Reconnecting with landscapes
Taking old hikes and reinvigorating past writing
Howdy, folks!
This week has been a bit of a doozey, but a blessed, happy, swirling one. Many happy memories were made on a little road trip over the last few days, and I’ll plug some pictures from it in future blogs.
But for this week, I’d like to share some of my writing pulled from 2019 and 2020. I composed a series of essays on Lost Cove in Sewanee, TN for a university writing capstone project.
Recent talks with fellow Sewanee grads and Sewaneesians re-sparked my interest in the essays—they were a labor of immense love and curiosity. I was able to swing through Sewanee for just a day or so (I’m sorry to all who I couldn’t see!) but took the time to revisit the cove. Now I’m thinking about doing some small-scale publishing to get the collection out to friends, family, and Sewanee folks who are interested in the natural history of the area.
I hope you enjoy it, and that you get the feel for some woods that I spent countless hours in back in the day.
The Sacred Beeches
It’s near winter’s end on the Cumberland Plateau and the sodden backdrop of fallen oak leaves is vibrant with decaying color. From our shoulder of mountain, parallels of trunks andhashings of twigs make the gulley below look greyish. But the red damp leaf seeps, setting an undertone of vermillion below and behind the ashen foreground. Splintering the carpet of red are bright fragments; wide-looping embroideries of blonde leaves, clinging to scaffoldings of silver bark.
Last October, the sun bronzed these beech leaves and some fell alongside the shedding oaks and hickories, papering the near untraceable carriage road that wraps around this bench of eroding limestone. But now, in early March, many stubborn remnants of the beeches’ autumnal gold have blanched and curled in on themselves, hanging in isolated snags.
Sandy Gilliam points to a snub of a near-unnoticeable rock jutting from the ground before us. I stabilize my camera, knowing my SD card is almost full. I get seconds of fidgety film, but at this point footage is just a guise to hear more stories and follow him deeper into secret corners of this cove.
He knows them, having walked these woods since he was ten years old. In junior high, he and his friends scrambled down the bluffs after school, hunting raccoons all night on the unfenced slopes. They’d make it back up in time for school the next day, their under-eyes as dark as their catch.
It’s difficult to imagine him as a child, or as anything other than what he is now: A tall, lean, pale, often taciturn man with a white handlebar moustache that he’s had since he was sixteen years old. Wide set eyes. Never hatless. Always wearing snake boots. He’s wary of snakes, though he finds their colors beautiful.
The deer stand in the white oak above us was built by Sandy’s friend--the man spent hours building it and even more hours sitting in it in silence. Watching his salt lick. Waiting for white-tailed deer to materialize. Wholly unaware that he was suspended above a burial place.
Gilliam tells the story slowly, his Tennessee accent pushing angled vowels through gentle consonants, earnest in every soft, tilted syllable.
“You know you’re in a graveyard, right?” he said, cocking his snowy eyebrow in the retelling. His hunter friend had no idea. “Some people just don’t see these things. Don’t know what to look for.”
Sandy found the cemetery by spotting the deer stand, and even then he barely saw more than a few rocks poking up from the leaves. “I ended up scratchin’ round a lil’ bit,” he says. He found sixteen graves in total, all with hand-cut limestone head markers and not a date or a name among them.
Most Scots-Irish burials before 1850 were marked only with field stones. Naturally well-shaped rocks were plucked from the ground and tilted on their side, sometimes positioned with an unrefined corner pointing upward. Today they seem diminutive, masked by the landscape of bigger limestone boulders and thick layers of leaves. In this cemetery, about half the graves are marked with blank fieldstones, the rest engraved with names now barely legible: Garner.
We are each on one knee. I click my camera off, and Sandy stops talking. The unnamed grave we stoop at is blanketed in a quilt of decaying reds, browns, pale yellows. We look up, listening.
...
Hiking into the cove mid-winter, these yellow adolescents are the season’s lustrous greeters. Too young to have reached the forest’s ceiling, the papery, stubborn beech leaves wave flippantly as you walk the trails, branches low enough for passing touches on your shoulders and outstretched arms.
Often, the trees grow in clusters, congregating around a canopy-bound senior. Though their three-sided seeds can be errantly farmed by forgetful rodents and spread far across the landscape, groupings of this sort have an aesthetic sameness that evokes a kinship closer than daughterhood--a genetic uniformity.
“Root sprouting,” is one means by which American beech, Fagus grandifolia, has survived millions of years of changing climate. When the physical world is unforgiving, when hard frosts zap growing buds and tender roots, the beeches can’t rely only on their offspring to spread. They self-renew, building on the accumulated strength of their roots.
Even in this cove, suckled by frequent drizzles and abounding topsoil, mature adults mast every two to eight years and often yield aborted or infertile seeds. Surviving offspring are rare.
