THE GRANDFATHER MOUNTAIN
DOWN in the plains and in all the cities it is August. Up here it is some celestial month not mentioned in any calendar. For we are camping at the back of the Grandfather Mountain; our tents are pitched on a slope that is separated from the base of the mountain by a narrow, wedge-like little valley down which ripples the silvery beginning of the Watauga River. To be at the beginning of a river is guaranty of many pleasant things. Opposite us the mountain rises, steep, rough, and covered with beautiful growths. It is so near we can see the shades of green and even make out the forms of the tree-tops. On its side the clouds form, welling up as from a caldron of the storm gods. We are shut in by tree-clad slopes, excepting towards the east, where the view opens down the valley upon distant blue hills.
Ripe blackberries hang over the roadside, and the bushes growing about the rocks in an abandoned field near us are loaded with extra good fruit. There is a certain pleasure in gathering one's food from the bushes; one is apt to gather so much more than bodily sustenance. You think of things in a berry patch, for instance, that never come to you anywhere else; you solve the problems of the universe differently. In a brier patch you think in cycles and flavor your food with dashes of cosmic philosophy. And there is profit as well as pleasure in gathering your food from the bushes. At the back of the Grandfather, berries are important in our daily fare. We eat them as they grow, and also prepared in many ways. We make discoveries in culinary aesthetics as well as in cosmic philosophy, dealing with blackberries. You have never really tasted a blackberry pudding, for instance, until you have stood on a stofle in the Watauga River, stripped the heavy, shining clusters of ripe fruit into your tin carried them back to camp, and made your pudding; for your true blackberry pudding must be flavored with warm sunshine glinting between green leaves, the sparkle of running water, and the remembered fragrances of herbs and trees and bushes, with memories of pleasant reveries, and it does it no harm to be spiced with scratches.
There is a certain sensuous pleasure to be derived from the scratches of a berry patch. The hot rip of the thorn through the skin, the crimson line of blood that appears at the surface, but does not overflow, the tingling sensation that courses over your whole body for a moment, - for this you willingly endure the smart that comes for hours afterwards whenever your wounded members touch anything. Moreover, you would endure the scratches so soon forgotten for the memory that lasts of the feel of the sun, of the beleaguering fragrances, and for the rich booty you carry home.
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| Peaks of Grandfather Mountain |
And your blackberry pudding, to be perfect, must be eaten in a tent, or sitting on a rock by a brookside, or in a shakedown bower under a big tree. Our dining-room is a bower roofed with evergreen boughs. Out through the open front, through the overhanging ends of the evergreen boughs, we see the top of the Grandfather Mountain and the clouds that come and go over it.
The country people bring us food, apples, butter, eggs, and milk. The butter comes out of a tall earthenware churn whose dasher is moved up and down by a mountain friend whom we see sitting in the doorway of her house busily churning, with a background of the black interior in which are faintly outlined the kitchen utensils. Under the slopes of the Grandfather we go down the valley to picturesque houses shaded by fruit trees.
Sometimes we spend the day on the Grandfather Mountain and such days cannot come too often. Sometimes we walk over the gap under Hanging Rock, or we cross over to Banner Elk, or go down to Linville, and wherever we walk the air stimulates like wine and the wayside is abloom with summer flowers, among them goldenrods and asters for memories of life in the North, and the hillsides are sofld masses of white bloom, or they are yellow or pink with flowers, - but the slopes along the northern bank of the Watauga River are distinct in your mind from everything else. In the late summer they may be a mere tangle of flowers and plumy grasses, but did you not come along here once and discover them carpeted with strawberries? You could not then walk over them without dyeing your feet in the juice of the ripe fruit. Above the strawberries red-clover was thickly blooming, and above the clover ox-eye daisies. The odor of this field was perceptible before you otherwise noticed it - a chorus of sweet smells seemed shouting to you to come up. As soon as the land is left untilled about here, wild strawberries rush in as pink azaleas do about Traumfest. You can buy them for five cents a gallon, but you will be foolish to do that when you can stain your own fingers with their juices, and fill your tissues with sunshine and fresh air and fragrances out on the slopes when strawberries are ripe.
