  In a desperate effort, I presume, to make up for his outrageous misjudgment of my walking prowess, Assistant Chief Ranger Harold Edwards devoted his weekly day of rest to showing me some of the interior of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We drove over to Cade’s Cove in the far western end of the park. Cade’s Cove is several thousand acres of flat farm land set right down in the middle of the Smoky Mountain chain. Its floor is at 1800 feet elevation, and mountains ring it on every side. In the old days, the people of Cade’s Cove lived in a Shangri La almost as isolated as a Tibetan monastery. They sent almost nothing to market. They made their own clothes, ground their own meal, butchered their own meat. Only one road ran into Cade’s Cove, and it was a pretty bad road until the park and the CCC got hold of it. Even today it winds and twists down over the pass to the tune of 200 hairpin turns. It isn’t a scary road at all, just a crooked one. Some families left the Cove when the Government took over, but 19 families remain. They have cars and trucks and tractors, and a school and a store and even a post office with an R. F. D. carrier. They are still pretty much their own world. But Mr. Edwards comes from the Montana mountains, and he is nuts about flat land. You know those little two-pronged stickers that come off onto your clothes by the hundreds when you walk through the weeds in the fall. In Indiana we always called them Spanish needles. Here in the mountains they call them “beggar’s lice.” ‘HEARTS-A-BUSTIN’ WITH LOVE’Miss Laura Thornburgh lives in Gatlinburg and loves the Smokies so much she’s written a book about them. One evening she sent us over a beautiful bouquet of Hearts-a-Bustin’-with-Love. I’ll bet that one stops you. It is a local shrub, or hedge, or flower, or tree. I don’t know what you call it. Anyway it looks like Christmas holly at first glance. But when you get up close, you see it has been a round pod, and then it has broken open and out have come four red berries, just like lights on a chandelier. It is lovely. The real name of it is Wahoo, but around here it is always called “Hearts-a-Bustin’-with-Love.” On the day that America registered for conscription, the Park Service set up its counter and registered all travelers and wayfarers and residents of the Park. One Ranger had to hike five miles back into the mountain wilderness to register a boy who had been crippled since childhood with infantile paralysis. There is no road back there, only a foot trail. I have a sneaking feeling that if this young man had never been registered at all, nobody would have gone to the penitentiary over it. I can’t be as astonished by some of the local expressions as the discoverers would like you to be. The mountaineers say “shoe lastes” for “shoe last,” and they say “you’uns,” and “heerd,” and “poke” for sack, and “whistle pig” for groundhog, and “ketched” for caught, and so on. Yet when I was a boy in Indiana there were people within three miles of us who talked that way. And I have cousins back home (nice people too) who say “you-uns” and “we’uns” and “ketched.” I don’t have to go out of the family to dig up a little picturesque grammar. In fact, I don’t even have to go out of the room. |
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