Dam Tadpoles!

May 29, 2008 -- Day Seven

By J. Trace Kirkwood

I find the last day of a trip to be painful, especially if I like the place or places I've been. I don't like writing about the last day. If I were to examine my real feelings about ending a vacation, I'd come across as moaning and groaning, and nobody wants to read that from a soul who can afford to take vacations.

I've divided the world into two types of people. There are those who live to work. I've worked with some of these people and am great friends with several. There are those who work to live. I fall into the latter category. I've never put much stock into career or position or title or climbing any kind of ladder. I work for a paycheck so that I can provide for my family and to do the things I love to do. I enjoy my job, which sort of soothes and avocation (travel), but I'd much rather travel beyond the limits of my employer's leash. When I pass an interesting place or event I'd like to stop and find out more about it.

A county official with whom I work has promised to take me to Mantle Rock in his section of Kentucky. Mantle Rock is where the Cherokees wintered in 1836 prior to crossing the Ohio River. Many of them died there. The acquaintance of mine and I can't seem to find a suitable day to link up and hike back to the place. Most of it is my fault because of my busy schedule.

So, on the last day of a vacation I feel like time is running out on me.

I had promised my daughter all week that we would hike part of the Appalachian Trail. Last summer, she and I hike across Clingman's Dome on the AT and she did fine at that altitude. My daughter is nine years old and almost five feet tall. She's as big around as a twig, but tougher than a catcher's mitt when she chooses to be.

We started hiking the AT at a spot near Fontana Dam, and we headed north up Shuckstack Mountain. When we started Dana and my little boy, Parkman, were with us. When he realized that every step of the trail was uphill, he decided he wanted to head back to our truck. My wife took him back, which left Sylvia and me on the trail. We were alone. I knew that a hiker was behind us, but no one was heading south on the trail that morning.

We went further and further up the trail.

I've learned something about hiking in the mountains. In west Kentucky I like to hike in the early mornings because it is cool. Humidity is a problem but not enough to counterbalance the cool air. Late mornings and afternoons in Kentucky are too hot for hiking. Then, early evenings are great times to hike but still quite hot.

In North Carolina, the mountain coves are filled with clouds and moisture, and I've discovered that it can rain along a ridge top but not at lower elevations. That was the case on our hike.

I kept an eye on my daughter to see how she handled the trail and the steep climb. She was careful and seemed not to fatigue too much. We stopped often and I bewildered at how she can walk so far on her skinny legs. I'd ask her if she wanted to go on up the mountain, and she always answered with a firm "yes." That was my same experience with her as we traversed Clingman's last summer.

We made it almost to the top of Shuckstack Mountain, which is near Fontana Dam. As we started up the last stretch of the mountain, I noticed that Syl's steps were sloppy and her feet appeared to be heavy. I asked her about continuing, and her "yes" had no enthusiasm, so we turned around and headed for Fontana Dam.

As we got closer to the point where the AT intersects with a road leading to Fontana, I could hear the squeaky breaks of our truck through the woods. We timed it perfect. My wife and little boy had been wheeling around in our old Ford and had come back to get us. I whistled (I can do an incredibly loud taxi hailing whistle) through the forest so they knew we were near. Sure enough, when we got there, they had heard me whistle and knew to wait.

We drank some lemonade they had in a cooler and ate a hearty snack. I decided I was hiking all the way back to the dam, and Sylvia and Parkman joined me. It's not much of a hike because the AT follows the road down to and across the dam. Still, how many chances does a person get to hike the world's most famous trail across the tallest dam in the eastern U.S.?

On the dam we discovered a puddle on the road that was full of tadpoles. I must point out that Warren County, Kentucky, is largely devoid of creeks. We live in a karst topography, and our water flows down and through rather than over and around. Our part of Kentucky is also known as "the barrens." I guess it's the first patch of prairie as one travels from east to west in this nation.

My kids are mostly unfamiliar with tadpoles. The puddle provided great amusement for them, and it fascinated me. There's not a patch of grass or dirt within a thousand feet of that spot on the dam. The water is 468 feet down on one side and about 30 feet down on the other. How the heck did a frog or frogs find that spot to lay its eggs? Why? Sylvia and Parkman delighted in catching the squirmy little ink spots. I tried snatching them, but my hands aren't as quick as they were when my friends and I caught tadpoles when we were kids.



Thankfully, there's no traffic on the dam.

We spent the afternoon at the swimming pool as the time ran out on this year's vacation.

