Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  So many woods, so little time. But by the time I walk out from the arms of Gold’s white pines, I’m starting to feel the pull of Tennessee. I’m thinking a week down there, maybe two, the urge kindled by nothing more than a small hope of refreshing some of the memories I have as a kid watching those staggering, tree-covered mountains fly by from the road on our way to Florida, and later, in high school, on trips with my brother in his growling, fat-tired Mustang. For sheer variety the forests of the southern Appalachians are among the best on earth. Not that I knew that back then, of course. Then it was just all that wildness hanging in the sweat of summer. It was houses in hollers where people could walk off the front porch into miles of woods—woods with streams and wildflower gardens, black bears and whitetail deer, even mountain lions. What had been the stuff of imagination in northern Indiana was for the first time reality in east Tennessee.

  Determined to keep as far away from the freeway as possible I rise at dawn and start moving west through Connecticut on a web of county roads, then begin a long drift south along the Hudson, winding past roadside stands of raspberries and strawberries and honey, past what long ago was a jumble of orchards and hardscrabble farms, much of it now reclaimed by modest runs of woods. To the west the sun is pouring onto the crumpled loaves of the Catskills, turning the Hudson into a breathtaking flash of silver. Unfortunately, a lot of other people are heading south with me, trying to get to work, and the last thing they need is some gawker from Montana driving his van like an old man who just fumbled his glasses out the window. The honk of horns and the occasional dirty look prod me to start searching for a turnoff, and the first one I happen on is a narrow, wooded road leading, according to a sign beside the highway, to a place called “Olana.” And so it’s quite by accident that I find myself on a high bluff above the Hudson, at the magnificent Persian-style home of that pious nineteenth-century landscape painter, Frederic Church—one of the true geniuses of the Hudson River School, and in the 1850s and 1860s the most famous artist in America. A guy who knew something about woods.

  The signs say the museum is closed today, but there are a few employees arriving for work via the back door, so I hang out until Museum Director Jim Ryan arrives, a graceful, articulate man of forty-something, sporting a splendid mustache, who, on hearing of my interest in the forest, is kind enough to invite me inside to glimpse a few of the treasures. Ryan is a fount of knowledge, and when he talks of Frederic Church his voice and the sweep of his arms have the easy comfort of old books and stuffed chairs—the kind of person who leaves you wanting to carry on the conversation in a smoking jacket with a snifter of brandy.

  While the outside of the house is a grand splash of Persia, tiles and turrets and braids of spirit-colors, the interior is flat-out cerebral. Nearly every room is filled with art and sacred objects collected from cultures around the world, from China to Assyria to Mexico. As far as Church was concerned this house high above the Hudson overlooked the world’s true paradise, this fresh, new Garden of Eden. By filling it with carefully chosen vases and sculptures, tapestries and pottery, he turned it into a shrine, a sanctuary meant to serve as a kind of corrective for all the ills of all the civilizations that had come before—a museum for shards picked up along the path that led finally and inevitably to America. The attention to detail is overwhelming: the quality of the light and the views coming in every window; interior walls wearing paints and designs for which every color was painstakingly mixed on Church’s own palettes; the dining table in the so-called “Medieval Room,” where the family could eat to soft light pouring through a row of cathedral-style windows, illuminating an enormous run of paintings of various subjects and sizes, some from as far back as the fifteenth century, carefully matched and positioned from low to high, leaving the room looking at first glance as though it’s been wallpapered with art.

  Because the mansion is closed, there’s very little light to guide us, rendering the paintings even more mysterious. In the sitting room is a final sketch for Church’s Cry in the Wilderness, completed in 1860 and considered by today’s scholars the ultimate statement about wilderness in America. A stroll down the walls, viewing such images in murky light, feels like a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past—one arresting scene after another depicting the deepest, most profound myths, yearnings, and terrors ever to drive our culture. On one wall is a Thomas Cole piece, a dark, disturbing image of the woods, full of the fear that infused early Colonial times. Directly across from it is a solitary lake in New Hampshire, where the forest has been completely transformed. Suddenly the trees are surrounded by light, caressed, wrapped in full-blown, born-again affection. The kind of affection that would for a time come to define the most fully American notion of evil of them all: the thoughtless, grinding destruction of nature. A clue to why, perhaps, seventy years later a guy named Joe Knowles could become famous just by turning his back and walking into the woods.

