Mexicowoods—An Expatriate Life

Old-Time Mountain Music

During unbearably hot summers, Floridians traditionally retreat to cooler weather in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Places like High Hampton Inn and Country Club cater to visitors, offering upscale rooms, fine dining, and golf. In recent years, vacationers have become retirees, building dream homes and creating demand for fine restaurants and boutiques. Jeeps and pickup trucks no longer rule: Mercedes and BMWs crowd parking lots.

But original mountain folk still live here, and we joined them one evening at the Lake Toxaway Community Center for the Friday Night Jam, an open microphone event where locals play country music. It begins with a volunteer-prepared dinner prepared in the center's commercial kitchen. On the night we attend, the fare consists of an overcooked pork chop, canned peas, canned applesauce, dinner rolls, iced tea, and a selection of homemade desserts. Mine is strawberry-flavored Cool-Whip "cheesecake." Haute cuisine it's not. It probably doesn't even rise to the standards of Zeke and Earl's Hot Dog Shop (five stars).

But our eight bucks buys us not only fuel for the evening ahead, but three hours of authentic music. And that's what we're there for.

At the Friday Night Jam, everyone is welcome to put their names on a sign up sheet. The performers are mostly local residents, mostly amateurs. A few are gifted musicians. A few. All are entertaining.

They perform bluegrass, old timey, country, and traditional Appalachian folk songs. Here the Hooper Sisters sing a gospel song.

Clarence Zachary, Laura's distant cousin, picks his Martin dreadnaught and sings in a fine, nasal country voice. He's an audience favorite.

Musicians whose turn has not yet arrived remain on stage to pick along with those who are soloing. I counted six guitars, two mandolins, a fiddle and a stand-up bass. One or two versatile musicians fill in from time to time on five-string banjo, dobro, or pedal steel guitar.

  

Lively numbers brings out dancers. This 80+ year old man is doing the twist to a number written is his honor: Bert's Boogie.

You can dance, but please don't swing on the ropes. People dance alone and in threes. Children dance with their parents. A man twirls a wheelchair-bound woman around the floor.

An elderly couple shows moves honed after decades of dancing together. He's wearing an oxygen bottle on his hip. You're never too old. Nobody seems shy or self-conscious.

 

Nor is anyone shy about airing dirty laundry. The bass player and emcee (visible behind the dancers, above) recently left Mary Etta, his wife of many years, for another woman. Mary Etta, accompanied by the fiddle player, works out her anguish, singing:

I've had nothing but sorrow
Since you said we were through.
There's no hope for tomorrow.
How's the world treating you?

Her ex stoically plays bass behind her while we all endure her strange quasi-operatic falsetto.

A slogan on a sweatshirt seems to deliver a message consonant with the social conservatives of the Cashiers Valley but leaves me wondering exactly what the point is.

The ensemble—if that's what it is—is anchored by this man, Joe Byer, a retired picker who once played with the Stanley Brothers. From time to time he steps up to the "redneck" mike and makes his old Gibson boom and twang, earning cheers every time.

 

Tonight's music is much like the dinner: not particularly good but extremely satisfying. An elderly man, apparently having studied guitar for about six months, painfully picks out Wildwood Flower. A little girl with way too much voice for her years sings I Am a Child of God. I hear my favorite country songs about lost love, like Pick Me Up on Your Way Down.

At the end of three hours the emcee says "I've enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand." For him, maybe so. But I could sit there for hours more.

If I moved to Cashiers or Lake Toxaway, I'd spend a couple of months rebuilding the callouses on my chording hand. Then I'd get up there on Friday nights and pick like I did forty years ago. I'd sing Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger When You Go Out at Night with all the pathos and solemnity that song deserves, with tears in my eyes and Joe Byer taking the breaks.

Hiking the Blue Ridge Mountains

We are hiking mountain trails near Cashiers, North Carolina: Whiteside Mountain, Rock Mountain, Silver Run Falls. The woods we walk through are cool and serene.

None of the paths are flat. All have steps cut into them. Good thing we're conditioned from scampering up and down San Miguel's hills every day. Our cardiovascular systems are acclimated to 6000'—we don't get winded at Cashiers wimpy 4500'.

It's said that long ago, a squirrel could travel from Georgia to Maine jumping from one American Chestnut tree to another. Chinese Chestnut trees, introduced at the beginning of the 20th Century, carried with them a blight that killed more than three billion trees throughout their Appalachian Mountain range. All that remain today are shoots from old roots. The photo shows two live sprouts and a dead 4" sapling. Sad. A Nantahala National Forest brochure encourages hikers to report any tree at least 10" in diameter in the hopes of finding blight-resistant varieties.

Details seen along the trail: a granite outcrop encrusted with an unknown green mineral. Can anyone identify it?

Fungi sprout from a dead snag. I don't know enough about them to pick and eat them. These looked good to me, though.

The season is fall—and lucky us, we caught the peak of the color change.

Autumn leaf color is more muted here than in New England, but gorgeous nonetheless.

Atop Whiteside Mountain, Laura and her Uncle Jon read all about the granite formation they're standing on. Part of our oldest mountain chain, it's a mere nub compared with the Himalaya-like peaks that existed here 450 million years ago.