Shading our camp is the remains of a grove, for most of the trees lie on the ground, bleached skeletons, which, however, prove to be a blessing rather than a misfortune for us. For towards night the air grows cold-and then comes the crowning pleasure of the day: a royal camp-fire suddenly blazes forth.
We have a perfect firemaker in the mountain man who lives in the canvas-covered wagon that brought us here, bag and baggage. Every mountain man is a perfect firemaker, though he is by no means a fire worshiper. He makes his fire for homely uses, not for any spiritual cause such as we imagine kindled those fires of early man in the Far East, fires that yet burn in poetry to warm the heart even at this distant time. The mountain man always starts his fire with a stick whittled into a brush. He scorns paper even when he can get it, seeming to whittle into his brush a sort of magic, for try as you will you cannot whittle a brush that will burn like his. It never fails, and he uses only one match. Our back-log is the trunk of an ash tree seasoned to perfection. Against this is laid various kinds of wood, each kind giving forth its own flames and its own sparks; for trees do not all burn alike. The oak, for instance, expresses itself as distinctly in its flames as in its leaves and fruit, or in its voice in the wind, or its color or the odors it sends forth. Even the different species of oak burn differently. One can sit in reverie before the calm blaze of a white-oak fire, but your Spanish oak explodes and sputters and shoots out sparks in a way to induce anything but reverie. Hickory burns with a steadfast glow, but the unstable chestnut pops and sputters worse, if anything, than Spanish oak. Your firemaker says it is linwood that sends out those fascinating broods of fiery dragons that leap with lashing tails high into the air.
There are some things one would like to know about trees. One would like to know from the flames what tree is burning, how old it is, and what have been its experiences in life, as well as how to tell, by the sound of the wind among the leaves, beneath what tree one is passing, and by the smell of the opening buds as you go along what trees are about you.
As we lie on the fragrant earth watching the flames and the fiery serpents ascend into the black vault above, this seems to us no common fire, but rather the sudden rush into elemental freedom of those patient giants of the forest that have lain here waiting for us to come and free them.
Sometimes a bat flies across the fire, and one night a dark toad was discovered sitting close to your ear. But he had nothing important to say. He sat still for a while, his eyes glistening in the firelight that seemed to fascinate him. Then he attempted to enter the heaven thus suddenly opened to his imagination. In pursuit of his dream he went straight into the fire. What he expected to find, who can say? And what a disillusionment it must have been when he found himself sitting on a red-hot fagot! He made a quick backward movement, to be swept into safety by a merciful human hand. If a toad had the wings of a moth, it would doubtless fly into the fire in the same way. A toad followed a lantern a long distance one night. It is impossible not to like the toad when you once realty know it. Besides its friendly manners it has the most beautiful eyes in the world. Those eyes so soft and bright betoken a good heart. What is the old fable of the toad wearing a jewel in its head? The truth of that is, the toad wears two jewels, and they are its lovely golden-brown eyes.
As the fire dies down, talking ceases, the black trees come out more plainly, and the head of the Grandfather wears a crown of stars where great Scorpio lies along the sky.
If you chance to waken in the night, out through the triangular space between the open tent-flaps you see the slopes of the Grandfather bathed in moonlight, or dimly looming in the faint light of the stars, or shrouded in white mists like a ghost. One sleeps soundly in the keen, thin air and at daybreak wakens, not slowly but all at once with a sense of buoyancy in every member. How the cold spring water stings the skin and makes it glow suddenly hot! And as we step out of doors we see the mountain emerging from its robe of white mists, its colors fresh and fine as though it, too, had slept well.
Oftener than anywhere else we go up on the mountain. One can easily, by jumping from stone to stone, cross the Watauga's pretty rippling water, where the trout hide. Some of our little party may stop to fish, and that is good for those of us who come home hungry at night - and how hungry we do come home! - but the Watauga has better uses than fishing, an occupation apt to absorb one's attention too closely, withdrawing it from matters more important than trout. There is a matter of real interest, however, connected with fishing in this region. For it was either here or in the Linville that we saw the sacred piscatorial art pursued with woolen mittens instead of rod and fly. Thus equipped you wade in and grab the fish where they lie in the clear pools.