Trailing the Tears

By J. Trace Kirkwood

May 28, 2008 -- Day Six

When I'm on the road I have a routine. Whether I'm on vacation or working I do not sleep past sunrise, which means I'm up long before any of the rest of my family. My routine is to eat breakfast, write about the day before, and maybe take a walk before showering. It's always a peaceful time. I can't remember if it was Benjamin Franklin, Shakespeare, or some other sage that said, "he who sleeps late trots all day."

When I opened the curtains on the morning of our sixth day I discovered low clouds scraping across and breaking on the mountains. Without looking at a forecast I could tell that rain would fill the day and that we would have to find some other distraction besides hiking or playing Hillbilly Putt Putt. I sat at the table scanning a North Carolina Map and shuffling through the stack of brochures we had picked up during our travels trying to come up with something to do on a rainy day. It's always hard for me because I hate rain, and I like to be outside. I also hate to be wet unless I'm in a shower, pool (I don't even like pools that much), lake, or ocean.

I don't know why, but I suggested that we drive up to Cherokee, which is in the Cherokee Indian Reservation. Dana and I drove through a small part of Cherokee when we were in the National Park a couple of years before, and I wasn't impressed. I thought maybe there was a good part that we did not see because we only turned around and headed back up the mountain when we were there before.

Really, my first impression of Cherokee was right on the money. It's a string of crappy shops selling crappy stuff, all of which increases the wealth of the People's Republic of China with every plastic or glass trinket purchased. Take that Chairman Mao!

Cherokee is undergoing a transformation. Harrah's has a casino there, and it looked to me that one or two other casinos are being built on the edge of town. The casino is bringing in some big money, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee uses the money to build even more crappy shops. The development is shifting the commerce from the strip just outside the National park to the strip on which the casinos are located. I guess it's shifting from U.S. 441 to U.S. 19.

I foresee a time when Cherokee gives Gatlinburg a run for its money. They are essentially the same, except the Indians have the casinos, which will siphon tourism dollars away from Gatlinburg. Maybe Southerners are enough opposed to gambling that they'll continue to stay in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, but the cancer of casino gambling is pervasive. The ones at Tunica, Mississippi, have been a huge success, and I think buses bound for that place pull out of Bowling Green on a daily basis.

I wonder how the Tribal Elders distribute the revenue generated by the casinos. I noticed that they are not run by the tribe. Harrah's runs the one I saw. So, I wouldn't be surprised if the management wasn't screwing over the tribe or if the money only finds it way to certain people within the tribe.

I've always admired the Eastern Band of Cherokees. They stood their ground. They used their heads and evaded the United States government. They fought when they had to. They avoided Removal. I love the U.S., but the Removal and the Trail of Tears episode is one of those pieces of our history that makes me queasy. Greed drove this nation into a terrible humanitarian mistake.

It makes me sad that the EBCI has opted for casino gambling. The future will see how they handle their greed.

Kentuckians have stood up and said "no" to casino gambling, despite having a beefheaded governor who kowtowed to their interests within the state. Governor Beshear is not politically capable enough to get the people to accept casinos. The stumblebum mis-read an anti-Fletcher (Kentucky's previous inept governor) vote as an endorsement for casino gambling into the Commonwealth.

This is what I see in the future, however. Some day the drain of tourism dollars out of Gatlinburg will pressure Tennessee to succumb to the gaming table. Once Tennessee does it, Kentucky will feel compelled to allow casinos.

All of it will have started with the Cherokee Indians. A new Trail of Tears will cut through Tennessee and Kentucky.

We didn't stay in Cherokee for very long and was back at Fontana Village in time to play a stirring round of putt-putt. Parkman had back-to-back holes-in-one, but once again his daddy prevailed on the links. The course was wet, so I had a little trouble with the slow greens.

In the evening we linked up with a Fontana Village employee named Jerry Span. He lead a night hike back to an old cemetery near where Paynetown once stood in the National Park. The cemetery is perched on a large hill overlooking an old road that once was a vital artery for the area. Span has done a tremendous amount of first rate research on the cemetery, the old town, and the road, and he seems to know a lot or a little about each soul buried in that graveyard. He told us some very good stories, including a ghost story about the old TVA hospital, which is now part of Fontana Village. He told the story so well Dana and I had trouble getting a couple of kids to bed that night.

I'd write the story, but I don't like re-telling other people's stories. I cannot tell them as well. Mr. Span is passionate about what he does and his interest in the area is genuine. I always enjoy talking to people who are passionate and knowledgeable.

Mr. Span explained how the TVA and later the National Park Service came into the area and removed the people then worked to eradicate any visible trace of them. It echoes the stories of Paradise, Land Betwixt the Rivers (now Land Between the Lakes), and Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. In their wake -- both in North Carolina and Kentucky -- they left violated property rights and hard feelings.