  By the time I make my way back down the drive to the highway—a route Church engineered to make certain every bend offered a perfect glimpse of field or mountain or Hudson River—the southbound rush to work has ended. I settle in again to a happy poking, rolling downstream with the river. Past old German settlements, past the flaky, chalk-colored limestone cliffs towering to the west in the toes of the Catskills. Into Port Jervis, with its neighborhood streets and front porches safely guarded from the heat by the shade of a thousand maple trees; to Milford, birthplace of Gifford Pinchot, the so-called “Father of American forestry,” and south farther still, into the narrow fields and wooded ridges of the Delaware Gap, near where Swedish immigrants built America’s first log cabin more than three hundred and fifty years ago. Summer has risen to a shout, and the land is thick with buttercups and purple-flowered raspberry, with cinquefoil, butter-and-eggs, clover, Depford pink, and huddles of hay-scented fern. Black and yellow birch lean out over the roadways, shading the edges, and blooms of rhododendron peek through the woods past the hemlock and the white pine.

  On past fields in Pennsylvania thick with red clover and woodlots dappled with sumac. Past rows of big, blocky houses in Freeburg and McAlister, their front porches elbowing so close to the highway you can almost reach out and touch them when you pass; and beside the houses, kids on bikes practicing wheelies, and old women in cotton dresses and big straw hats tending thin strips of roses and gladiolas. A parade of radio shows streams in and then fades behind the mountains. In Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a preacher blames society’s corruption not on our having abused nature, but on the Beatles, then goes on to warn me that the god of the New Testament is the same one as the god of the Old Testament. “He hasn’t grown any older,” the preacher says. “He hasn’t even learned anything.” Later on, in Allegheny County, Maryland, a breathless announcer breaks into the regular broadcast to announce that the Old Town Volunteer Fire Department is on fire.

  Past the wooded pockets and hollows of northwest Maryland, down West Virginia through old logging towns where timber companies from Chicago rushed in after the turn of the century and punched railroads up every cranny, cutting nearly every tree. “Used to be a thousand people a week come to square dances in Harmans,” says a clerk at a nearby gas station. “Then just like that, it was over.” He explains that most of the families were forced out to the cities but that they held on to their property, left it to go to woodlots, turned their noses up at real-estate agents and developers. A lot of them, he says, are still holding on. “There’s two kinds of people. Those that came back home, and those that are still hopin’ to.” It’s a story I’ll hear told again and again all along the southern Appalachians.

  With the invention of the Shay steam locomotive, which could climb steep grades into what were until then inaccessible valleys and hollows, it took less than forty years to wipe out the lion’s share of some of the greatest forest systems on earth. Not surprisingly, with the hills denuded there came mud slides and floods without end, a needless, bitter refrain that had already been played out in ancient Gree
ce, in Rome and Venice, in a thousand other times and places around the world. Most of the woodlands I pass today are new arrivals—nurtured by federal protection, such as the magnificent Monongahela National Forest, as well as by Civilian Conservation Corps tree-planting programs in the 1930s.

  Of course, when you destroy an ecosystem, you don’t necessarily get the same ecosystem the second time around. In West Virginia the astonishing old-growth red spruce groves—the so-called “he-balsam,” and probably the finest tree in the world for making the belly of violins—never did manage much of a comeback. Red spruce doesn’t reproduce well from stumps, relying instead on sprouts from seed. And the dry, desiccated lands left in the wake of logging made that all but impossible. Instead we got brambles, and then aspen and fire cherry, and finally trees like maple and yellow birch and beech.

