Appalachian State Quotes

Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line across the United States at any angle, it’s going to pass through nine murder victims.

I glanced at my watch - it was two minutes to eleven; just right for lunch when and if we ever got to the godforsaken lodge - and took some comfort from the thought that at least I still had my wits about me. Or at least I felt as if I did. Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me - and here was an arresting notion - unless persuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by the fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state. That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state’s farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.)

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.

I couldn’t describe the smells of West Virginia, even if I tried. It has something to do with the leaves composting in the woods, the cold trickle of little creeks and waterfalls, the ferns greening up everything. But somewhere deep below, I can smell the rock and the coal this state is built on.

The next day, I would finish Virginia, the longest state on the AT, and enter West Virginia, the shortest state.

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

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.

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.

Thoughts are the most effective weapon in the human arsenal. On the upside, it is powerful to realize that goals are reached primarily by establishing the proper state of mind. But if allowed the perspective that our endeavors are propped upon nothing but a notion, we falter.

One-third of the landscape of the lower forty-eight states is covered in trees—728 million acres in all. Maine alone has 10 million uninhabited acres. That’s 15,600 square miles, an area considerably bigger than Belgium, without a single permanent resident. Altogether, just 2 percent of the United States is classified as built up.

If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.

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.

Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me—and here was an arresting notion—unless persuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by the fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state.

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.

I finally began loving every last bit of the experience; the good, the bad, and the ugly. The indifference, acceptance, disdain, and hate for all the obstacles and challenges I encountered out there had all but vanished. Now, all that was left was this crazy maniacal love for all of it… the mud, the rocks, the cold, and the terrible weather. I was done trying to ignore or curse them, and instead embraced all of it. I finally realized that it was an attitude such as this that set thru-hikers apart from every other person that couldn’t or wouldn’t complete this adventure. Aristotle said, “Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility, but through greatness of mind.” That quote pretty much sums up the state of mind that you have to adopt in order to overcome the challenges of the Appalachian Trail.

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

The real loser in the eastern forests has been the songbird. One of the most striking losses was the Carolina parakeet, a lovely, innocuous bird whose numbers in the wild were possibly exceeded only by the unbelievably numerous passenger pigeon. (When the first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons—more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.) Both were hunted out of existence—the passenger pigeon for pig feed and the simple joy of blasting volumes of birds from the sky with blind ease, the Carolina parakeet because it ate farmers’ fruit and had a striking plumage that made a lovely ladies’ hat. In 1914, the last surviving members of each species died within weeks of each other in captivity. A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird—the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler—that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50 percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen population declines since the 1960s. These days, the woods are a pretty quiet place.

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.

Katz needed bootlaces, so we went to an outfitter’s, and while he was off in the footwear section I had an idle shuffle around. Pinned to a wall was a map showing the whole of the Appalachian Trail on its long march through fourteen states, but with the eastern seaboard rotated to give the AT the appearance of having a due north-south orientation, allowing the mapmaker to fit the trail into an orderly rectangle, about six inches wide and four feet high. I looked at it with a polite, almost proprietorial interest—it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its entirety—and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches. I went and got Katz and brought him back with me, pulling on a pinch of shirtsleeve. “What?” he said. “What?” I showed him the map. “Yeah, what?” Katz didn’t like mysteries. “Look at the map, and then look at the part we’ve walked.” He looked, then looked again. I watched closely as the expression drained from his face. “Jesus,” he breathed at last. He turned to me, full of astonishment. “We’ve done nothing.” We went and got a cup of coffee and sat for some time in a kind of dumbfounded silence. All that we had experienced and done—all the effort and toil, the aches, the damp, the mountains, the horrible stodgy noodles, the blizzards, the dreary evenings with Mary Ellen, the endless, wearying, doggedly accumulated miles—all that came to two inches. My hair had grown more than that. One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine. In a way, it was liberating. If we couldn’t walk the whole trail, we also didn’t have to, which was a novel thought that grew more attractive the more we considered it. We had been released from our obligations. A whole dimension of drudgery—the tedious, mad, really quite pointless business of stepping over every inch of rocky ground between Georgia and Maine—had been removed. We could enjoy ourselves.

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.

those who don’t want to grant the timber company access to the timber on the mountain to raise their hands.” He leaned forward and raised his voice. “Without arguing about it or stating any more opinions.” I reckon more than half the people in the room raised their hands. Reverend Justice turned to Mr. Evans. “You have your answer, sir. I don’t see that there’s anything else to discuss.” I heard a scuffle in the back of the room and turned around to see Sawyer Eldridge and Joe Harris punching at one another. Uncle Fletcher and Sheriff Nanny hurried that way but Possum Gilliam and Bull Elliott reached them first.

Washington believed there was no reason the inland immigrants on that isolated frontier, severed from the 13 seaboard states by the mountain crests of the Appalachians, would maintain allegiance to their new country instead of the settlers allied with Great Britain to the north, or with the Spanish to the south. He wanted a canal extending west from the Mid-Atlantic’s Potomac River, but he recognized that a connection to the West had to be made, one way or the other—and in one place or another.