The path beyond the river is cut through the dense kalmia and Rkododendron maximum that make a wide band along the base of the mountain, then it leads up and up and up through the more open forest. There is no sweeter walk in the world than that up Grandfather Mountain, where the path winds among the trees, a canopy of leaves screening the sky, the forest shutting from view the outer world. Once, there were large wild cherry trees on the slopes of the Grandfather, but the wood being valuable-- it is what the people call mahogany, - there are only saplings left, and a few patriarchs that, though useless for lumber, give an air of dignity to the forest in company with the clear gray shafts of the tulip-trees, the grand old chestnuts, the oaks, the maples, beaches, birches, ashes, and lindens that mingle their foliage with that of the pines and spruces.
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| The Grandfather Profile |
You pass beside or under large detached boulders covered with saxifrages, sedums, mosses, and ferns, and in whose crevices mountain-ash trees and twisted hemlocks have taken root as though for purposes of decoration; and in the damp hollows away from the path great jack-vines hang from the tree-tops. The rock ledges sometimes make caves where bears were wont to live, for the Grandfather was once a famous place for bears. Squirrels still "use on the mountain," as the people say, and a "boomer" will be apt to bark down at you as you go along. You hear the waters of a stream in the ravine below, and here and there you cross a natural garden of "balimony" or some other precious herb that the people gather in the season. About two thirds of the way up you take a path that branches off to the left and leads you over the mossy rocks to an open place on the edge of a gorge where looking off you see the clear-cut profile of the Grandfather sculptured on the edge of a rocky bluff, the bushy hair that rises from the forehead consisting of fir trees that when whitened by the winter snow give a venerable appearance to the stone face. Somewhat above this profile from this point is also visible another, with smaller and rounder features, which of course is the Grandmother.
Returning to the main path and continuing the ascent, the way grow's wilder and if possible sweeter. One has a sense of rising spiritually as well as ically. At the base of a high cliff, framed in foliage and crowned with the rosy-flowered Rhododendron Catawbiense, gushes out the famous Grandfather Spring that is only ten degrees above freezing throughout the summer. Up to this point there is a bridle path; beyond here it is necessary to walk. The rose-bay still in bloom clings to the rocks, in whose crevices little dwarf trees have taken root along with the mosses, ferns, and saxifrages.
The path gets very steep and rocky. You are now among the balsam firs, those trees to name which is to name a perfume, and you go climbing up over their strong red roots. The pathway becomes a staircase winding about moss-trimmed rocks in whose crevices are tiny contorted balsams 1ike Japanese flower-pot trees. Enormous coal-black lichens hang from the cliffs and the ground is softly carpeted with mossy growths and oxalis, out from whose pretty pale leaves 'look myriads of pink-and-white blossoms. Long after the Rhododendron Catawbiense is done blooming below, one finds it in its prime on the high peaks of the Grandfather.
Up among the balsam firs and about the rocks grow large sour gooseberries and enormous sweet huckleberries, and it was here we found a new and delicious fruit. The bushes crowding the woods in places were loaded with bright red globes the size of a small cherry, each dangling from a slender stem. rhese delightful berries were mere skins of juice, my wine-bottles full of refreshment for a summer day. The natives were afraid to eat them, but having decided that they were cousins to the huckle-berries, we ventured, and added these jocund fruits to the many attractions that called us again and again to the top of the Grandfather. One wishes it could truthfully be said that these berries grow only on the Grandfather Mountain, but the fact is we discovered them on other mountains, though never much below an altitude of six thousand feet. Finding them thus among the mossy rocks up in the sweet, keen air on the summit of our favorite mountain gave them a charm that was enhanced by the fact that they belonged to us and the birds. Now we shall have to share them with every passer-by, for when we ate and survived, our mountain friends ventured to partake, and doubtless they will spread the news that you can eat with impunity the juicy red berries on top of Grandfather Mountain. One woman even took home a pailful and made from them the most exquisite jelly imaginable, ruby-red, clear, sparkling, and with a delicate wild-flower flavor that made one think of the sweet things growing on the mountain-top. We named them "Our Berries," and with them quenched our thirst instead of carrying water when we went above the spring.
