Appalachian People Quotes

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident that she was a rarity.

But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn't know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition--either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit--that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn't all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and till fields.

To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.

I stood in a Burger King and studied, with absorption, the photographs of the manager and his executive crew (reflecting on the curious fact that people who go into hamburger management always look as if their mother slept with Goofy),

The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no—though that was the original plan.

She introduced people to the A.T., and at the same time she made the thru-hike achievable. It didn’t take fancy equipment, guidebooks, training, or youthfulness. It took putting one foot in front of the other—five million times.

The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbiggind, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild . . .savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical.

Deep Southerners assumed Appalachia would rally to the Confederacy because of a shared doctrine of white supremacy. Instead, Borderlanders did as they always had: they took up arms against whatever enemy they felt was the greatest threat, and fought ferociously against them. To the planters’ shock, most Appalachian people regarded them as a greater threat to their liberty than the Yankees.

I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth,

All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods.

all 'people of one blood' who made homeplace in isolated landscapes where they could invent themselves, where they could savor a taste of freedom.

More than nine million people a year come to the Smokies, many of them to picnic. So bears have learned to associate people with food. Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake. Since the bear doesn’t mind being filmed and indeed seems indifferent to his audience, pretty generally some fool will come up to it and try to stroke it or feed it a cupcake or something. There is one recorded instance of a woman smearing honey on her toddler’s fingers so that the bear would lick it off for the video camera. Failing to understand this, the bear ate the baby’s hand.

you don’t need to be rich to care for people. You only need to be creative and willing to meet them where they’re at.

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail,

We all are born with the will to live. Rarely people lose it. Nobody wants to die...you fight. You just fight for all you're worth.

He didn’t want people to be right about him. He didn’t want to go back feeling like a failure. He put his pack back on and returned to the trail.

Beulah has a husband?” “I know. It’s a miracle. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who’d be willing to sleep with her and here we are both in the same town.

William Wordsworth was said to have walked 180,000 miles in his lifetime. Charles Dickens captured the ecstasy of near-madness and insomnia in the essay “Night Walks” and once said, “The sum of the whole is this: Walk and be happy; Walk and be healthy.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of “the great fellowship of the Open Road” and the “brief but priceless meetings which only trampers know.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche said, “Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.” More recently, writers who knew the benefits of striking out excoriated the apathetic public, over and over again, for its laziness. “Of course, people still walk,” wrote a journalist in Saturday Night magazine in 1912. “That is, they shuffle along on their own pins from the door to the street car or taxi-cab…. But real walking … is as extinct as the dodo.” “They say they haven’t time to walk—and wait fifteen minutes for a bus to carry them an eighth of a mile,” wrote Edmund Lester Pearson in 1925. “They pretend that they are rushed, very busy, very energetic; the fact is, they are lazy. A few quaint persons—boys chiefly—ride bicycles.

People living normal lives are ruffled by folks like Doc and Llama. Nonconformity is an affront to those in the mainstream. Our impulse is to dismiss this lifestyle, create reasons why it can’t work, why it doesn’t even warrant consideration. Why not? Living outdoors is cheap and can be afforded by a half year of marginal employment. They can’t buy things that most of us have,

That fence has gotta 'lectric charge runnin' through it!" Duffy whispered. "Felt like I got struck by lightnin' right b'tween my shoulder blades! It crackled like when the barber turns on his trimmer." Ott had had his suspicions about the electric fence, but there had been only one way to know for sure. That's why some people were generals and others were sergeants, after all.

I had recently read to my dismay that they have started hunting moose again in New England. Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do—so many, in fact, that states now hold lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just 1,500 permits. Over 12,000 outof-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to be allowed to take part in the draw. Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, “Hey—woods. Now how the heck did I get here?” Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety. Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cunning and peculiarly-blunted survival instincts, it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just plodded on. It hasn’t always been so. At the turn of this century, it was estimated that there were no more than a dozen moose in New Hampshire and probably none at all in Vermont. Today New Hampshire has an estimated 5,000 moose, Vermont 1,000, and Maine anywhere up to 30,000. It is because of these robust and growing numbers that hunting has been reintroduced as a way of keeping them from getting out of hand. There are, however, two problems with this that I can think of. First, the numbers are really just guesses. Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses. Some naturalists think the population may have been overstated by as much as 20 percent, which means that the moose aren’t being so much culled as slaughtered. No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick—with a folded newspaper, I’d almost bet—and all it wanted was a drink of water. You might as well hunt cows.

There really is no correct way to hike the trail, and anyone who insists that there is ought not to worry so much about other people's experiences. Hikers need to hike the trail that's right for them...

I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared.

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly in high summer.

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition - either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit - that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn't all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilled fields.

