Famous Appalachian Quotes

I don't give a damn about geography, but I'll note that Vance has transcended one of the most authentically Appalachian experiences of them all: watching someone with tired ideas about race and culture get famous by selling cheap stereotypes abou the region.

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.)

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.

Truth be told, I don’t think most thru-hikers hike the 3.5 miles of trail outside of Monson. Shaw’s, the famous hiker hostel in town, runs a morning shuttle right to the 100-Mile Wilderness trailhead on Route 15, and it’s easy to miss these miles unless you’re an AT purist and make a point to hike every step from Georgie to Maine.

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

What’s your view on carbon fiber stays?” I would shake my head with a rueful chuckle, in recognition of the famous variability of views on this perennially thorny issue, and say, “You know, Dave, I’ve never been able to make up my mind on that one—what do you think?

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.

Despite Old Leatherman’s mystique, Edward Payson Weston was probably America’s most famous pedestrian. In 1860, he bet his friend that Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t win the presidency. In 1861, he walked nearly five hundred miles, from Boston to Washington, DC, for Lincoln’s inauguration, arriving a few hours late but in time to attend the inaugural ball. He launched his pro career a few years later, walking thirteen hundred miles from Portland, Maine, to Chicago in twenty-six days. Two years later he walked five thousand miles for $25,000. Two years after that, the showman walked backward for two hundred miles. He competed in walking events against the best in Europe. Once, in his old age, he staged a New York to San Francisco one-hundred-day walk, but he arrived five days late. Peeved, he walked back to New York in seventy-six days. He told a reporter he wanted to become the “propagandist for pedestrianism,” to impart the benefits of walking to the world. A devout pedestrian, he preached walking over driving. Unfortunately, he was seriously injured in 1927 when a taxicab crashed into him in New York, confining him in a wheelchair for the remainder of his life.

Eastern North America was colonized by four distinct migration streams that originated in four different parts of the British Isles. When they touched down in eastern North America, they created four clearly bounded ethnolinguistic regions between about 1620 and 1750. The Yankee dialect was spoken in New England. The same region also had a distinctive form of domestic architecture—the salt-box clapboard house—as well as its own barn and church architecture, a distinctive town type (houses clustered around a common grazing green), a peculiar cuisine (often baked, like Boston baked beans), distinct fashions in clothing, a famous style of gravestones, and a fiercely legalistic approach to politics and power. The geographic boundaries of the New England folk-culture region, drawn by folklorists on the basis of these traits, and the Yankee dialect region, drawn by linguists, coincide almost exactly. The Yankee dialect was a variant of the dialect of East Anglia, the region from which most of the early Pilgrim migrants came; and New England folk culture was a simplified version of East Anglian folk culture. The other three regions also exhibited strongly correlated dialects and folk cultures, as defined by houses, barn types, fence types, the frequency of towns and their organization, food preferences, clothing styles, and religion. One was the mid-Atlantic region (Pennsylvania Quakers from the English Midlands), the third was the Virginia coast (Royalist Anglican tobacco planters from southern England, largely Somerset and Wessex), and the last was the interior Appalachians (borderlanders from the Scotch-Irish borders). Both dialect and folk culture are traceable in each case to a particular region in the British Isles from which the first effective European settlers came.