47.

Waterways

EACH WATERWAY HAS ITS OWN VOICE: A SET OF SOUNDS THAT ARISES

FROM THE CONFLUENCE OF WATER RUNNING AT A GIVEN RATE OVER A

PARTICULAR CONFIGURATION OF ROCK AND SOIL. WHEN MOODY OR

MEDITATIVE WE ARE ATTRACTED TO CERTAIN STREAMS WHERE THESE

SOUNDS BECOME VOICES THAT SPEAK TO US QUITE CLEARLY.

We are attracted to water. Mountain paths always wind down

to springs, creeks and rivers. Every reader of Marjorie Kinnan

Rawlings’s The Yearling recalls the novel’s opening wherein the

boy Jody makes his way from the family’s cabin down to a

springhead he liked to think no one else knew about.

He stood his hoe against the split-rail fence. He walked down

the cornfield until he was out of sight of the cabin…The east

bank of the road shelved suddenly. It dropped below him twenty

feet to a spring. The bank was dense with magnolia and loblolly

bay, sweet gum and gray-barked ash. He went down to the spring

in the cool darkness of their shadows. A sharp pleasure came over

him. This was a secret and lovely place…Beyond the bank, the

parent spring bubbled up at a higher level, cut itself a channel

through white limestone and began to run rapidly downhill to

make a creek. The creek joined Lake George, Lake George was

part of the St. John’s River, the great river flowed northward into

the sea. It excited Jody to watch the beginning of the ocean.

There were other beginnings, but this was his own.

Jody’s spring, creek and river were in Florida, of course. Here in

the mountains the waterways we call creeks and rivers are more

varied and turbulent. But our attraction to them has always been

about the same as Jody’s. Running water is more than a material

force…it is a spiritual element.

Water is as central to life here in the Appalachians as the

mountains themselves. You can’t have mountains like the ones

found here without the seeps, springs, branches, creeks and rivers

that form them. Flowing water was the primary agent that sculpted

mountain landscapes as we know them today.

“A spring issuing from the living rock is worthy of confidence,”

was the considered opinion of outdoorsman Horace Kephart.

Mountain families more often than not picked their homesites

according to the location and purity of springs. They were

connoisseurs of water.

Taste was the prime consideration, followed by coolness,

clarity and reliability. There are older people to this day who

will not drink city water and make regular pilgrimages to fetch

water from a favorite spring. In midsummer lines sometimes

form at Cold Springs Baptist Church just west of Bryson City.

Wilma Dykeman noted in The French Broad that when the

buyers for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park were

appraising some of the small landholdings one old fellow

would come down from his little farm each day and

demand of the buyers:

“When’ll you be a-getting to my place?”

“We’ll be up there as soon as we can,” they’d reply.

“Well, I’m just aiming to make sure you see my spring,”’ he said.

“Why’s that?” they’d ask.

“You’d have to see it afore you could know the worth of my place.”

Once a family’s prize spring was located, the women would

sometimes line its sides and bottom with shards of quartz and other

sparkling stones. Catching a shaft of light through an overhanging

hemlock, the spring would glow in the dim light. It was a place of

enduring sustenance and beauty.

True springhouses were normally small, low structures. Most were

placed downstream from the springhead. Some had board floors

while others preferred stone slabs. Water flowed to and through

springhouses in various ways: rock-lined channels, hollow logs

and elevated troughs.

Crocks were placed in the water for food that required cool conditions.

Shelves along the interior walls provided storage space for other foods

placed in heavy crocks capped with ceramic lids, boards or flat rocks.

Sausage wrapped in corn shucks placed in a crock and sealed with fat

would keep through the summer.

Long before the first Europeans arrived, the Cherokees developed

ceremonials that focused on the spiritual power of running water.

When ethnologist James Mooney arrived on the Qualla Boundary

in the summer of 1887, those beliefs, which he described as the “The

Cherokee River Cult,” were still in place.

From the beginning of knowledge, Fire and Water, twin deities of

the primitive pantheon, have ocupied the fullest measure of man’s

religious thought, holding easy precedence over all other deities.

Others were gods of occasion, but these twain were the gods of

very existence. As the reverence for fire found its highest and most

beautiful expression in sun worship, so the veneration for water

developt into a cult of streams and springs. In Cherokee ritual,

the river is the Long Man, “Yu-nwi Gunahita,” a giant with his

head in the foothills of the mountains and his foot far down in the

lowland, pressing always, resistless and without stop, to a certain

goal, and speaking ever in murmurs which only the priest may

interpret.

Mooney observed that purification in moving water was an integral

part of day-to-day life and tribal ceremony. Water dipped from chosen

waterfalls was employed on special occasions. Even in winter whole families

would go to water at daybreak and stand in prayer before plunging into

the cleansing element together.

Our attitude toward and use of this most basic of our natural

resources is, in essence, no less spiritual than the Cherokee.

Like them or the early white settlers or country boys like

Jody, we have the opportunity to come away after

each visit with new beginnings.

When I was a boy, a springhead in a wooded ravine not too

far from my house was a secret hideaway. I would go there to

read and dream. It was my place of refuge. Moving water

and dappled shadows and bird song beckoned me toward a

closer relationship with the natural world.