Spring Comes To Thumping Dick

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Title:     Spring Comes To Thumping Dick
Author: Walter Prichard Eaton [More Titles by Eaton]

When the ordinary American who "does things"--atrocious phrase, symbol of our unrecking materialism that does not consider the value of the things done--wants to give a place a name, he affixes his own, or that of his sister-in-law or the congressman from his district. Thus our noblest North American mountain is called McKinley, though it already bore a beautiful Indian name--Denali, "The Great One"; and thus in Glacier Park we find a Lake McDermott, a Lake McDonald, and a Mount Jackson, to contrast painfully with such beautiful titles as Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, Rising Wolf Mountain, and Morning Eagle Falls. The Indians expressed their poetry in their names. The pioneers and the colonial rural Americans expressed, if not poetry, at least a fine, spicy flavor of the local tradition; their names grew out of the place. In the corner of New England where I was born we had a Slab City, a Tearbreeches Hill, a Puddin' P'int--well-flavored names, all of them, descriptive and significant, even the last, which strangers mispronounced Pudding Point. Even in old New York there were once such names rich in historical association as Long Acre Square, now reduced to Times Square to please the vanity or cupidity of a newspaper. But, save the Indians, no body of people on this continent, not even the old-time cowboys and prospectors with their Bright Angel Trail, have ever rivaled the southern highlanders, the mountain folk of the Blue Ridge, the Great Smokies and the Cumberlands, in the bestowal of picturesque titles. It is hard, sometimes, to say whether the southern mountaineers are poets or humorists or realists; they may be one or the other, or all three at once. But they never fail with the inevitable appellation. Not Flaubert with his one right word, not the school "gang" with its nicknames, can equal them.

Thumping Dick Hollow, Milk-sick Hollow, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, Falling Water Cove, Maniac's Hell, Lost Creek Cove, Jump Off Point, Rainbow Hollow, Slaughterpen Hollow--they come back to me in picturesque array, and with them come back the memories of the gray cabins, the clear bright water on the race, the silent forests, the billows of laurel, the song of the brown thrashers, the shy children in a dusky doorway, the lean pigs not shy at all, the bloodroot underfoot, the soft, hazy sky overhead, the sense that here life was always as it is, and always will be, with no change but the changing seasons. I remember once more how I met the Spring at Thumping Dick, like a dryad dancing through the wood, caught her in the very act of climbing up from the cove below to find a road to take her north. So we loitered together for one whole, blissful day, and when I came back to the college campus I wore her violets in my hat.

But first I must tell you how Thumping Dick Hollow got its name. That is more important even than knowing where it is. Many, many years ago, so long ago that all traces of his cabin have disappeared, a man called Dick dwelt beside the little brown brook which flows through a slight hollow on its way to the cove below. Now, this Dick was averse to over-much effort, unless it were effort connected with the pursuit of bears or panther, and being of an ingenious turn of mind he invented a labor-saving device to pound his corn. (Unfortunately, he still had to grow it himself.) He took a hollow log and pivoted it across the brook, at a little fall, in such a way that the upper end would rest in the water while the lower end projected over the rocks below the falls. Then he fastened a board across the lower half of this lower opening, and underneath the log, also at the lower end, he fixed a pestle. He then placed his mortar on a stone directly beneath. The water, flowing into the hollow log, ran to the lower end and piled up against the board till there was weight enough to tip the entire log down. Then enough ran out to tilt the log back again. Of course, each time the lower end of the log descended the pestle struck a blow in the mortar. All Dick had to do was now and then to empty out his pounded grain and put in a fresh supply. The log kept at its solemn seesaw night and day, its dull thumps resounding through the woods. So Thumping Dick Hollow it is to this day, and being close to Sewanee, Tennessee, instead of New York City, Thumping Dick Hollow it will remain, instead of becoming the Pratt Street section of Elmhurst Manor.