In the Carolinas they say "hill people" are different from "flatlands people," and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I'm inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I'd been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community ... and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice -- which bears only a primitive resemblance to anything written in law books. I thought the mountain types would be far more tolerant of the Angels' noisy showboating, but -- compared to their flatlands cousins -- much quicker to retaliate in kind at the first evidence of physical insult or abuse.

But outsiders who rush into the hills don’t always take the time to see that mountain people are a creative, resourceful lot. They don’t understand that Appalachians can be—should be—partners in the effort to make their lives better. They don’t grasp that, if given the right resources and opportunities, these communities are capable of saving themselves. If there’s one thing that women in these hills know how to do, it’s get things done.

Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake. Since the bear doesn’t mind being filmed and indeed seems indifferent to his audience, pretty generally some fool will come up to it and try to stroke it or feed it a cupcake or something. There is one recorded instance of a woman smearing honey on her toddler’s fingers so that the bear would lick it off for the video camera. Failing to understand this, the bear ate the baby’s hand.

I wanted nothing more than to yell at these people, “SHUT UP! I’ve been traversing cliffs, creeks, mud, jagged rocks, drop offs, bug hoards, and hellish inclines all morning and all I had to eat before all of it were skittles wrapped in a tortilla!” This

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition—either you ruthlessly subjugate it...or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote...Seldom would it occur...that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit... (p. 200).

As a child I read hoping to learn everything, so I could be like my father. I hoped to combine my father's grasp of information and reasoning with my mother's will and vitality. But the books were leading me away. They would propel me right out of Pittsburgh altogether, so I could fashion a life among books somewhere else. So the Midwest nourishes us . . . and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters, and the forested river valleys, with the blue Appalachian Mountains to the east of us and the broad great plains to the west. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities.

As one book, Appalachian Odyssey, notes about the influx of hill people to Detroit: “It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers ‘out of place’ in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban whites. Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved . . . the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.”10

The unwritten rule for hikers is to take one of whatever is provided. If there is a large selection or quantity, then you might take one of each or one of a couple things, then move on. You have to be considerate of the people hiking behind you that haven’t arrived yet and give them a chance to get in on the magic whenever they get there. 

I knew that the feelings they got from providing the kindness was stronger than the gratitude I got from receiving it. It was on this day that I realized I wanted to experience that feeling as much and as often as I possibly could. I wanted to do good things for people I didn’t know and watch the surprise and appreciation wash over their faces.

He found it puzzling that so many rural people were hostile to, even terrified of, the place where they lived. It wasn't just that hard-working country folk had no time for the precious concerns of the effete urban environmentalists, what amazed Rice was how you could spend your whole life physically immersed in a particular ecological system and yet remain blinded to it by superstition, tradition, prejudice. Out west, it was ranchers' holy war on predators and their veneration of Indo-European domestic animals they husbanded on land too dry to support them. Here in the Appalachians, you saw rugged country men who refused to walk in the woods all summer because they were scared of snakes.

This day and age, so many people over-complicate their lives to the point of ludicrousness.  I couldn’t see myself ever going back to my life of over consumption and over indulgence with the ambition to acquire “more.” When you simplify, you learn to be happier with less. It’s a happiness that trumps every other happiness I’ve ever experienced thus far in life.

He seems to be giving his people a (mostly) gently worded lecture on their lack of willingness to work even when it appears almost pointless to do so. For that reason, the book should have been titled Hillbilly Reprimand, because Vance doesn't want to mourn his hillbilly family. He wants to make them good proletarians like they allegedly were in the twentieth century.

Out there in the woods, there’s no one to impress and no one to judge you. The only people you’ll see are your fellow hikers, and they don’t care what you look like, or what you wear. It’s when you get past this attitude of judging people by their surface appearance that you’re able to genuinely get to know someone on a deeper, more personal level. This is why relationships formed on the trail are so strong. In

Afghan Girl Ice blue eyes that look to the morning sky as I knit the pieces and remnants of my life. I have No books, no paper, no pencils, and no black boards. I look at the holes in my life as I see the hills of the Appalachians that echo. I think to myself, who will I marry? Is my life-like Pari? These strings please come together. Snowflakes give me hope, and my dreams dance all around me. I‘ll put another log on the fire. I watch the brown paper bag over the broken glass pane letting the cold wind in; I’ll take some of these remnants and stuff it. These strings are come together. Mama told me that life would be hard. I bartered for flour the other day, and the chickens ain’t laying no eggs. I struggle with life and these strings. My hands are worn and tired. Now, I have granny square hands. I am unclean, unblemished, and finished, Afghan girl.

