A Sense of Place

It was the mid seventies when I moved from Alabama to the northern corner of North Carolina near Boone, the highest county seat east of the Mississippi. It was Smiley that triggered the memory. He lives in the high country. I know a song that has the line “the warm winds of memory drifted past him”. In the case of my experience in Mabel NC, it was the cool winds of memory that came to mind when Smiley reminded me of those days... and flooded me with the pleasure of my learning experiences there. Place has a strong effect on us and I hope this essay reminds us all to choose our place(s) carefully.

Boone is a tourist town. They come for skiing in the winter and to escape the heat in the summer. There's a historical outdoor play there “Horn in the West”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Krp3Wjzd4 (6 min)
http://www.blueridgeheritage.com/attractions-destinations/horn-in-the-west

And a favorite tourist restaurant with southern fare...
http://www.danlbooneinn.com/

But my experience in NC was more about community....

My plan was to set up a home and get a job. I was about twenty and hoped to get my teaching degree at Appalachian State. I had a $1000 in pocket from summer work and struck out. I found a nice house to rent in Mabel, a little town in a valley between Boone and Mountain City, Tennessee. Mabel was (maybe still is?) just a country store and a few churches. Up and down the valley, folks farmed Burley tobacco.

I stopped in the country store and met Vic and Hon, the owners. He was a retired Marine and Hon his Vietnamese wife. It was an old timey store with a potbellied stove and old timers hanging around ready to offer advice. They told me about a little house for rent. The owner was working in the Detroit car industry. His brother, John, lived nearby. I found out later he was retired CIA. He cut the rental deal with me.

The house was full of wormy chestnut woodwork. The American chestnut, once the dominant tree of the forest, is essentially extinct. On the ridge tops large trees still lie, resistant to rot, silent reminders of the forest of 100 years ago. https://www.ourstate.com/american-chestnut/

The water in the house was gravity fed from a spring half way up the mountain behind the house. Ray, a farmer I met down the valley didn't bother to put shut off valves on his piped spring, he just let his spring run in his sink 24/7. He didn't have a refrigerator, but used a spring house. The spring ran through a concrete trough than widened and narrowed to provide shallow or deep placement of items in the cool spring water allowing him to cool a butter dish or a big pitcher of milk. There was electricity and a refrigerator in my rental house.

The heat was from a fuel oil (something between diesel and kerosene) furnace that resembled a wood heater. In Alabama natural gas or propane was the fuel of choice, and this was a new experience for me. It was all a new experience in this remote little valley.

Finding work was the first order of business. Initially I landed a timber site improvement job. It involved killing hardwoods in pine plantations. Using a hatchet you knocked off a chunk of bark and then sprayed a herbicide into the notch. After two weeks, a local carpenter recruited me. Both jobs were weather dependent and winter was around the corner. I drove the 10 or so miles into Boone and started asking about work. A couple of days later, I got a call from the Hardware Store with a job offer. I jumped at the chance, and I landed on of my favorite jobs I've ever had.

Farmers Hardware was right in the center of Boone. It was a big three story affair with a mezzanine. Out back a separate building held a ski shop and under it, tractor and chainsaw sales and repair. The bottom floor of the main store was paints and glass. In the old days they had a shooting range for customers to try out guns before purchasing them, but that was long gone ... only some bullet holes in one of the chestnut columns supporting the building still told the story.

The main floor was tools, dishes, screws, guns, knives, stove pipe, kerosene lamps, horseshoes and harness, and much more. It was the kind of store where you needed a clerk to help you find what you were looking for. Things were stocked in drawers with multiple bins. Women worked the front where the dishes and housewares were located and the guys were in the back with the hardware bits and bobs.

The mezzanine was electronics...Sony TVs and the newly released beta max recorders. Cecil, the owner, had his office there and he handled most of those sales. He had a window that looked down over the main floor. Third floor held picnic tables and patio furnishings, wood stoves, fireplace equipment, and similar seasonal items. There was a old freight elevator to take items and customers up there.

It was a thriving business throughout the year with winter ski clientele and summer snowbirds returning from Florida. Cecil treated his employees right. He had profit sharing. He paid a substantial bonus at the end of the year, not to mention giving everyone a wheel of cheese and a big ham for Christmas. That sure creates loyalty and makes you want the store to do well.

Doc Watson, who was from Deep Gap a few miles down the road, was a regular customer. When you were helping him he would say,”let me see it.” Which meant take it out of the plastic wrappings so he could feel it to see if it was what he wanted. He wired his own house. He must have used a sound generator to tell the wires apart. People who knew him as a child said you would never know he was blind. He would play with other children running around the playground as if he was sighted.