I didn't realize it until the next morning but bears got into the garbage cans for the cabin next to ours. I heard them but thought they were raccoons or our neighbors. When I looked the next morning both cans had been lifted out of a wooden pen and laid down on the ground.

The Better and The Worse

By J. Trace Kirkwood

Day Five -- May 27, 2008

I think the modern world is sloppy with the meaning of words. Maybe it is not sloppiness but, instead, carelessness. "Love" is used more carelessly than any other word in the English language. I'm careless with it most of the time. I knew a man in Mayfield, Kentucky, who used to say that man had no true love for anything that wasn't living. I think about that when I say things like "I love biscuits and gravy" or "I love to nap while watching golf on summer Sunday afternoons."

Does drowsing on the couch really stir man's deepest emotion?

While it may seem that dozing off while the cicadas buzz outside and Jim Nance quietly marvels at Tiger Woods' hooded four iron swing may bring great happiness it is not "love." It makes me happy, very happy.

The true definition of this great word was demonstrated to me over the course of the past few weeks and really driven home on the fourth night of our travels in North Carolina.

First, however, we spent the day digging for jewels. I guess there is some parallel between man's greedy search for something of value and his search for the emotion that is the only real value in our lives. And, just like the search for riches, often times the quest for love is right there in front of us the entire time.

In the morning of our fourth day in Carolina, we drove down to Franklin to go to one of the several sapphire and ruby mines in the area. On the internet I learned about "salted" and "unsalted" mines, but when I got there I learned that the locals call the salted ones "enhanced." Yeah, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the meaning, but I'll explain a little more.

A salted mine is one in which the proprietors bring gem laden dirt in from some other location, which almost guarantees that miners will find nice sized gems. Unsalted mines are the ones in which miners dig dirt out of a hillside and sift through it looking for treasure. I decided before we even left Kentucky that I was going to take the kids to an "unsalted" mine and let them get the real experience of mining for jewels in an uncontrolled environment.

Going to a salted mine is like participating in a modern day school field day where every kid gets a ribbon. There's no challenge.

My grittiness landed us at Mason's Mine, which is 10 miles out some winding road northwest of Franklin. I shelled out $75 for all of us to mine, and as I handed my fold of dead presidents (and one Treasury Secretary) I thought about how many cut sapphires I could buy for that amount, but what would be the fun of going to a jewelry store and buying the glittering stones from a glass and metal case. No, by golly, I was going to dig through the Carolina mud looking for the stones.

Only, I had no idea for what I was looking. I quickly realized that these things were not going to glitter in the sunlight like a pile of jewels in a pirate movie.

The process is much more difficult.

First, we had to hike back to this open pit mine carved out by years of digging into the hillside. We had to fill pickle buckets full of dirt, which we carried back across a rickety bridge to flumes running with cold creek water. After digging, lifting, hauling, and sifting, I thought, "I've just paid seventy-five bucks to work my butt off."

At the flume we sifted through mounds of dirt by letting the water dissolve it away through the bottom of a screen framed with wood. Sifting left a variety of stones in the bottom of the screen, and while many looked impressive, most were completely worthless.

It wasn't until I sifted through the last of my second pickle bucket that I found my first sapphire. I didn't know what it was, but one of the guys who works at the mine identified it for me. A blue bolt of greed surged through my body and energized my hands like I had just downed a quart of Dr. Pepper and a box of Vivarin. nothing was going to keep me from finding every sapphire in the Tarheel state.

After several hours of sifting through the dirt, I found six sapphires about the size of the kidney stone that tied up my right kidney just a few weeks before. Their total value is untold. It's untold because I don't want to come across as a sucker. Sylvia found seven stones and Dana found three or four. Parkman found a couple. If I had to add up our total haul, I'd guess that we took 75 cents worth of jewels out of the ground.

Once I saw one, I could spot them on my own.

All day I kept find a type of mica in the screens that was golden and was soft and flaky. It looked and felt like gold, except that it was very light. An older lady sitting next to me convinced herself that it was gold and that the mine was a scam. She thought the men running it had us paying to screen out gold, which was tossed on the ground, and they would collect it after everyone left. She crammed her pockets with probably a pound and a half of the stuff.

I told the mine owner about the lady and he laughed. He asked me, "do you think if there was that much gold here, I'd be living like this?"

I had a great time that day. I enjoyed the challenge of no knowing if I would actually find anything or not. So much of American entertainment is rigged these days. It's as if we have no tolerance of failure and that we cannot face any kind of disappointment.

I wanted my kids to learn that the fun is in the quest and that any further reward only adds to it.

