The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains by Brent Martin

Author:Brent Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

During my continuance here, about half an hour, I experienced the most perfect and agreeable hospitality conferred on me by these happy people; I mean happy in their dispositions, in their apprehensions of rectitude with regard to our social or moral conduct: O divine simplicity and truth, friendship without fallacy or guile, hospitality disinterested, native, undefiled, unmodified by artificial refinements.

—William Bartram’s impressions of the Cherokees at Watauga Town, 1775, Harper’s

Watauga Town long vanquished, the ceremonial mound Bartram described is now a slight rise in a pasture behind the abandoned hull of Big D’s convenience store. It would have been something to behold from horseback, riding north out of Nikwasee toward Cowee in 1775, miles of Cherokee corn and bean plantations spreading across the land and views of the high Nantahala and Cowee Mountains flanking his sides. This particular scene in Travels is intriguing, as it is one in which Bartram takes liberty to invite his readers to remove themselves from his unfolding narrative of the natural landscape and turn to the inner landscape that he also traverses and explores. Today, it is beheld through a windshield, punctuated by cold gray powerline pylons, flanked with odd billboards, real estate signs and advertisements for a diversity of nearby Protestant churches—both inner and outer landscapes under assault.

This significant Cherokee village was only a few miles up the road from where I live, but outside of the meager remains of the ceremonial mound and the aptly titled Watauga Creek, nothing is left to indicate its past presence. Sanderstown Road, Lyle Knob, Gibson Bottoms and Mason Mine are among the place names that link Anglo family histories and form the contents of the local geographic lexicon. Now the past rises up again in unforgettable and dramatic ways—Rebel flags flying from the backs of trucks as we arrive home, dotting the porches of Cowee and Watauga Towns, where those with no connection to the horror of the flag’s meaning fly it with naïve rebellion. Land of my birth, land of my ancestors, land of the flag wavers whose kinfolk never owned slaves, who displaced a native people and did so in the name of the Lord.

My heart is still not right. I call my family doctor when we return and make an appointment. My EKG results in hand, he says calmly, “There is really nothing I can do for you. You should go to the ER. I can take you if your wife is not here.” She is grocery shopping at the nearby Ingles, so he offers to go and find her with me, offering to take me if she isn’t there.

After ICU and a procedure to correct the atrial fibrillation I have endured for eight days, my heart returns to normal, and I’m soon back to jogging and exercise. But my heart is no longer in this landscape as it once was. It’s grown hardened against many of its human inhabitants who’ve had a good go at it, and there are many days I think I could leave.

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