Up through the spruces and the balsams you mount in the resplendent day, lingering at every step. The trees below you are sending up songs as the wind sweeps over them, the balsams about and below you are pouring a vast cloud of fragrance into the blue bowl of the sky, and you yourself someway seem to be a part of the general rapture.
Thus climbing up through the wonderful day, you reach the summit, "Calloway's High Peak," the highest point on the mountain, but from which one cannot command the circle of the horizon. It is necessary to get the view from two points, which is all the better. The rocks at the lookout towards the south being covered with "heather," one can lie on a delightful couch studded all over with little white starry flowers, to rest and receive the view. Lying thus on the earth, warmed by the sun and cooled by the fragrant breeze, one looks over a sea of blue mountains that breaks against a bluer sky. Out of the sea of mountains rises many a well-known among them the big beech with its memories of lovely pastures and groves of beech trees, for it is needless to say that a mountain of beeches is a sort of enchanted place. In the distance lies White Top whose summit three states meet, a heaven for the moonshiner, one should think, if he is able to take advantage of the situation.
Leaving this place and walking on to the point that looks to the south, one shares the feelings and almost the faith of Michaux. The view is very impressive, because of that steep descent of the mountain into the foothills, the long spurs sweeping down in fine lines to a great depth. Above them one looks off over scores of noble forms overlapping and blending in the hazy distance. The Black Mountains stand forth very high and very blue, and beyond them, among the many familiar forms, are distinguished what one supposes to be the faint blue line of the Smokies - or is it the nearer Balsams?
The greater mass of the Grandfather lies on the south side, where those long buttresses sweep down into the valleys of the Piedmont region, glorious ridges with broad bald shoulders where cattle pasture and rhododendrons, laurel, and azaleas stand in regal beauty. Between the long spurs, as well as between the many smaller ridges, glance rivulets that finally become the John's River, whose valley one sees from Blowing Rock winding so prettily between the foothills.
Sooner or later you will find your way to McRae's, which is to the south side of the Grandfather what Calloway's is to the north side, a farmhouse where one can stay awhile. There is a trail over the end of the Grandfather by which you can go directly from Calloway's to McRae's, but to strike this trail you have to walk down the Linville River, which, rising in an open space but a stone's throw from the head of the Watauga, flows in quite the opposite direction, and through so narrow a pass that you have to keep crossing and recrossing it, no small matter in a season of rains. For there are no footdogs at all. Evidently you are not expected to walk along this road, and if you do you must cross the river, jumping from rock to rock as best you can. But the Linville is one of the streams you are glad to know through all its sparkling length, from the spring behind the Grandfather to where it escapes in wild glee through the gorge below the falls.
There are peacocks at McRae's, and Mr. McRae has not forgotten how to play on the bagpipes those ancient airs that have so stirred the blood of his race. One of the pleasant memories of this side of the Grandfather is Mr. McRae walking up and down before the house playing the pipes. But you will have to coax him to do it.
McRae's stands on the Yonahlossee Road that connects Linville, just below the mountain, with Blowing Rock, - Yonahlossee, trail of the bear, - but one need fear no bear on the Yonahlossee Road to-day. From McRae's there is a path up the Grand father, not to Calloway's High Peak, but to another peak reached by a very sweet climb through the balsams, which, in all this region, are smaller and more companionable than the straight giants of the Black Mountains, these of the Grandfather being twisted and rriendly and profoundly fragrant. From this peak one can see in all directions, excepting where one of the Grandfather's black summits obstructs the view.
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| The Yonahlossee Road |
It is the lichens growing on the rocks that give so sombre an appearance to the top of the Grandfather, those big, black lichens with loose and curled-up edges. Grandfather's black, rocky top is eight miles long, and once Mr. Calloway and our friend the post-master - he who brought us our mail, walking four miles every day for the pleasure of doing a kindness - and the men of the camping party blazed out a rude trail so that we could all take that wonderful knifeedge walk up in the sky over the peaks of the Grandfather; Indian ladders - that is, a tall tree trunk from which the branches have been lopped, leaving protruding ends for steps - helping us up otherwise insurmountable cliffs. It was the great event of the season, a very wonderful walk, and one seldom taken by anybody.