We drove back to Franklin, hungry, tired, and dirty. We found a restaurant downtown called the Motor Company Grill. It was a 1950s throwback diner full of manufactured ambiance. The hamburgers were o.k., but not good enough to ever lure me back there for a meal.

While we were waiting for our food, an older couple from Louisiana pulled up in the parking lot. The woman was driving, and when they got out of the car I recognized the purposeless walk and distant look in the old man's eyes. It was apparent that he suffered from some form of dementia. He stood at the back fender of the car and waited for his wife to take him by the arm and lead him across the parking lot.

See, I can spot that lost look very easily these days. My mother suffers from dementia that is most likely Alzheimer's Disease, so I've become accustomed to the distant look in her eyes and the lack of purpose in her movement.

The older couple took a seat in the booth across from ours. She sat down beside her ailing husband, almost like a couple of teenagers on a date. She pulled a folded up piece of paper from her pocket and started doing puzzles with her husband. One of the puzzles was to fold up a twenty dollar bill until it showed an image that looked like the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center on one side and said "Usama" on the other. She meticulously showed him how to fold the bill and then discussed the amazing coincidence of the trick.

The lady was performing a remarkable act of love. Love is unselfish. She took her time to do silly little tricks to keep her life's love's mind in gear. That is what has to be done with dementia sufferers, and it is a hard thing to do. It was a beautiful selfless act performed without any kind of fanfare in the booth of a cheesy diner in some no name part of the country.

I quit worrying about the $75 I spent to mine sapphires and quit worrying about the dirt on my clothes and under my finger nails. I thought about how my father lays out my mother's medication every morning and how he makes sure she takes it at the appointed time every day and night. I thought of how Dana tended to me when I was so sick with pain and fever earlier in the month.

I thought about the seriousness of the marriage vows, "for better or for worse and in sickness and in health." Love is the only beacon to navigate people through the those things in life. So many things in life are like the tiny jewels that lurk in those buckets of Carolina clay. They're there, but you have to learn how to identify them to find them. In love and life the real gems -- the things of real value -- are the gentle touch of a loving wife's hand, a spouse playing goofy games to hold onto her lover's mind, or a husband carefully placing medication in a tray for a fading wife.

Incredibly, a double rainbow arched through the clearing sky over Franklin while we sat in that diner.

Fools Like Me

Day Four, May 26, 2008

The Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is one of those places that people look at on a North Carolina highway map and say, "ah, there's no reason to go there." That would be a terrible mistake because there are few places in this nation where a soul can see the eastern American forest as it once was. I've been in forests throughout all of Kentucky and a lot of Appalachia and have been impressed by the size of some of the trees. There's been times that I've had to remind myself that every piece of ground on which I have hiked has been logged and a lot of it once was clear cut as the growing country spilled out onto the treeless prairies of the Midwest.

When I was a freshman at Male High School, my freshman English teacher made me memorize Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees," and I can still recite a good portion of it today.

"Poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree."

It wasn't until I had English Literature my sophomore year in college that I learned that Joyce Kilmer was a man. Besides being a poet, Kilmer was a heavily decorated soldier in World War I and served in the Regimental Intelligence Section, in which he led patrols into the "No Man's Land" between the network of trenches in Europe. Kilmer was killed during the Second Battle of Marne in 1918.

After the collapse of the timber market in the 1930s, a forester recognized the importance of the trees standing in the mountain cove and suggested that it be preserved as an example of a virgin stand of American hardwoods. In 1936, the U.S. Forest Service purchased about 13,000 acres around the cove and preserved the stand of ancient trees.

If anyone reading this has never seen an original stand of forest, then I urge you to take a trip to Kilmer Memorial Forest. If you're in Kentucky and can't get there, you should check out Lilly Cornett's Wood's in the mountains.

When we started our hike into the Kilmer forest, all of us were impressed by the size of some poplar trees near the trailhead, but we later learned that they were dwarfs compared to the big trees in the cove deeper in the forest.

My wife and I once owned a house in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and a massive poplar tree stood beside it. The tree towered over the house, and the diameter of that tree was probably about 8 feet. If I had to guess, I'd say it was about 100 years old, which was about the age of the house. It was probably the largest and oldest tree in that part of the town, and I could spot its top branches from one of the main streets in the winter.

That tree in Shelbyville wouldn't make the "D" list in the Kilmer Memorial Forest. We found a poplar tree that was probably 450 years old and had a diameter at six feet from the ground of over 21 feet. If I had to guess, I'd say it was well over 100 feet tall. The fascinating thing about old poplar trees is that they are nearly as big around 50 feet from the ground as they are at six feet. Some of the branches in the tops of these trees are as big as most of the trees in a place like Mammoth Cave National Park.

