Up on Grandfather Mountain

The Piedmont of North Carolina has five seasons. Spring and autumn are beautiful, warm in the day and cool at night. There’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be in the spring and autumn than in the middle of North Carolina. Winter occurs for about two weeks in December or January, sending everyone into a panic. All government offices, bars, restaurants, Laundromats, barber shops, nail salons, book stores, boutiques, trading posts, general stores, and not infrequently supermarkets and gas stations close their doors at the first sign of snow accumulation. Summer occurs twice – once from April till early or mid June, then against around early September into October.

There’s another season between summers I call Hell Season. Hell Season started early this year, in May. Living in a trailer during Hell Season only makes it worse. When we come home after work, it’s so hot in that thing you can fry an egg on the toilet seat. Even the roaches are getting the hell outta dodge. We have three window-unit ACs, one works for sure, a prehistoric monster of a Whirlpool, barely held up by the metal holder-uppers attached to the outside of the trailer. The on/off switch is broken and out landlord, nice guy but an old forgetful fella, was supposed to order a part for it but never did, so we have to risk electrocution by pulling the plug out of and inserting it into the wall in order to turn it off and on. The chilly air feels great, but is a waste of power, since trailer walls are only insulated with 1/16 inch piece of cardboard. Five minutes after you cut off the power to the AC the trailer heats up again, and repeating this cycle every night racks up the kilowatt hours on the old power bill.

So the lady and I keep a couple of cheap oscillating fans running and drink plenty of beer each night to forget how hot we are. One night we couldn’t drink enough hand decided to pack up the truck and take a trip into the mountains.

We drove out on Saturday morning to Boone, a funky little college town wedged inside the Blue Ridge Mountains about a 2 ½ hour drive west of Chapel Hill. We had lunch at a tavern there, then ventured out to look for a campground.

We drove southwestward down the Blue Ridge Parkway peeking at the awesome views, but all of the campgrounds along the way were booked solid. We took a right off the parkway near Grandfather Mountain, and soon after noticed a sign on the side of the road; something about “Highland Games”. We didn’t consider what it meant and drove on.

The little blue Chevy pick-up ascended a slope, Joann and I unaware of the horror that awaited us atop, although an eerie vibe saturated the air. We reached the crest and in our field of visions, were hundreds, then thousands of red-haired, thick-limbed, pale monsters in plaid dresses – and a millisecond later what we were truly facing hit us like a bolt of lightning. SCOTTISH PEOPLE! EVERYWHERE!

“Just drive slowly, and don’t make eye contact,” I said to Joann, trying to keep calm. What this was I would later find out from a brochure, was the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, the “largest gathering of Scottish clans in the world,” happening in this time and space, and we happened upon it unknowingly by sheer, brutal fate. There they do all kinds of Scottish crap, like play bagpipes and eat haggis and engage in competitions like “Throw the Tree”. Had the weather in Chapel Hill beer a few degrees cooler, had we picked a different mountain out of thousands… hindsight and speculation were worthless.

“Turn off the music!” snapped Joann. I hit the power button and the Chieftains CD stopped spinning. Close call.

The truck crept slowly, the Scotsmen staring intently, scoping us out, waiting for our next move. The fear was heavy on us, so I tried some idle conversation to quell it.

“That’s, uh, nice shirt you have on, hun. Where’d you get it?”

She looked at me. Looked around at the Scottish. Looked back at me again, with question marks in her eyes. “It’s a white T-shirt. Probably Rose’s or something.”

“Oh,” I said, searching for another subject. “Um, that’s a nice…”

“SHHH!” she shushed.

“What?” I said, raising my voice from tension. “I was just going to comment on your SKIRT!”

Not a second later we had no less than twelve red-faced Roddy Pipers on the truck, pounding on it with burly freckled forearms, trying to get at us, thinking I’d made a derogatory remark about their traditional kilts, a dozen of which now flapped about us.

“What do we do now, idiot?!” screamed Joann.

I had to stay calm and think fast to prevent us from being ground into haggis. Surely many an Irishman had been in the same situation, roaming the highlands outside of Inverness on his horse cart, attacked by local rowdies. What would he have done?

