Penguin Persons & Peppermints

by Walter Prichard Eaton

Spring Comes to Thumping Dick

When the ordinary American who “does things”—atrocious phrase, symbol of our unrecking materialism that does not consider the value of the things done—wants to give a place a name, he affixes his own, or that of his sister-in-law or the congressman from his district. Thus our noblest North American mountain is called McKinley, though it already bore a beautiful Indian name—Denali, “The Great One”; and thus in Glacier Park we find a Lake McDermott, a Lake McDonald, and a Mount Jackson, to contrast painfully with such beautiful titles as Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, Rising Wolf Mountain, and Morning Eagle Falls. The Indians expressed their poetry in their names. The pioneers and the colonial rural Americans expressed, if not poetry, at least a fine, spicy flavor of the local tradition; their names grew out of the place. In the corner of New England where I was born we had a Slab City, a Tearbreeches Hill, a Puddin' P'int—well-flavored names, all of them, descriptive and significant, even the last, which strangers mispronounced Pudding Point. Even in old New York there were once such names rich in historical association as Long Acre Square, now reduced to Times Square to please the vanity or cupidity of a newspaper. But, save the Indians, no body of people on this continent, not even the old-time cowboys and prospectors with their Bright Angel Trail, have ever rivaled the southern highlanders, the mountain folk of the Blue Ridge, the Great Smokies and the Cumberlands, in the bestowal of picturesque titles. It is hard, sometimes, to say whether the southern mountaineers are poets or humorists or realists; they may be one or the other, or all three at once. But they never fail with the inevitable appellation. Not Flaubert with his one right word, not the school “gang” with its nicknames, can equal them.

Thumping Dick Hollow, Milk-sick Hollow, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, Falling Water Cove, Maniac's Hell, Lost Creek Cove, Jump Off Point, Rainbow Hollow, Slaughterpen Hollow—they come back to me in picturesque array, and with them come back the memories of the gray cabins, the clear bright water on the race, the silent forests, the billows of laurel, the song of the brown thrashers, the shy children in a dusky doorway, the lean pigs not shy at all, the bloodroot underfoot, the soft, hazy sky overhead, the sense that here life was always as it is, and always will be, with no change but the changing seasons. I remember once more how I met the Spring at Thumping Dick, like a dryad dancing through the wood, caught her in the very act of climbing up from the cove below to find a road to take her north. So we loitered together for one whole, blissful day, and when I came back to the college campus I wore her violets in my hat.

But first I must tell you how Thumping Dick Hollow got its name. That is more important even than knowing where it is. Many, many years ago, so long ago that all traces of his cabin have disappeared, a man called Dick dwelt beside the little brown brook which flows through a slight hollow on its way to the cove below. Now, this Dick was averse to over-much effort, unless it were effort connected with the pursuit of bears or panther, and being of an ingenious turn of mind he invented a labor-saving device to pound his corn. (Unfortunately, he still had to grow it himself.) He took a hollow log and pivoted it across the brook, at a little fall, in such a way that the upper end would rest in the water while the lower end projected over the rocks below the falls. Then he fastened a board across the lower half of this lower opening, and underneath the log, also at the lower end, he fixed a pestle. He then placed his mortar on a stone directly beneath. The water, flowing into the hollow log, ran to the lower end and piled up against the board till there was weight enough to tip the entire log down. Then enough ran out to tilt the log back again. Of course, each time the lower end of the log descended the pestle struck a blow in the mortar. All Dick had to do was now and then to empty out his pounded grain and put in a fresh supply. The log kept at its solemn seesaw night and day, its dull thumps resounding through the woods. So Thumping Dick Hollow it is to this day, and being close to Sewanee, Tennessee, instead of New York City, Thumping Dick Hollow it will remain, instead of becoming the Pratt Street section of Elmhurst Manor.

To be precise, it is four miles from Sewanee, and to be more precise, Sewanee is eight miles straight up hill from Cowan, and to be still more precise, Cowan is thirty-five or forty miles from Chattanooga, and now you begin to know where you are. Chattanooga, as you know, is in Tennessee, and sits beside the superb Moccasin Bend of the Tennessee River, under the shadow of Lookout Mountain, entirely surrounded by freight trains. It runs Schenectady, New York, a close race for the title of the noisiest city in the United States. But after you have taken a west-bound train in the quaint old station of the N. C. & St. L. railroad you pass rapidly into silence, down the gorge of the splendid river, and then into the broken, ragged hills. At Cowan a pig meets you on the platform, with the amiable curiosity of the small-town resident toward the arriving stranger. Here you change to the little branch line which runs north, up the side of the gorge, to the coal mines. Up and up the train climbs, puffing and straining, through a tall forest of hardwoods, and eventually reaches an almost level plateau. Once on this plateau, you lose all sense of mountain country and if you had not been aware of the steep climb to get here, you would not believe that you were on the southern nose of the Cumberland Range. Presently you reach a station—and that is Sewanee.

There are no academic squatters at Sewanee, in their $100,000 cottages, as there are at Princeton. It is too far removed from any cities, in the midst of its timbered mountain domain. There is a little hotel, much frequented in summer, to be sure, but for the most part the town is the university and its preparatory academy, and the university is the town. Here is the Gothic chapel, the ivy-clad scholastic buildings, the tree-shaded campus walks, the wandering groups of hatless boys, the encircling street lined with professors' houses—all the traditional flavor of a college, in a setting of forest. For it is one of the unique charms of Sewanee that a walk of a mile in any direction is a walk back into the ancient order, into the wilderness of the southern mountaineer, into the eighteenth century. A class that studies Shaw's plays in the morning may even catch the vocabulary of Shakespeare in the afternoon, repeated unconsciously by the lips of mountain children in the coves.

