I have joked that if my journalism got someone in the region angry enough to spit, a DNA swab could prove beyond any doubt that we were cousins.
That's the way it is when you count eight generations tying you to these mountains. It’s likely those descended from early settlers are related.
That blood-link was a driving force for me and my wife, who is descended from Tiptons involved in the fleeting State of Franklin, to return home so I could be managing editor of Smoky Mountain Living magazine.
Some have suggested that a guiding hand led us here, now.
The luck of our timing is better understood if you know we lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands for the previous 30 months.
We were on St. Thomas. I was enjoying life as a daily newspaper writer after decades of work as an editor and a stint as owner of our own weekly newspaper.
Island life was exhilarating, with sandy beaches beckoning in all directions—most accessible within 10 minutes. Our dogs became so attuned that they would run to the door whenever they saw us putting on swimsuits and filling the cooler with ice.
The dogs—Ditto and Brutus—are brothers born to a stray adopted when we lived in Celo, North Carolina, when we owned a gutsy weekly newspaper in Yancey County.
We had flown them to St. Thomas as we started the Caribbean chapter of our lives.
The dogs—we call them collectively ‘the boys’—loved the beaches and the smells and the freedom to chase iguanas in the overhanging trees at the shoreline. However, they did not like the water. They would walk with me along the tide line, but whenever the water pushed higher on the sand they would retreat, uncertain about just what this big, loud, seemingly never-ending puddle was all about.
Over time, Brutus came to enjoy the coolness of the ocean on a blistering hot day, and one of my favorite sights was to watch him celebrate our arrival at the beach. He would run around looking for iguanas for a few minutes, then calmly and purposefully stride into the surf and sit on his haunches. He would stay for a minute or two, cooling off, then slowly walk back onto the beach to sniff and snort and dig with his brother.
My journey to the Caribbean was not unique for my mountain family.
My great-aunt, Della Sophronia Penland, attended the Asheville Normal and Collegiate Institute and then traveled to the Caribbean early in the 20th Century to visit her brother, my mother’s Uncle Lon, who was in the Navy stationed in Puerto Rico.
Della met a Canadian engineer there and fell in love, and the two were married in San Juan and spent their lives raising their children on islands throughout the Caribbean.
Strong ties to the mountains meant Della and her children often visited over the decades, flying to Miami to catch a train that, in a round-about way, dropped them at Asheville.
I often thought about Aunt Della as I sat on my patio in St. Thomas. Her beloved mountains were quite undeveloped in her time, and she had fled and helped her husband as they secured an upper middle-class status in the Caribbean.
I wonder if the austerity that came natural to mountain folk helped her navigate the underdeveloped world of Puerto Rico, Cuba and other places she lived.
Many early people from our region maintained strong, emotional ties to their holler or creek or community, often while leaving to explore opportunities elsewhere. They saw their beloved mountains as a bosom of emotional comfort, even as they traveled widely for jobs or opportunity.
Sometimes they never came back. Aunt Della often visited, but even after Americans were banished from Cuba she settled in Coral Gables, Florida, instead of returning here. Perhaps she had grown accustomed to being warm in the winter and houses without a fireplace, wood stove, or furnace.
But when she died she was returned to be buried on a mountainside just outside of Weaverville, North Carolina.
I am happy to say my wife and I returned to our beloved mountains just 15 days before Hurricane Irma—and then Hurricane Maria—struck at our many friends and former co-workers, leaving one friend dead, others homeless and all suffering.
We remain shell-shocked by the devastation there, and I am forever thankful to have landed here writing this for you.
Thomas Wolfe also left these mountains to see what was beyond the ridge peaks, and he wrote one of the most oft-quoted phrases about the inability to regain what once was.
But Tom, you can go home again, for we have, and it is sublime.
—Jonathan Austin, managing editor