I searched my limited American knowledge of every bit of Scottish culture I could find. This is what I came up with:

“Kill the English!” I hollered in an attempt to create a sense of camaraderie, like in Braveheart when the Irish guy joins forces with Mel Gibson’s clan. This backfired on me. Inserting the thought of an ancient foe was like throwing dynamite into their already exploding minds. They began to chant, “Kill the English! Kill the English!” And now we were the English.

Plan B kept them off for half a minute, then backfired like my first plan when they discovered I was lying when I hollered, “Look! It’s Sean Connery!”

Joann was about to join the Scotsmen and beat me to death for my stupidity when I remembered the only Scottish song I knew. I’d memorized it one December day as the new year was approaching, and knew not only the popular verses but the lesser known ones as well. I cracked the window and sang in a last ditch effort to save us.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?

(A few of the older Scots started to sing along.)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne!

On the chorus almost all the rest joined, with a few still pounding on our battered blue Chevy. Hearing the old song, the pounding grew weaker, until the last kilted pounder was pounding out a steady rhythm on our tailgate. The beer in the cooler in the bed of the truck was guzzled dry and we had thousands singing along.

Chorus.-For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye'll be your pint stowp!
And surely I'll be mine!
And we'll tak a cup o'kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou'd the gowans fine;
But we've wander'd mony a weary fit,
Sin' auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin' auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

And there's a hand, my trusty fere!
And gie's a hand o' thine!
And we'll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

Our trucked rolled slowly, cautiously away. Thank you Robert Burns.

We drove around Grandfather Mountain and found a campsite on the eastern side, away from the wildlife. But there were so many Highlanders that some spilled over from the west. We heard bagpipes in the distance as we sat round our campfire drinking Yuenglings replenished at a nearby gas station. Joann took a last gulp and poured a little backwash from the bottom of the bottle to the ground.

“Don’t scatter beer!” I whispered. “It attracts them!”

Luckily we had no more problems that night, even though the fear kept a presence in our stomachs, and I was careful not to say anything remotely offensive. I didn’t want anyone to throw a tree at us.

We walked up a slope to a nearby brook. We took our shoes and socks off and walked over the slippery moonlight rocks with the frigid mountain water flowing around our ankles. Even with the earlier excitement it was still a pleasant retreat from Hell Season in the Piedmont.

****

Sunday we woke early and watched the fog breathe off the mountains. We decided to do some hiking. We drove to a trail along the Blue Ridge Parkway called Tanawha, a Cherokee word for “fabulous eagle.”

The Tanawha would up the mountain. We got half a mile in, and rounded a bend, and stopped dead in our tracks when we spotted a ginormous black bear in the center of the trail. It must have weighed two tons, with machete-like claws. We trembled with fear.

The bear stood on it’s hind legs. It must have been 10 feet tall. We were frozen. “Rahhhhhhhh!!!” said the monster, showing its viscous fangs.

We paused. “Wait… did you say ‘rahhhh’?” I asked.

“Rahhhhh!” the bear replied.

“Rahhh? You’re just a guy in a bear costume.”

“Well, no, I’m actually a bear, but I don’t speak bear, I only speak English. See, I was captured at an early age and raised by television producers who were shooting a pilot for a spin-off of Grizzly Adams called Black Bear Brown – kinda like an East Coast version of the original. It was a dumb idea but in the meantime I was completely assimilated into American Human Culture. Then one day they tranquilized me and dumped me off the side of the Blue Ridge Parkway.”

“Oh, uh, sorry,” I said. “You’d think there’d be some money to be made from a bear that speaks English.”

“You’d think. But we’re talking sitcom writers here.”

“Must be tough for a bear that doesn’t speak bear.”

“You’re telling me. I’m lucky I’m so big, so I get left alone, but it gets lonely not knowing how to speak the language. When I first got out here I didn’t know my ass from my snout and didn’t know how to ask where the fuckin berries were. I was reduced to eating campsite trash and scaring the shit out of the yuppies.”

“So, what? Can we get by?”

