THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9606280252
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: 78 lines
Used to be that if someone said to me, ``Wayah Bald,'' I'd say, ``Because my hair fell out.'' Yuk, yuk.
Now I know better. Wayah Bald is a place, not a question.
It's a place in my favorite corner of North Carolina. I mean the western part where the Smoky Mountains rise majestically and the natives have a vocal twang that somehow soothes the heart while it sandpapers the ear.
I am a former New York flatlander who has learned to love the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina. My wife is a native of Lynchburg, built on seven steep hills. For her, mountains are a visible symbol of what is beautiful and eternal in nature.
And so our favorite destinations are those places where you head downhill in second gear lest your brakes fume like a cigar smokers' convention.
This time, we headed for Franklin, N.C. That's where good friends Niya and Bobby Jones live. Niya, whose name means ``life'' in an American Indian dialect, works with clay to create wonderful little figures drawn from nature and Cherokee legend. Her creatures, her people are open-mouthed. ``The earth has a song,'' she says. ``All of us, human and animal, should sing it.''
Bobby Jones is a carpenter with the old-time skills you had to have before prefab short cuts came along. We have a miniature cabin he built and roofed with 228 hand-cut little shingles.
The Joneses live on a country road with four dogs and two cats. Two of the dogs are collie pups rescued from a mountaintop cabin where they had been marooned in a blizzard. Bobby and Niya trudged and slipped and slid through a snow storm, brought the pups down and nursed them to bounding good health.
Then there's Cody, their 14-year-old Lab, a quiet canine senior citizen. And Luke, an 80-pound mixed breed who charges into a room like a Sherman tank with paws. He introduces himself to friends by licking their faces and it's like being kissed by a passionate sponge.
It was Niya who took us to Wayah Bald. In nature, a bald is a mountain top where nothing much grows but scrub pine. You get to the Bald by driving five miles up on a road laid out by a corkscrew maker. Once at the top, you're a mile high. Fifty miles of foothills and mountain ranges stretch out before you. You're above the clouds and, once, we even looked down on an eagle swooping below us.
``Wayah'' means ``wolf'' in Cherokee. The bald is in the Nantahala range, part of the Smokies. Another Cherokee word, Nantahala means ``place of the midday sun.'' That's because the forests are often so thick that only the rays of the midday sun penetrate the glades.
There is a Nantahala River, too. We drove along its banks, watching the sun-sparkling water dance and tumble and froth around the rocks in its path. There were no cars, no people to break the spell of serenity. Through the eons, the river has etched its course between towering cliffs that shut away the everyday world like an unwelcome stranger.
This is the sort of travel mood my wife, Miz Phyllis, and I wallow in. Not the touristy places where nature has been smothered in pricey gimmicks and parking lots. Nor is our travel mode a behind-the-wheel marathon to get there from here in record time. On the road, we laze and loaf if we feel like it. Certainly a stop every couple of hours and find a motel well before supper time. Vacations are to recharge your internal batteries, not to burn rubber.
And nothing recharges us like our pilgrimages to the mountains. When we see them first in a distant haze, our excitement level rises like a kid waiting for a birthday cake. This time, when we got past Asheville and the Smokies loomed, it was a special treat. Morning mists were rising in that magical way that makes the mountains seem to be on fire. It's an illusion that gave the Smokies their name.
The play of light and shadow across the peaks and valleys can be breathtaking. There is a gamut of green in every shade, here dense and dark, there bright and gleaming. Our drive is punctuated by oohs and aahs and, sometimes, simply an awed silence.
This isn't intended just as a recitation of ``What I Did On My Summer Vacation,'' like some elementary school show-and-tell. I hope you get the message that nature, in the mountains or at the shore or right at home, is an unending wonderment. Not the fake Disney version, prettified and price-tagged, but nature in its often spell-binding simplicity.
What's the old line about taking time to smell the roses? Do it, man. Do it, madam. If life were a dance, Mother Nature would surely be the belle of the ball. by CNB