Brawny Moonshine and an Old Man

By Kevin Huelsmann

Back in the early 1750s, when the U.S. was still settling into its new land, a few settlers parted ways with the rest of the lot and headed for the mountains. They were largely Protestant Scots-Irish with some Welsh and Germans thrown in the mix, too. They wanted to be left alone. No government. No harassment. No nothing. All they wanted was to live in peace and live on their own terms. If they wanted to enforce their own vigilante laws, drink moonshine until they pickled their livers and participate in their own forms of religion and worship, then everyone else be damned, they would.

Since then a lot has happened. The mountains they settled in were deemed the Blue Ridge Mountains (part of the Southern Appalachians), and the town, Boone. Many of the forests are still intact, but there have also been many cleared away to make room for ski lodges, multi-million dollar “getaway” homes, a major university (Appalachian State University), gas stations, strip malls and restaurants. The tiny settlement that once was the location of some of Daniel Boone’s cabins and favorite hunting grounds is now a growing town of more than 15,000 permanent residents. From mid-August to late May that number swells to almost 25,000 when all of the students and faculty are in school. 

It has become a town of many different cultures. There are pockets of mountainside homes, pricey restaurants and high class shopping. Partially for wealthy residents and partially for the great number of retired people who have a home in the mountains to break the sunny monotony of their Florida retirement community (they have taken on a new identity as Floridiots because of their driving habits). There are swarms of tourists who come to Boone to enjoy the hiking and skiing, depending on the season. During the school year, thousands of students also descend on the city. Then there are the townspeople who live here all year round, working for the university or the hospital (the two major employers in the area) and who have to put up with the rotating cast of passersby. 

The ethos of the original Boonenites is still alive and well though. Every time another law is passed that restricts what people can do on their land or in their home, a small furor rises out of the mountains, like memory of past come to take back the town to its roots. It slowly snakes through the town, in the soil, underneath the streets and buildings and homes, and it erupts in the community courthouse over local political issues like zoning restrictions or taxes. But it is not an ancient town, out of touch with reality. There are many well-educated, very liberal minds in Boone. 

The problem is that those very liberal-minded people are considered foreigners, or people who moved to Boone for jobs or school or retirement. The “foreigners” tend to clash with the “original” residents of Boone, or those whose family goes back three or four generations. Similar to any university and town relationship, there are also a lot of “us” versus “them” issues that add fuel to the fire, or maybe it launches in some Molotov cocktails into the fight. The vitriol spit forth in letters to the editor can be quite fervent.

When I was driving into Boone, winding through the mountains on US 321, I was conjuring images of men with long wisps of beards, chugging moonshine by the jug and playing rowdy bluegrass on their porch with their wives fixin’ meals and the kids playin’ barefoot in the wild grass. On the road I saw some broken down shacks that didn’t really dispel the myth I had brewing in my mind. It felt like there were lines of anonymous eyes watching my car sail past on the roads plotting an attack on this intruding foreigner, like a mix of Deliverance and Looney Tunes. 

The fog of stereotypes blew away when I pulled through the quaint main street of Boone. There were art shops, tourist kitsch, an independent music store and some restaurants. It was the mixing of college life, tourism and pragmatic, everyday need. It felt familiar and made me feel comfortable, like cookies and milk, warm cookies and milk, I might add. 

I opened the windows, probably the first time in almost 10 hours (it was in the upper 90s when I left St. Louis) and inhaled the thin, clean mountain air. It was like I was reliving a Brawny commercial in my car. “Mmmmm, ahhhhhh, fresh mountain air,” as all of these flowers and fresh crystals graphics flooded into my bearded mouth. I was really having a great time driving into town. I thought about not making the rest of the trip to my cousins’ house, and just driving around town to maintain my little vision. 

That would have been rude though and I had been in the car way too long. I made it to my cousins’ house at about 9 p.m. Wednesday. I walked in, said hi, gave some hugs, got some food and fell into a coma for the rest of the night. It wasn’t the most gracious hello I’ve ever given, but who can really do that after spending 11 hours in a car. If you say that you can or have, you’re a liar. Sorry to say it, but it’s true. 

I can’t understand how one gets fatigued sitting on their ass, moving their ankle a few inches every so often and making the occasional stop to eat or go to the bathroom. It defies the physical world. In my driving from St. Louis to Boone, I learned that not only does one’s car become conducive to visions and hallucinations, but that it also sucks energy directly from your body (maybe that’s why cars really get better mileage on the highway, it starts running off of the driver’s energy, oil crisis solved, move on). The things that you learn when driving for extended periods of time are amazing. 

On Thursday morning we awoke at the crack of 10 a.m. We had haphazardly planned a hike on Grandfather Mountain the night before. Grandfather Mountain is just that: a mountain with the alleged profile of an elderly man. It took a while to see it, but I do agree that it looks like some random old fella. We bought our hiking passes from a local gas station and started up the mountain by 11 a.m. Ill-prepared is a nice way of describing my status for the hike. I was in tennis shoes and tiny ankle socks with the thought that the hike would be a breeze; a few hours on a trail through the woods. Over six hours and some change, a trail took us over boulders and craggy ridges, straight to the peak of the mountain, called Calloway Peak (5,964 ft.). 