The day before I awed at the sight of an omnipresent structure designed and built by man. On this day I stood in awe of something God designed and built a half century before John Smith set foot at Jamestown in neighboring Virginia. While the lost colonists of Roanoke toiled, suffered, and died at the other end of North Carolina, the trees at Kilmer swayed in the sun and wind.

"A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray..."

The impressive thing is that there are more than just one of these trees in the forest. There are hundreds of them. One tree took three and a half of my wingspan (six feet) to link around it. It took Dana six spans to get around it, and Sylvia had to link eight times to make it around. Parkman is not a tree hugger and opted out of the nonsense because he was pretending to be a Civil War soldier.

When I worked at the Filson Club Historical Society in Louisville, I often lectured civic and school groups. People always asked me if I would like to time travel, and I always answered "no." It usually shocked everyone, but when I'd look through our museum and see old doctors' and surgeons' kits I realized nothing could lure me out of the era of modern medicine. We should be thankful for what we have.

However, I've always wished I could see the American forest before the logging industry and before Endothia parasitica (chestnut blight) destroyed the American Chestnut trees. These trees were the "queens" of the American forest and the blight destroyed them all. It is my understanding that they were larger than any other tree in the east, and they had aromatic blossoms in the summer.

I still find chestnut stumps in the forests, and occasionally find the sprouts of chestnut trees. They only live a handful of years before the blight wipes them out.

A blight is now killing all the hemlock trees in the United States. I know very little about it, but all the hemlocks in Appalachia are dying and a lot are completely dead. We talked to a forester, who was on vacation from Kentucky on sort of a busman's holiday, who told us that we should remember the hemlock because they won't be around in a few years. They do look ragged, too. There are plenty of very old ones in the Kilmer Memorial Forest, but they are in bad shape. I hope Sylvia and Parkman remember seeing those huge hemlocks at Kilmer and last year when we hiked over Clingman's Dome on the Appalachian Trail.

Just like at Fontana Dam the day before, we lingered at Kilmer. I spent parts of the rest of the vacation wanting to go back there.

On the way back to our cabin, we stopped by the Cheoah Dam. Dana took pictures of the dam because it is the one from which Harrison Ford's character in the movie "The Fugitive" jumped to escape from Tommy Lee Jones.

We also celebrated Dana's birthday. We bathed the kids and ourselves and went to the main dining room at Fontana Village. We had some pricey, good food, and the kids tried to stay on their best behavior while worrying about why they had so many forks and spoons. When it was finally time to go, they bolted from their chairs and could not wait to get out of that place.

It was a far cry from the freedom of the trail amongst those massive trees.

Don't Give A Dam

Day Three, May 25, 2008

By J. Trace Kirkwood

The Tennessee Valley Authority's Fontana Dam is a 480' X 2,365' concrete plug in the middle of the Little Tennessee River. I can't say that it is an eye appealing thing, but it is the tallest dam east of the Mississippi River and a real engineering marvel. The dam created Lake Fontana, which is a beautiful lake that has spread its fingers through the green mountains of western North Carolina.

It certainly provides one of those "wow!" moments for tourists, and the angles and proportion of the structure left this visitor with a sense of bewilderment. The spillway for the dam is two massive tunnels through which, I'm certain, you could run 10 railroad trains simultaneously. They descend at such steep angles that looking at them made my stomach feel light and made it easy for me to imagine falling to some horrible death. The tunnels, the deep water on the backside of the dam, and the 480 feet of steep concrete on the front side of it made me know the whereabouts of the children at all times.

Looking at the dam, it's hard to believe that human hands built the thing.

When World War II started Alcoa Aluminum over the mountains in Tennessee needed power. They built their own hydroelectric dams, but the TVA decided to build Fontana to make sure Alcoa had all the power it needed to fabricate aluminum for aircraft.

Having been a "106 worker," I found the timetable for the construction of Fontana Dam to be amazing. 106 workers, by the way, are people who make sure government projects comply with Section 106 of the American Historic Preservation Act, which is a fancy term for slowing all progress with bureaucracy.

The TVA had thought of damming the Little Tennessee, but they had not done anything to start the project. Officials from the agency along with federal officials met on December 8, 1941, and finalized the go-ahead on construction. They started construction shortly after new year's in 1942. The dam was completed in late 1944.

There are projects I worked on a decade ago -- Louisville Bridges -- that are still in the preliminary design stages.

Over 5,000 people worked on the project and worked around the clock for those nearly three years. I wondered where in the heck they all lived. As I read through things at the dam visitors' center I realized that all the dam workers lived in a TVA built village just up the mountain from the construction site.