The Kennebec River was the largest river we had to cross without a bridge. The stories of peril and even death as a result of wading across haunted the Trail registers. Not to worry . . . the wonderful state of Maine provided a “ferry service” for Appalachian Trail hikers. It was a low-budget program featuring a scruffy guy and his trusty canoe. According to rumours, he would be there twice a day to perform his service. A bunch of hikers hung out patiently on the south bank to wait.

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

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

In the decades following the Revolution the northern states moved to destroy the institution, and by 1804 every northern state had committed itself to emancipation in one form or another. In many cases blacks themselves took the lead in using the Revolutionary language of liberty to attack slavery. By 1810 the number of free blacks in the northern states had grown from several hundred in 1770 to nearly 50,000. The Revolutionary vision of a society of independent freeholders led Congress in the 1780s specifically to forbid slavery in the newly organized Northwest Territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The new federal Constitution promised, in 1808, an end to the international importation of slaves, which many hoped would cripple the institution. In fact, all of the Revolutionary leaders, including southerners like Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Henry Laurens, deplored the injustice of slavery and assumed that it would soon die away. This was perhaps the most illusory of the several illusions the Revolutionary leaders had about the future of America.

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.

Tiff was a voice major at Appalachian State and had been singing in the St. Barnabas choir for a couple of years under our “scholarship for young singers” program.

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;

Ohio Geologists in Ohio have for the first time linked earthquakes in a geologic formation deep under the Appalachians to hydraulic fracturing, leading the state to issue new permit conditions Friday in certain areas that are among the nation’s strictest. A state investigation of five small tremors last month in the Youngstown area, in the Appalachian foothills, found the injection of sand and water that accompanies hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the Utica Shale may have increased pressure on a small, unknown fault,

Canary Dirge (From Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy) -Dale Marie Prenatt American Elegy is coming Just you wait - A bestseller will kill you off too I'm a hillbilly, they plum kill't me Bulldozed my bones into valley fill with the other dead canaries When exxon oil busts up your aquifers a red state lawyer will write a bestseller about your loose bootstraps too and shove them down your throat You'll be paying nestle for your muddy tap before your bookclub figures out that our selenium sludge runs downstream and we are your headwaters

Thoughts are the most effective weapon in the human arsenal. On the upside, it is powerful to realize that goals are reached primarily by establishing the proper state of mind. But if allowed the perspective that our endeavors are propped upon nothing but a notion, we falter.

We can see Katahdin, perfectly centered in the swath cleared of trees. The side of the peak to our right is tinted gold with sunlight. The top of the mountain is the first piece of land in the United States touched by the morning sun.

I have come through fourteen states, seen twenty-one bears, lost eight toenails, and gone through six pairs of shoes.

The cultured New England states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont contrast with the haggard look of hikers who have endured months on the trail.

The trail passes through fourteen states.

Scotland's contribution to American balladry is a subject which was either glossed over or neglected entirely by Cecil Sharp, the English folklorist and ballad collector, when he came over to the United States in search of traditional song poetry. Over here we are indebted to Sharp and to Miss Maud Karpeles for exploring the back country and helping us find what we had. Their visits were fruitful and their English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is an exemplary work. But it is regrettable that a Scottish folklorist, familiar and in tune with Lowland traditions, was not close at hand to make a few claims of his own. Somebody needed to suggest that Scotland had as good a claim to half the British ballads Sharp collected in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina as England has. Somebody might have suggested that English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is a misleading title - that British Folk Songs would have been more accurate. For, after all, the most authoritative editor in the business, Francis J. Child, had clearly recognised two national traditions in his monumental English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which is the keystone work on which all subsequent studies have been based.

One man, more than anyone, loved this untamed land. By foot and on horseback, he blazed trails for others to follow. A great hunter and woodsman, he led the first pioneers across the Appalachian Mountains into a paradise of fields and forests. Today we know it as the state of Kentucky. No wonder he became famous throughout the world as a frontier hero. No wonder his nickname was the Great Pathfinder. Who was he? Daniel Boone.

NH is definitely the toughest hiking state on the AT especially with wet, rainy conditions.

There are thirteen states with Appalachian counties—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York—and West Virginia is the only state entirely within Appalachia.

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.

Hiking is putting one foot in front of the other. One foot. In front of the other. Repeat forever. One step becomes ten and then a thousand. Eventually, these steps turn into miles. Miles turn into days. Days turn into states. States turn into months. Months become life hiking the Appalachian Trail.

To the settlers’ dismay, soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, King George III issued a proclamation that prohibited British settlement west of the Allegheny-Appalachian mountain barrier, ordering those who had settled there to relinquish their claims and move back east of the line. However, British authorities did not commit enough troops to the frontier to enforce the edict effectively. As a result, thousands more settlers poured over the mountains and squatted on Indigenous lands.