The Yonahlossee Road ought to be followed early in the summer. For then the meadowy tops of the long spurs are like noble parks created for man's pleasure. The Rhododendron Catawbiense lies massed about in effective groups and covered with rosy bloom, beyond which one looks out over a wide landscape of mountains and clouds. From these open, flower-decked spaces the road passes into the shadowy forest, to emerge upon a bushy slope where blazing reaches of flame-colored azaleas astound your senses. There are other flowers along the way, but you scarcely see them, intoxicated as you are with the glory of the rhododendrons, and after them the azaleas, for these marvelous growths almost never blossom within sight of each other. You would say they know, like ladies at a ball, how important it is to avoid each other's colors.
Under the trees along the roadside the earth is covered with a superb carpet of large and handsome -galax leaves, for the Grandfather is distinguished by. the great beauty and abundance of its galax. Laurel, too, claims standing-room on the side of the grand old mountain, and here as elsewhere one notices the apparent capriciousness of the laurel, which forms an impenetrable jungle for long stretches and then stops short, not a laurel bush to be seen for some distance, when with equal suddenness it appears again.
The splendid slopes of the Grandfather are enchanting also when autumn colors them, - deep red huckleberry balds, trees wreathed in crimson woodbine, vivid sassafras, tall gold and crimson and scarlet forest trees - it seems more like the brilliant display of a Northern forest. You would say the outpouring of fragrance must pass with the summer. Not so. As you walk among the trees in their thin, bright attire you have a feeling of their friendliness. The forest, as it were, breathes upon you, you are drowned in the sweetness of resinous perfumes that distil from a thousand pines, firs, and hemlocks. When the leaves of the trees are growing scarce and changing to duller hues, into the open spaces witch- hazel weaves its gold-wreathed wands and brightens the woods like sunshine.
Turning to the right from the Yonahlossee Road, a short distance up from Mckae's, you walk along under the chestnut trees just beginning to open their burrs, away from the Grandfather out over a beautiful spur that ends in an open, rounded summit. The road to this place has side paths that lead you to high cliffs, whence you look off towards Blowing Rock, and where the sweetest of mountain growths ring to the crevices and drape the edges of all the rocks. For some reason the trees here are small, the chestnuts being not much larger than bushes, but the nuts are proportionately large, the largest nuts one ever saw on our native chestnut trees, and they are peculiarly sweet, again a hint to the fruit-makers who from this could doubtless create a nut as large as the chestnuts of France and as sweet as those of America. The summit of this little mountain of the large chestnuts is one of your favorite places to go for a day of rest and contemplation. It is a lovely, soothing place, as it ought to be, for it is the Grandmother Mountain.
BACK to Traumfest one comes, after each expedition out over the mountains. And one day the truth dawns upon you, - the title so arbitrarily bestowed upon Traumfest belongs to the whole region. Yes, this whole stretch of enchanting and enchanted mountains is the "Holiday of Dreams." And thinking back over those days of happy wandering, how many interesting places appear before the mind's eye that have not been so much as mentioned in this book; how many lovely scenes have been witnessed, how many pleasant adventures encountered that have not been recorded, how many flowers have blossomed without mention, how many birds have sung unchronicled, how many quaint native phrases have been passed over in silence!
And as the years have slipped by, with what pangs of regret one has watched the passing of the primitive life of the mountains, and with what pleasure one reverts to those old days when everybody was uncomfortable and everybody happy. How many to-day, seeing the train with its line of Pullman sleepers come in on time at Traumfest, remember those days when the track went only as far as Hendersonville, and when, with the old-time courtesy of the Southern man, the conductor politely stopped his two cars on request of any lady passenger who wished to gather a few wild flowers, willing to please so long as he could get in before dark.
Since then, like a cosmic spider, the Southern Railroad has woven its meshes below the Carolina mountains on either side, and thrown its steel threads across them in several places, while now yet another line is being surveyed across the Blue Ridge to the north of Tryon Mountain, up the Broad River Valley, past Chimney Rock, and on as far as Bat Cave where it follows a devious route of escape by way of the Pigeon River Gorge. The Blue Ridge that looks so ethereal in the distance presents almost insuperable obstacles to the civil engineer, as do also the guarding ramparts of the valleys of the plateau, but the great transcontinental line, that is to reach from the Atlantic coast of North Carolina to Seattle on the Pacific, will doubtless find a way.