In 1960, of Ohio’s ten million residents, one million were born in Kentucky, West Virginia, or Tennessee. This doesn’t count the large number of migrants from elsewhere in the southern Appalachian Mountains; nor does it include the children or grandchildren of migrants who were hill people to the core. There were undoubtedly many of these children and grandchildren, as hillbillies tended to have much higher birthrates than the native population.6

the American population was increasing rapidly, from 5.3 million in 1800 to 12.9 million in 1830, and from sixteen states in 1800 to twenty-four in 1830, most of the increase across the mountains in the trans-Appalachian west. The river steamboat from 1807, the Erie Canal between Albany, New York, and the Great Lakes from 1825, railroads from 1829, penetrated the American wilderness and fostered its settlement. These new places and people needed lighting.

It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers ‘out of place’ in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban whites. Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved . . . the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas.

For me, there is hope in the spirit of a people who find creative ways to exist in a community that has been systemically marginalized. In men and women who take care of each other even when the outside world does not take care of them. In people who broke their bodies in tobacco fields and coal mines to make a living in the only community they have ever known. We don’t take time to see it: the hope in the poverty, the spark against the dreary backdrop, the grit in the mountain women.

All kinds of people have completed thru-hikes. One man hiked it in his eighties. Another did it on crutches. A blind man named Bill Irwin hiked the trail with a seeing-eye dog, falling down an estimated 5,000 times in the process. Probably the most famous, certainly the most written about, of all thru-hikers was Emma "Grandma" Gatewood, who successfully hiked the trail twice in her late sixties despite being eccentric, poorly equipped, and a danger to herself. (She was forever getting lost.)

Parallel to the idea of the US Constitution as covenant, politicians, journalists, teachers, and even professional historians chant like a mantra that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” From its beginning, the United States has welcomed—indeed, often solicited, even bribed—immigrants to repopulate conquered territories “cleansed” of their Indigenous inhabitants. From the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants were recruited to work mines, raze forests, construct canals and railroads, and labor in sweatshops, factories, and commercial farm fields. In the late twentieth century, technical and medical workers were recruited. The requirements for their formal citizenship were simple: adhere to the sacred covenant through taking the Citizenship Oath, pledging loyalty to the flag, and regarding those outside the covenant as enemies or potential enemies of the exceptional country that has adopted them, often after they escaped hunger, war, or repression, which in turn were often caused by US militarism or economic sanctions. Yet no matter how much immigrants might strive to prove themselves to be as hardworking and patriotic as descendants of the original settlers, and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unum, they are suspect. The old stock against which they are judged inferior includes not only those who fought in the fifteen-year war for independence from Britain but also, and perhaps more important, those who fought and shed (Indian) blood, before and after independence, in order to acquire the land. These are the descendants of English Pilgrims, Scots, Scots-Irish, and Huguenot French—Calvinists all—who took the land bequeathed to them in the sacred covenant that predated the creation of the independent United States. These were the settlers who fought their way over the Appalachians into the fertile Ohio Valley region, and it is they who claimed blood sacrifice for their country. Immigrants, to be accepted, must prove their fidelity to the covenant and what it stands for.

Shortly before his assassination, he envisioned bringing to Washington, D.C., thousands of the nation’s disadvantaged in an interracial alliance that embraced rural and ghetto blacks, Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans to demand jobs and income—the right to live. In a speech delivered in 1968, King acknowledged there had been some progress for blacks since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but insisted that the current challenges required even greater resolve and that the entire nation must be transformed for economic justice to be more than a dream for poor people of all colors. As historian Gerald McKnight observes, “King was proposing nothing less than a radical transformation of the Civil Rights Movement into a populist crusade calling for redistribution of economic and political power. America’s only civil rights leader was now focusing on class issues and was planning to descend on Washington with an army of poor to shake the foundations of the power structure and force the government to respond to the needs of the ignored underclass.

It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers ‘out of place’ in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban whites. Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved . . . the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.”10

You don’t often find trusting and kindness like this in the world anymore. Strangers inviting strangers into their homes to have dinner with them is practically unheard of in this day and age. It felt amazing to be on the receiving end of such kindness, but somehow I knew that the feelings they got from providing the kindness was stronger than the gratitude I got from receiving it. It was on this day that I realized I wanted to experience that feeling as much and as often as I possibly could. I wanted to do good things for people I didn’t know and watch the surprise and appreciation wash over their faces.

The state of New York had just one important advantage—an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that those soft and rolling mountains, often little more than big hills, could ever have constituted a formidable barrier to movement, but in fact they afforded almost no usable passes along the whole of their twenty-five-hundred-mile length and were such an obstruction to trade and communications that many people believed that the pioneers living beyond the mountains would eventually, of practical necessity, form a separate nation.

A word to the wise, NEVER try and push bigger miles when you begin a long distance hike without any prior experience or conditioning. Listen to your body, and unless you absolutely have to go further due to water or an emergency, stop when it tells you to stop. It will save you a tremendous amount of pain and heartache. I can’t tell you how many people I saw quit the trail due to overdoing it in the beginning and hurting themselves or causing themselves more pain than they could tolerate. There is no harm in going slow and building yourself up gradually. You have plenty of time and distance to grow stronger, and believe me, you will! I

As one book, Appalachian Odyssey, notes about the influx of hill people to Detroit: "It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers 'out of place' in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban whites. Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved ... the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.