From the mountaintops, we look out over the Cashiers Valley, our view enhanced by all that fall foliage. This view is from Rock Mountain, looking toward Whiteside.

I found myself drawn to this old land, its gentle mountains more nurturing, more inviting than California's Sierra Nevada where I used to backpack. Unlike the high sierra, I could find a home here.

Others feel this way: this area is home to retiring boomers. Land values inflate, mountain cabins give way to elegant lakefront homes, chi-chi restaurants line the main streets. The Cashiers area, with its moderate climate and beautiful setting, is becoming a haven for the well-to-do. We who live in San Miguel know this story all too well.

On the Rock Mountain trail, we met only one group of hikers (although the trail had recently been detoured to bypass a new housing development). On Whiteside Mountain, we ran into hundreds. Whether we shared the trails with others or had them all to ourselves, our experience was exhilarating and memorable.

Over the River and through the Woods

Grandma and Granddad have passed on, but Laura's mom and her three brothers have hung on to the old family home and the twenty acres of mountain land it sits on. The simple house contains three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a genuine parlor. The latter is kept neat as a pin and appears to be used mainly for company (which we are not). The one small bathroom created an intricate logistical dance among four adults and visitors. During our stay, we learned to cope.

The original house is old. Signs of nineteenth-century construction methods can be seen. These ceiling boards show tool marks from a scrub plane. The boards were cut from trees felled on the homesite and flattened using the gently curved plane blade. The work must have taken many hours and a lot of sweat.

The family calls this log shed the Apple House. The old orchard at the front of the main house suggests it was used to store fruit.

The Apple House is actually a small log cabin. Log ends are locked together using a triangular notch. I suspect this approach is easier (but less stable) than cutting the usual rectangular notches.

Above right, grooves in the sides of the logs give convincing evidence they were squared with a broadaxe—a tool generally seen only in antique shops.

On the inside of the Apple House, mud chinking between the logs can be seen. Built by Laura's great-grandfather, the family claims his thumbprints can still be seen pressed into the mud.

Living in old houses is one thing: my former home on Aldama in San Miguel dates from the mid-eighteenth century—far older than this mountain home. But what makes this place special is that it has been occupied by the same family ever since it was built over a hundred years ago. To its owners, its history has more significance than any colonial Mexican mansion could possibly have for Johnny-come-lately expat newcomers.

Laura's mom, her uncles and cousins and their families all crowded into the old house. We had to take turns sitting, the place is so small. We cooked a country ham. We harvested last-of-the-season squash and potatoes from the garden and ate those too. We found enough windfall apples and pears to make a pie. One of Laura's uncles picked guitar and sang. And in this way, we continued the chain of life that has come down through the generations in this old family home.

We Drive to North Carolina

We have been visiting family in Pensacola. This, I have to point out, is not the Florida of Miami or Tampa. No wall-to-wall high rises, no East Coast retirees, no Midwestern snowbirds. Here we are in the true South; the panhandle is virtually a part of Alabama. The beaches are lovely white sand, minus the hassles and expense of South Florida: The Redneck Riviera.

Now we're traveling through more of the South. We're driving eight hours from Pensacola to Cashiers, North Carolina (pronounced Cashers) where Laura's mom grew up. We're crossing Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, headed for the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Our route takes us through the Old South, Old Dixie, the Confederate South. Good times here are not forgotten. A joking man asks in passing, "How come the South lost the war?"

In the center of a small Alabama town, we pass an old log cabin.

No longer king, nevertheless some cotton still grows here. This field, shot from our speeding car, looks odd: lots of cotton bolls but no leaves. Laura's stepdad explains: cotton isn't picked by hand anymore. Farmers spray defoliant on the fields and mechanically harvest the bolls after the leaves have fallen: efficient, but the romance is gone.

Near Greenville, Alabama, we pass Hank WIlliams' birthplace. Along the lonesome highway a billboard declares:

GOD, GUNS & GUTS

We Support Our Troops

We pass the Beams of Light Church, the Apostolic Faith Campground, the Abundant Life Parking Lot. Here jackleg preachers perform foot washings. Here abortion clinics suffered bombings. Here a fanatic assassinated Dr. David Gunn.

Signs hawk green peanuts, boiled peanuts, goobers. One delivers a mixed message: "Layaway Plan Available—One Nation Under God." A vanity license plate admonishes: "Choose Life." Church and State are not so separate in Alabama.

But whether Southerners want it or not, change is coming. A billboard heralds: "Hyundai—Proudly Built in Alabama." Koreans now own a part of Dixie.

Hours later, crossing into Georgia, we spy the golden dome of the state capitol. For a brief while we leave the Old South behind, passing through a modern metropolis of freeways, skyscrapers and mammon.

 

Kudzu grows everywhere. This rampant vine continues to eat the south, smothering trees, impossible to eradicate.

 

We cross the South Carolina line—really cheap gas! One of our party orders the chicken fried steak at Cracker Barrel. He won't do that again.

In North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Mountains appear on the horizon—welcome sighting of our destination.

 

We're in a different kind of South here: still socially conservative but less strident. We're going to visit mountain people, more independent than doctrinaire. We're looking for a small hamlet along a winding mountain road, where Grandma and Grandpa lived their entire lives, cutting their own firewood, putting up homegrown string beans.