Some Stories do not have a clear beginning, middle and end

Some stories do not have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing...

Gilda Radner

Meadow at Buckhorn Inn

This is supposed to be a travel log and as such should have a well defined sequence of events. However time has taken on a twisting, helixical shape, like the swirls of mist brushing gently along the dense, green hills and valleys in front of me. Birds whose whippoorwill, chattering tweeter, tweeter, tweeter, high, clear sopranos are unfamiliar to me sing out from the trees.

Little Pigeon River

The draw of these Smoky Mountains is irresistible, and if you do not fall completely in love, you are at least drawn in to a sweet romance. The kind where you return year after year to meet your lover in the same hidden cabin, when summer leaves have a hint of the changing season. 

The cabin is off the highway, down a gravel road, that runs along a tumbling, clear river. The road is lined with a low, stone wall, painstakingly built by a homesteader a 100 years ago, and with rhododendrons, birch and maples whose canopies reach up to the sky, across the road, and hold hands with trees who drink from the river on the other side. Everything here drinks from the river, and the humid air. 

Cades Cove Cabin

To get to the cabin from the gravel road, you climb stairs built in the stone wall and walk past a graveyard. Most of the graves belong to babies, one or two days or one or two years old. A moss roof covers the cabin, and sweet sunlight dapples down through oak leaves. There the mountains wait for you.

Yesterday Roy and I floated down the Little Pigeon river in big, fat, yellowinner tubes. We had a BLAST! The water was clean, cool, just right for swimming. The river banks are crowded with dense foliage and stacked gray layered sandstone. We floated past summer cabins - family get-aways decorated with all manner of water toys and hammocks, clean, crisp villas of the well-to-do, and shacks with chicken wire decks and Jesus Saves, No Drinking, No Drugs signs, and the occasional camp-ground and RV park. We bounced, swirled and spun through small rapids. Wooo Hooo Fun!

The river was low, and so was my butt in the water, so I kept getting stuck on the rocks. I passed by a teenager breaking off a tree branch on shore to make himself a pushing stick. "thats a mighty fine lookin stick you have there" I called out. He replied "Thankya ma'm you may have this 'un an I'll make myself anuther" and tossed me the stick. Such is the way with all the people we have met here - incredibly gentle and kind.

Roy and I eating ice cream after our float trip

The stick made me a river navigator par excellence and I scooted through the little rapids with no more butt-hangy-uppy. I was scooting thru a little rapid and started to bounce past a little girl whose inner tube was stuck on a rock and her mama was getting away from her. mooomaaaaa, she cried, so I stuck out my stick and said "grab on" and we floated down river to where her Mom was waiting for her where the river slowed. Two kindnesses with one stick. The entire time the theme from Daniel Boone played in my head - Born on a Mountaintop in Tennessee...

Evening found us at the Buckhorn Inn, where I sit now, overlooking a meadow and mountains and misty, swirly clouds and time has another meaning, except Roy has the car packed and we must be off to other adventures.

Roy on the patio at the Buckhorn Inn