Indian Summer

Autumn conjures up hallowed thoughts of education. Scholars conversing under sturdy campus oaks. Visits to libraries late at night, haunted by information.

Yet harvest’s end heralds an older turn from physical to mental labor, one that predates mortarboards and standardized tests. It’s a release of time to reflect on our ways, visit the smokehouse of knowledge, slice into some farm-cured ideas.

This homecoming of the mind is open to everyone, not just the Brahmans of academia. Common subjects can ripen our intelligence. I learned some things, for example, while chewing on this essay about my summer vacation.

If a teacher had assigned this topic, forty years ago, I might have written about our annual trip to the beach.

My report would begin with mom and dad rousing us before dawn, ushering us into the station wagon, and lulling us back to sleep as dad drove out of the hills. I’d describe the bliss of re-awakening in the piney flatlands of Carolina; how my siblings and I argued over who got the Sugar Smacks in the variety pack of cereal; how mom and dad would sometimes entertain us with songs, like the one about good living in gloryland. The next day we were body surfing and searching for sharks teeth along the glistening shoreline.

Now I live on the north coast of Oregon, where the water’s so cold that surfers wear wetsuits, and most of the sharks teeth are still attached. Usually I stay put in summer at my secondhand bookshop, combing the tourist tide during peak season. It takes a bit of doing to keep us in Angora Peak granola, our premier local brand.

But sometimes we muster enough time and money for a little family getaway. This year Jennifer and I woke our girls before sunrise and boarded an early-bird flight to Tennessee.

Over a decade has passed since I visited the South in summer. Been about that long too since I wrote Sunday columns for my old hometown newspaper — the Kingsport Times-News. I remember sweating over sentences in our tiny farmhouse, walking the line between conventional thinking and unorthodox truths.

My last missive for the Times-News — titled “Convicted hillbilly spills guts in final newspaper column” — was written after I moved to the Pacific Northwest. Like many I’ve penned, it was an expatriate’s lament for the rural small-town soul of my native region.

Appalachia: where traditional yeoman farmers are portrayed as uneducated sloths; where leaders work to cover over all traces of native self-reliance with urban consumerism. Time hasn’t changed that tune, just made it louder. Sometimes I hum a few notes when prompted by bookshop customers who notice my Tennessee accent.

“Oh we love that part of the country,” they say. “Traveled through there years ago. Little historic downtowns and rolling farmland. So beautiful!”

“Sure,” I reply, thunderclouds gathering round my heart. “But much of that country is gone now. The hills and fields and hamlets are being leveled and replaced by the same commercial sprawl we see everywhere.”

Sad, yes, but few people are surprised to hear it. When visitors to this slice of paradise talk about how their home towns have grown, nine times out of ten, their brows are furrowed. A grief is shared by folks who come here from every corner of the world.

In recent years we’ve learned — or should have learned, again — that more than local charm is sacrificed by this process. The financial collapse that fouled our economy was fueled in large part by unregulated speculation on urban growth. High rollers gambled on more residential and commercial development than buyers could afford. After losing that bet, their buddies in government bailed them out with taxpayer dollars.

Yet we hear little about this link between scarcity and consumer sprawl. Nada from the politicians. Next to nothing from the mainstream media. Barely a peep from academia. The tragedy is rooted in an ignored cultural failure that severs our connection with the land and bleeds our community values.

On the way to the airport our seventeen-year-old daughter read aloud from a book about personality types (“The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life,” by Helen Palmer). Best as Willa could figure, her old man fits into a category called “Tragic Romantic.” That means my outlook on life, and my behavior toward others, is shaped by a dramatic sense of loss.

After listening carefully, I informed the family that no personality type in that book really describes me. Alas, said book points out that a defining trait of Tragic Romantics is that they really don’t want to be categorized.

Very well, call me a Romantic. I believe awe of Creation is a pillar of wisdom. For me folklore and storytelling are as critical to human survival as advanced degrees in business or engineering. This belief would have put me in the school of thought labeled Romanticism in the 1800s.

Today the perspective fits my definition of a hillbilly – one who flies the rural flag, who resists the push to turn the Earth into one huge city. Our kind are slow to surrender to a confining citified vision of progress.

Does being a hillbilly Romantic here at the end of the Mayan calendar make me inherently tragic? Are we the last of a dying breed, dramatically poised on the brink of apocalypse?

Headed back to my native hills I resolved to seek an answer, beyond the thunderclouds, deep into the burning sunshine.