To be precise, it is four miles from Sewanee, and to be more precise, Sewanee is eight miles straight up hill from Cowan, and to be still more precise, Cowan is thirty-five or forty miles from Chattanooga, and now you begin to know where you are. Chattanooga, as you know, is in Tennessee, and sits beside the superb Moccasin Bend of the Tennessee River, under the shadow of Lookout Mountain, entirely surrounded by freight trains. It runs Schenectady, New York, a close race for the title of the noisiest city in the United States. But after you have taken a west-bound train in the quaint old station of the N. C. & St. L. railroad you pass rapidly into silence, down the gorge of the splendid river, and then into the broken, ragged hills. At Cowan a pig meets you on the platform, with the amiable curiosity of the small-town resident toward the arriving stranger. Here you change to the little branch line which runs north, up the side of the gorge, to the coal mines. Up and up the train climbs, puffing and straining, through a tall forest of hardwoods, and eventually reaches an almost level plateau. Once on this plateau, you lose all sense of mountain country and if you had not been aware of the steep climb to get here, you would not believe that you were on the southern nose of the Cumberland Range. Presently you reach a station--and that is Sewanee.

There are no academic squatters at Sewanee, in their $100,000 cottages, as there are at Princeton. It is too far removed from any cities, in the midst of its timbered mountain domain. There is a little hotel, much frequented in summer, to be sure, but for the most part the town is the university and its preparatory academy, and the university is the town. Here is the Gothic chapel, the ivy-clad scholastic buildings, the tree-shaded campus walks, the wandering groups of hatless boys, the encircling street lined with professors' houses--all the traditional flavor of a college, in a setting of forest. For it is one of the unique charms of Sewanee that a walk of a mile in any direction is a walk back into the ancient order, into the wilderness of the southern mountaineer, into the eighteenth century. A class that studies Shaw's plays in the morning may even catch the vocabulary of Shakespeare in the afternoon, repeated unconsciously by the lips of mountain children in the coves.

The word _cove_ is omnipresent here. Even the mountain folk are called cove-ites. It needs but a short walk to show you why. The lower Cumberlands, on the southern border of Tennessee, are unlike any other mountain region, with a charm all their own, inherent in their topography. Apparently an almost level stretch of timbered country along the little railroad, in reality this level is the plateau top of a great rock wall, a kind of huge mesa extending north and south. If you walk to the edge, you discover that it suddenly falls away with startling abruptness, sometimes in sheer descents of several hundred feet till the top of the ancient shale pile is reached (now covered deep with soil) and then dropping away more gradually with that lovely curve of debris. But nowhere is this Palisade-like wall continuous, and here is where the southern Cumberlands get their unique flavor. The descending water from the plateau top has eroded deep into the precipice every mile or even every half mile, each brook in the course of ages eating far back into the mountain mass, forming a V-shaped depression called a cove, and between two coves thus formed is a reverse [symbol: upside-down V], called a point, always, naturally, composed of the hardest rock, and not infrequently ending in a literal point so sharp that it is like a vast granite bowsprit thrust out into the green plains far below, terminating in a sheer precipice of several hundred feet. Roughly, then, you may visualize this section of the Cumberlands as a giant double-edged saw, a thousand feet thick, laid down across the State, each tooth a "point," each V between the teeth a "cove." Standing far out on one of these rock bowsprits, in the soft, hazy air of the southern mountains, you look over the far valley lands below, you look north and south at the other thrusting bowsprits growing bluer and more mysterious as they recede, you look to left and right down into the timbered green lushness of the coves, where invisible water tinkles.

But the simile of the saw is only a rough one, after all, because erosion is never mathematical, some coves have bitten back far deeper than others, side coves have developed, and if you follow down the mystery of some brown brook, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, let us say, for love of the name, you may very soon precipitate yourself into such a maze of coves, such a tangle of tough, tearing shrubbery (the term "laurel hell" is the mountaineer as realist), that you will regret, perhaps, the day you abandoned what in this region is euphemistically called a road. But you will hardly forget the view from some inland point, where you look, not out over the Tennessee plains, but over a branching canyon of coves, cut like the Grand Canyon out of an apparent plain, but, unlike that epic of naked magnificence, timbered with great, upstanding hardwoods from floor to rim, a soft, silent, hazy green hole where the forest floor has sunk a thousand feet, to rise again in the smoky distance and melt into the blue. There is no sign of human habitation, though in those coves, where the forest mould is rich to clear and cultivate and the springs are never dry, the cove-ites dwell, stock of the highlanders who are almost a race apart in the fastnesses of our southern Appalachians. They have no roads, only dim trails or footpaths. The protecting forest hides their little clearings. Only a hawk sails on silent wings over the leafy depths, and perhaps the faintest thread of smoke winds up and is lost in the haze of the air, a haze which seems faintly tinged with the all-pervading green.