Rarer still are the rebellious sproutings: The occasional shallow root that defies the downward lures of gravity and moisture, casting up and out and into the light of a new vegetative existence.
The lucky will bear leaves. The luckier will be neglected by the swarms of deer. The luckiest will grow beyond the reach of stretching necks and grinding teeth to wait in a sub-canopy purgatory, often for decades, biding time until a sunlit gap opens for their 30-foot race toward the sky.
Root growth is a paradox of the term “sharing,” because resources are sent across a network of seemingly unique trees, whose subterranean identity are the same individual. At first glance, it’s benevolent. It’s selfishness, really. That selfishness stretches from clone to clone across a landscape, but self-interest can also stretch across time. Fallen adults are capable of sprouting new trees from their decapitated necks, providing nursery for their new iteration of self. At a glance it seems benevolent. It’s only self preservation.
These techniques yield endurance, but also stagnancy, limited by an almost glacial rate of expansion and vulnerable genetics. Sameness begets sameness begets susceptibility to disease--one pest and the whole community of self could be decimated.
So mom-and-pop genetics reign supreme, strengthening populations and speeding their expansion across the continent. Beech’s winter leaves placidly wave from Nova Scotia to Louisiana, petering out farther west than Arkansas. A hold-out population in the mountains of northeastern Mexico suggest a once wider sprawl--truncated perhaps by impeding ice or growing desert in the Pleistocene epoch.
Reaching back from roughly 11,800 years ago to 2.5 million years in the past, waves of glaciation ebbed and flowed across North America. The glaciers themselves never reached this cove--they never even crossed into Kentucky--but if I had seen it then, this cove would’ve been wholly unfamiliar to me, whittled not by glaciers, but by glacial effects: a different climate, less moisture, a disparate regime of plants.
Though perhaps these beeches were near.
During the last “glacial maximum” nearly 30,000 years ago, the last crest in glacier growth before receding again, beeches had found refuge in lower Alabama. The cove where I stand with Sandy lies ten miles from the Alabama border, a puff of wind away for beech pollen. By 19,000 years ago, pollen records show beeches in north Georgia, only twenty miles distant. That journey is possible.
Without the summertime squall of competing photosynthesizers, the rattling of decrepit leaves in juvenile beeches dominates the soundscape, overlaying passing whistles of wind with higher, barer treetops--the original woodwinds. They shake against each other in almost a whisper, a long shhh growing louder before the breeze stops to answer their apparent request for silence.
Sandy and I don’t talk much on the walk back to his truck. Lost Cove has lost much of its history. Pioneer families persisted here for generations, though no one has lived in the cove for over half a century. Some are commemorated by names and maps--Prince Spring, Garner Cemetery, Kelley’s Point. Most are left for wanderers to guess at, stumbling on blank headstones or the fallen chimneys of what could have been a home, a church, a school. Time reduces structure to rubble, and we’re left wondering.
More distant and enduring history is still found in creek beds. Arrow points and broken nodules of chert, displaced fistfuls of sandstone with divets worn from cracking the prolific hickory, walnut, acorn, and beech nuts.
About four miles north of the cemetery stands a lone beech tree, about four feet wide, domineering a manicured lawn. It’s larger than most beeches in the cove that I’ve seen, but stands isolated, disjunct from its grove. Few plants will grow well around a beech, but it’s clear that some landscaper is trying. Lost Cove is now owned by The University of the South, and this beech stands before the University’s administrative offices. According to lore, a Cherokee man at the turn of the 20th century took a pilgrimage from Oklahoma to Tennessee, to revisit Lost Cove, his family’s home before the Trails of Tears forced them out. At the end of his journey, he took a beech sapling from the cove and carried it up the mountain, calling on the University vice chancellor at the time and planting it outside his office.
Rumors swap between hikers and professors that Lost Cove was once a locus of spiritual power for Native Americans. Local historians say that the Cherokee took pilgrimages here for the sake of a sacred beech grove. In the 1970s, Sandy remembers seeing tour busses park at Natural Bridge, a State Natural Area leading into the cove, filled with visitors from some reservation, though he didn’t ever know which one. “They’d spend hours down there,” he said, before they’d head off again.
People ask Sandy about the sacred beech grove. Has he seen it? Does he know it? No, he says. He’s never found a cluster of trees more spectacular than the rest, there are no suspiciously perfect rings of beeches standing like overgrown fairy circles in the wood.
But he’s found stone bluffs shaped like faces, and makeshift iron weapons buried in creekbeds. Hidden waterfalls that shower rainbows during winter sunsets and caves that puncture the land like holes in a sieve, offering shelter to an unknown depth. Then, there are all of the beeches. Tremoring in hushed conversation, flashing green and gold and pale in turn.
“I think this whole cove was just a sacred place to them,” he reasons. “It’s a sacred place to everybody that gets to know it.”