Occasionally one sees an old-fashioned, boat-shaped wagon covered with a canopy of white cloth, a survivor of those trains that crossed from Tennessee to the Carolinas over the hard-won roads where no longer move trains of wagons, droves of cattle, hogs, and sheep, all these now passing over another form of highway behind the iron horse that pulls the contents of a hundred caravans in one load.
And what means that sudden appearance of two dozen automobiles on Traumfest's modest "Trade Street" the other day? Two or three of these wonders of the age belong to people living here, and those others came on a mission, which was, to further their own interests by making plans for the extension of the road that brought them here. They came up from Spartanburg, a sign of the new era that has dawned to transform the mountains. For already from Spartanburg there comes a wide, new road, a great red serpent whose head is pointed up the Pacolet Valley, and that will never stop until it has coiled and writhed its way over the helpless rampart of the Blue Ridge to its goal - in Asheville? No, not in Asheville, but through it and on and down out into the now teeming Western world beyond. The automobile, which is doing for this country what the military power has so long been doing for Europe, networking it with perfect roads, will soon speed from Jacksonville, Florida, across the plains, the foothills, and the astonished mountains, down to Knoxville, Tennessee, over the broad highway now being constructed for that purpose.
Wherever you go the portable sawmill is ahead of you, the temporary railway of the lumberman disdainfully penetrating the "inaccessible" places. And wherever you go the people of the mountains are waking up out of the care-free, simple life of the past into the wearing, tumultuous life of the present, and that is what causes those pangs of regret. The comforts that are pouring in are not in themselves regrettable; it is only the price one has to pay for them, the exchange of Arcadia for Gotham.
Social transitions are always trying, and perhaps peculiarly so here, where the awakening consciousness suddenly sees the glitter of the prize without understanding the law of exchange. But the people are sound. To native intelligence they add a rude but strong sense of honor and of justice which with the passing of time will undoubtedly mould them happily into the new conditions.
The world is coming; the old-time mountaineer is going, but he will never be wholly metamorphosed so long as human nature remains fundamentally unchanged and the sun continues to exact obedience to its great command, "Thou shalt not hurry." And so long as human nature remains as it is, the newcomer will in time have the sharp edge of his "ambi- tion" dulled by the same resistless force: "Thou shalt not hurry" applies to all alike.
And now, into the increasing turmoil of many interests there comes like an emblem of peace the great Appalachian Park, that, lying in calm expanse over the slopes of the Blue Ridge and the Smoky Mountains, shall save forever for the happiness of the people a part of this glorious wilderness, With the park will come a new world to the mountains. Not only will railroads and highways open up all parts of the country, but an increasing number of those people who need to rest or to play will find their way here, and build themselves homes. Summer homes for the Southerner, winter homes for the Northerner, all-the-year-round homes for many from both sections are already growing up in the laurel thickets and under the trees.
Those who desire an estate in the forest primeval can no longer, it is true, buy a whole mountain covered with virgin forest for a few cents an acre, as was the case not so long ago, when "inaccessible" localities were looked upon as encumbered rather than benefited by their burden of big trees. But whoever wants a mountain-side, with a laurel-bordered stream and a wide view of enchanting heights, can have it, and if all the forest is no longer primeval it is nevertheless charming. The half-grown trees and the saplings, with the few large trees that generally manage to escape destruction, afford a starting-point for the creation of delightful landscape effects. And although the mountains have no great agricultural value, frequent statements to the contrary notwithstanding, they are capable of responding cordially to him who, desiring a garden, a fruit orchard, or a vineyard, goes about it in the right way. New methods will doubtless increase the bearing capacity of the earth, but when all is said neither soil nor climate is as well suited to the production of food crops for man's needs as they are for the production of laurel and azaleas for his pleasure.
Where the mountains stand supreme is in their gracious climate that seems to caress the world- weary; in that and in the subtler beauties of nature that everywhere cover them as with a garment. The chance to build a castle out of fancies and a few firmer materials, to snare the vagrant fragrances that float free, to fix the rose-bay on the cliff, to clear a vista to the heavenly heights, moves the desire of every lover of beauty who comes here sighing for release from the bondage of icy winds or city conventions. Nor is a lordly mansion full of cares the proper housing for this country. Far better for those who seek their freedom is the restfully-proportioned "bungalow," with spreading roof and broad porches, appropriate to the climate and harmonious in the landscape, and which is now growing so greatly in favor.
