Since April, I have four trips on the interstates through the Blue Ridge, Appalachian and Smokey Mountains. My companions and vehicles have varied on these drives, but the road and scenery remains much the same. Sounds boring doesn’t it? Surprisingly, it isn’t.
I have discovered that I am a mountain woman.
Don’t get me wrong, my dream is not to live in a rustic cabin miles away from my nearest neighbor, nor do I have any desire to dress in camo, roaming the hills to snap, trap or shoot woodland creatures for food. Simply said, I feel a deep connection to the vast waves of rolling greenery and peaks wrapped in clouds. To me, mountains are beautiful, challenging, and even holy.
The roots of my connection to vertical landscape may be in the rolling hills of Western New York where I was born and spent my early childhood, between the foothills of the Alleghenies and Lake Erie. The hills seemed pretty high to me, but I was little. Sometimes, as we approached the top of a hill in the car Dad, or “Daddy” as he was called then, would say, “we’re going to fall over the edge!” Playing along we’d all let out a feigned frightened “ah” as we “plummeted” over the rise. No matter how many times we did it, it was always fun.
Going for rides on Sundays after dinner were a popular summertime activity. Many times my Grandma and Grandpa Farner would join us as we retraced the rural roads passing the farms where they had lived while my Dad was growing up. We would take our station wagon, so there was enough room for all seven of us. (My youngest brother, Mark, hadn’t arrived yet.) Dad drove with Grandpa in the front seat and usually one of my brothers between them. Mom and Grandma sat in the back seat with my youngest sister Barb, while the rest of us were relegated to the “way-back’.
We kids did our best to stay quietly “under the radar”. My parents had a zero tolerance for naughty behavior or in your face crankiness. Whining was a sure-fire way to abruptly end the ride and dash any hopes we had for a small Tastee Freeze cone before we went home. The promise of soft-serve went a long way to keep five little kids under control. Grandma always came prepared to squelch the minor disturbances with a box of Chiclets in her purse, and sometimes bright pink Canada Mints.
The adult conversation was a travelogue of stories of the people who lived along those roads, past and present and memories of funny and sometimes sad stories. Names of people we didn’t know became familiar to us as did their stories I loved the stories best of all. Sometimes we passed the house where my father was born or the one-room school-house Grandma attended. There were lines of trees my dad planted and fields they worked season after season. Each time we drove, more details of days gone by were planted in me; grounding me in who I was and where I came from. Tones we kept just loud enough to be heard over the crunching gravel under the tires. Those days most of the back roads hadn’t been paved yet. Combine that with a lack of air conditioning and open windows the result was often Dad having to pull over to go to the back of the car to crank up the back window to protect us from the rolls of dust that would choke us in the way-back.
How different my rides now are from those of my childhood. I am driving with a purpose, a destination and a time limit in mind. Protected in my air-conditioned bubble I’ve driven without a cough. No longer am I siting in the furthest reaches of the vehicle, but instead, I sit in the front with plenty of space and sometimes even drive myself! I don’t know any of the stories of the people who live in the homes I see from the road, but I try to imagine that they are happy in such beautiful surroundings.
I know I am.