The Fontana Village Resort, in which we were staying, was originally built by the TVA to house its workers. No wonder it had a company town feel to it. My senses rarely fail me when it comes to the cultural landscape, especially in the South. My first impression of Fontana was nearly exactly right. It wasn't a coal camp, but it was sort of a company town for the TVA. Of course, they've "purtied" the place up a little, but a lot of what the TVA built is still a part of the resort.

After I learned this, I had a new affinity for the resort.

This also meant I skulked around the resort the rest of the week looking for things that fit the World War II time period and things that were added after it had become a resort. It also explained some of the old stone steps leading up the sides of hills into a tangle of brush and trees. Even the TVA's old baseball field is still used by the resort. It's full of cinders and gravel and reminded me of the football field at old Male High School in Louisville.

When we were touring the dam, we discovered that the lady running the gift shop was born in Farmington, Kentucky, which is in Graves County. She grew up in Murray. An older married couple, who were volunteers, manned the visitors' center. His name was Jim Daniels and originally from Russellville, and his wife Carol?? was from Auburn, both in Logan County, Kentucky.

There's Kentuckians everywhere, and I'm afraid it tells a story about what has happened to this state.

Mr. Daniels started working for the TVA at Paradise Fossil Plant at Paradise, Kentucky, and he worked all over the TVA system in Tennessee. His wife told me they lived in "Monkeytown, Tennessee," which was her humorous way of telling me they lived in Dayton, which is where the Scopes "Monkey" Trial was held in 1924. They volunteer for two weeks every year at a TVA visitors' center. They were working Fontana Dam this time, and the TVA put them up at the Village.

Interesting Tidbit: The Appalachian Trail traverses Fontana Dam. We saw and talked to several through hikers (running late) and some who were just hiking and camping in the Nantahala National Forest.

Fontana Dam is unforgettable.

After eating lunch at our cabin, we headed back out on the Hellbender -- NC Highway 28 -- to go to Twentymile Ranger Station in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. We had tipped off to a short hike to Cascade Falls, which are along one of the numerous mountain streams in the park. It was a very short hike, but the kids were tired, so we just lounged around at the falls watching the clear, cold water wash over the rocks. Sylvia and Parkman are so content to play around these places. It makes me proud of them because I know so many kinds who never pull themselves from in front of the television or video games.

We stayed until it was getting nearly too dark to hike out of the thick forest.

It's funny. We ended up back at Fontana Dam, this time at the base of it. By this time I had finally figured out where the roads went and knew how to get to the base of the dam. I don't really find the dam attractive, but I was drawn to it by its size. I've been to Hoover Dam, and it's an amazing structure. There's something about the width and the height of Fontana that makes it equally fascinating.

I've crossed Kentucky Dam, which impounds the Tennessee River in west Kentucky, thousands of times, and I'm still fascinated by that structure.

A Familiar Feel

Day Two, May 24, 2008

By J. Trace Kirkwood

There's some adventure to arriving at strange place in the middle of the night and then waking up to have all your first impressions wiped away. We stayed in cabin 594 on Welch Road in Fontana Village. It was a nice cabin -- small but air conditioned and very new appliances. It also had an infestation of black ants, but we learned to live with them. We had the very same ants in our house in Bowling Green last summer, and they eventually drove us to the "nuclear option." We hired an exterminator who hosed down the inside and outside of the house with various chemicals. He told us to keep the dog outside for a few hours but seemed unconcerned about the kids. I guess kids don't eat off the floors or lick the base boards (as far as I know) and won't ingest too much of the poison. Both did fine in school, so I don't think there are any lasting effects.

When I drew back the curtains in the cabin's living room I sort of did a spit take. The mountains around Fontana are quite large, and I'm used to the low rising west Kentucky hill behind my house known as Copperhead Ridge. The hills around Fontana are real ridges and the one behind my house should be called "Copperhead Pile" compared to the ones in Carolina.

I think my first impressions of Fontana Village were wrong because I ended up really liking the place and hope to go back sometime. Part of my first impressions was right on and other parts were way off.

As I drove through the village in the daylight for the first time I got a haunting feel of one of the many coal camps I visited and photographed in the Kentucky mountains back in my environmental management days. The roads in the village were narrow and winding and many of the older cabins had uniform construction but placed at odd angles to the road, which is a compromise with the topography. I felt as if I had stumbled into Harlan County, Kentucky, or that the Tail of the Dragon kicked me off to eastern portion of my home state.

Later in the trip I learned how that first impression was nearly right on.

It seemed that every cabin was filled with people, and I was sort of turned off by the crowd. I later realized that it was Memorial Day weekend, which seems to bring out the travels who are hellbent to bring all of their stuff from home with them. They don't vacation. They bring home with them and change few of their habits, which seemed to include parking in the front yard and leaving laundry on the rails of their porches.