Revelation rushed up at me during the descent into Knoxville. Volunteer State fans tend to see the world through orange-tinted glasses. But gazing out the airplane window I saw anew that Tennessee is green. Big green.

When the writer Edward Abbey wrote about a trip into east Tennessee, he called the region the “vegetation cradle of North America.”

“All those trees transpiring patiently through the wet and exhilarating winds of spring, through the heavy, sultry, sullen summers into the smoky autumns. Through the seasons, years, millennia.”

Abbey is celebrated for his word-slinging in defense of the wild West. His best-known work, “Desert Solitaire,” is a collection of essays about the time he spent as a park ranger in Utah. He’s also notorious for “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” a novel rumored to be so subversive that a list of people who check it out is kept on permanent file at the Kingsport Public Library.

Like Abbey, I followed the sunset. It pulled me to Colorado and on to Oregon. Yet no matter how far West I’ve come, my roots are Appalachian, same as Abbey’s. I think that shaped our temperaments, and I suspect it helped get him the gig to write the fore-quoted text for a beautiful book of photographs titled “Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains.”

Reading further in that book one gets a whiff of Abbey’s feral kinship with the region.

“We were out in the country, out where the people used to live. Picnic country, good place to throw beer cans, out there among the forgotten general stores and deconsecrated churches. Hysterical hens tearing across the path of the car, hogs rooting in the oak groves, an old horse resting his chin on the crotch of a butternut tree…”

Then, at the end of his trip, Abbey flared his nostrils in a mill town named Sylva near the Smokies.

“When I commented to one of the town’s leading citizens, a fine old Southern gentleman, about the perpetual stink in the air, he replied, ‘Why, son, that there smells lahk money to me.’ Smug and smiling all the way to the bank, where — I hope — he drops dead on the doorstep. Pascal said something in words to this effect that in order to grasp the concept of the infinite we need only meditate for a while upon human stupidity.”

Which may explain why irascible hillbilly philosophers are seldom asked to write coffee table books. Abbey is well-criticized for his angry polemics, but his words track shame like a bloodhound. He reminds us that Appalachia, like most of rural America, has been ravaged by Babylon’s pimps who prey on mindless consumption.

And Abbey knew, as I do, that Nature will have the last word. Can essayists inspire a good ending, before it’s too late, while Appalachia is still the “land of the breathing trees, the big woods…?”

Oregon is lauded by nature-lovers for her vast evergreen forests and conserving land-use laws. Tennessee is equally worthy of praise and protection, with her green pastures and diverse woodlands that color so vividly in the fall. Oaks, maples, hickory, beech, walnut, chestnut, hornbeam, sweet gum, basswood, cherry, sassafras, pawpaw, locust, box elder, buckeye, hackberry, redbud, dogwood, persimmon, ash, rowan, crabapple, elm, willow, birch, catawba, sycamore… the list goes on. That kind of diversity doesn’t exist in the Northwest, outside of college campuses and older neighborhoods.

Many times during our trip I found myself staring dumbfounded at deciduous giants, like a tourist gawking at skyscrapers in New York City. Our family spread our arms round a huge willow oak near my parent’s home. Having been away so long, it now seems that when I lived in Kingsport I was oblivious to these old ones, distracted perhaps by the skanky scent of commerce.

Kingsport. King’s Port. The name is derived from its crowning nautical location near the confluence of the north, middle, and south forks of the Holston River. Kingsport is the furthest upriver that flatboats could navigate into the hilly hinterlands of the Tennessee Valley. It’s an old fulcrum of human exchange between the outside world and the storied mountains. In the early 1800s, a Colonel with the last name of King started trading at that focal point: exporting natural resources; importing cash and the stuff it could buy.

Dad says the river trade continued into the time of his parents. “Men would load barges with salt from southwest Virginia, float down to Knoxville, then walk home.”

Now an industrial hub, Kingsport is home to a colossal chemical company, a huge paper mill, and a facility that makes military explosives. The town’s social structure is layered with strata composed of wealthy executives, middle-class managers, and blue-collar workers. Most associate the town’s notorious stink with economic security. So long as lay-offs aren’t heavy, and the odor isn’t toxic, it’s hard to argue.

In elder days the place went by other names — Long Island of the Holston, Big Island, Peace Island. All refer to an 840 acre isle that sits amidst the pivotal upland waters. The ground there was sacred to Appalachia’s first inhabitants, a refuge where Indians, frontiersmen, and settlers could meet with the knowledge that no living creature was to be harmed.

