Sports: Outdoors

Appalachian nightfall: A blanket for  the soul

Bob Kornegay

Night falls hard in the Southern Appalachians. Up high, away from the towns, where hemlock and mountain laurel cling with tenacious foothold to sparse, spongy mountain soil, night can be as black as the bowels of a limestone cavern.

Tall trees with black, parasol-shaft trunks form an opened-umbrella canopy of leaves, needles, and branches that absorbs and digests the icy, weak light of far-away stars and the paltry, pitiful beams emanating from a hapless moon, no matter how full. Add clouds and a doused campfire and the Appalachian night becomes the beginning of beginning; the brief, yet interminable instant before God said, “Let there be light,” or before the “bang” that split the “everything” and inflated a bulging, burgeoning universe. Your choice; the forest and the mountains do not care. Their night-blackness is old, timeless, unfeeling; just one more silent throb in the rhythmic pulse of ancient North American geologica.

The Chattahoochee, Cherokee, and Nantahala National Forests, which crown the state of Georgia and shoe the feet of East Tennessee and Western North Carolina, exhibit scant emotion as they shroud their realm with ebony cloaks following each and every spring and summer sunset.

They leave emotions to the pitiful, hairless, two-legged organisms who dare intrude and walk or lie upon the deciduously carpeted floors after darkness falls. Those emotions adequately suffice, and each invasive Homo sapiens bares them all.

We fear, for example, the black bear’s snuffle and snort, for there is only audio and no visual image: a proverbial thing going “bump” in the night.

Did I hang my food high enough? Is he curious enough to enter this tent? Our courage, on the other hand, is bolstered by the bruin’s passing us by. We shall not be so afraid next time.

With this realization, comes pride.

Acceptance of night in the Southern highlands comes with the passage of time and with acclimation. The barely audible shriek of an owl-caught mouse mere feet from where we lie eventually becomes just one more note in the lilting mountain lullaby. The raccoon invisibly chasing crayfish in the nearby stream still commands attention, but now there is no what-is-that-sit-up-all-night-and-listen response.

Our Aanger at the skunk drawn to the cold leavings inside our coffee pot quickly dissipates. It is soon turned upon ourselves for neglectfully placing temptation in the polecat‚s path.

 We are happy, in time, to be where we are; we even lust to return to experience this soul-searing mountain darkness again. There is peace here, no sadness but the thought that there are some down slope, in well-lit people-places, who plot to conquer the night and light the dark mountaintops with neon and incandescence.

Let these stay in Atlanta, Nashville, Raleigh. The rest of us shall descend from time to time to view the lesser nighttime lights of Hiawassee, Etowah, Franklin. Those will do, thank you.

Or maybe it’s quite enough to move about randomly in the Appalachian dark, atop a domed, forested peak and happen upon a clearing, a mountain meadow heretofore unseen in either sunlight or shadow. We pause there, in the middle of the glade, and look skyward. Icy, weak starshine? Weak no more. Now clean, strong, breathtaking. Paltry moonbeams? Not so pitiful dancing about one’s feet in a mountain “pasture.”

“Like lookin‚ up through a great big chimbley,” a wise, toothless old mountain man once told me.

Yes indeed.

An Appalachian nightfall cannot fail to thread dead-center through the gamut of human emotions. And you have read them all here, in this hopelessly inadequate chronicle.

But, no, wait a second. Not all, I think. Not quite. Did I mention I lovenight in the Southern Appalachians?

And I’ll take it straight, please.

Just as it’s been poured for nigh on a billion years.

Back to today's Sports>>