Other Voices, Other Towns
The Traveler’s Story
Caleb Pirtle III
Copyright 2011 by Venture Galleries, LLC
1220 Chateau Lane
Hideaway, Texas 75771
214. 564. 1493.
Contact: www.venturegalleries.com
Published in eBook format by Venture Galleries, LLC
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ISBN-13: 978-0-9842-0836-4
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval program, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the author and publisher.
Text: Caleb Pirtle III
Editing and Design: Linda Greer Pirtle
Cover Design: Jutta Medina
Cover Photograph: Glenn Hyde
Prologue
My travels have never been measured in miles, only in people. The places I’ve gone, the sights I’ve seen, the long back roads I’ve walked have never been as important as the people I’ve met along the way.
Their voices stay with me. So do the stories they have told me.
The voices may come from down the road, at the counter of a diner, on the bar stool in a beer joint, sitting in the front yard of a mountain cabin, along a stretch of spun-sugar sand, back in the darkness of a pine thicket, amidst the downtown traffic jam of a city at sundown, or from the faint memories of a distant past.
Everyone who crosses my path when I travel has a story to tell. It may be personal. It may be something that happened last week or the year before. It may have been handed down for more than a single generation.
On numerous occasions, I’ve simply sat for awhile with the oldest man whittling and whistling on a courthouse lawn, spent time with the ladies who fight against all odds to preserve our past and our architectural heritage, or bumped into strangers who have elbowed their way into chili cook-offs, watermelon thumps, shrimp or crawfish boils, intergalactic chicken fly-offs, contests for tobacco spittin’, prune spittin’, rattlesnake milking, jalapeno gobbling, and turkey galloping.
Those voices, those recollections, those stories reflect the personality of the land itself.
Mountains fade into the distance. Beaches are timeless. The tides come and they go, but once they have gone, they are gone forever.
The town I’ll never forget today is forgotten tomorrow.
Voices remain eternal. Some people collect the oddest of things.
I collect stories. Here are a few that are as vibrant today as when I first heard them.
Last Man on The Mountain
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Elkmont, Tennessee.
Pop: 0
The Scene: The Great Smoky Mountains National Park reaches out and touches the sky for eight hundred square miles. It’s big. It is overwhelming. There are both high roads and low roads into areas of virtual isolation, including seven hundred miles of hiking and horseback paths.
One of them is a rugged sixty-eight-mile section of the Appalachian Trail that stretches from Maine through Georgia. Many, however, prefer to stick with the paved roads. One winds thirty-five miles from the resort city of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, to Cherokee, North Carolina, and another twists its way through the high timbered ridges from Gatlinburg into the living history farmstead of Cades Cove.
The Setting: Elkmont is more or less a ghost town with a campground and historic district that showcases pioneer cabins dating back to the 1830s and ‘40s. The town was established by the Little River Lumber Company in 1908 as a base for its logging operations.
Four years later, the famed and notorious Wonderland Park Hotel was built on the crest of a hill overlooking Elkmont, and the resort became the favorite hideaway for Tennessee’s wealthy and socially elite. The town itself was located in a narrow valley that lay at the junction of Little River and Jake’s Creek. Many came; all left but one. He stayed on for a long time.
The Story: No one ever dropped by Lem Ownby’s place on their way to anywhere else. Lem Ownby did not live on the way to anywhere else. His gray, weathered cabin hunkered down in a little grassy hollow at the far end of a paved road that became a dirt road that became a pair of wagon ruts, then beyond the brush and over a ridge stopped for good.
Stooped and wearing faded blue overalls, Lem Ownby shuffled his way along the neat row of rain-stained beehives that stood like aging tombstones in a world he hadn’t seen for almost twenty years. The mountains, strong and forgiving, kept their burly arms around him. The creek out back soaked up his thirst. The bees gave him their sourwood honey in case anyone with a few extra dollars came down that paved road that became a dirt road, then stopped for good when the wagon ruts ran out.
The last time I saw him, Lem Ownby was ninety-two and alone. His shoulders were stooped, his voice gentle. He was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat that had probably been new before the war, World War II. He kept the hat clamped down on his head to keep the rain off his face. He no longer needed it to keep the sun out of his eyes. The sun had not bothered his eyes for a long time. Lem Ownby was the old man of the mountains. He told me, “I sometimes take spells of being lonesome, but like a bellyache, it always passes.”
Behind him, the Great Smoky Mountains muscled across the timbered backbone of Tennessee, rising up into a blue mist that touched their wounded gorges like swabs of cotton and gauze. Until 1940, bib-overalled settlers, on farms beside country roads where no one hardly ever traveled, scratched out meager livings on scattered patches of soil mortised between stump and rock. “The land was so steep,” Lem told me, “you had to plow with one hand and hold on with the other.”
The sun rose above the mountains far too late in the day. It set beyond the mountains far too early. The tall country was creased with ravines