As one book, Appalachian Odyssey, notes about the influx of hill people to Detroit: “It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers ‘out of place’ in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban whites. Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved . . . the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.” 10

When this sort of thing happens (and about a dozen people a year are injured, usually at picnic sites, usually by doing something dumb) or when a bear becomes persistent or aggressive, park rangers shoot it with a tranquilizer dart, truss it up, take it into the depths of the backcountry, far from roads and picnic sites, and let it loose. Of course by now the bear has become thoroughly habituated both to human beings and to their food. And who will they find to take food from out in the back country? Why, from me and Katz, of course, and others like us. The annals of Appalachian Trail hikes are full of tales of hikers being mugged by bears in the back country of the Smokies.

Stephen Colbert: [sitting to Stewart’s right at the anchor desk] Actually, Jon, we’re not quite done. Jon Stewart: [rolling away from Colbert on his chair and nearly toppling off the riser] Don’t do this. Stephen Colbert: [rolling after Stewart and grabbing him by the arm] No—you can’t stop anyone, because they don’t work for you anymore! Huge mistake! Jon Stewart: Please don’t do this. Stephen Colbert: Here’s the thing: You said to me and to many other people here years ago never to thank you, because we owe you nothing. Jon Stewart: [quietly] That’s right. Stephen Colbert: It’s one of the few times I’ve known you to be dead wrong… We owe you because we learned from you, by example, how to do a show with intention, with clarity. How to treat people with respect. You are infuriatingly good at your job, okay? [Stewart covers his eyes, which appear to be filled with tears] And all of us who were lucky enough to work with you—and you can edit this out later—for sixteen years are better at our jobs because we got to watch you do yours. And we are better people for having known you… Personally, I do not know how this son of a poor, Appalachian turd miner—I do not know what I would do if you hadn’t brought me on this show. I’d be back in those hills, mining turds with Pappy! Jon—and it’s almost over—I know you are not asking for this, but on behalf of so many people whose lives you changed over the past sixteen years, thank you. And now, I believe your line—correct me if I’m wrong—is “We’ll be right back.

Nova Berry looked like a hickory switch- tall, thin and knobby. She could trace her family line back hundreds of years in the Appalachian Mountains. These days people treated what she did as a novelty, but there was a time when the Berry women were known far and wider their natural remedies.Slippery elm for digestive problems. Red clover for skin conditions. Pot marigold for certain monthly female ailments. Nova had been forced to spice things up a bit now that there were things like Maalox and Midol on the market, so easily acquired. So she made it known that her cure for heartburn also mended a broken heart, and her cure for cramps also made you more fertile, or less, if that's what you wanted. Half the time it really worked, because if it was one thing generations of Berry women knew, it was that confidence was the primary ingredient in every potion.

People thought of Adam as dim, flawed, “Lights are on, but nobody home,” they said about him. Because he had been told so often, Adam had come to agree with them. None of this made Adam think less of himself. In fact, Adam rarely thought of himself at all. He was different that way. Adam looked out at the world and whatever he saw required his total attention. He engaged his visible universe with an absolute, unreserved surrender. The intensity of his observation would have put an angel to shame. Mamaw’s preacher, a man more enlightened than he was educated, and who had some sense of the Spirit that was in Adam, might have said God looked down on Marshall County through Adam’s eyes, loved their little slice of the Appalachians through Adam’s heart, so that people and places there became real through being truly and completely seen and cherished by a selfless soul.

Horty had a theory about motivation. He told me that a lot of motivation could be boiled down to this: How bad do you want it? He would ask people, "What's the furthest you can run without stopping?" After they replied whatever distance, he followed up with "Could you run a mile further if I gave you a million dollars? What if I was running behind you holding a gun to your head, could you run even further?" He said, "It's easy to say you want it real bad when you're sitting at home on the couch. But when the going gets tough, do you want it enough?" We often think we can't go any farther and feel like we have nothing left to give, yet there is a hidden potential and strength in all of us, begging us to find it. We arrive at it via different means---something reward, sometimes fear. There was something to Horty's motivational theory, and finding that desire was the most vexing problem. How bad did I want it?

the morning, I drove to Pennsylvania, thirty miles or so to the north. The Appalachian Trail runs for 230 miles in a northeasterly arc across the state, like the broad end of a slice of pie. I never met a hiker with a good word to say about the trail in Pennsylvania. It is, as someone told a National Geographic reporter in 1987, the place “where boots go to die.” During the last ice age it experienced what geologists call a periglacial climate—a zone at the edge of an ice sheet characterized by frequent freeze—thaw cycles that fractured the rock. The result is mile upon mile of jagged, oddly angled slabs of stone strewn about in wobbly piles known to science as felsenmeer (literally, “sea of rocks”). These require constant attentiveness if you are not to twist an ankle or sprawl on your face—not a pleasant experience with fifty pounds of momentum on your back. Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest

And then we went out to see the town. I was particularly eager to have a look at Gatlinburg because I had read about it in a wonderful book called The Lost Continent. In it the author describes the scene on Main Street thus: “Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on their bellies, consuming ice-creams, cotton candy, and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously.” And so it was today. The same throngs of pear-shaped people in Reeboks wandered between food smells, clutching grotesque comestibles and bucket-sized soft drinks. It was still the same tacky, horrible place. Yet I would hardly have recognized it from just nine years before. Nearly every building I remembered had been torn down and replaced with something new—principally, mini-malls and shopping courts, which stretched back from the main street and offered a whole new galaxy of shopping and eating opportunities. In The Lost Continent I

The tragedy of Central Appalachia is that it is becoming more marginalized in American life just when the country needs more than ever what it has to offer. At a time when the bonds of community and family are visibly failing and people feel more alone than ever, and as they are bombarded from all sides with more demands, and with more "data" that they can possibly digest, Appalachia offers a model for a less frenetic and more measured way of life. People of Appalachian descent elsewhere in the nation-and they number many millions-still feel deep ties to some Appalachian hamlet or hollow as to an ancestral homeland, though they may never have even visited it. As they make their way in the big world of getting and spending they know that something valuable has been lost for all they may have gained. That less frenetic way of life is deeply embedded in Appalachian culture, which has proved incredibly tough and enduring. Yet Appalachia has now been so thoroughly bypassed and forgotten that it cannot give, because the rest of America will not take, what could be it's greatest gift.

While we waited on a bench outside the motel office, I bought a copy of the Nashville Tennessean out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton—not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened—was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

Clingmans Dome in the middle of the park. Then, it’s downhill to Virginia, and people have told me Virginia is a cakewalk. I’ll learn soon enough that “easy” trail beyond the Smoky Mountains is as much a fantasy as my dream lunch with pizza…uh, I mean Juli, but for now I’ve convinced myself all will be well once I get through the Smokies. I leave Tray Mountain Shelter at 1:00 with ten miles to go. I’ve eaten the remainder of my food. I’ve been hiking roughly two miles per hour. Downhill is slower due to my sore knee. I need to get to Hiawassee by 6:00 p.m., the check-in deadline at Blueberry Patch Hostel, where my mail drop is waiting.5 I have little margin, so I decide to push for a while. I down a couple of Advil and “open it up” for the first time this trip. In the next hour I cover 3.5 miles. Another 1.5 miles and I am out of water, since I skipped all the side trails leading to streams. Five miles to go, and I’m running out of steam. Half the strands of muscle in my legs have taken the rest of the day off, leaving the other half to do all the work. My throat is dry. Less than a mile to go, a widening stream parallels the trail. It is nearing 6:00, but I can handle the thirst no longer. There is a five-foot drop down an embankment to the stream. Hurriedly I drop my pack and camera case, which I have clipped over the belt of my pack. The camera starts rolling down the embankment, headed for the stream. I lunge for it and miss. It stops on its own in the nook of a tree root. I have to be more careful. I’m already paranoid about losing or breaking gear. Every time I resume hiking after a rest, I stop a few steps down the trail and look back for anything I may have left behind. There’s nothing in my pack that I don’t need. Finally, I’m

The shift in focus served to align the goals of the Civil Rights Movement with key political goals of poor and working-class whites, who were also demanding economic reforms. As the Civil Rights Movement began to evolve into a “Poor People’s Movement,” it promised to address not only black poverty, but white poverty as well—thus raising the specter of a poor and working-class movement that cut across racial lines. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders made it clear that they viewed the eradication of economic inequality as the next front in the “human rights movement” and made great efforts to build multiracial coalitions that sought economic justice for all. Genuine equality for black people, King reasoned, demanded a radical restructuring of society, one that would address the needs of the black and white poor throughout the country. Shortly before his assassination, he envisioned bringing to Washington, D.C., thousands of the nation’s disadvantaged in an interracial alliance that embraced rural and ghetto blacks, Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans to demand jobs and income—the right to live. In a speech delivered in 1968, King acknowledged there had been some progress for blacks since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but insisted that the current challenges required even greater resolve and that the entire nation must be transformed for economic justice to be more than a dream for poor people of all colors. As historian Gerald McKnight observes, “King was proposing nothing less than a radical transformation of the Civil Rights Movement into a populist crusade calling for redistribution of economic and political power. America’s only civil rights leader was now focusing on class issues and was planning to descend on Washington with an army of poor to shake the foundations of the power structure and force the government to respond to the needs of the ignored underclass.”36

Like this geode, people may look ugly but once you really get to know them you discover they are really beautiful.

