Thoughts of Nature and Place

By Renea Winchester

Outside, a Cardinal declares the day shall be "pretty, pretty, pretty," a refreshing change from the dreary "wet, wet...you" accurate prediction of precipitation we've endured this winter. A Carolina Wren joins his song, drowning the forecast with tweets and clicks. She sings her gravely song with head held high, as she awakens daffodils from their slumber, giving me hope that finally, I've made it through another winter.

Nature plays an important role in not only establishing a sense of place, as was the case with my book, In The Garden With Billy: Lessons About Life, Love & Tomatoes, but providing the physical escape needed in order to create. I refer to myself as a "sensory-author," one who must feel (sometimes literally) that which she is writing about. Concerned that my memory would fail, I wrote portions of In The Garden With Billy on fast-food napkins. Scribbling frantically beneath the corn stalks while praying for a cooling breeze, I wrote clipped phrased I'd use later. Once I returned home, I'd unfold the napkin, brush aside the dirt wedged in the creases, and relive the day while working on my laptop.

Recently, I was awarded the Denny Plattner Award for my non-fiction essay. Remembering is a come-with-me story about the tradition of "Decoration Day;" a practice my family has maintained for over seventy-five years.

From Remembering:

The road narrows and turns to grass. I inhale deeply and fight back tears. I am home. Several generations of family members have loaded into the back of pickup trucks then parted a sea of tourists to visit a place we hold sacred. While others flock to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to play, we travel to a place few will ever see. We travel in part out of duty and respect. We travel to honor our heritage, and remember.

In this excerpt, I carry you into a secret place my people once called home. Without personally experiencing the moment, my feeble imagination can not envision anything as accurate as what I share. While I do not categorize myself as a "Nature Writer," everything I've written that has won awards has reflected my love of nature. Leaving me to ponder for a moment, Where am I finding this soul-feeding nutrient in the heart of Atlanta?

Often, I retreat into the woods behind my home. Carrying a blanket, water bottle, and a notebook (yes, I still put pen-to-paper), I escape to the trickle of a creek which is actually the overflow from a neighboring pond. Sitting beneath an enormous river birch, I imagine the whispering water is actually the deafening rush of the Oconaluftee River, or Indian Creek Falls. I must write quickly, because my mind is rarely fooled by this trickery.

Inevitably, this attempt at solace triggers my neighbor's need to cut his lawn. The whining Briggs and Stratton grates against my process like nails on chalk. It is, without fail, a promise that the moment I begin to write, he decides it's time to cut the grass (on a Sunday, no less). Shaking away this impediment, I try another route. Lacing my shoes tight, I grab the hand-held recorder, determined to walk myself into a creative moment. For me, walking has proven to be a highly effective means to generate ideas. Unfortunately, soon after I begin rambling off a list of ideas, the ear-piercing cry of an ambulance shatters the moment.

Desperate, I must escape into a place where I can not be found. Vanishing into a pathless place where busyness is not invited, I listen for the voices of those who have walked the land before me. I sit still, aware of everything and nothing. I must taste the sweetness of the moss, hug the calloused fragility of bark, and try not to cry as my face presses into the creases of the hemlock tree, all while knowing this species may vanish during my time on earth.

Overhead hemlocks are loosing their battle with the Wooly Adelgid. The once strong trees stand weak and anorexic. Only a few green branches remain. Surrounded in death, they bravely fight to survive the microscopic beetle’s attack. I notice the smell of the forest has changed. Something is missing. The honey fragrance of mountain laurel and honeysuckle travel on the breeze, but the heady smell of hemlock is less pungent. Tears fall as I wonder if the species will survive another season, or will their skeletons be all that welcomes me home next year.

Lacking the imagination of those much greater than I, my best offering to readers is an invitation into my world; one filled with yarn-spinning true-life characters, pristine places few will ever see, and the belief that everyone, every single one of us has a story that matters to someone. While I create this on paper, it is impossible for me to share it with you unless I first experience it through the eyes of Mother Nature.

Renea Winchester is an award-winning author whose book In The Garden With Billy: Lessons About Life, Love & Tomatoes was recently nominated for the SIBA award. She lives in Atlanta, but escapes to the Smoky Mountains at every possible opportunity.

