“Road Trip: Pt. III”

The trip from Athens, GA, to that rainy highway median in east Tennessee was a very long day.  Since I was on my own time and the weather was still good for January in 1972, I decided to do a bit of exploring.  I checked my map—paper then, of course—and headed to the northeast from Athens to Rabun County.  I had read and been a fan of Eliot Wigginton’s Foxfire books.  He was a high school English teacher at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School.  In order to get his students writing, he had them collect oral stories from their relatives and neighbors in the hills and hollows of the Appalachian Mountains where they lived.  This classroom project eventually grew into a dozen books of stories and other pieces—ghost stories, traditional songs, instructions for making all sorts of things.  Great reading.

The school is in the mountains up a winding highway.  I got a ride at some point to within a few miles of it and started walking.  Not many vehicles passed.  No one stopped.  I’d had pretty good luck up to that point, and it was probably mid-morning when I caught sight of the school buildings.  For some reason I didn’t do more than just stand there and look at them and think about the first few volumes I had read.  At the time I think only a couple had been published.  I hiked on up the road.

An hour or so later I crested the rounded top of the mountain and started down.  The sun was west of me then but still high in the sky, and I could see gathering clouds.  I knew I needed to get farther north and west, always west.  No one stopped for quite a while.

Eventually I got the classic hitchhiker’s ride.  A beat up old two-ton truck pulled up in front of me.  If it had ever had paint, it was all simply rust then.  The tires looked like ring baloney skins.  The sideboards were combinations of one-by-sixes and plywood and held a miscellaneous load of five or six kids—two human, the rest goats—a few bales of moldy hay, various pieces of machinery I don’t recall too well, and a dog of dubious heritage that wasn’t sure about me, either. 

The driver was an old woman right out of a Grant Wood painting, bonnet included.  Four more children of various ages occupied the bench seat in the cab; not one looked to be older than about ten, and one held an infant in her arms.  Granny smiled an almost toothless smile and asked me where I was headed.  I explained I was eventually bound for Missouri but would appreciate any help in that direction.  She spit a black stream of tobacco juice over the top of the broken side mirror and told me she’d get me another forty miles or so.  After thanking her profusely, I threw my pack on and jumped in back with the kids.

The dog eventually warmed up to me.  I’ve always had a way with canines.  The goats were tied to the back on short ropes.  The two children, a boy and a girl maybe six years old, were silent in their shyness until I rummaged through my pack for my lunch and gave them a Hershey bar to share.  They quickly devoured the chocolate while I went through a package of peanut butter crackers and an apple.  We watched one another for a while, and then I settled down to take in the scenery.  It was pleasant enough despite the bleating of the goats and the bumpy, springless ride.  I’d put up enough hay and spent enough time in barns that the smells didn’t bother me.  The Smokeys and Appalachians are beautiful.  Much different from the Rockies—they seem older, more settled and maybe more secretive.  I recalled the folktales from the Foxfire books I had read, and remembered that some of my ancestors lived for a time in these hills up in the Carolinas.  Cemeteries back there are full of stones with COX chiseled in the marble.  I wondered who these folk were.

It was a short ride, but it got me down the mountain and into Tennessee.  Since leaving the campus at the University of Georgia in the morning, by the middle of that afternoon I felt as if I had traveled back in time and returned.  I still had miles to go before I could sleep.  The clouds were gathering.