You only have one life, and its ending one minute at a time. Don’t let all of those minutes’ tick by or belong to people that don’t truly appreciate them. If you’re not happy, then what’s the point? Figure out what makes you happy, then do everything in your power to make it your reality.

The purchase of Louisiana from a beleaguered France, engineered by Thomas Jefferson, created not an 'empire for liberty,' as Jefferson had promised, but an empire for slavery. With New Orleans and its vast hinterland now under American rule, planters quickly occupied the rich lands between the western Appalachian ranges and the Mississippi River. The two great thrusts of slavery's expansion - one east to west from the Chesapeake and lowcountry, the other south to north from the lower Mississippi Valley - soon joined. Before long, slaveholders were casting covetous eyes on the southwestern corner of the North American continent, a vision that they translated into reality with the successful American assault on Mexico in 1848. The territorial settlement that followed the Mexican War exposed the federal government's long-established role as the agent of slavery's expansion. Federal diplomats who had wrested Louisiana from the French in 1803 took Florida from the Spanish in 1819. Between these two landmarks in slavery's expansion, federal soldiers and state militiamen forcibly expropriated millions of acres of land from the Indians through armed conquest and defended the slave regime from black insurrectionists and foreign invaders. After defeating slave rebels in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, in 1811 and British invaders in New Orleans in 1814, federal soldiers turned their attention to sweeping aside Native peoples.

As an American practicing within an Asian religion, both here and in the States, I try to stay vigilant concerning issues related to cultural appropriation—especially the purloining of spiritual traditions from foreign nations…Such issues have validity. So do issues relating to spiritual dilettantism, the shallow, selfish dabbling in religious beliefs and practices of other people.

If we don’t judge people for deciding to hike the AT, we certainly can’t judge them for deciding to end it.

I think I know why all these people line up by that big plaque on the boulder every year and funnel—baby step-by-baby step—onto the Grandma Gatewood Trail. To be here is to participate in an experience, her experience. To walk this path that she loved is to embrace her memory, to come as close to her as possible. To see what she saw and step where she stepped and feel some thin connection to a farm woman who decided one day to take a walk, and then kept going, getting faster until the end. I could be imagining all this, but I lost myself a little. In her footsteps, I forgot my troubles. Maybe the fountain of youth wasn’t a fountain at all.

Perhaps I’d been born that way, but my many miles on trail had made me more comfortable in nature than anywhere else. More comfortable in the presence of wild animals and trees than with people.

While hiking, you experience hardship, deprivation, drudgery, and pain, and the cooking stinks. The similarities to marriage don’t end there. Some people love it, and many are committed to seeing it through.

Religion played a major part in the history of the Appalachian pioneers. Their way of life was characterized by a strong sense of independence and an inherent distrust of religious hierarchies. Many of their beliefs were influenced and modified by early interaction with the Shawnee and Cherokee people, as well as by the African religions of their slaves. Some of these adaptations are still in evidence in present day church services in Appalachia, including creek baptism, foot washing, chanted preaching and congregational shouting.

I can’t understand how Herbert Ryan would run around the country throwing people in the creek and trying to keep them from going to work when his kids are dirty and hungry and his wife’s about to die.  And he’s supposed to be a Christian and a church member.”               “My

Apocalypse was one of those people that didn’t care what others thought. He was going to do his own thing, his own way.  He just had this sureness about him. Like no matter what unexpected thing happened to him, he still had it all figured out. I admire the hell out of people who think like that and are still able to make life work for themselves.

Funny enough, it’s the smallest things that weren’t that exciting or worthy of recounting to other people; even though at the time they seemed like the most important and joyous things in the world to me and those hiking with me. Even in memory-they’re still important, and it is times such as those that I realized what the whole journey was about. Living in the moment, camaraderie with your fellow man, and breaking into song when the moment feels right. The smallest things have the biggest impacts on us, and no one else in the world will understand them as profoundly as we did at those moments.