Richland Balsam Epitaph

by Pamela Duncan

High in the Blue Ridge stands a graveyard, one of many on these mountaintops, eerie aeries where the dead stand erect, monuments to themselves. Richland Balsam does not sound dead or dying. Words rich and land and balsam ring full and heavy with sap and life: verdant, aromatic, green words. But only ghosts abide here now, ghosts of greenness, straight and sharp as needles, rising from the mountain, accusing the sky. Hollow white bones deny the sun with silvery glint. Falling corpses lean together, cry and tremble above decaying brothers. Richland Balsam mourns.

Before death, light lived here, thousands of feet above sea level, a sacred cathedral, hushed and quiet and cool. Sunlight filtered gently through evergreen mesh and tended earth swollen soft and full with blessings of rain. Mosses, lichens, ferns, shrubs – so many living things thrived beneath the sheltering canopy of Red Spruce and Fraser Fir. Inviolable and pristine, it seemed. Perhaps then, as now, merely a dream: secluded haven for fragile things.

Then the killers came, invisible, insidious, launched by millions unaware of their power to ravage, in a war instigated by ignorance and waged by apathy. Now acid rains, and where nature reigns, one law exists: survival of the fittest. This holocaust appears irreversible.


A few years back, some friends and I followed the Blue Ridge Parkway from Boone to Cherokee, NC. Although I'm a native North Carolinian, it was my first real trip on the Parkway, and I wanted to see it all, every mountain, tree, leaf, and hawk. One friend, a botanist, raved about the incredible beauty of a particular trail on top of a mountain called Richland Balsam (short for Richland Mountain of the Balsams). At 6,410 feet, it's the highest peak in the Great Balsam Range separating Haywood and Jackson Counties.

"You won't believe how lovely it is," my friend told me. "It's so green and perfect and pure, shadowy and cool. It's like stepping into a fairyland, a magical place."



At milepost 431.4, however, the fairyland is gone. The 1.5 mile nature trail still loops around the top of the mountain, and it is still a beautiful place, but now it winds through weeds and the rotting remains of Red Spruce (Picea rubens Sargent) and Fraser Fir (Abies fraseri [Pursh] Poiret). Defenders of Wildlife lists this type of forest as the second most endangered ecosystem in the United States. My friend told me that, although there is no concrete proof, scientists believe acid rain is responsible. It weakens the trees' resistance to the aphids which literally suck the life from them.

"But there must be some way to reverse this, to save these trees, this habitat," I said.

"No, there's really nothing anyone can do. All of these trees are dying now, and that means the fragile plant, animal, and microbial life that can only exist in their shelter will die too."

Later, excited by a mini-nursery of spruce seedlings apparently flourishing beneath a huge tree, I asked, "But won't these grow and replace the dead trees?"

"That tree is dying and, without its protection, the seedlings will die too. This forest may never grow back, and even if it does, it probably won't be in our lifetime."

In the silence that followed, the wind pushed pale dead trunks against one another and, as they moaned, I felt a raging inside myself at the needless loss of this small forest, or any part of the environment that humankind has damaged or killed.


I cannot accept feeling helpless. The only way to cope with my anger and sorrow is to do something. Whether or not Richland Balsam is lost, I must do something. I'm not a scientist, a leader, a crusader, or a reformer. The steps I take are small, but important to my peace of mind. Everyone can recycle, conserve, and protect, and there are numerous resources available to tell you how to do these things.

The point is to DO them. Every day. For the rest of your life. I've been as guilty as anyone of forgetfulness, laziness, or blatant indifference, but Richland Balsam changed my attitude. I saw one real result of apathy, and realized my responsibility. It's like voting. You may think, "What good can one individual do?" But the combination of every individual effort amounts to an incredibly powerful force that may just keep what's left of this planet, our habitat, alive.

Writer Robert McKee says, “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” I believe that has always been the case and always will be. So, as a writer, there’s something else I can do. I can tell the stories of places like this in our Appalachian mountains, places that are dying or disappearing at a terrifying rate. I can tell the stories of the people who live there, too. I can put the idea into the world that they are part of our history and our future, and that they are worth protecting.


(Novelist Pamela Duncan is the author of Moon Women, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award Finalist, and Plant Life, which won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. She is the recipient of the 2007 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her third novel, The Big Beautiful, was published in March 2007. Visit her website at http://www.pameladuncan.com/.)