  The land is turning more southern, the steep hills gone to dogwoods and young Virginia pine, fan-leaved hawthorn and shagbark hickory, locust and crown vetch, ailanthus and moonseed vines. There is so much humidity, so much transpiration from these runs of trees that the hills have grown bleary, weakened from kelly green to murky sage. There’s a catchy, spirited prance and gambol to these back roads: From the crest of a ridge you snake down the other side on a ribbon of pavement or dirt that looks like cooked spaghetti tossed on the plate, making your way through beautiful hardwoods and conifers along the way, finally bottoming out into a narrow strip of valley from forty to several hundred yards wide; run that to the far end, then climb up and over another wooded ridge. Over and over again, mile after sweet, twisted mile. The mold is finally broken near Newport, Virginia, in a long and lovely bottom cut through the center by State Highway 42, rimmed by open country, green and gold, much of it dappled with dairy cattle. Signs are up in coffee shops and on yards all along this route, protesting plans for a 750,000-watt power line to be strung down the valley. “APCO Towers,” one sign shouts at passerby. “No Need, Just Greed.” Long after passing out of the fight zone, in a town with no traffic lights and a trailer for a post office—a town so small a guy could sneeze on one end and give a cold to somebody on the other—someone has placed a sign with a more universal message: a forty-foot banner hung across the front of a house. “I wouldn’t mind the rat race,” it says, “if I had more cheese.”

  Chapter Six

  LESTER AND DARLA SIMPSON LIVE at the poor end of Stevens Holler. The high side, upcountry, past where the road gets so skinny you can’t drive without your bumpers kissing walls of mint and pokeberry, where the land is wrinkled and steep, tossed like salad, covered with woods. A couple of miles down the road is the Wilbert place, and while it’s true that old Roy Wilbert has to make a sharp climb to get from his mailbox back to the front porch of his house—no small feat for someone ninety-five, even if he is a faith healer—once up there, he’s at least got a terrace close to flat enough to be worked without rolling the tractor. Farther down still is the Widow Johnson place, flat enough even for a good half-acre of lawn, which seventy-five-year-old Alice keeps in good order by pushing a power mower across it once a week. And by the time you reach the mouth of the holler, things get downright level, broad and well-watered enough to grow respectable patches of tobacco and field corn, and long sweeps of juicy melons.

  But not here. Not at the end of this long dirt driveway barely holding its own against the weeds, next to a root cellar that Lester helped his daddy build some twenty years ago, and an old barn that has posts leaning up against the outer walls to keep it from falling down. The house is small, maybe four hundred square feet, with tar-paper walls and a tin roof, a single-seat outhouse squatting out back in a patch of wild mint. There’s no sign of anyone stirring, so I grab my notebook and tape recorder and head for the front door, passing a porch rail lined with faded, freshly washed jeans, and bundles of catnip, each neatly tied and hung in a line to cure. It’s dark past the screen door but I can make out the sound of a TV turned low—theme music of some kind—and then an announcer welcoming viewers back to the 700 Club. I mean only to give a modest knock but the door is loose in the frame and when I hit it, it makes a terrible rattle, and I’m standing here wishing I could take it back. Finally a couple comes to the door, each around thirty, hair matted, looking sleepy. Lester has on a pair of worn jeans and a thin, white-cotton T-shirt that stretches like a second skin over his muscled shoulders and slight paunch. His face resembles a kid’s face, smooth and round, but his eyes have a touch of hardness, making the kid part seem a little bit bully. Darla, on the other hand, though barely five feet tall, is lean and strong, dark-skinned with a sharp chin and nightfall eyes, and long, straight hair that hangs to the lower part of her back—her grandpa’s look, she likes to say—Cherokee blood.