I had a very intense flashback to my days in east Kentucky when we walked down our road past a cabin with four or five people lounging on the front porch. I waved to them. They didn't wave back but stared until we were out of sight. If that happened to me once in the Kentucky mountains it happened a thousand times. I mean no insult, but it was a familiar feel to a veteran of working in the hills.

We spent a large portion of the day hiking the Lewellyn Cove Trail loop on Fontana Village's property. At least I think it is the village's property. I was a little concerned because 22 days before I was in surgery having a kidney stone removed and the trail was 3.5 miles long. I feared getting to the far point on the loop and not being able to go any further.

In April we took a guided "nature hike" in Mammoth Cave National Park back to a place called Cedar Sink. Along the way, the park ranger -- a beautiful young lady -- picked up this hideous looking millipede and told us that it was "an almond scented millipede." She cupped her hands over the creature and gave him a good shake. Sure enough, her hands smelled like almond extract. She told us that there was also a "cherry scented" millipede.

On our hike through Lewellyn Cove we found an almond scented one and later a cherry scented one. Dana scooped up the latter to give it a shake so we could smell the scent. While she was doing this I thought, "what if the park ranger at Mammoth Cave was a magician and tricked us and Dana was about to pick up a toxic millipede." That wasn't the case.

There's not much to say about the hike, but I could praise the beauty of the North Carolina mountains for pages and pages.

I fully realize that this song is not about North Carolina, but I had Michael Martin Murphy's song "Carolina in the Pines" in my head throughout the hike. I also realize that none of the peaks in Carolina reach above the tree line. I've been above the timberline in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, though. It's no place for a Southerner.

"And we'll talk of trails we've walked up
Far above the timberline
There are nights I only feel right
With Carolina in the pines"

I never really liked Murphy's version of the song, but Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver has a version of it that I listen to very often. No, I did not run calling "wildfire."

We spent the afternoon playing miniature golf at "Hillbilly Putt Putt" at Fontana Village. We cannot pass one of these places without my little boy begging to play a round. He's five, so it takes forever to play around, and he mixes a little hockey in with his putting. I never really know how to score one of the holes for him because he pushes the ball up the green like he's Mario Lemieux.

It irritates his sister. She wanted to stop him, but I told her "You better watch out. He might body check at the tee."

When I filled out our scorecard I used the names Kenny Perry, Annika Sorenstam, Michelle Wie, and Tiger Woods. I was Tiger and Parkman was Kenny. When he discovered his nom de links he protested. He pointed out that I was fat like Kenny Perry and he was skinny like Tiger Woods. I told him that I won rounds like Tiger. No offense to Mr. Perry, who lives just miles from my house in Kentucky and is one of the nicest people around.

Chasing the Dragon

By J. Trace Kirkwood

Day One, May 23, 2008

It's been a long time since I posted on Crossroads. In the winter, I was busy with my basketball website -- on the flip side of this one -- called Pennyrile Pick and Roll. Plus, I've written several articles for a couple of sports magazines in recent months, and that has kept me busy. Those stories have to be accurate, truthful, and non-libelous, which are three things that make me work very hard. I just can't throw words out on the page and expect everybody to be hunky-dory with them.

Also, I endured one of the worst illness of my life starting late in April, and it kept me down for nearly a month. I started passing a kidney stone, which got stuck three centimeters from my bladder. Surgery, infection, a blood/tissue clot amplified the pain and misery. If I described much more the men reading the column would break out into cold sweats, cringe, and stop and click back to their favorite sports website (hopefully the Pick and Roll).

I spent nine days in that condition. It weakened me to the point that I was collapsed in a lawn chair in my driveway, sweating painkillers and anesthesia through my pale, clammy skin. I was so tired that I could just barely move, but doctor's orders dictated that I should be walking to keep my body from shutting down. As I sat in that chair it felt like a thousand pounds of pressure was pushing me to the ground. It would've been easy to go into the house, crawl into bed, and leave my fate to death or luck.

So, when we started on a family vacation on May 23rd, I wasn't sure if I was up to the travel or the activity. We were supposed to go to Colorado this summer for two weeks, but fuel prices forced us to scale the trip back to a quick drive down to the North Carolina mountains.

I had some sense of disappointment as we trucked east and south out of Bowling Green instead of west. I was disappointed until I met The Dragon. I've always associated the term "The Dragon" or "chasing the dragon" with heroin or the use of that drug until I met the dragon that straddles the mountains along the Tennessee-North Carolina state line.