The word cove is omnipresent here. Even the mountain folk are called cove-ites. It needs but a short walk to show you why. The lower Cumberlands, on the southern border of Tennessee, are unlike any other mountain region, with a charm all their own, inherent in their topography. Apparently an almost level stretch of timbered country along the little railroad, in reality this level is the plateau top of a great rock wall, a kind of huge mesa extending north and south. If you walk to the edge, you discover that it suddenly falls away with startling abruptness, sometimes in sheer descents of several hundred feet till the top of the ancient shale pile is reached (now covered deep with soil) and then dropping away more gradually with that lovely curve of débris. But nowhere is this Palisade-like wall continuous, and here is where the southern Cumberlands get their unique flavor. The descending water from the plateau top has eroded deep into the precipice every mile or even every half mile, each brook in the course of ages eating far back into the mountain mass, forming a V-shaped depression called a cove, and between two coves thus formed is a reverse Ʌ, called a point, always, naturally, composed of the hardest rock, and not infrequently ending in a literal point so sharp that it is like a vast granite bowsprit thrust out into the green plains far below, terminating in a sheer precipice of several hundred feet. Roughly, then, you may visualize this section of the Cumberlands as a giant double-edged saw, a thousand feet thick, laid down across the State, each tooth a “point,” each V between the teeth a “cove.” Standing far out on one of these rock bowsprits, in the soft, hazy air of the southern mountains, you look over the far valley lands below, you look north and south at the other thrusting bowsprits growing bluer and more mysterious as they recede, you look to left and right down into the timbered green lushness of the coves, where invisible water tinkles.

But the simile of the saw is only a rough one, after all, because erosion is never mathematical, some coves have bitten back far deeper than others, side coves have developed, and if you follow down the mystery of some brown brook, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, let us say, for love of the name, you may very soon precipitate yourself into such a maze of coves, such a tangle of tough, tearing shrubbery (the term “laurel hell” is the mountaineer as realist), that you will regret, perhaps, the day you abandoned what in this region is euphemistically called a road. But you will hardly forget the view from some inland point, where you look, not out over the Tennessee plains, but over a branching cañon of coves, cut like the Grand Cañon out of an apparent plain, but, unlike that epic of naked magnificence, timbered with great, upstanding hardwoods from floor to rim, a soft, silent, hazy green hole where the forest floor has sunk a thousand feet, to rise again in the smoky distance and melt into the blue. There is no sign of human habitation, though in those coves, where the forest mould is rich to clear and cultivate and the springs are never dry, the cove-ites dwell, stock of the highlanders who are almost a race apart in the fastnesses of our southern Appalachians. They have no roads, only dim trails or footpaths. The protecting forest hides their little clearings. Only a hawk sails on silent wings over the leafy depths, and perhaps the faintest thread of smoke winds up and is lost in the haze of the air, a haze which seems faintly tinged with the all-pervading green.

But I wander as aimlessly as the enchanted visitor to Sewanee, and am by way of forgetting that it was Spring I set out to recapture with my pen—as if one could recapture the vanished Aprils! It was April, to be sure, early April, very cold in the Berkshires, with great, dirty drifts of snow still lingering on the northern sides of walls and hedges, and ice on the pools of a morning. Down here on the Cumberland plateau the trees were still bare, too, and the mornings chill, though you could easily find a blade of grass “big enough to blow,” and the brown thrashers sang in the dooryards. But there came a day when the sun rose misty and hot, and I wandered out through the woods, by a dim, sandy cart track, missing the solemn evergreen note of our northern forests but happy in the fragrance of life reviving under last year's leaves—that peculiar odor of the woods in Spring. The little brown brook at Thumping Dick was softly vocal, and it, too, smelled of leaves. After a time I reached a point which jutted out directly over the tops of the trees growing on the débris pile below. These trees were as tall as masts, and as straight, though they were hardwoods, and from my rocky perch I looked through their upper tracery of budding twigs, as through a veil of faint green and red, out on the brown and green plains of Tennessee shining in the sun, or left and right across the canons of the coves to the stately procession of receding headlands. Then I cast about for a way down into one of the coves, and presently came upon a footpath.

It led down the headwall by sharp switchbacks till it reached the easier declivity below, passed a gushing spring where a tin dipper hung on a twig proclaiming unseen passers, and presently picked up the bed of a tumbling brook. It was when I reached this brook that I was aware of Spring coming up the slope. I could see ahead, and to either side, a considerable distance through the open woods, and, lo! the Judas trees were in flower, stray bursts of purplish pink lighting up the forest floor like bright-robed, wandering dryads. (The mountain folk call this shrub the red-bud.) I loitered on down the brook side, through moist leaf-mould and rocks, while overhead the trees began to cover me with their frail, new foliage, and under foot the forest floor began to burgeon with bloom. Great double bloodroots came first—I stepped suddenly into a garden of them and hastily stooping crushed some juice on my fingers. Next the umbrella tops of the May apple leaves began to push up. There was a great dogwood tree in full bloom beside the path. A hedge-like bank of azaleas were showing bud. Then came the violets, yellow violets, wood violets, but especially the birdfoot variety, with their pink-tinged blue petals ubiquitous amid the leaves. To me this violet is particularly dear, for it was the flower which in my childhood was culled to fill those bright-colored May baskets we hung upon our sweethearts' doors at the festival of Spring, gathering them in the village cemetery, where they grew in great beauty and profusion, quite as Omar would have expected. Now I gathered a handful again, for memory's sake, and stuck them in the band of my hat, before I resumed my journey down the cove.