But I wander as aimlessly as the enchanted visitor to Sewanee, and am by way of forgetting that it was Spring I set out to recapture with my pen--as if one could recapture the vanished Aprils! It _was_ April, to be sure, early April, very cold in the Berkshires, with great, dirty drifts of snow still lingering on the northern sides of walls and hedges, and ice on the pools of a morning. Down here on the Cumberland plateau the trees were still bare, too, and the mornings chill, though you could easily find a blade of grass "big enough to blow," and the brown thrashers sang in the dooryards. But there came a day when the sun rose misty and hot, and I wandered out through the woods, by a dim, sandy cart track, missing the solemn evergreen note of our northern forests but happy in the fragrance of life reviving under last year's leaves--that peculiar odor of the woods in Spring. The little brown brook at Thumping Dick was softly vocal, and it, too, smelled of leaves. After a time I reached a point which jutted out directly over the tops of the trees growing on the debris pile below. These trees were as tall as masts, and as straight, though they were hardwoods, and from my rocky perch I looked through their upper tracery of budding twigs, as through a veil of faint green and red, out on the brown and green plains of Tennessee shining in the sun, or left and right across the canyons of the coves to the stately procession of receding headlands. Then I cast about for a way down into one of the coves, and presently came upon a footpath.

It led down the headwall by sharp switchbacks till it reached the easier declivity below, passed a gushing spring where a tin dipper hung on a twig proclaiming unseen passers, and presently picked up the bed of a tumbling brook. It was when I reached this brook that I was aware of Spring coming up the slope. I could see ahead, and to either side, a considerable distance through the open woods, and, lo! the Judas trees were in flower, stray bursts of purplish pink lighting up the forest floor like bright-robed, wandering dryads. (The mountain folk call this shrub the red-bud.) I loitered on down the brook side, through moist leaf-mould and rocks, while overhead the trees began to cover me with their frail, new foliage, and under foot the forest floor began to burgeon with bloom. Great double bloodroots came first--I stepped suddenly into a garden of them and hastily stooping crushed some juice on my fingers. Next the umbrella tops of the May apple leaves began to push up. There was a great dogwood tree in full bloom beside the path. A hedge-like bank of azaleas were showing bud. Then came the violets, yellow violets, wood violets, but especially the birdfoot variety, with their pink-tinged blue petals ubiquitous amid the leaves. To me this violet is particularly dear, for it was the flower which in my childhood was culled to fill those bright-colored May baskets we hung upon our sweethearts' doors at the festival of Spring, gathering them in the village cemetery, where they grew in great beauty and profusion, quite as Omar would have expected. Now I gathered a handful again, for memory's sake, and stuck them in the band of my hat, before I resumed my journey down the cove.

The first intimation I had of coming habitation was a pig, a lean, black, razor-back pig which grunted at my intrusion beneath his oak tree and went racing off at a great pace, almost gracefully, I might say, for even a pig which wanders on a mountainside develops something of the agility of a wild creature. Not far beyond I came quite suddenly upon such a picture as you may see nowhere in the world but in our southern highlands, in the Spring. Aware of my coming, if I was not aware of their proximity, six tow-headed, bare-footed, single-garmented children, the eldest a girl not over ten, the youngest an infant just able to stand, were ranged in solemn row, like a flight of steps, upon the top of a large flat stone at the edge of a little clearing, in perfect silence watching me approach, the violets and bloodroot blossoms they had been gathering dangling in loose bunches from their hands. Behind them, just across the brook which ran, like a road, in front of the gate, stood a weathered-gray cabin, of rough boards, with a central doorway and windows without sashes. At one end was an outside chimney of field-stone, laid, it seemed, with clay. Surrounding this cabin was a rough picket fence, again of untrimmed boards, with a gate opening on the brook and stepping stones across to the path. In the little compound thus enclosed, and almost overtopping the cabin, were half a dozen peach and plum trees, veritable geyser jets of pink and white bloom. Behind, in a small clearing, was the stubble of last year's corn. Squalid and poor and mean enough a dwelling, a shiftless clearing, a dirty family of children--yes. But under its geyser jets of blossom that little gray cabin was the essence of the picturesque, with the forest wall rising behind it, and behind that the great headwall of the cove. It was weathered and old and primitive and lovely; and the six little shy ragamuffins on the stone, still staring at me with the eyes of timid animals, were--well, they were six little shy ragamuffins, and that is nice enough!