Daniel Boone began the Wilderness Road from the Long Island in 1775. Some historians suggest the name Tennessee was birthed on the island — from “Tana-see,” meaning “The Meeting Place” in the language of indigenous folks who dwelled there prior to the Cherokee.

Little was said about those elders during my K-12 education in Kingsport. Are some descendants of those folks still around? The paternal lineage of both my papaws reaches back seven generations in the area, a length of residency shared or exceeded by many of my classmates. Do some local bloodlines go back thousands of years?

If so, those ancestors were caretakers of a revered spot where a key waterway connected with an ancient north-south corridor known as the Warrior’s Path. Athowominee in Iroquois. The route, which extends north to New York and south to Georgia, was first traced by bison moving along Appalachia’s ridge-and-valley province. Indians used the old buffalo path to hunt, trade, fight, pray, and gather medicine. Trucking companies now use much of the same corridor to haul stuff to and fro along Interstate 81.

A herd of ideas migrated down to Kingsport during the early twentieth century. Financiers and planners came from New York and other points north to re-construct the town in their modern image. They made a scale model with zones designated for residential, commercial, and industrial development. Everything radiated out in a spoke pattern from a central circle surrounded by churches. My second public profession of faith was given at Church Circle. (The first occurred up the street, during an end-times revival at the civic auditorium.)

So it came to pass that Kingsport was christened the Model City when it was re-chartered in 1917. The tallest building on Church Circle is now a bank. All over the place are boxes where people spend money – gobs of global logos that entice people to eat out and shop. Local politicos strive to attract more national chains with government givaways and special tax deals. Kingsport competes with Bristol and Johnson City — the other two nodes of what are collectively called the Tri-Cities — to see which town can acquire the most concrete.

While writing this essay, I learned that Kingsport leaders are royally bummed that Bass Pro Shops (a large outdoor sports chain) is locating at a new development along an I-81 exit in Bristol (rather than a new development along an I-81 exit near Kingsport). The announcement was followed up by news that Cabela’s (another large outfitter) is also locating at another I-81 exit in Bristol, thanks to an upfront government gift of land and $25 million.

Public officials are gambling that there will be enough sales tax revenues to foot the bill for their market manipulations. Meanwhile, commercial property remains vacant at other locations. Which gang of crony capitalists will control the Warrior’s Path?

Commenting on a Times-News article (6/22/2012), a reader named Brian said it well.

“I feel bad for the local businesses that are family owned that will have to compete with Bristol [government-recruited chains] for business. I would like an article on businesses like Laurel Marina, Bristol Boat Doctors, South Holston River Fly Fishing. That is just a small fraction of small business owners that will have to compete with the new store[s].”

The most powerful player in this competition is the land herself, rugged terrain that annoys developers as much as she invigorates outdoor enthusiasts. City leaders are forever seeking the means to flatten her out. The uphill battle hits home during summer, when earth movers go gangbusters as she lets her hair down.

Most locals associate Appalachia’s rollicking verdure with yard work. Yet the same mix of soil, sun, and rain that spawns proud lawns begets a wild tangle of flora. In my youth we explored lush patches of jungle between the houses, building forts and practicing to be survivalists.

That was back in the 70s, before actors were paid to wear fancy outdoor gear in commercials made at scenic backwoods locales. Us small-town kids would just slip out of the house and go native in our cut-offs for a few hours. There were spots within a short walk where the vines grew in mats so thick we could bounce on them like trampolines. We invented hillbilly Olympic events like “vine climbing” and “bush jumping.” Once I discovered a patch of giant puffballs – amazing fungi unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere in my travels. Of course those pockets of nature where we played are gone.

It was even more fun in the country. Sunday afternoons we’d travel a few miles from the center of town to my grandparent’s farm, where there was room to roam. There we explored the cattle-terraced slopes, picked veggies (reluctantly, but it was cool finding cucumbers), ate mamaw’s come-to-Jesus cooking, hunted Indian arrowheads, went on hay rides (sitting atop the bales crossing Horse Creek was as thrilling as any carnival ride), and caught big-ass bass in little farm ponds.

You have to go out further from town to get that rural feel now. I was glad to do so during our trip when our family went camping on the Nolichucky River. The younger among us, including Jennifer, were quick to test the safety limits by leaping off big slippery rocks. If one of us had a video camera, we could have made a cool retro commercial – like one of those Mountain Dew ads from back in the day when all they needed to sell soda was folks splashing around in nature.

