Canoerebel
Posts: 21100
Joined: 12/14/2002
From: Northwestern Georgia, USA
Status: offline
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One other tangential foray. A few weeks ago, I did a long hike in the mountains with a good friend. He's an old timer, able to tell me who lived where, where the old roads where, crazy things that happened, and the like. When I returned home, I started toying with a little free-verse poem about what I learned and saw that day. It ended up this way:
MEETING WHEELER CRENSHAW
I’d never heard of Wheeler Crenshaw
until I met his branch, his gorge, his gap.
It happened one afternoon in May, early enough
in the season that Vasey’s trillium still bloomed;
late enough that air lolled beneath the tree canopy,
motionless, damp and stifling as in mid-summer.
I made acquaintance with Wheeler’s namesakes
where two prongs join to create lively, splashy Mountaintown Creek.
From the west, Heddy Creek tumbles down from Three Forks Mountain.
From the north, Crenshaw Branch bounds down from Buddy Cove Gap.
An old-timer told me that if we wandered up Heddy Creek a ways,
we’d find a surprising waterfall – one worth seeing, few have seen.
I’ve really no reason to call him an old-timer, though;
I’m scarcely younger, so I’ll call him the Throwback.
The Throwback told me, “Dick Heddy once farmed up there,
a little flat land fit for corn, onions, beans and some orchard trees.”
A toppled pile of chimney rock is all that remains of his life’s-work now.
Since no named trail followed Heddy Creek, we saved it for another day,
choosing instead to amble up the Pinhoti Trail beside Crenshaw Branch,
splashing through its rock-dappled water time after time after times.
We slowed for a steeper pitch, climbing sharply a third of a mile or so,
paralleling a generator of prodigious noise to our right and down,
partly hidden by white pine and mountain oak and others,
deep within a jagged earth-gash named Crenshaw Gorge.
“More than fifty years ago, when I was 12,” the Throwback reminisced,
“my father and I walked right up that long, sliding sluice of whitewater.
When we finished, Dad said, ‘We’ll never do it again; it’s too dangerous.’”
The Throwback’s father was right, I could see.
The volume of water cascading down that race,
swollen by plentiful spring rains, reminded me
of an arcing white torrent discharged by a tall dam’s turbine.
Any water-walker who fell here would hurtle downstream,
dashing against rocks or snagging beneath one of the logs
that strains and chokes this lovely, untamed, reckless flume.
Above Crenshaw Gorge, the Pinhoti climbed more gently,
easing its way north, passing two tamer but eye-catching cascades.
On our right, Saddle Ridge rose sharply through the forest,
perforated here and there by coves, each leading to a gap at its crest.
The ruins of Wheeler Crenshaw’s homestead lies up another cove,
the Throwback told me. “He grew corn, like Heddy, and hunted ginseng
growing wild in the rich west-facing cove soil. Beyond his place,
an old wagon road climbed all the way to Crenshaw Gap,
but the trail didn’t take us there, instead following the creek
a ways, before abruptly turning aside to climb to Buddy Cove Gap.
The Throwback and I had already walked ten miles by then,
so that final climb through dry-land trees on a dry-land spur
left us winded, or maybe it was just me left winded,
on the memorable day I made acquaintance with
Wheeler Crenshaw, his branch, his gorge, his gap.
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