Morgan is author of 18 books of poetry and fiction, including “Gap Creek,” a New York Times bestseller and Oprah Book Club selection. He is currently Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University.
Until I was nine years old my family did not have a car or truck or tractor.We plowed the fields with our horse, Old Nell, and depended on relatives and neighbors to carry our pole beans to market in Hendersonville, N.C., and to let us ride to town with them for shopping. Sometimes our beans had to wait a day after being picked to reach the market, and then brought a lower price. Most worrisome was trying to get to the doctor in town when someone was sick.
In 1953 my dad bought an old Chevrolet truck for $300. It broke down often, and coughed and sputtered, but suddenly we had wheels to get to Hendersonville and even Asheville for Christmas shopping. We took trips up to Pisgah National Forest and the Blue Ridge Parkway. We could haul our produce to market, and visit the county fair. I saw my first Christmas parade.
It was only after we had our own truck that I noticed the increase of traffic on N.C. 25 in summer. That road, called “The Dixie Highway,” came up the mountains from South Carolina and continued north to Asheville and to Cumberland Gap, and on to Cincinnati and Toledo, Oh. It was our link to the greater world. The road was clogged with cars on weekends and holidays. It seemed everyone in America wanted to drive up to the cool mountains in summer. Long pink Cadillacs with fins followed Plymouth convertibles. Motorcycles and sports cars nudged along in the mirage of blue exhaust. In 1955 I saw my first Ford Thunderbird, powder blue and sleek and low as a toy rocket.
My friends and I watched the big trucks and pumped our arms to ask the drivers to pull the cords of their mighty horns. I was fascinated by the hiss of air-brakes. We looked for tags from distant places like California, Montana, Alaska.
In 1956 my parents bought a new Studebaker pickup. One day that October my dad and I drove it up to the parkway, and halfway up the mountain plunged into a fog thick as smoke.The new engine had not been broken in yet and it overheated with the steep climb.We stopped to let the radiator cool, as the fog whispered around the cab windows.
When we started again the fog closed in even thicker. We crawled along the winding road at five or 10 miles an hour. Just as we finally reached the mountaintop the mist suddenly tore apart and sun broke through, illuminating the giant rock face the Cherokees called The Devil’s Courthouse. The autumn trees were brilliant as opal.
In the 50 years since that afternoon, as more and more industry and people have moved into the mountains, the roads have been made wider and faster. Even so, they are jammed most days with overwhelming traffic. Air is heavy with the fumes of burned oil. The coves and hollows are filled with golf courses, gated communities, condos, malls, motels.
I am excited by the growth and wealth of the region, the greater opportunities, the diversity of the community. But at the same time I miss the sense of belonging when we could only reach the outside world by smaller highways.
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Law of Compensation, we tend to lose something for every gain achieved. My hope is that the southern Appalachian region will be able to plan more carefully its development in the future, will not let the thing that attracts so many to our mountains be destroyed.