At one point a big RV pulled up and a bunch of youngsters came barreling down to the water with their kayaks. The sight of them doing flips in the rapids made my nephews salivate. Within a day the boys had bought their first boats. Soon afterward they were trading them online for a profit.

If old man King were operating a port on the Holston today, he’d probably be an outfitter. And surely the seasoned trader would be smart enough to know that all the designer outdoor gear in the world isn’t worth didly without the outdoors.

I like to imagine Col. King’s ghost working with local industries to fully restore the historic Holston for recreation. Tie the town’s riverfront trail system into a natural water park. Maybe the Colonel could even twist the arm of our military-industrial complex to open up a stretch of the river that’s currently off limits to taxpayers. Involve local science students. Re-brand the Model City as a clean green turnaround.

After a full day of riverside recreation the family gathered round the fire and listened to a primordial chorus. Words cannot do justice to the rockfest of crickets, katydids, cicadas and whatever else makes that glorious racket. Here’s the best clip I could find, from a farm in southern Kentucky. You’d come close to being there if you could pump up the volume by a factor of 10 and blast it through cinematic sensurround.

I asked one of my nephews at the campout what percussion instrument he’d use to simulate the sound of cicadas. Carson and his brother Hayden serve on the drum line for the marching band of my alma mater, Dobyns-Bennett High School.

After considering the question carefully, he suggested a hollow wooden instrument that’s rubbed with a stick called a “guiro.”

“You’d want to use a small skinny one to get the right pitch,” said Carson.

If any band could simulate the sound of a Southern night, it would be Dobyns-Bennett. I think they could play anything. Nearly 350 members strong, the band was invited last year to perform at the Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City and during halftime at a University of Tennessee football game.

During our visit we were blessed to catch a pre-season show. Deep pride welled up when I witnessed their boom and precision in the renovated DB stadium. Mine ears have heard the glory of the Indians!

Yep, Indians. Generations of Kingsport youth march into adulthood wearing tribal jerseys. Mascot identities are the one part of our local schooling that draws from the indigenous roots of the area. Young ball playing braves spar against each other in the town’s two rival middle schools – as Sevier Warriors -vs- Robinson Redskins. Then everyone unites under one big Indian war bonnet in the DB sports arenas.

The rite of passage seemed pretty straight forward when I was a teenage Indian. Since then the city has annexed much of the surrounding countryside, grabbing more taxes and trying to raise the city’s population. As a result, three other high schools are within or touch Kingsport’s service area. Other mascots are entering the metropolitan fold from the wilds of Sullivan County – Raiders, Rebels and Cougars.

Oh my word. This presents a challenge for loyalists of Dobyns-Bennett, crown jewel of the Model City’s school system (developed in 1917 with assistance from Columbia University). City kids, county kids — the distinction has loomed large. Over the years I suspect it has influenced school district boundaries and distribution of resources.

Par for the course. A common habit of urbanization is that politicians are quick to claim more territory, yet slow to administer funds in a way that covers the full costs of schools, fire protection, law enforcement, roads, and utilities. I voiced this concern repeatedly when I wrote for the Times-News. During our visit I was grateful to see similar misgivings expressed by columnist Dave Clark, a Kingsport developer and former alderman.

“…For decades we have pursued the elusive goal of reaching 50,000, a mystical number to the economic development community. We haven’t gotten there through natural growth, so the city has pursued an aggressive policy of annexation that dramatically increases costs. These costs have now become so burdensome that the city is looking to extend the time frame for the installation of infrastructure from five to eight years to obscure the true expenditures.” (Kingsport Times-News, 7/26/2012)

Clark points to a pattern of budget prioritization that’s common with public leaders. “We have pawned current costs off on the future,” he writes, “a disturbing trend at all levels of government.”

I’ll be more pointed. This trend seduces certain private interests on the front end. More big boxes are built. Select bankers, developers, contractors and realtors profit for a time. Multinational chains grow their share of local markets as more people consume their food and imports. Often this gives the appearance of economic expansion, even as longstanding local businesses shut down.

But eventually the bubble bursts. When we neglect the cost side of the equation, sooner or later, we’re left with broken budgets, underwater mortgages, foreclosures, empty houses and vacant storefronts. All the while more farmland and forests are lost. There are fewer green places to restore our spirits. Less carbon-filtering vegetation is available to help buffer climate change and counter-balance deadly weather patterns.

Is it possible to for us to stop exhausting the earth’s resources, draining our savings, and fouling our nest beyond habitation?

