Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler's Story

Caleb Pirtle III

Description

"Other Voices, Other Towns" has, in reality, taken Caleb Pirtle III a lifetime to write. During the thirty years he has been writing about travel across this great land, he spent much of his time listening to those whose paths he crossed.

Pirtle collects people. He collects their stories. He is firmly convinced that everyone who has ever walked across the street has a great story to tell if only someone will take the time to listen.

Pirtle has recorded many of them in "Other Voices, Other Towns." The sketches, the anecdotes, the tales they tell, the memories they have stored, their lessons of life make you feel better or make you want to cry.
Their stories are filled with disappointments and with inspiration: The blind man who tends his beehives in the Smoky Mountains and knows that someday "I'm going to where the mountains are higher and prettier and you don't get bee stung." The rancher who bought a whole town because it had a beer joint, and he could get a drink any time he was thirsty. The woman who built a major university on the strength of a dime. The grieving father searching for "the best little girl in the world." The vagabond who became a great writer because he flunked grammar and could not enroll in college. The last man on the mountain, the last survivor on an island, the last woman strong enough to tame though not civilize the Okefenokee Swamp. The teacher who taught history in school by singing the lessons he had written as songs. The men who created "Lum and Abner." The scientist digging for clues to prove a space ship had crashed in the backyard of Aurora, Texas. The performer who rescued the abandoned remains of a crumbling theater. The actor who figured out that a theater ticket was worth a mess of greens or a gallon milk during the Great Depression. The old con artist and wildcatter who defied the odds and discovered a great oilfield. The politician who had one cause, passed it in the legislature, and went home because there were no other bills that concerned him. The fishermen who stumbled across pearls in a landlocked lake. The girl singer who rode in a small RV behind the star until she became the star. The sad journey down the trail of broken promises. And the greatest worm fiddler of them all.
For Pirtle, other voices in other towns, have all been joined together to form the traveler's story.

Sujets

• Travelogues
• Essays
• Travel

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 05 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780984208364
• Langue: English

Extrait

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
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
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 and creeks, the slopes quilted with wildflowers. The earth was old. Pine, oak, hemlock, and yellow poplar all shadowed the wrinkled land that long kept mankind out of its hollows, then protected the few who dared battle their way in and stake claim to soil where only the courageous dared walk. In places, the mountains shut out the sky, and the pathways leading into the dark woodlands seldom found their way back out.
“Have you ever been lost back in this country?” I asked.
Lem Ownby glanced out across a fine purple mist that rolled atop the highlands. I knew it was purple. Lem had no idea. Lem had been blind for decades. He grinned, and said, “No, I don’t guess I’ve ever been lost. But I have been powerfully misplaced from time to time.”
The mountains themselves are ancient, the oldest landmarks on the face of the earth, having watched over Appalachia for two hundred million years, give or take a millennium or two. In 1940 the Great Smokies became a national park, and most families had to give up their raw acreage and move out. A few were allowed to stay. No others would ever homestead those mountains again. All of the original setters were gone.
Save one.
Lem Ownby was the last man on the mountain.
His grandfather had defied the mountains in search of gold, and his parents fought their way into the solemn refuge of the Smokies during the War Between the States.
They brought with them all they needed: a gun for hunting, a broad axe to cut the logs for a home, and a froe to slice the shingles that became a roof. Their philosophy had been a simple one: “If you can’t buy it, make it. And if you can’t make it, just do without it.”
In 1902, at the age of thirteen, Lem Ownby, swinging an axe as tall as he was, worked with his father to build the cabin that now sheltered him.
“It’s just back of beyond,” said the old man. He grinned a tired grin. “It was so far back in the woods, we had to go toward town to hunt.”
The Ownby family had neighbors up on Meigs Mountain and over on Blanket Mountain, where a bright red blanket had been hung atop a rusty wire to designate the official county line. It was seldom seen by anyone who didn’t belong in the high country.
“We did have an educated man come in here one time,” Lem remembered, “but he almost starved to death. He wouldn’t have made it if we hadn’t felt sorry for him and fed him. He was a college man.”
Lem Ownby rubbed his chin and leaned back on the old rocking chair beneath the picture on the wall, the faded photograph with images of a smiling mother and bearded father.
 
Maybe she was smiling because, in those days, old women knew how to get rid of worrisome warts without going to the doctor, which was good since there were a lot more warts than doctors back in those hard-rock Smoky Mountains.
“Just steal a dishrag,” she had told Lem, “then rub it over the warts. Hide it under a rock and never go back. When the dishrag rots, the warts will go away.”
The warts left. And, after a while, so did all traces of humanity. Only the chimney above Lem Ownby’s cabin mixed its ashen smoke with the blue mist of the mountains.
When the mountain farm boys stumbled awkwardly across the threshold of puberty, they diligently searched the corncribs from barn to barn. When someone found a red ear in the pile, he would have the pleasure and sinful distinction of being able to kiss the girl of his choice, provided he could talk her into such a provocative deed.
“We couldn’t be choosey about the girls,” Lem said.
“Why not?”
“There weren’t many of them.”
“How did you find a wife?” I asked.
“We took whatever was available.”
“And what if you married the wrong girl?”
“My daddy always said, ‘You’ve burnt a blister, now sit on it.’”
The mountains bred strong, self-reliant individuals. Lem Ownby called them stubborn. They were his neighbors, and they had been gone so long he sometimes wondered if he had ever really known them at all.
He remembered the day Ephraim Ogle and John Hampton went up the mountain together to bring down