laboratories. He sent me a sign from those days warning motorists of radioactive frogs. It was on my old state government office door for years. They gardenened and spent increasing weekends in the mountains, eventually buying a cabin for summers. But one day Lori came home from a particularly irritating engineering conference and announced “I’ve had it with people like this! Let’s move to the mountains." After a month of talking it over, they moved in the fall in time for the most severe winter in years. Since then they have never looked back.

Each year Dick and Lori fall deeper into mountain life, and cut more ties to the modern world. “We don’t like the world, much,” Country explained when I first asked him why he had moved up here. They grow their crops and hold on to some telecommuting work to supplement their limited needs. By the “world” it is clear that Dick does not mean the natural world in which they dwell, including that part of the natural world that is the society of mountain people. The “world” that he refers to is the created, perhaps even “virtual” world of human gain and ambition and rush and estrangement lying far below their hilltop. It is this world that makes the smog that has begun to replace the clean “Smoky” fogs blanketing the valleys below. It is this world, he keenly knows, that is killing off the frogs all over the world, even in the most remote mountains, because of pollution. The spring lizards will eventually follow.

Dick and Lori are keenly aware of having at least some toes of one foot remaining in this rejected world. In addition to making his potatoes and garden crops, Dick writes a national newsletter for his former employer, the Department of Energy, using a computer and a modem over the slow mountain telephone lines. Telephones are relatively new here: the first phones didn’t get put in to this area until 1968, and the technology is rudimentary. Lori spends all day working at her own computer running an environmental engineering department at the University of Tennessee, driving the hour and a half there and back once a week. She, particularly, is restive to cut this last economic link. Her hope is that herbal cultivation, and perhaps renting out a house they just bought nearby, might allow them to live within the local economy alone. The outside work has become an increasingly dissonant note in their high mountain tune.


As they settle deeper into “mountain living,” I see what Country Dick and Lori are doing as having real significance in the modern world. At a time in which local ways of living in a particular place and a particular way are perishing from the earth, they have gone back to a place to try to learn what place and people can teach them. In trying to keep the mountain ways alive, what they are doing is as important as those who maintain “heritage” seeds of once-common apples, or garden plants, plants that, unlike those from modern hybridized and perhaps even genetically manipulated stock, can provide their own seeds for following years.

When my son and I helped Dick plant, we seeded sunflowers that he had harvested from last year’s crop, just as farmers had done from the dawn of agriculture. His planting was informed by the moon and stars as the Farmer’s Almanac advised, just as those now resting in the local cemeteries had planted in their own time. And he leaned against his hoe and took time to talk about crops and weather in the same laconic drawl that all these people spoke to each other in as well, cultivating the human culture in they had root.

Country Dick and Lori came to this life not being born to it, but by rejecting prevailing ideas of how people should live, and deciding upon a different traditional of living. They were hillbillies, one might say, not by birth but by intention.


Boomer Den

"High on the ridge above his farm
Gone, Gonna rise again.
I think of my people that have gone on,
Gone, gonna rise again.
Like a tree that grows from the mountain ground
The storms of life has cut them down
But the new wood springs from the roots underground,
Gone, gonna rise again."

Si Kahn, "New Wood."


Even the many people who had left these parts continue to return to this
soil as home. Births, weddings, and deaths mark the reuniting of family clans on their soil. The cemetery nearest Dick and Lori’s has a picnic grove adjacent to the graveyard for burial dinners. Each family cemetery has a different weekend for a “decoration day,” when they all convene to rake out and trim the plots. But the greatest example of the attachment of these people to their original soil is what Country Dick showed me in Boomer Den.

The beautiful, musical and laconic language of the hill people is filled with words unique to the mountains. Sitting on Country’s porch, your gaze drops into the deep valley below called Boomer Den. He and Lori tend a small field down there, at the lower reaches of their property. To farm it, he usually walks, a trip of some twenty minutes. Driving down as we did takes forty-five.

Taking one twisting road after another winding into the depths of the den, we gained the bottom and followed along a winding stream to its origin. There, alone in the woods, stood a picnic pavilion, a developed spring, and a closed up log cabin. “Boomer Den,” Dick told me, was once a settled little hamlet. Most of what is woods now were fields, where they grew their beans and corn and squash, and grazed their cattle. They shot squirrels - “boomers” - with which the hollow was thick. Whether the term “den” signified a valley or rather a home, not only to squirrels, although the picnic grove was all that testified members once scratched their living out of this tiny place. In the depression, everyone left, hoping for better economic times in the cities. That hope turned out to be a cruel disappointment for many, but once there, they inevitably stayed. Except for once a year, when they all came back.