The Model City will answer this yes-or-no question. During our trip I saw something encouraging. Mom and dad loaded us in the car and took us to an older brick building near what was once the edge of town. Back in my youth it was Lynn View High School. Now the building serves as an extension for the Kingsport Senior Center.

We went inside to watch adults working on a project my parents had been touting. For about two years local citizens have been carving figures for an old-time carousel. Classrooms were reconfigured to serve as workshops. Emerging from the wood are a variety of carousel animals — noble steeds, a sleek giraffe, a fantastic frog, an elegant unicorn… One man was sculpting a replica of a Lynn View class ring to put on the paw of a stealthy lynx (the historic high school mascot).

I have a book in my shop about famous carousel artists. The figures I saw at Lynn View were as exquisite as anything in the book. And these works of art are being carved by small-town citizens who learned how to do it themselves in that old brick building.

The project startled me. I could imagine Kingsport leaders buying a prefabricated merry-go-round to help promote another carnivalesque commercial complex along the Interstate. This is different. Citizens have picked up tools, learned to be artists, and plan to place their finished product near the center of town.

One never knows what will spark the enthusiasm of a hillbilly Romantic. The path to knowledge circles back to old stories, some we lost track of because we didn’t pay attention or because we covered them with concrete. Yet a trace survives.

Carved wooden figures can be as instructive as symbols on a totem pole. One totem charged out at me in the last workshop I entered in the old Lynn View High School. It was an immense bison named Spirit – an American Buffalo to be featured in the lobby adjoining the carousel.

I spoke with the carver, a 35-year resident of Kingsport who was born in southwest Virginia. Joe told me the buffalo will be painted white, and so identified with a legend that is sacred to many native peoples. Here’s a paraphrased version I gleaned from a transcribed telling by John Fire Lame Deer (1967).

One summer, a long time ago, two scouts were hunting in the hills when they saw a beautiful young woman approaching dressed in white. One scout was filled with desire and tried to touch her. Lightening consumed him and he was reduced to a pile of blackened bones.

The other scout was “overawed” by the woman and behaved respectfully toward her. She instructed him to go and prepare a lodge for her among his people. When she arrived the woman taught them the right way to live.

Before leaving, she promised to return. As she walked away she changed into a white buffalo. Soon afterward hunting was plentiful for the tribes.

The birth of a true white buffalo calf (not an albino) is a very rare occurrence in nature. Such births have occurred in recent decades. They are believed by some to herald a time of balance between mankind and the earth, as well as harmony among people.

To me the story itself offers a pivotal teaching that could restore man’s relationship with Creation. It instructs us on the consequences of two opposing ways of thinking.

The white buffalo woman represents mother earth. One kind of mind approaches her with lust and seeks to possess her body. The other treats her with respect and makes a place for her to teach his people.

“All I’m doing is setting out a symbol,” Joe told me. “People need to get back to the place where they respect mother earth and respect the original peoples who lived here.”

Joe says most of the real hillbillies he grew up with are of like mind. How do we share that kind of knowledge?

“Take a deep breath. Now, let it out. The college application process into which you are about to enter may be challenging, but it is also exciting — a time to discover who you are and who you want to become…”

So says a brochure mailed to our oldest daughter from the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Columbia University. If all goes as planned, Willa will graduate next year from Neah-Kah-Nie High School. She’s setting her sights on some top-drawer scholastic brands — Amherst, Pomona, Macalester, Whitman, and Brown.

It is indeed a challenge — choosing which gatekeepers of upscale learning to approach, then convincing them to let us buy, borrow, or beg a way into their echelon. Jennifer and I will do all we can to help our daughters discover what is within them.

College can be part of this journey. It was for Jennifer and me. She earned a degree in urban planning from Stanford (former home of the Indians, prior to 1972, when the mascot was dropped following complaints by real American Indians). I majored in biology at the University of Colorado (where a real American Buffalo runs on the field at special home games).

But the bulk of my life learning comes from encounters with folks like Joe, yeomen scholars and artists who inspire me to think more deeply. Some are hillbillies. Some are real American Indians. Some write books that wash in with the tide, or post writings on the web so that any household can be a global meeting place of ideas.

Can the human tribe use these educational resources to repair our bond with the land? What is it worth to know who we are, and who we want to become? Enough to take time out from our consumption of nature to examine our community values?

Native intelligence can help us survive, and it’ll tickle our innards. Good hunting to all who scout for wisdom. May each of us graduate with honor from the school of life.