“No. I hate humans. Way back in the day the Indians didn’t come near us. Maybe we had a couple scraps here and there but what are you gonna do with a arrow or some shit against my big ass? Then you honkies came in bringing guns and killed the shit outta my species. Now, the hippies are protecting us but if you gave me the choice between being tranqed, anally probed and pierced with a humiliating tag in my ear and being blasted with a cap , I’d choose the cap. And we have to deal with yuppies buying up all the property and we’re forced to move all over the damn place. Plus they’re building trails and campgrounds out the ass and we have to listen to shit like crying yuppie cubs and this weekend all of us are chillin’ on the east side of the mountain because you got Roddy Piper motherfuckers all up in here playing bagpipes. Every time I hear bagpipes I wanna puke. And during the peak months it gets smoggy as shit. You wonder why grizzlies are attacking you bastards all up and down the Rockies nowadays? It ain’t because humans taste good – it’s because there’s too many of you motherfuckers encroaching on our area code. ”

“So you gonna eat us?”

“Hell yeah, pass the hot sauce, bitch. I’m hungry.”

With that the bear swallowed us whole.

“This sucks,” said Joann as we rode around inside the bear’s stomach.

“Stinks in here,” I said. “You got a knife or something? Maybe I can cut us out.”

“No,” she said.

“Damn, how did Pinocchio get out of the whale?”

“I think he tickled it with a feather,” Joann said.

“You don’t have a feather, do you?”

“I can still hear you asshole,” said the bear. “Don’t try to pull anything smart. In about four hours you’ll be a pile of shit. In fact, I’m gonna lay down and take a nap to speed up digestion.”

The bear lay down and slept. He snored loudly. We had to yell to talk over it.

“That is some loud snoring,” I yelled.

“You’re worse than he is,” yelled Joann back.

“Well, at least we can talk while he’s sleeping. Do you remember how Jonah got out of the whale?” I asked

“Who?”

“You know – Jonah – the guy in the Old Testament who was swallowed by a whale.”

“How am I supposed to know? I wasn’t the one raised Catholic.”

We pondered and thunk. Thunk and pondered.

Then we heard two voices.

“Is the bear dead Angus?”

“Doon’tcha hear him snoo-ering, Owen?”

“I’ve ne’er seen a dead bear, Angus, I don’t know whether they snoo-er.”

“Hey!! Help us!!” we hollered.

“The bear, he’s talkin’ Angus. And it appears he’s a schizophrenic.”

“No! We’re inside the bear! The bear’s swallowed us!”

“He didn’t chooo ya?”

“Do you have a knife?” I asked

“We don’t.”

My mind raced for another plan. “Kill the English!” I yelled.

“What?” said the Scotsmen.

“Um, forget it,” I said.

I thought of something. Maybe it would work. It was my only hope. “Haggis! Do either of you have any haggis?!”

“Of course we doo, we’re Scottish,” said Angus.

“Feed it to the bear!”

“Who’d waste some gude haggis on a stinkin’ beast as this one?” asked Owen.

“Please! Just feed him the haggis!”

“If yoo insist.”

Owen opened the slumbering bear’s mouth, still sleeping, while Angus stuffed into it a wad of the disgusting Scottish grub. The haggis dropped on our heads and we scattered it all around the stomach lining.

“Now, bagpipes! Do you have bagpipes?” I asked.

“Of course we dooo, we’re Scottish,” answered Angus.

“Play them!”

“But it’ll wake the bear.”

“Please play them! He’s not hungry, he won’t hurt you. Just play!”

“If yoo insist,” said Angus, who proceeded to tear into some horrible tune. It might’ve been a nice tune, but on bagpipes they all sound horrible. The bear awoke.

“Son of a bitch!” groaned the bear, putting his paws up to his ears. “Aw.. man. Get outta here with that shit!”

“He’s getting mad, Angus, yoo’d better stop,” pleaded Owen.

“Don’t stop!” I insisted.

Angus jammed out. The bear groaned and staggered around, attempting weak swats at the piper, but missed, then finally leaned against a tree and vomited Joann and I out onto some rocks. We were covered in regurgitated haggis. Not pretty, but the alternative would have been much worse.