The world may be coming, but the colors and the fragrances, the wonderful air and the ardent sun remain the same, and ever will. The change that is going on may have its trials, but one has only to project the imagination far enough into the future to see these heights transformed from glorious wildness into glorious order. One looks ahead with undaunted courage to the time when both visitor and native will enjoy without destroying the charming efforts of nature; to the time when man will - to adapt Emerson - name the birds without a gun, love the wild rose and leave it on its stalk; to the time when, undisturbed, the arbutus will again carpet the woods close to the houses, and the flaming azaleas cover the slopes, pressing down as they once did against the wheels of the carriage as you drove along the more frequented roads. For Nature is long-suffering and very kind, so kind, indeed, that 'in moments of discouragement one has only to remember that even if the worst were to happen, and these beautiful mountains become devastated by ignorant invaders, when the time came, as come it would, that the profaner departed, Nature would begin anew her beneficent task of creating beauty. These mountains, with their tremendous fecundity and their resistless allies of sun and rain, in half a century would erase all but the ineradicable signs of the presence of the destroyer, presenting to some future generation the privilege of joining the beauty of the wilderness to the graces of civilized life. For the whole world is now one population, all knowing each other, and it is incredible that the work of the future will not be in the direction of abolishing war, misery, and ugliness.
When the vitality of man and the energy of money are freed from the barbaric waste of to-day, physical and municipal, as they will be freed, and can be diverted into making the earth beautiful, then, if not before, this enchanting region will be transformed into the paradise which is so evidently its function in the scheme of nature. For these mountains have been preserved as though on purpose for man's pleasure. Nowhere else does such variety of beautiful trees grow in natural forests, nowhere else do such flowers bloom in gardens of nature's planting. The long line of the Appalachian Mountains, the oldest land in this country, perhaps in the world, having in its southern part escaped the cold death of the glacier, is probably the original home whence many of our hardwood trees have spread over the Northern Hemisphere. Once connected by land with eastern Asia, North America shared the flora of that part of the world, and when the Ice Age spread its destroying mantle over the whole northern part of the earth, the plants of the New World, - which is, geologically speaking, a very old world, --receding before it, took refuge in these mountains where soil and climate were alike favorable to their sustenance. So that here has been preserved in a great natural botanical garden and arboretum some of the choipest growths of recent millenniums, growths which but for these friendly heights would have been numbered with the long list of forms of beauty that doubtless lived and vanished before man came upon the scene to witness and enjoy.
And here to-day it is man's privilege to enhance the loveliness of the earth by use of the wonderful trees and flowers that grow spontaneously, as well as by the introduction of the many beautiful forms that recent years have made accessible to us from that sister continent where the people of the Celestial Empire and the Flowery Kingdom have so long made their part of the world enchanting with flowers, foliage, and trees; and where they have created a form of beauty expressing the personality of their race. Seeing the exquisite results obtained by them, one imagines our own civilization expressing itself with equal force and originality, and here in the Southern mountains, with every natural advantage to draw upon, evolving a form of landscape gardening sympathetic to the region, as beautiful as that of any nation, and free from those traditional conventions of ours, which introduced here would convert a possible paradise into a stupid repetition of buildings and gardens that whatever may be their excuse in other climates and other regions, are utterly out of place here.
Already lovely homes, and grounds beautifully planted with the natural growths of the mountains, testify to the possibilities of the country, and form, let us hope, the beginning of a vast domain of beauty, a domain created, not by a few great land-holders, but by the many who shall come to take possession.
The Italians have a graceful way of placing in their village parks a notice to the effect that the park is entrusted to the honor of the people for whose pleasure it was made, and in the same spirit one would like to confide nature's great park of the Southern Appalachian Mountains to the loving care of the people. May it be the pleasure of all to assist the charming efforts of nature and to pass on, as a rightful inheritance to future generations, an ever more enchanting Holiday of Dreams.