by Tim Westover
Chapter Thirty-Five
Morning, always late to come to the Lost Creek Valley, was further delayed by the tailings of a rainstorm. Blue mist flowed into the hollows, forming the ghost of the lake. Breaking the fog was a dogtrot cabin, ringed by a wide porch. Holtzclaw worked on the front stoop, cleaning up from the previous evening. An automatic banjo had gone out of tune; Holtzclaw twisted the pegs until the banjo was again strumming itself in a major key. The singing tree, splayed across the cabin steps, slept off the heavy dram of sugar water it had imbibed last night. Holtzclaw nudged its trunk. The singing tree rustled its branches, which could not help but emit an amiable melody, then rose, bowed, and returned to the woods, throwing root over root. Not all nights were so rambunctious, but from time to time, Holtzclaw and his guests enjoyed great festivities.
At first, Holtzclaw had a hard time in the valley. For months, he worked under Emmy, the mushroomer. She showed him how to hunt up ginseng, which Holtzclaw sold to itinerant medicine men. The city apothecaries wanted the invigorating herb for a new line of carbonated cures. The flood of the lake had sown new goodness into the soil; the ginseng came up strong and vigorous.
With his savings, Holtzclaw invested in a partnership with Sampson, the unseen master chef. Holtzclaw built for him a respectable establishment but did not smooth over Sampson’s notable eccentricities. They became part of the legend of the place, and its fame spread beyond the valley. Turkey drovers and tourists ate at long benches with miners and farmers and shopkeepers. An article in the Milledgeville paper awakened substantial interest, and Holtzclaw had to open a second location, so that all eaters could be accommodated. He had still never met Sampson; Holtzclaw deposited the cook’s share of the revenues into a shallow hole behind the kitchen.
The springs in all their varieties—saline, sulfur, white sulfur, chalybeate, epsom, lythia, plyant, and freestone—ran clear and pure from a hundred sources. Holtzclaw’s palate, trained by years of claret, found subtle distinctions among all the different waters. Some of the more pungent may have had healing powers, but these he ignored, not wanting to compete with the patent medicines. Instead, Holtzclaw bottled the four varieties he found most delicious. Each bottle had its own full-color label, lithographed in batches by a printer in Gainesville. Specialty stores in Milledgeville took regular delivery; the water mixed well with a variety of fine spirits.
At last he had enough capital to outfit a hotel of his own. At the edge of the Cobalt Springs Lake, he built a cabin, which was his home, office, and kitchen. The front stoop hosted fiddle songs and molasses boiling dances and, four times a year, gala events under the stars, where natives and tourists dressed in their finest and danced the country quadrille. The guest quarters for the hotel were located under the mountain, in the passages of the Sinking Mountain mine. The temperature and humidity in the tunnels were ideal for those suffering from rheumatism and consumption. For other visitors, the novelty of sleeping in an old gold mine was attractive enough.
When the human guests were asleep, the moon maidens ran soundlessly through the deep tunnels, their silver hair glistening, and then, bursting to the surface, they fell like moonbeams into the cobalt-blue lake.
Holtzclaw finished the cleaning on the front stoop and slipped back into the cabin carefully, so as not to wake Abigail. She was just beginning to stir in their bed. He located his fishing rod in the twilight of the room and left before she awoke. He peeked in on Hulen and Hiram, their five-year-old twins, who had the same fiery curls as their mother, to make sure that they were still sleeping peacefully.
The sun hadn’t yet risen over Sinking Mountain; Holtzclaw navigated the roads by familiarity. He stopped for a drink at a cold spring, which he’d named the Sweet Potato Pool. It ran for only ten feet before it joined with a more substantial creek. From the creek bed, Holtzclaw scooped a handful of black sand. He dropped this into the crown of his hat and worked the pan. The hat showed six colors of gold, which worried him. He rinsed the colors away.
He stopped at a rocky knob, clear of trees, that afforded a view of the valley. Holtzclaw was not so limber and sure-footed that he risked dangling his feet over open space, but he went close enough to the edge to cast his line into the mist. Auraria was invisible beneath him. The sky and the lake of mist were the same smoky blue, mirrors of each other.
The babbling of a spring became clear behind him.
“Hello, Princess,” said Holtzclaw. “It’s been a long time.”
“Has it?” she said. “Time is so difficult to remember. You look puckered and wrinkly, James. Like you’ve been bathing for too long. And what happened to your hair?”