“Unnggh,” groaned the bear. “Anybody got any Pepto?”

We didn’t want to stick around and wait for the bear to recover, so we thanked the Scotsmen and went on along the Tanawha.

The trail is moderate to strenuous, as the brochures say. We leapt over downed trees, squished through thick black muck, climbed and descended steep slopes over rocky paths and through thick, prickly shrubs, climbed over and under boulders the size of three trailers and crossed bridges built by mountain and bridges built by man. The climax to the Tanawha is the view from a long boardwalk leading up to a high rock where you can look out at endless mountains, green then blue then fading into the misty distance.

We reached the boardwalk and along the way saw two eagles perched on the handrail.

“Good morning,” we said.

“Good morning,” they said back. Very friendly eagles.

“Did y’all see the sunrise?” one eagle asked.

“Missed it,” I said. “We were swallowed by a bear in the forest and couldn’t get up here time.”

“Yeah right. Like I believe y’all got swallowed by a bear. Uh huh. Sure.”

“Whatever, talking eagle,” I said.

“Good point,” said the eagle. “Weird shit does happen around here.” We all laughed.

We climbed up onto the Looking Rock and rested, and looked. The mountains were forever and ever, like the ocean. Green, then blue, then fading into the misty distance, far far away. We looked and looked into the big old mountains and felt quiet with them. We looked and looked till out lookers were sore, till the mountains looked back into us, and we were inside the great picture. Gravity dropped out from under me. I looked to my immediate left and saw a broad wing flapping slowly. I looked right and saw a great bird flying over the great hills.

“We’re eagles,” it said in Joann’s voice.

We soared along with the contour of the mountains like we were surfing colossal tree-covered waves. I’d dive bomb and catch myself just before I hit the treetops then float back up in a J, while Joann twirled round and darted through low white clouds.

After who knows how long we got hungry, and flew around looking for a town we could land in to get some lunch. We noticed a town to the North that had something very odd about it. There were pointy pink things, looking like tiny, narrow mountains, moving among the buildings. We weren’t sure what to make of this strange phenomenon but it piqued our curiosity enough to decide on this place as a suitable one to eat, or at least find out what in hell those pink things were.

We got closer and closer, and despite our powerful eagle vision we could not for the life of us tell what in hell those pink things were, only that the tops of them appeared slightly round. We each landed on our own pink, round, rubbery surface. Our perch bounced up and down, and we could see the rooftops of Main Street.

Then Joann’s pink perch rumbled.

“AHHH CHOOO!” It was the loudest sneeze ever. Joann was blown to the rooftop of the Blowing Rock Public Library. Those pink things were, in hell, gigantic noses attached to the townsfolk of Blowing Rock.

I flew over to Joann. The sneeze had blown her back into human form. Right after by claws hit the roof, I was back in human form as well.

“You were just sneezed off of a giant schnoz,” I told Joann.

“I know,” she said. “This weekend is getting weirder and weirder. Where are we?”

“We’re on the roof of the Blowing Rock Public Library. We should probably get down from here.”

We climbed down from there and walked around the town, looking for a decently priced restaurant. Rich folks resided in this town, as evidenced by the meticulously manicured landscaping, the stony architecture and the fresh-off-the-assembly-line SUVs. A lot of these folks walked around with their noses turned up. WAY up. So far up that they had to grow extra nose tissue to keep it from falling over. The plastic surgeons there must be rolling in it. Only people don’t want Hollywood noses. They want to have a bigger and higher nose than the Joneses. Higher than the highest building in Blowing Rock.

We found a beach-theme restaurant, in the middle of the mountains, but at that point our tolerance for weirdness was so high it didn’t phase us. We sat on a second-floor patio and quickly ordered beers, so we could numb ourselves from the strange sight of huge noses bouncing by.

The subject of how in heck we were going to get out of this goshforsaken heckhole came up. We were a good 10 miles from the truck, with too little time to hike back and drive home for work the next day. And we didn’t have any haggis or bagpipes to keep from being swallowed by bears.