  Given that Lester is a moonshiner I waste no time identifying myself, offering the name of the local woman who suggested I look them up, explaining how I’ve come from Montana to learn about the woods. Darla’s quick to offer a smile—seems she’s already heard through the grapevine I’d be coming—invites me in, shows me to a green, threadbare couch, its cushions squished into bucket seats. The walls of the living room are made of uncoated pressboard, empty but for a few taped-up pictures of flowers, and one of a doe and two fawns grazing in a meadow. The roof has leaks in it, leaving places where the upper walls and ceiling have warped into waves, sprouting mushroom- and teardrop-shaped stains; it’s a weather record of sorts, fingerprints left by some of east Tennessee’s more rollicking mountain thunderstorms. The old saw flashes through my head about the woman who asks her husband when he plans to fix the roof: “Can’t work up there when it’s raining,” he tells her. “And when it’s not, well, there isn’t any need.”

  Darla turns off the sound from the 700 Club but leaves the picture, then sits down at the other end of the couch. Lester settles into the single stuffed chair, watches me fumbling with my notebook, then reaches over and takes a .45 pistol from the top of the end table. He turns it in his hand a few times, angling it so the blue steel of the barrel catches the light coming off Pat Robertson’s forehead. Now and then it comes to rest pointing at me, hangs there for a minute, then twirls off around the room again. When Darla sees this, she shifts so her whole body is turned toward her husband. I’m imagining—hoping would be a better way to put it—that she’s angling to give him a dirty look or a shake of the head or something of the sort, anything to discourage him. After what seems like a long time, she draws him in for a couple of seconds, then he breaks back toward me. “Just so you’re who you say you are,” he says to me, being as friendly as a man can be in such an awkward moment. “Cause if you’re not—Ya know some of the boys ‘round here find people snooping around where they oughtn’t be, they just rough them up. But the way I figure, by then the damage is done.”

  One of Lester’s relatives I met a couple days ago called him “a colorful boy”; another, more candid, said that for a long time Lester himself preferred the term “holy terror, crazy motherfucker of the Holler.” Some say he settled down when he met Darla, that she was just the right mix of smart and tough, and give him credit for knowing a good woman when she came along. One old man said it might also have had something to do with an incident years back, on a winter night when some of the neighbors caught him stealing and as punishment, roughed him up, stripped him naked and tied him with ropes, threw him in the back of a pickup and sped up and down the country roads till daybreak, when they dumped him back on his front lawn, bruised butt, numb nuts and all. “Whatever you do in your early life,” Lester will tell me later, “in this hollow, that’s what you are forever. If you’re a drug addict for five years and then go straight, you’re always a drug addict.”

  I press on, uncap my pen, ask Lester what it was like to grow up here, make a couple of meaningless scrawls in my notebook, trying to look like a writer and not a fed. He keeps the gun in his hand for another minute, then, content he’s made his point, sets it down again, gently, like it was something alive. “There’s thirteen in my family,�
� he says. “Twelve livin’ and one dead. We grew up right here. My daddy farmed this land, right where you’re sittin’, with a mule and a plow. These little fields you see, that’s what he made his livin’ on. Growed tobacco, growed corn and peas and potatoes—whatever you could put in a jar and set back there in that can house.”

  Darla nods, probably eager to keep things rolling, but also, I think, taken by the images, as if they could have come from her own life. “Tell him ‘bout the woods,” she says. Then to me: “That’s what you said you was writin’ about, isn’t it?”

  Lester takes a deep breath. “Well, I don’t know. Dad got diabetes somewhere along the way, and after that, ‘bout the only meat we ever ate came from these woods. I ‘member one winter—maybe I was nine or ten—all we had was soup beans. So I busted the neighbor’s wood for him and he’d trade me shells for it. Then I’d go out and shoot squirrels or rabbits or coons and that’s what we ate. You could sell ‘possum hides for around four ‘n’ a half dollars, and with that money we’d buy coffee and sugar.”

  “There was plants, too,” Darla adds. “There’s always people wantin’ to buy things like sang [ginseng] and pennyroyal and lobelia. You could go out there right now and collect herbs for money, but you’d have to be good at knowin’ where to look. My granddaddy was Cherokee, a medicine man, and my daddy was a healer, so I learned way back how to find all that stuff. Right now sang is sellin’ for forty dollars a pound.”