The Dragon is U.S. 129 between Tallassee, Tennessee, and Topton, North Carolina. Motorcyclists and sports car enthusiasts have popularized the nickname of the road, and it is aptly named. The stretch crossing the mountain that forms the state line has 318 curves in 11 miles. It's a road in the sense that it is asphalt and has yellow and white lines, which are used to settle disputes among insurance companies, but it is a trail in the sense that engineers hitched a paver to a team of crazed mules and ran them through the mountains.

I met the dragon at 11:15 p.m. on the night of May 23rd. I had no idea what I was getting into, and for several minutes I was convinced that I made a horrible mistake. About halfway up the mountain I found myself wishing that I was chasing some other dragon, except I did not know of the road's infamous reputation and colorful nickname. Outside of several expletives I called the road, I arrived on "The Vomit Comet" because my kids were in the backseat pleading for me to stop and let them puke at the side of the road. There was no place to stop, so I told them to hang their heads out the window. They didn't and, thankfully, they held their suppers.

Worrying that I was lost, I breathed a sigh of relief when I found North Carolina Highway 28 in the darkness of midnight and towering hardwoods. NC 28 was no better than U.S. 129, and I later discovered that same people who named the latter call the former "The Hellbender," which is a tip-of-the-hat to a salamander found in the mountain streams of the region. The Hellbender is as curvy as 129.

We had a cabin reserved at Fontana Village Resort, which is located near Fontana Dam on NC 28. When we finally got there I collapsed into bed. It was my longest drive since my ordeal earlier in the month, and the twisting turning of those two roads took the last of my energy. As I lay in bed drifting off to sleep, I felt the swaying of my vehicle as if I were still driving. I remember fishing off a floating dock when I was a little boy. I was on that thing all day, and when I laid down to sleep that night I could still feel the bobbing of that dock.

I flinched out of sleep several times that night turning the steering wheel of my vehicle in some tight turn on the Dragon or the Hellbender. I was chasing the dragon in my sleep and wondered if the painkiller tormented sleep from my illness had returned.

AN ACT OF BEAUTY IN A FRACTURED WORLD

When the wake of World War II washed into Kentucky, it brought German soldiers captured in North Africa to Camp Breckinridge in Union County. During the war, the camp was home to four thousand German prisoners-of-war, and among them was a soldier named Daniel Mayer. He brought with him the mental pictures of the landscape of his native Europe.

I know very little about Mayer, and world would have known little of him had he only fought and died in the sands of the Sahara or in Europe like hundreds of thousands of other soldiers. The Americans captured Mayer, a German native to Czechoslovakia, in 1943 and brought him to America – to Kentucky – to sit out the war as a prisoner. I wish I could travel through time to know how Mayer felt when he first arrived on Kentucky soil.

Was he frightened or even terrified? Maybe he was at ease with his American captors by the time he traveled from Africa to Camp Breckinridge. I try to put myself in the place of Mayer and think about how terribly homesick and afraid I would be if I lost my freedom and put in a strange places thousands and thousands of miles away from my home. What did he think when he first looked out over the flat land surrounding the camp? What impression did Kentucky leave on him that first time his eyes scanned the horizon as he thought about where he was in the world?

In a world and a time fractured by ideological differences, one in which massive armies cut at one another with horrific weapons, Mayer and his captors formed some sort of bond at Camp Breckinridge. When the Americans discovered Mayer’s artistic ability with the paint brush, they paid him a few cents a day to paint scenes from Europe along the walls of the Non-Commissioned Officers’ Club.

Daniel Mayer spent the next two years painting scenes of an idyllic Europe, which through his brush seemed untouched by gruesome battles. He spent 15 months painting a 20X30 foot mural that looks like a massive window into a peaceful world, but he painted many other smaller murals, drawing inspiration out of his memory and from postcards he received from home.

Mayer only ever made it back to his homeland through his memory, however. In 1945, just months before the end of the war, Mayer died of pneumonia at Camp Breckinridge. He is buried at Fort Knox, Kentucky, along with four other German prisoners-of-war.

There is a contrast between the cruelty of war and the inexplicable humanity found in the galling inhumanity of warfare. Daniel Mayer’s story at Camp Breckinridge displays that contrast. He was plucked from the battlefield by his enemy, possibly extending his life, and flown to a land strange to him, a place called “Kentucky.” There he performed an act of humanity amidst the greatest human struggle of modern times. Mayer, through his brush, demonstrated there is something greater than man. He showed that man can love and trust one another.

Today, people can tour the NCO Club at Camp Breckinridge and look at the magnificent scenes Mayer painted. They can see for themselves how one POW took oil paints and brought planks of plywood to life in a time when so many things and lives were destroyed.