Music is common in the area, and it became more a part of my life as well. One day a fellow came in the store, said he was looking for a bandger screw. Well, we had all kinds of screws...round head, flat head, wood, self tapping metal, and so on...but no bandger screws. I asked him what they were for...and he looked at me like I was an idiot and made like he was strumming and said you know, for a bandger (banjo). Ended up he needed a small screw for a mechanical tuning peg.

Here's some background about the Appalachians and the European settlers (and their music) (30 min)

It wasn't just locals, lots of tourists came to the store. One day I was filling in downstairs in the paint department. It was winter, and a woman came in from out at the ski shop. She was wearing a loose knit sweater, and it being cold her headlights were on high beam with her nipples sticking out of the sweater. Dale was working the floor with me, an older local fellow. He was dumb struck and could not even speak. I was a young hippie accustomed to nudity and got the paint brush she was seeking without a blush. Seems there was always something entertaining at the store.

The little town of Mabel was also constantly entertaining. Tobacco farming is one of the last crops that allows for small farms. I arrived in the late summer, and helped my neighbor (D.E. And Ruby) with their harvest. There a good bit of hand work. You cut the tobacco plant. Use a metal cone over a stout stick and stack the cut plants on it. The sticks get hung in the barn to dry. After drying the tobacco leaves are pulled off and graded into “hands” ready for sale.

The tobacco allotments are small enough that many folks still work them with horses and mules. Down the road I met Earl, a retired salesman. He was the resident horse expert and often judged shows and went to auctions. He had a old white mule that was smart as could be. He would buy a untrained horse and harness it up with his mule. That mule would train the horse to work biting or kicking it till it would work like a dream. Then Earl would buy another matched horse and swap sides, letting the old mule train the second horse. Then he would harness the two horses together and work them... finally selling them as a match pair. People came from all over to buy his well trained horses (and he would make a pretty profit as a result).

Denver and Ruby lived across the road. Denver's Dad once owned the little store in town. He remembered going with his Dad in a wagon to Mountain City once a month to get supplies for the store. It was a day there and a day back home. Ruby always seemed the one who did the work around their farm. She could tote two square bales at a time by holding them at shoulder level. They had hippie chickens, that's what they called them anyway. Their feathers grew over their eyes. Ruby would catch them and trim their head feathers so they could see better. One day I went over the visit. Denver was reclined in a outdoor lounge chair, and Ruby was on the roof caulking around the chimney. Denver keep hollering instructions...a little more over to your left.

Every Friday night there was a auction in Mountain City, Tennessee about ten miles away. We got in the habit of going with some of our neighbors. I still have several items in my house from those auctions...a mirror on my medicine cabinet, an old chestnut washstand, a few tools, and old wheat cradle that hangs in my barn. Like the Trade Day in my current life, the auction was as much a social event as a shopping opportunity.

I had to learn to drive on snow. The hardware store opened at 7 AM and I was often the first person out of the valley. It started snowing in December that year, and I didn't see the ground again till late March. Some mornings the only way to see where the road was were the tops of the fence posts on either side of the road. You had to drive down the valley and turn left to get to the main road which was plowed. When I first arrived they gave me advice on how to drive that sounded bizarre but ended up being the strategy. First thing buy snow tires with studs (little metal spikes). When you need to turn, start early and go into a controlled slide, when you're lined up with the road use your gas to propel you in the right direction. After a week or two it was natural and pretty easy.

We met some folks over in Spruce Pine. They took us cross country skiing on the Blueridge parkway. He was a wood turner and I also had my first experience with a lathe there. It was easy to meet people in the store. Some of them I encountered years later. Paul comes to mind. He was a musician and I was invited to a session at his house. He had built a plastic greenhouse type structure over a little creek outside his door. The little stream buffered the temperature and he had early spring blooms there as winter was letting go its grip. Years later we re-met in Rome Georgia at a little festival we were both playing.

Spring replaced winter and the area has some great hiking opportunities. The tobacco farmers set up plastic covered nurseries to start their plants. The more prosperous farmers would use tractor driven planters. The smaller operators planted their crop by hand. Ray just used a stick to poke a hole, placing the seedling in it, and covering it covering it by hand...much like I now plant in my garden.

I guess that's the point I'm trying to make in this essay. Where we spend our time, shapes how we spend our time, and so directs us on our path. I loved my year in Mabel and Boone. It help mold me in many ways. You may be wondering why I left. One of my profs at Auburn offered me a scholarship ...an offer I decided to take - going to school full time. I went on to get my BS and MS in Agronomy and Soils. I had an $800 debt when I finished my BS and no debt when I completed my masters. I went on to UGA for a PhD, but left the publish or perish corporate research world to teach in public schools with a MEd in science circling all the way back to my goal when I first struck out to make a new life in NC.

Has there been a place in your life that shaped you? I would love to hear your story.