"Hello," said I, "I see you've got the baby out to gather wild flowers, too."

The eldest girl found speech, after an effort. "That ain't the baby," she said, with a show of scorn for my ignorance. "The baby's in the house with maw."

My respect for the capacity of that little cabin was still further increased by this revelation. I asked the eldest girl some questions about the way, finding her directions for spotting a trail in this forest maze remarkably lucid, and went again on my wanderings, my last backward glimpse of the mouse-gray cabin under its pink and white geysers of blossom still showing the six little tow-headed, barefooted youngsters standing like six little patiences on a pedestal, staring after me. But when I had disappeared down the trail I heard from far off, mingling with the murmur of the brook, the shrill sound of childish glee, as they resumed their search for wild flowers. Then it was that Spring smiled, and gave my fingers a little squeeze!

So I wandered on, with Spring for company, all that blissful day, through forests of oak and chestnut where the Judas trees danced, past dogwood thickets and over beds of violets, into unexpected little clearings where always the same gray cabin of rough, weathered boards sat under its geyser jets of pink and white, while shy, pretty children peeped like startled rabbits from the dim doorway and the pig ran off through the woods (when he did not follow me), and finally up the steep slope at the head of a cove again, into the region of the earliest bloodroots, and so to the final shin up the last precipitous wall to the plateau above. As I reached the summit and looked back, I saw the cove was green, and the veil I had gazed through that morning was hazier now; Spring had climbed with me back up the slope and even here on the two-thousand foot rim the trees were bursting into leaf. There was a carpet of brilliant red stonecrop on the rock at my feet. As I came once more to the brook in Thumping Dick I saw a bloodroot on the bank, with the dead leaf it had that day pushed up still clinging to it. Yes--and here was a tiny bed of violets, in a warm, sheltered glade, opening to the sun. I gathered them all, and redecorated my hat. Then I bathed my hot face in the brook and lay listening to a thrasher for a while, as the long shadows of afternoon crept like lean, ghostly fingers through the forest and between me and the sky I could see the lacework of the budding twigs, with here and there a tree that actually showed leaf. No one passed me on the trail. The thrasher and I had the woods all to ourselves, except, of course, for Spring, who sat beside me singing _mezza voce_, to herself, a song curiously like the ripple of a brook.

At last I rose and followed the dim trail back toward the college, entering the campus as the evening lights were coming on in the dormitory windows, and somewhere a group of boys were singing, not lustily but with the plaintive quality that sometimes steals into the voices of the young and happy at the twilight hour. I tossed my hat on a table, and saw my withered violets falling dejectedly over the band. But I did not care. Back below Thumping Dick was a cove full on the march, coming up the slope, the blue battalions of the Spring. Outside, in the smoky, warm dusk, a thrasher still sang. Spring had left me, for she had far to go, but all the way north I should see the signs where her feet had trod, and when at last I reached once more my northern mountain home, I should find her waiting with a smile, perhaps with just a trillium in her hand to offer me, before she sped on again toward Labrador. But, I thought, I could never know her quite so well again as I had this day; she would not loiter with me quite so familiarly, with her dear, friendly squeeze of my fingers as the childish voices drifted with the brook song down the cove. I had kept tryst with Spring at Thumping Dick, for once the favored of all her myriad lovers.

[The end]
Walter Prichard Eaton's essay: Spring Comes To Thumping Dick

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