“It has retired, but I haven’t.”
“Have you caught any fish?” she said.
“I’ve never figured out the secret,” said Holtzclaw. “Perhaps all the mist-dwellers swam out to the sea.”
The princess dug in the earth with her bare, four-toed foot.
“I’ve seen colors of gold in the rivers again,” he said. “For years there were none.”
“Someday we’ll need another flood,” she said.
“When?”
“Oh, not for many, many years. You’ll be long dead, little mortal, unless you become great or harmless or invincible.”
“That’s a relief,” said Holtzclaw. “I’ll sit on my gravestone and let others do the work.”
“No,” said the princess, “you won’t.”
Holtzclaw cast his fishing pole. Across the lake of mist, he could see the bit of land that he had made, a piece of new earth in a very old world. He had meant to take down the rotten wooden dock, but the promontory was overgrown with love-apples. Rain fell on the bushes of purple sheep-fruit, on ginseng and mushrooms and ramps, on chestnuts and on the singing tree, going home. Water ran from a thousand springs. Creeks, rivulets, and cascades took up their voices. The valley was an instrument playing the Old Songs.
A Note on Sources
Several elements of Shadburn’s story are based on the Lake Toxaway Hotel, an ambitious North Carolina project that required construction of what was, at the time, one of the largest dams and artificial lakes in the United States. While the hotel became popular, the industry promised by the Lake Toxaway Company to the Southern Railroad never developed. When the dam at Lake Toxaway burst in 1916, the hotel fell into ruin. The dam has since been rebuilt, and the area is now a posh mountain retreat for wealthy people from Atlanta. Huge resort hotels are no longer in fashion, but the lake is ringed by fantastically expensive guesthouses. (See Jan Plemmons’s Ticket to Toxaway.)
Tallulah Gorge, in the northeastern corner of Georgia, was home to a series of waterfalls alternately called sublime and terrible. The town of Tallulah Falls was a popular resort through the 1890s. When the Tallulah River was dammed in 1913, the greatest individual beneficiary was a German immigrant named Augustus Andrae. He had attempted to raise silkworms in Georgia, but after his failure, he went to work at one of the Tallulah Falls resorts. He bought properties above the flood line and made a fortune selling lots for summer homes after the dam was built and the lake reached full pool.
Georgia claims to be the site of the United States first gold rush (though an eighteenth-century fever in North Carolina came first). The center of earliest mining activity in the Georgia mountains was the town of Auraria, a few miles southwest of its rival town, Dahlonega. At its peak, Auraria was home to a thousand people; it had twenty stores, fifteen law offices, a hundred homes, and a confectionery shop. It published its own newspaper, The Miner’s Record and Spy in the West. Auraria was passed up as the county seat, not for lack of vigor, but because of land ownership issues, and thus Dahlonega survives today. Auraria is now only a historical marker, a few houses, the fallen ruins of a boarding house, and the collapsing structure of a general store. Occasionally, one will see a few bored teenagers standing in the river; they’re holding a beer can in one hand and a gold pan in the other. See Merton Coulter’s Auraria: The Story of a Georgia Gold-Mining
Town for more background.
Georgia’s Vogel State Park is the site of Lake Trahlyta, an artificial pleasure pond that is emptied by a picturesque waterfall.
North of Dahlonega is Porter Springs, a parcel of land that is now thick forest but was once the site of a luxury hotel advertised as the Queen of the Mountains. It was known for its exceptional local cuisine and rigorous application of mineral waters. The corridors connecting its various wings and buildings were rigged with explosives in case of fire.
Nearby is a cairn of white stones, which was a popular destination for those taking a vacation at the Queen of the Mountains. It was just far enough from the hotel for a respectable post-luncheon constitutional. The cairn is more often seen nowadays, but less often visited. It sits on a traffic island at the intersection of US 19 and SR 60, which both bend awkwardly to avoid the stone pile. A historical marker identifies the pile as Trahlyta’s Grave, though the legend recorded there conflicts with my story in several key ways. According to archaeologists and historians, it’s unlikely that the cairn marks a burial site—it’s only a souvenir from an earlier era of tourism.
About The Author
Tim Westover, a graduate of Davidson College and the University of Georgia, lives in suburban Atlanta.
Born in the north, educated in England, and frequent visitor to Russia, he found his home in the North Georgia mountains. In addition to writing, Westover busies himself with programming, playing the clawhammer banjo, and raising his daughter to be a modern American eccentric.
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