This visual of two different worlds and planes of existence converging on a mountain top was actually quite amazing and eye opening to witness. The “haves” and the “have nots.”  It gave me a new perspective. More perspective than I feel I’d gained on the journey so far. People simply don’t know how good they have it, even when things seem terrible or difficult. Although I’d chosen to do this hike and live this way temporarily, I understood there were people out there who lived like this permanently, without any choice, while in much worse conditions and circumstances. Any Dick and Jane can say, “Yeah, I know there are people out there who live like that, and I understand and feel sorry for them.” I’m sure some people reading this are thinking that same thing. I’ll tell you right now, I’ve been to third world countries and you can see it, sympathize with it, and think you understand it; but in reality, you may not. Not until you’ve experienced and lived it for yourself. I thought I understood it simply by seeing it, but it wasn’t until I’d lived parts of that “have not” experience, that I realized just how much I didn’t understand it. Defecating outside and maybe not having toilet paper. Sleeping outside, not having running water or hot water, not having showers, and being miles from the nearest help. Not having whatever you want to eat every day or possibly running out of food, or not finding water. Not having electricity, not having climate control, and having your feet as your only means of transportation. Dealing with any and all elements whenever they should arise, as well as having limited hygiene products and smelling terrible every day. This only scratches the surface. I won’t pretend to know exactly what it’s like for people who are stuck in this lifestyle permanently, but in making this journey I certainly gained a much better understanding. I knew that even though it was the life I’d chosen to live at that time, I still had it better than probably half the people on the planet. I could get a reprieve (for a price) anytime I went into town. I could end any suffering, discomfort, and pain I experienced on any day I chose... but I didn’t.  I was enjoying the experience and perspective I was gaining on an almost daily basis. The time for personal reflection and the thousands of moments I had each day that belonged to me and only me was intoxicating. The whole experience was surreal, yet at the same time more real than anything in the modern world. Everything around you out there “is what it is” and isn’t trying to be anything else. It’s simple and honest, which is more than can be said for the “modern” world, where many things are never as they seem, and most everybody wants something from you. 

In the material world you miss opportunities to forge friendships and meet people because of appearance, social, and socioeconomic standings. Examine your friends that you have in the real world right now; many of them probably dress similar to you, as well as have similar affiliations, interests, and hobbies. On the trail, stripped of all your comforts and everything you own, everybody you meet is the same yet simultaneously unique. Everyone you come across is just another sweaty, smelly human being that’s having the same rough day as you.

When I arrived at the river, I sat on the bank for a while just looking at the water level and considering my options. I could camp on the riverbank and wait for the level to drop, which would take a least one day; I could walk down to the highway and back up to the opposite bank—a 15-mile detour; or I could find another place to cross. I scouted up and down the river for a while, looking for a better place to cross, and secondarily, for a nice campsite. In the end, I came back to the crossing and sat there for a while, looking at the beaver dam which people normally walk on to cross this river. One third of the dam had washed out completely and the river was pouring through here faster than the section that was overflowing the dam outright. None of this was good.

I went hiking with my sister and a friend on the Appalachian Trail for 7 days. No change of clothes, no hot shower, no bed. By the end of it, I was thankful for just a hot cup of coffee and a shave. As they say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” This is true of people, possessions, and experiences.

The way the truth of it hits you is less white-lighting whisky more the slow arrival of fall in a place that knows little of hard, dug-in winters. Here we are southerners playing North, Appalachians denying everything by the salvation of the Lord, folks running from those people everyone tries to make us be. Daylight bends through the trees and steady songs of birds we cannot see.

If your goal is to walk the entire Appalachian Trail, then do it. People who take shortcuts do so because they are usually shorter, quicker, or easier. So where is the challenge and honor in that? We have enough of this in the real world. • Expect the worst. If after one week on the Trail you can honestly say that it is easier than you expected, then you will probably finish your journey. • We all have our own temperaments, levels of comfort, and thresholds of pain. If these are congruent with what the Trail requires, you should succeed on your pilgrimage.

Until they became the British Empire’s greatest voyagers, indeed its greatest export, settling in odd places all around the world. And for that splinter of them that became my people, the Scots-Irish, this meant the Appalachian Mountains, their first stop on their way to creating a way of life that many would come to call, if not American, certainly the defining fabric of the South and the Midwest as well as the core character of the nation’s working class.

With nowhere to be and all day to have them, conversations out on the trail took on a whole new meaning and depth. In this age of technology where everyone is plugged in, it’s all too apparent that people have never been more disconnected and out of tune, as well as touch with each other. While out on the trail, walking or sitting around campfires, I’d never had so many deep and meaningful conversations with people in my entire life.

May 21st was my 53rd day on the trail, as well as another pivotal and painful one. It was the day that I entered the Grayson Highlands; an area famous on the trail, as well as the United States for their wild ponies. Nobody owns them and no one takes care of them. They all live up there grazing and reproducing, with no natural predators, while droves of people visit the highlands every year to photograph and pet them. Due to all the visitors, the ponies can be overly friendly and nippy at times. They’re quite accustomed to people and could almost be described as tame. However, the second you forgot they were wild; you could end up with a pony bite. Something

AT legend has it that Pennsylvania hiking clubs and trail crews are proud of their state's nickname of Rocksylvania and don't remove rocks from the trail. In fact, some people claim they actually dump wheelbarrows full of rocks onto the trail.

When pondering elevation gain and mountains along the Appalachian Trail, most people think of the high peaks of New England: the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the Mahoosuc Range in Main. However, the highest mountains are actually in the South. In fact, seven of the ten highest peaks on the AT are south of Virginia, and four of them are in Great Smoky Mountains National Park; three of those are over six thousand feet.

