Mamaw: Trail Guide and Muse
As I walked this morning along a trail in the wilderness behind my house, meandering meditatively while listening to the rolling clarity of a transparent creek and the simple auditions of birds and squirrels, I pondered the similar quests that my paternal grandmother made many years ago. Though I am blessed to still have the chance to walk the earth of my childhood, it is an experience that requires both connection and reconnection—it requires unplugging myself from the cares of the frayed world and immersing myself in both the present and the past. In essence, the commitment to journey down these old familiar paths, both literally and figuratively, has much to do with taking the time to remember where they are and what they have meant.
Although I was born in mountains of remote Appalachia, I admit that I am really what might be called a “refined hillbilly.” For one, I am a bibliophile, a woman perhaps much too bookish; what I love more than the trails themselves are the paths of words that have been written eons ago and left for me to roam. Perhaps this fondness of books—pages once made themselves from nature’s loveliest beings, the trees—has also made me rapt, and wrapped, in thought even in the silence of nature. However, when my walks along trails are at their most profound and most meaningful, it is simply when I stand speechless for a spell in utter awe at the smallest of living things in the forest, like a batik-printed terrapin, an ancient oak, or the dance of light in the sunset—when Something Greater overtakes me and seems to whisper an inner song.
From whom did I inherit such a thing? My connection to the earth and its carved paths had to be nurtured by my grandmother. The woods drew Mamaw Velvie to them time and time again; for her they were both a necessity and a sanctuary. Having spent the last few months preparing for the publication of my first poetry book, Trailing the Azimuth, I re-encountered a poem that I had written years ago about this stalwart mountain woman, one of the guides of my journey in life. This piece of writing, entitled “Whispers of Wings and Things,” appears in a refurbished form in the Tennessee Trails section of my soon-to-be-published collection. As I reread and polished this poem, a discovery that reappeared to me like tarnished gold brought to light after years of sitting in a locked cedar chest, I recalled how I had once turned to writing poetry immediately after Mamaw’s death. I also remembered how the most profound element of her being to me was her immense love of the woods.
Of Irish and German heritage, Mamaw in my memory is ever attached to the landscape of the wilderness. In my youth, she—standing at a mere 4 feet and 11 inches—was my fairy guide into that place of excellent green. Naming all the plants that she came upon as we walked, she was intent upon quizzing me about botany, and about life itself. When various ailments, from grueling cough to menstrual cramps, seized my body, she took from the earth what she needed to make me well. Later, when I studied Appalachian folklore in college and recorded her spine-chilling and magical tales in the colloquial, I perhaps began to romanticize the woods and associate them with the lyrical nature of her voice. However, neither the fairytales nor the idealism nor the tendency toward the bucolic drowned the flames of the reality of her larger-than-life character. Small but stout, and as tough as nails, she could wring a chicken’s neck with both hands, and I’ve seen her do it. In my poem “Mountain Woman in Four Seasons,” also in Trailing the Azimuth, I write that in her “I notice / a strength more forceful than iron.”
Amid this strength, my grandmother also bore the Irish sense of melancholy. However, the woods, I came to understand, were a force of healing to her. Mamaw’s history is, thus, not so much about seeking a landscape to preserve but a landscape to preserve her. The trails in the woods that led up the mountain to Gobbler’s Knob were the incarnate, tangible representation of a hope that resides deep within the soul, not a place apart but a place that one must make the effort and the trek to discover—and rediscover. It is the place of the spirit. Having lost her father when she was four to the Spanish Flu epidemic, having been raised by a struggling single mother, and having suffered serious illness as a child, she was in desperate need of healing even young in life. Then when she married my grandfather, she found love and sanctuary, surviving poverty and the hardships of the Great Depression, living off the land as the companion to a preacher-farmer, burying two children, and raising two others successfully and in great beauty. She conquered much, and I imagine now in retrospect that the woodland paths were connected to her love for her family and her trust in the Guiding Hand of God.
This is how I know. When my grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack in 1981, Mamaw was stricken by ponderous grief. She began to go to the woods more and more often, day after day, year after year, returning with plants and herbs on occasion but, more importantly, with increased renewal and strength. Over time, in the fifteen years she lived without my grandfather, she became more whole. She did not need to take a vacation to a remote national park; in fact, I’m pretty sure that she never visited one, never knew the concept of vacation. But her soul was lured into the woods by the promise of health and well-being, of spiritual connection and peace.
As I have walked the trails of Tennessee and those around the world, I have done so because natural medicine espouses the benefits of hiking on unpaved ground. Indeed, there is healing power in the experience of taking a forest bath, placing our feet in soil and our hands on trees, breathing in the richness of botanical life and the Good Lord’s creative power. I also walk to remember my roots, both physical and spiritual. Moreover, I visit and revisit trails because of the need to cherish the great green life before it is devastated by the grim impact of climate change. Like my grandmother, who walked in the woods because of an inner compass and the tines of divine melody, slowly, I have drawn closer, year by year, to the beautiful messages that nature sings. It sings them to us all. The essence of this understanding is what I hope to share with you in Trailing the Azimuth.