The next day I was tired, but so what, I got to spend six hours in a beautiful forest, hiking past beautiful scenes and spectacular views from more than 5,000 ft. The woods had an eerie calm to them when we were walking through. The trail we did isn’t really a popular one for tourists. Most people who want to see the mountain drive to the top, pay the $15 entrance fee, and walk around for an hour. I had no problem with that though; it was their loss and our quiet woods. Everything smelled fresh and alive; like the woods were breathing and moving (I kept thinking of the giant trees in the Lord of the Rings movies). The ground was soft and gave a little under my feet. Stray leaves and branches, still wet with mist from the morning, brushed against my arm as we walked. The ground was soft. For long periods of time all I would hear would be our feet shuffling over leaves and rocks. 

“Sweet Thing”(Van Morrison) was running through my head: “…and I will drink the clean clear waterfall to quench my thirst….and I will walk and talk in gardens all misty and wet with rain…and I shall never grow so old again.” It’s a very sparse song, almost entirely built around vocals and guitar. It’s a very natural sounding song. It’s honest. It’s penetrating. The woods were penetrating. Their quiet is powerful and the solitude is almost frightening. It appeals to a very basic, natural feeling in people. I think that it’s the same feeling that is connected to love. It’s raw and visceral, emotive and evocative of things beyond us. All of your senses are heightened and focused by the whole experience. It’s like a blind man’s hearing being heightened or vice versa. The quiet focuses everything. 

That feeling has to be the reason so many people are drawn to the woods; the feeling of being part of, or at least in the presence of, something bigger than us all. Thoreau went to Walden Pond to escape society and found solitude and peace. Keroauc went to Big Sur and found God. There is a divine pull from wide expanses of nature. When you see everything in balance, an intricate ecosystem surviving on its own, it’s kind of hard not to gravitate towards those ideas of divinity and metaphysics, all the big unanswered questions and what if’s. 

At a clearing towards the top of the mountain, we stopped and ate some lunch. It wasn’t much, hummus and pita bread, some nuts and some fruit, but it was perfect nonetheless. We sat looking out over Boone and the surrounding mountains, talking about the view, family, and food among other things. Then we moved on. 

We finished the hike that evening and piled into my cousin’s jeep, melting into the seats. 

That night we went to a local music series at a nearby park. A woman in a jean skirt, flannel button-up shirt, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat sang some bluegrass songs along with some folk songs. She was actually really good. From the name, Shannon Wurst and Friends, we were worried that we were going to get a bunch of ugly, middle aged women yodeling about jug bands. Everyone there brought picnics, but if you hadn’t the local Boy Scout troop had set up a tent to sell food. They made a mean chocolate crepe, no kidding. 

Over the next two days, we spent our time driving through Boone and the Blue Ridge Parkway (469 miles of incredibly scenic road from Shenandoah National Park, Va. to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, N.C. that has been adopted by RVs and bikers as a rite of passage), eating at various restaurants and touring the university. 

One entire day was devoted to the World Cup, at least for me and my cousin. The women opted out of an afternoon on the couch and went shopping at an outlet sale. It was really all about what a vacation should be: relaxing and eating. I’m not a lazy person, but people need these kinds of days every so often (notice I said every so often, not every day, some people don’t need any more of these days). We enjoyed the game and the vicious head butt delivered by the balding bastion of athletic prowess/violence, Zinedine Zidane. The penalty kicks were the truly disgusting part of the match, not the head butt. Two great teams play a great match and it gets decided by guessing and luck. 

The women came back from their trip and we all made dinner. Then we hung out around the living room and talked, played games and basically did nothing.

Another hike was planned for the next day in order to balance the loafing. It was much shorter than the first one. There were three trails carved out around a modest waterfall, maybe about 25 feet tall. Each trail was about a mile long. One brought you to the top of the waterfall, one to a mid-point lookout and the other to the bottom. 

At one lookout point all you could see was forest. I walked out from the wooden platform and sat on a rock that jutted out from the cliff. The guard rails were gone, the town was gone, the roads, the cars, the buildings, all gone. No more skyscraping monuments to progress and technology. No sea of cement and pollution. It was like looking into the past, into what the settlers had seen when they came here: forest and mountains. When I looked out I imagined all of the plants, the animals and the tiny creeks and springs. It wasn’t like the cold, ordered feeling that you sometimes get in a big city. Everything felt open. There was room to the edge of the sky. 

When we got down to the waterfall we walked to a huge boulder sticking out of the water in front of the falls. The water was persistent and pounding, but it was soothing. There is no hard surface to crash against, so big ssshhhh and wwwssshhhhing sounds come out. It has a delicate power. We sat there for a while, just being quiet. We were on a giant rock in the middle of the woods starting at a waterfall. Just like at the lookout point, everything attached to modern civilization just faded from my mind. At that point, nothing else really existed.

Hunger broke our minds from the focus. We walked back up through the gorgeous rhododendrons and virgin trees to the parking lot and once again accepted the fact that we drive a car, live in a house and are part of the civilization that had been forgotten an hour before. 

We said our woozy goodbyes the next morning, thankful for the hospitality we received and the things that we were able to see, not to mention the four foot rhododendron jammed in my back seat. On the drive out of Boone we passed still, glass ponds and heard all of the birds and bugs as the day was just beginning. We took a big breath of mountain air and closed the windows, prepared for the ride home.