Back then the Appalachian Trail was barely a trail at all—it consisted of over 2,000 miles of mostly unmarked wilderness from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia. A man named Benton MacKaye had proposed its creation in the early 1920s. He had utopian visions about a place that could “transcend the economic scramble” and be a balm on the American psyche after World War I. He thought the trail could lift people out of the drudgery of modern life. Government workers needed a relaxing place to recuperate, he wrote in his proposal. Housewives, he said, could use the trail’s rejuvenating powers too. They could come during their leisure time. It could even be a cure for mental illness, whose sufferers “need acres not medicine.” Civilization was weakening, he said. Americans needed a path forward. The Appalachian Trail was the solution. There was still so much undeveloped land in the United States. The West had Yosemite and Yellowstone, and many more national parks, but the East Coast was the most populous part of the country, and the people who lived there should have something to rival the western parks. National parks already dotted the East Coast’s landscape, but what if they could be united? MacKaye imagined what Americans would see as they strode the length of the trail: the “Northwoods” pointed firs on Mount Washington, the placid, pine-rimmed lakes of the Adirondacks. They would cross the Delaware Water Gap, the Potomac, and Harpers Ferry. They could follow Daniel Boone’s footsteps through southern Appalachia to the hardwood forests of North Carolina and end at Springer Mountain in Georgia. They would know their country. Barbara was swept up by

When our people were forced out of their homes and made to walk the Trail Where They Cried, the Elders were worried because the mothers couldn’t stop crying. Unlike the white man, women are revered by our People and are held as the head of the family. They hold much power within the different clans and are free to choose or reject their mate. The Elders knew there was no hope for the People if the women didn’t make it to the new land. They prayed to the Creator, asking Him to give the women strength. The Creator heard, and the next morning when the soldiers made them start walking again, He told the Elders to tell the women to look back down the trail where they’d walked the day before.

Around the same time that index was released, Nicholas Kristof (again, a hero to many liberals), wrote a column that addressed the dependency on government programs.5 He focused on Kentucky’s Appalachian area, where people have yanked their kids out of literacy classes because if those kids learn to read, the parents will be less likely to qualify for a monthly SSI check for having kids with intellectual disabilities. We are not even making this up. Apparently, many of these people receive nearly $700 each month from Supplemental Security Income for those “disabled” children, and they receive those payments until their kids turn eighteen. And when the kids do turn eighteen, they are illiterate and unproductive because of their parents, and they collect SSI income as adults, many of them never holding a job in their entire lives. This is how our entitlement programs “help.” Nice, huh? Kristof wrote, “This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.

You shouldn’t be scared of people just because they’re different. There are plenty of scarier things in this world.

Human beings always seem to look for someone to torment. They’ve been doing it for many years now and I expect they’ll continue to do it as long as there are any people alive.

A friend complained that his brother-in-law had phoned and woken him up in the middle of the night. The brother-in-law said, “I like to drink a few beers every night. Do you think I’ve got a problem?” My friend said, “Well, I like to eat green beans every day, but I don’t go callin people up at midnight to ask them if they think that means I’ve got a problem! So whadda you think?

One of my favorite things about the trail is that you don’t see your face. I mean, I guess you can see it in the reflection of the water, but there are no mirrors, no vanities, and no places to check yourself out. I used to think that people perceived me based on how I looked, but now that I don’t see my face, I feel like people perceive me by how I treat them—that is, by what I say to them and how well I listen. Now I feel beautiful when I make other people smile.

shelter and uphill. I wasn’t ready for that. Left at 8:30 this morning and pulled in at 3:30. I wish I had a hiking companion. It was nice hiking with Mary. I suspect I’ll be at this site alone, after spending last night with over twenty people.   Other than the pack weight, the weather makes one the biggest of the

she had learned at an early age that silence was often the best course when it came to dealing with people.

Selective reporting of crimes such as the Appalachian Law School attack isn’t just poor journalism, it could actually endanger people’s lives. By turning a defensive gun use story into one where students merely “overpowered a gunman,” the media gives potential victims the wrong impression of what works when confronted by violence.

Sometimes all it takes is paying attention to the people you love to know what they want.

cultural journalists, anthropologists, and historians. An outgrowth of the work of educators associated with the Foxfire project that took the nation by storm in the 1970s and 1980s, this approach focuses on involving students in fine-grained investigations of the lives of people in their own communities, both in the present and in the past. The Foxfire journals and books explored the unique characteristics of Appalachian culture in northern Georgia. They inspired the development of similar journals and books across the United States and became the basis for an educational model that affected hundreds if not thousands of teachers through Foxfire training institutes;

Genuine equality for black people, King reasoned, demanded a radical restructuring of society, one that would address the needs of the black and white poor throughout the country. Shortly before his assassination, he envisioned bringing to Washington, D.C., thousands of the nation’s disadvantaged in an interracial alliance that embraced rural and ghetto blacks, Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans to demand jobs and income—the right to live. In