Each July, Dick said, the remaining elderly men and women who remembered living in Boomer Den came back with their children, their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; those who had married in, cousins, and others of assorted relation. They opened up the cabin, and pitched tents. They drew water from the spring, and cooked together, and ate together. They told the old family stories. They cleaned up the graveyard, and spoke of those who had passed on. Once again Boomer Den rang with the sounds of children playing around the streams and stumps and fields. Then everybody went back to the cities where they lived until the next reunion.

This story was testament to me of the powerful attachment of a family to a particular place, a particular soil. This is something that is talked of in many songs and stories, but never had I seen this bond so firmly maintained after so many years of diaspora. The connection of these people and these hills was the strongest I had ever seen.


Glimpses of Reasonable Lives.

These habits, this rootedness in the soil of a place, may run deeper than even this family, Country mused. Up here, people grow the trio of corn, and squash and beans, as well as the more recently-introduced practice of “making potatoes.” Maize and squash and beans were the holy trinity of native Americans. They had raised these crops in these valleys for centuries until displaced by Scotch, Irish, and English settlers. Those settlers in turn, perhaps taught by the natives, continued these crops so suited for cultivation here. But more than that, it is possible that the very way of relating to one another, the emphasis of mutual support and relationships in a daunting climate had its roots in native American culture. “The land shaped the Native Americans, and then the land shaped us mountain people, Dick murmured, looking out over the patch. Everybody was formed by this place, not the other way around. And now this place is shaping Lori and me.”

Over some days I watched how this place, and particularly Country Dick, shaped my son as well. Going out together to his potato patch one misty morning, Dick handed Nate a bag of sunflower seeds, dug a furrow with his hoe, and showed him how to plant them an inch deep. Nate worked his slow way down the rows while I followed behind, covering them and tamping them down with my foot, as fathers and sons had done in this place for a very long time. When he did well at that, Country set him to prepare a new section with the rototiller. Nate followed the massive machine as it turned over the soil, wrenching on the handles built for a man to turn it at the end of each pass, but not giving up and asking for help. Finally, apparently determining him to be reliable, Country let Nate run his new Kabota tractor.

Country backed the tractor up to the heavy disks, and lowered the three-point hitch while I slid the arms over the pins, forced them home with a rap of the sledge, and knocked in the restraining pins. Dick got Nate to climb up into his lap, and I watched him carefully instruct him about all of the unfamiliar controls: the throttle, gears and transaxle settings, the hydraulic controls for the disks. As they pulled to the end of the row, I watched Nate familiarize himself with the power steering; much easier to turn than our old Army jeep. Shortly, under Dick's oversight, he was running everything but the clutch; his legs were too short. He addressed the end of the row, lowered his disks, steered a pretty straight course for the far end, lifted the disks, turned around, lowered them, and started again.

Later, Nate confided to me his excitement: "Country Dick said I was the first person he has ever let drive his tractor!" This was no ride at Disney World. Nate had just a glimpse of an unspoken fact of life here: at nine a boy was ready to start to learn to run a tractor, because by ten he might be needed to do it to help on the farm. Up in the hills, a boy still needs to become a man. He was needed as a man.



Dick and Lori have a dream. They have purchased a nearby house, and hope to invite people who wish to know mountain life and mountain plants to come and stay. Lori knows her plants and herbs, and Dick knows the mountains and farming and local people. In addition, and importantly, he has a gift. That gift, which he has had as long as I have known him, is simple but profound: people in Country Dick’s presence become calmer and clearer. How this occurs I do not know. But now that he is in this place, his gift has magnified. Or perhaps it has just taken root.

Maybe Dick and Lori will be successful in dispensing with the “dissonant” economic notes which they find so foreign to this life, and be able to offer an immersion in this lost way of living to others. Guests can sleep in the clear mountain air, dream mountain dreams, eat biscuits and gravy, and walk in the herb-filled woods. Maybe they will hoe the rich loam with bare feet as I did, and look down into Boomer Den as I did, while the slow rhythmic tones of Dick and his neighbor’s speech work their way into nerve and muscle and bone. They may stoop to drink from mountain springs, scaring away a few colorful wiggling spring lizards. Like generations of people in this place, they may end each day on the porch along with the dogs, sipping a lemonade and watching the setting sun before turning to supper and playing some music and singing together, wishing that they didn’t have to go back down the mountain tomorrow to go to the cities to work:


Like a highway heading North,
Like a highway heading South,
Sometimes I feel that I’m
just like a rolling stone.
From the rolling mills of Gary
To the rolling fields and spinning mills of home.

-Si Kahn


There is a church tradition that monasteries, high on their own hills and seemingly producing little for others, are in fact “dynamos of grace,” bringing grace to earth through their ceaseless and rhythmic prayer. I wonder if it is too far afield to see Country Dick and Lori, up on their mountain, as practicing a similiar kind of devotion by the daily work of seed and soil and neighborliness, keeping a lost way of dwelling on a particular spot of earth alive with eyes clear upon the beauty that this most endangered of all species really is.