TWO WORLDS: TRADITIONAL MOUNTAIN CULTURE
Yesterday I drove with Susie to Madison County on a journey of discovery. She had read about a pancake breakfast and flea market at the community center in Flag Pond which was just over the mountain border from Madison County in Tennessee. But the people were the same mountain people as the people in Madison County.
We drove up Interstate 26 to the top of the range of Blue Ridge Mountains separating North Carolina and Tennessee and just over the ridge we exited to Flag Pond, a small community built around the former elementary school which had now become a community center.
We surveyed the small flea market of tables in which people were unloading things they didn‘t need and then went into the school where a team was cooking up pancakes which they served with butter and syrup and either bacon or sausage and coffee or orange juice for $5, a good deal. Everyone was super friendly and most of the people were locals.
On the walls of the community center was a room maintained by the Ruritan Club which must be a group dedicated to social development like Rotary or Civitan. The room had displays of local history and activities. A big event that happened in May, which we didn‘t know about and plan to come to next year, was a ramp festival, which was sponsored by a number of local groups. Ramps are a form of wild onion, used in cooking, but certainly a local mountain plant not celebrated anywhere else.
Much of the flea market was household discards, but one older woman had remarried after the death of her husband to a man whose wife had died and when they combined their things in a renovated house was trying to clear out the last of the things that wouldn‘t fit into the new house including some very elaborate wood carvings of figures which she said were from Florida but seemed to me more like Indonesia which must have required weeks and weeks or careful carving which she was selling for $8. I bought one.
Another man, obviously a farmer, was selling a couple of elaborate horse saddles for $150 apiece and a variety of other things. I bought a Carhardt vest for $5 and a wooden device that made when rubbed would produce the sound of a turkey gobbler. Carhardt is a brand much valued by hard working rural men. Another good buy.
A third woman was selling her collection of naked Barbie dolls which she had priced on line with their value depending on which Asian country they were produced in.
After the flea market we headed across the state line back to Madison County and Susie and Todd‘s cabin home.
We were only and hour from Asheville but already we seemed to be in a completely different world. The mountain roads followed the same curves to the mountains that the horse and buggy roads had followed, often following a winding stream that had cut through the mountainside. Houses were scattered along the roads often on flat places where there was enough even land to plant a field or two usually with a timbered barn which was often beginning to lean and collapse.
Many of the fields had waving hay which in some places was being cut and rolled into large round bales. In the old days before the collapse of the tobacco business many of these fields would have been planted with tobacco which would have hung in the barns to dry. Now there was hay and cattle in the fields and the barns are falling down. There were no towns so that everyone had a few nearby neighbors and would drive to a local country store for provisions. But above the streams and above every little farmstead were the steep slopes of the mountains covered in forest.
We took a side trip up a well maintained dirt road into a national forest where we got out to cross a narrow foot bridge built from two enormous thirty foot logs, flattened on one side to walk on, supported by a large log support at the center. We saw a some hunters with their hunting dogs looking out of little side windows on a pickup truck but otherwise it was peaceful and quiet and very, very beautiful.
Then, just before we got to Todd and Susie‘s place we stopped at a country store that sold everything a household could need in a space about the size of the cereal counter at the giant Ingles near Marshall. The woman owner prepared me a hot dog for lunch. There were old men sitting on the front porch talking with each other. It was as rural as you could get. And everyone was so, so friendly. And it occurred to me that this was MAGA Trump country and everyone of the friendly people we had met had pretty certainly voted for Donald Trump in the last election and would in the next. That is something that I want to think about and wonder about later.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 