What Is a Mountain?
When you are far away, our mountain looks like a big round hill covered with trees. But if you climb up, it changes. Our mountain goes up and down and up again and there are high flat parts and ridges and hollows, which are little valleys. You can be in a fairly open and level place, and come to a knob. That is a rounded top of a hill that usually is cleared off. Big knobs always have snow on them in the winter. Little knobs have old structures on them that people built so they wouldn't be surprised by Indians.
Creeks start up high in the mountain and travel down through the forest to the river. They are crooked. Fields and tall grass and farms are on the part of our mountain that's more level. Electric and telephone lines come up through cleared passageways in the woods. The road that goes up to our house is winding and gravelly. There is not very much traffic.
About thirty families live on our mountain. Most people don't live close together, but they are almost all friendly.
We were with some friends in town, at the softball field. Nothing was going on, so we went over to a junkyard where there was a boxcar that used to be part of a train. We were sitting there talking when all of a sudden a police car pulled up. A police lady came toward us. A little girl who was with us started to cry for her mother. The police lady said, “I won't hurt you.” She explained to us that people who lived in a nearby trailer said that we were vandalizing city property. We hadn't done anything wrong. She said, “You aren't supposed to be playing here. You could get hurt.” So we ended up going back to the softball field and getting bored.
Another time in town we were at Old Stone Presbyterian Church for a pancake supper. We had finished our pancakes, so we went outside in the cemetery. Pinecones were all over the ground. We started throwing them at each other. A pinecone almost hit a car that was driving by. The car backed up. The driver got out. She said to me, “What's your name?”
“Jimmy.”
“What's your last name?”
“Allder.”
“What's your daddy's name?”
“Bob.”
“What's his last name?”
“Allder,”
She said, “Your parents will be hearing from me!” They haven't, though.
A long time ago people who made moonshine hid out on our mountain. I bet we could, too, if we ever have to.
Another day, Corey and I, our cousin Timmy, and Sheba started from our house to go on a hike to the river and have a picnic. We usually go by our creek, but this time we walked through the alfalfa field, then down the mountain through the woods.
We crawled through a thicket of rhododendron and came out on a cliff. We could see the river and far down the Greenbrier Valley. Below us were some houses, and we could see a bridge way upstream.
The only way to get down from there was to slide on a bank of shale rock, so we did. At the bottom, the bank leveled off and sloped into the river. We sat there and ate crackers and cheese.
We began walking upstream, along the trail where the old railroad tracks used to be. We passed where our creek comes down. After a while, we saw some houses on the other side of the river. A woman called to us. “What are you boys doing over there?”
“We came from up on the mountain,” we called back. “Where are we and what time is it?”
“Spring Creek Station,” she said. “It's near two o'clock!” She told us that the bridge we could see was an old railroad bridge that goes across Spring Creek, not the river. We figured we'd better go back up the mountain by following our creek through the woods.
Part of the way you can walk alongside our creek on a path. Part of the way the bank is too steep and rough, and you have to walk in the creek by stepping on rocks. Sheba walks right in the water. There are many places in the creek where water falls over rocks into little scooped-out areas and makes pools. We decided to take a little bath in one pool because we had dirt on us and blood from cuts from the briers. The water was pretty cold.
We put our socks and shoes back on and climbed on up. Some of the pools we came to were muddy. We lay down on our stomachs and watched crawdads swimming around on the bottom. One was a huge granddaddy. We poked at him with a stick and he disappeared under a rock.
It was hard to walk without stepping on smushrooms, which is a word we made up. There's one mushroom that looks like a messy cow pile on the ground and you'll have to guess what we call it. Some of the mushrooms and other fungi along the creek are bright red, or orange, or polka-dotted. Some are on rocks, some on rotting wood. Some are round, like the puffball, which is a real name. Most puffballs are little, but once we saw one big as a turkey.
When we go walking, we try not to step on Indian pipes. They are flowers that stick up out of the ground and curl down, like real pipes. Some are white, but some are silvery orange.
We saw Sheba over on a big flat rock that has waves on it, just like waves in the ocean. They were made by water going over the rock for hundreds of years. Sheba was playing with something we thought was a snake. Corey jumped over to her and took it away. It was the backbone of some animal.
We were just going along, looking at things, climbing around, like always. Then something happened that made us glad for those natural bathtubs in the creek. Timmy and I had climbed up the hillside to swing on a grapevine. Timmy jumped off and came sliding down the hill. I tried to come down more slowly, but my feet slid over something that looked like a puffy mushroom but it wasn't. Yellow jackets started coming out of it. Timmy yelled and ran for the creek. The bees swarmed around my head. Timmy and I dived into a pool about two feet deep. We came up for air and the bees were still there, so we ducked under again and kept doing that, going under and coming up for air and ducking back under, until they had all gone away. We both got stung in a few places.
We decided to take a shortcut along the path made by the telephone company for telephone poles. We kept going and every time we thought we were real close, it took another five minutes before we thought we were real close again. We came to an old house that nobody lives in anymore. But the flowers in the garden were perfect. There were many, so we each took back some.
We walked to the road and followed it to the lane that goes in to our house….