She Walks These Hills, by Sharyn McCrumb

Sharyn McCrumb

 She Walks These Hills, by Sharyn McCrumb, captured my imagination through a second reading. I first read this book in preparation for McCrumb's appearance at my town's Literary Arts Festival several years ago. Hers was one of the better-attended author sessions we've ever had, although she talked mostly about her NASCAR book, St. Dale, and we wanted to hear about her Appalachian books. And, she chastised us for saying "App-a-LAY-shuh" instead of "App-a-LATCH-ya," and pretty much accused us of not being authentically part of the region. It's lucky we liked her books so much. We were forgiving and forebearing.

And, lord, she is a wonderful writer, a loom-worker, threading up a dozen strands of yarn and then warping and woofing them into an amazing carpet of intricacy and color and strength. She Walks These Hills takes place in the Appalachians and her characters take many routes through the region, crisscrossing and paralleling ancient buffalo trails, Indian trails, the Appalachian trail, old logging roads, state highways, all of them travelling in time as well as space. Inexorably, the disparate journeys wind and climb to a common end point--a particular cove where stories past and present overlap, intertwine, and, finally, resolve. The significance of this cove goes far beyond the decaying old trailer that is the sole remaining occupant.

I was intrigued by the McCrumb's retelling of old stories, reliving and exploration of old stories, being brought to bear on the current action and then that these stories were being created as well as being retold. One of the characters is an escaped convict who has been in prison for 30 years. He is walking his way across the mountains to that one particular mountain that he thinks of as home. He is suffering from Karsikoff's syndrome, a brain disease in which memories are lost almost as soon as they are formed. He does, however, retain boyhood awareness of the land and its plants and ways. He is a master storyteller as he reinvents his own story minute by minute and also he is a story--the story of old Harm, wrongly accused, escaped, on the run, on the way home. His story parallels a story from the 1700s of a Tennessee woman kidnapped by Indians and taken to Ohio. She, too, is wrongly imprisoned, escapes, and walks across the mountains to home.

The plot of this book is so richly detailed that I am not going to go further into a description of it. Read it for yourself. I will, however, discuss some key interactions in the book. The one that I most loved was the interaction of people with the landscape, the importance of geology and geological history and its influence on the people who came and went from Appalachia. The original inhabitants, native American people, were displaced by immigrants from mountainous places--especially the Scots. Today, the mountain whites are the ones dying out, being forced off the land, moving (often against their will) off ancestral lands.

Headstone of my great aunt and uncle at McCune Cemetery
in Limerick, Ohio, about 30 miles from my current home.

This blood-borne tie to the land is so hard to understand. Most of us think of home as where our house is, where our stuff is. We live a turtle life with heavier and heavier shells to move around. We don't take root. I have returned to the lands of my people, as it were--my grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents are all buried within about 30 miles of my home. But I still don't feel that I am one with this land, this place. I feel privileged to be here and cautious of my impact. Only a few times have I felt, truly, that I am as at home here in the Appalachian hills as the deer and turkeys and maples and morels. I have a lifetime of education and affectation that runs contrary to a tie to the land.

Hold on a minute. I'm going to go outside right now and look around. I'm going to see the trees and sky and the slope of my property as it tilts toward marsh and stream. I'm going to smell its smells for a few minutes.

OK, I'm back. It's beautiful out there. This morning I met a friend for breakfast at Lake Hope Lodge in Zaleski, Ohio. I left early, but barely made it to the lodge on time--I kept driving slower and slower because all of nature was alive and pushing at me and I knew how similar the landscape was to the places in McCrumb's book. I was driving slow enough to name the trees. I was grokking the hundred shades of green. But, I was a bit embarrassed as I finally pulled into the parking lot, only to find that my friend had just gotten there--she had done the same thing. The trees are amazing right now, but it's the wildflowers that pull at me--natives and non-natives--Queen Anne's lace, bull thistle, chickory, black-eyed susans, the first goldenrod. Like old friends, indomitable, strong and cheerful, drawing life from the very soil, the very earth of our place.