“Can we turn into eagles again and fly back?” Joann asked.

“The brochure says you can only become eagles by looking into the mountains from Looking Rock on the Tanawha,” I said, reading the wrinkled flyer we picked up at the campground.

“Shit,” said Joann. “Next time we have to plan the weekend a little better.”

“Well, I’m tired anyway. After we eat we might as well walk around and check out the town. Maybe find a bar somewhere. We’ll figure out a way to get back in the meantime.”

We ate and paid the waitress, a young girl who did not have her nose in the air, and for that I tipped her as well as I could.

We walked down Main Street again, passing all kinds of upturned nosers, and we finally found a pub. It turned out to be an English pub, complete with busts of every royal bastard who ever held the throne. I focused on a portrait of Winston Churchill, the one good limey among them, and raised my $5 pint to him.

"Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me." --Winston Churchill

There was a man sitting at the end of the bar whose nose was so big it had to be folded in half to fit inside the pub. They had tissues on the ceilings to accommodate these rich folks. He was talking about heading up to Price Lake, only a short distance from our Chevy. He was our ticket back.

“Maybe we can hang onto the bottom of his fresh-off-the-assembly-line SUV, like Deniro did in Cape Fear,” I suggested.

“Poppycock,” said Joann uncharacteristically. “It won’t work in real life.” She seemed to think we were still in real life. “We’ll either be burned or choke on exhaust fumes or they’ll have to scrape us off the parkway. There’s only one sensible way to do it. We have to hide in his nostrils.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

So, we climbed atop the roof of the pub and waited for the man to finish his overpriced hamburger, complain to the poor waitress, not tip her, piss and leave. As he exited the pub we leapt onto his nose and shimmied down to the nostrils, crawled inside and clung to his nose hair for dear life, praying he doesn’t sneeze. He got into his fresh-off-the-assembly-line SUV and stuck his nose, with us inside, out the driver’s side window, and drove.

And that’s how we escaped Blowing Rock.

****

It was tough to hang on, especially around the curves. One curve had me swinging way out over a ridge but luckily I held on. That dude had some strong nose hair.

Finally the man with the turned-way-up nose parked his fresh-off-the-assembly-line SUV at the southeastern corner of Price Lake, got out and opened his hatch to get some fishing gear. We shimmied down his nose hairs and landed on the ground undetected.

The truck was parked at the northwestern corner of the lake, so we needed a boat to get across. It would take too long to hike around and we didn’t want to run into any more trouble on the trail.

We approached a shady lakeside campsite nearby and out of the tent climbed a big man with a bushy black beard, decked out in camo from head to foot. We exchanged hellos and told him our dilemma.

“I tell you what,” said the camo man. “I got a rented rowboat docked to that three over there. I’m tired of rowing today and the boathouse charges extra if you don’t get it back at a certain time, so y’all can row it acrosst if you want.”

“Gee thanks mister,” I said like Beaver Cleaver. “But how will you get back?”

“I’ll hike back around in the morning. My rowing muscles will be too sore anyhoo,” said the kind beardy.

We climbed into the boat. Joann untied the knot and I took hold of the oars and rowed. We didn’t get far out when black storm clouds began to gather.

“Better hurry up,” said Joann.

I sped up, putting my weight into it. More and more the blackness was eating the blue sky. Thunder. Oh whoa oh whoa oh oh oh oh. Thunder.

“Hurry!” said Joann impatiently.

I rowed with all my might. Thick, cold droplets of rain fell from the sky, followed by lightning. All I could do was row.

The storm intensified. The rain like a thousand bullets against my face and chest. The thunder was ear-piercing and the lightning flashed around us. I rowed faster and faster.

“Hurry up!” yelled Joann.

“I’m going as fast as I can!”

“Go faster!”

The oars were circling as fast as propellers. I was a machine. The ship began to skip over the water like a motorboat. Then we were airborne, hovering over the surface of the lake.

“Look! I’m making it fly!” I shouted triumphantly.

“That’s the storm, you idiot!” yelled Joann. “We’re being lifted into the storm!”

