But Mr. Edwards comes from the Montana mountains, and he is nuts about flat land.
You know those little two-pronged stickers that come off onto your clothes by the hundreds when you walk through the weeds in the fall. In Indiana we always called them Spanish needles. Here in the mountains they call them “beggar’s lice.”
‘HEARTS-A-BUSTIN’ WITH LOVE’
Miss Laura Thornburgh lives in Gatlinburg and loves the Smokies so much she’s written a book about them. One evening she sent us over a beautiful bouquet of Hearts-a-Bustin’-with-Love.
I’ll bet that one stops you. It is a local shrub, or hedge, or flower, or tree. I don’t know what you call it. Anyway it looks like Christmas holly at first glance. But when you get up close, you see it has been a round pod, and then it has broken open and out have come four red berries, just like lights on a chandelier. It is lovely.
The real name of it is Wahoo, but around here it is always called “Hearts-a-Bustin’-with-Love.”
On the day that America registered for conscription, the Park Service set up its counter and registered all travelers and wayfarers and residents of the Park.
One Ranger had to hike five miles back into the mountain wilderness to register a boy who had been crippled since childhood with infantile paralysis. There is no road back there, only a foot trail.
I have a sneaking feeling that if this young man had never been registered at all, nobody would have gone to the penitentiary over it.
I can’t be as astonished by some of the local expressions as the discoverers would like you to be. The mountaineers say “shoe lastes” for “shoe last,” and they say “you’uns,” and “heerd,” and “poke” for sack, and “whistle pig” for groundhog, and “ketched” for caught, and so on.