Our Heritage

Storytelling
Mountain Statistics and Mountain Laurel

By Amy Ammons Garza






The misty forest of Appalachia begins on Canada's Gaspe Peninsula, and ends in northern Georgia and Alabama, spreading shady branches over 3000 miles of the eastern United States.

     Under one of those branches, in the back room of a log cabin in North Carolina,  I was born.  For a long time, I knew nothing of the world outside those misty forests.  Content to be a child of the land, I played "house" in the root cellar dug in the mountain just behind the old homeplace; I carried my cucumber doll around with me in an old discarded piece of blanket; I went looking for buckeyes when I wanted something good to happen.

     The land of Appalachia is ancient; it is estimated to be 500 to 600 million years old.  The Great Smokies, a land of moving waters, has no natural lake or pond; however, rivers, said to be older than the mountains, are fed by 620 miles of clear water streams that bubble up from the heart of the land.

     What a wonderful feeling it was to play in the cool waters of Grassy Creek and slide down the smooth mossy rocks of Grassy Creek Falls.  In the hot months of July, my sister, Doreyl, and I would splash in the clear spring waters while, on the bank,  my brother, David, would shake the limbs of the mountain laurel that hugged the creek's banks.  White petals drifted down all about us; we called it "summer snow."

     The area known as the Great Smoky Mountains, Appalachia's tallest mountain range, was added to the National Park System in 1934;  it is the only national park purchased by citizens occupying and owning the land...and literally given to the people of the United States.

     Growing up in Appalachia, I never knew I was poor for I had the beauty of the mountains all around me.  I rose to the crowing of roosters, hoed corn and potatoes, milked the cow, played with the dogs, and went to sleep watching the sparks of fireflies dance just beyond the open windows.  There was always food on the table: vegetables we grew ourselves, honey from Grandpa's wild bees, bacon from Daddy's hogs, and biscuits from Mother's hands.
 
     At least 150 species of birds breed in the Southern Appalachians, and many more are occasional visitors or migrate through the area: golden eagles, black and turkey vultures, chicken and buzzard hawks, great horned and long-eared owls, crows, ravens, pileated woodpeckers.

      As a child I was fascinated by nature's natural protection system.  While weasels and snakes found and devoured many eggs,  very few of our chickens ever came up missing.  The rooster was the "king of the roost" and seemed to have "eyes in the back of his head!"  When a chicken hawk would  fly over the yard in our valley, and the shadow of his wingspan would darken the ground below,  our rooster's neck would suddenly seem to grow a half foot;  his scratchy long cry   developing into a high warning to his hens.  Long before the chicken hawk found his prey, the rooster had spied the bird's dipping brown body and had sent his charges into hiding.
   
     The forest of the Smokies shelter 1200 different flowering plants in the spring and drape 500 mosses with prisms of color in the fall.  In all Europe there are only 85 varieties of trees; in the Smokies alone, there are 140 varieties, and 129 of them are native.

     The leaves from the chestnut tree healed the broken skin of Grandpa when he fell off a railroad trestle and broke almost every bone in his body.  The roots of the ginseng plant brought us money to buy kerosene oil for our lamps.  A twig from a limb of the beechnut, chewed at the end until shaggy, made the best toothbrush. And mountain laurel never looked prettier than when Daddy came trudging in after logging all day and laid an armload of them in Mother's lap.

     Today the tourists of the Appalachian Mountains come by road, by air, or by rail; they come in droves to witness the beauty of the landscape--the maples, the oaks, the balsams, the sourwoods--and to listen to its people.

     Underneath cliffs of spring-wet rock, behind the rosined trunks of pines, and above the diamond-sparkles of the Tuckasegee River, my "homeplace" of yesterday still exists.  Tourists are searching for what I had as a child...for softer times, for peaceful times, for beautiful times --the times of cucumber dolls,  dancing fireflies, and the beauty of the flight of a chicken hawk.

     The people of Tennessee and North Carolina wanted to keep their mountains beautiful.  They bought some land, called it the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and gave it to everyone, including themselves.  What a gift!  a gift to be shared forever.  They laid an armload of mountain laurel in our laps.