I stopped rowing. The boat still hovered, then twisted and ascended higher and higher into the storm, until we could make out the treetops beneath us through the sheets of rain.

“What did Dorothy do in this situation?” I asked.

“We gonna die!!!” Joann screamed.

“There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home,” I said, tapping my Addidas together.

“What the hell??!! Do something!!!” cried Joann.

Then I attempted to steer us through the storm with the oars. I stuck the left oar down to try to spin one way and the right down to spin the other as though I was still on the surface of the water, but it was of no use. The wind was too powerful. I pulled the oars into the boat and rested.

“What the hell are you doing?!!” Joann screamed, as thunder clapped and lightning flashed.

“Nothing,” I answered as we blew around in the boat.

“But we’re going to die!”

“We can’t get out of this one. The storm’s too powerful. There’s just nothing we can do. I could row all the live long day and we’ll still die one way or the other, so we might as well enjoy the rest of our lives,” I explained.

“Do you want a happy ending or a sad ending?” I asked Joann. “Comedy or tragedy? We’re our own Bill Shakespeare.”

Joann looked at me like I was insane. I was.

“How about this:” I tapped my Addidas together again, chanting, “There’s no place like now. There’s no place like now.”

She looked at me. “Do something!” she yelled again, distrusting my kick-ass wisdom.

“You’re going to give me a heart attack from stress. I only got five minutes to live – don’t cut it down to three,” I said.

She sat, soaked, in the flying boat.

“What? You want me to try to row again? Okay,” I said. I picked up the oars again and rowed as fast as I could, getting absolutely nowhere, looking like some bozo from an old silent moving picture comedy.

Joann laughed. Then she laughed louder. She laughed and laughed till her laugher was sore. I laughed too. I was more convincing as an idiot than as a wise man.

As our souls calmed so did the storm. The angry lightning disappeared and the furious thunder became silent. The menacing black clouds disintegrated and the hard rain softened to a drizzle. Our boat drifted back down toward the lake like a feather, and landed on the water with barely a splash.

I rowed us toward the boathouse. A young dude was at the dock. I positioned the boat alongside the dock and threw him the rope. He tied it and lent us a hang climbing out.

“You mean it ain’t a good idea to take a boat out during a storm?” he joked.

We were about to leave when the young dude said, “Hey! Ain’t y’all forgetting something?”

What do you mean?”

“Y’all owe $38 on this here boat,” he said.

“But we borrowed it from a guy across the lake that said it was paid for.”

“Big guy in camo with a black beard?”

“That’s him,” I said.

The young dude slapped his knee and belted out a high wheezy laugh. “That wasn’t no ‘guy’. That was the Bear in disguise.”

“You mean the English-speaking bear?”

“You met him before? He pulls this shit all the time. We’d bust him for it, but how you gonna arrest a bear?” He went on laughing.

“Why do you keep renting him boats?” Joann asked.

“Hey, he gives us the down payment for the first hour. We need all the help we can get to keep the lake nice and tidy. I tell you what. Since you folks seem nice, I’ll cut y’all a deal and call it an even $30.”

“Gee thanks mister,” I said, glumminsh, wondering if this dude and the Bear weren’t running some kind of lake mountain racket.

We hiked roadside and came finally to our beautiful little blue Chevy pick up, battered by the sons of Scotland and damp from rain.

****

Joann drove allaway home, and I know she was just as tired as me but I couldn’t keep from dozing off.

The air became hot and sticky again around Winston-Salem, and we drove on, bummed about the sizzling, sweaty hell we were coming back to after being up in those cool, majestic mountains.

When we approached Chapel Hill that same storm we flew through over Price Lake was on the eastern horizon. Only this time we welcomed the sight of it, because it’d cool us down and we could get a good night’s sleep in that balmy excuse for a house we call a trailer, and wake up tomorrow into Reality again, where folks aren’t attacked by Scottish mobs or swallowed by bears, where folks don’t transform into eagles and have noses taller than small-town buildings and row boats through stormy skies, like we did last weekend up in the mountains.

there’s no place like now, 7/21/04 12:05am