Mandy Newham-Cobb illustration
To the mountains, with love
Nine out of 10 historians and romance novelists agree: Western North Carolina’s mountains have inspired feelings of love and random acts of passion for centuries. From the original Cherokee inhabitants of these parts through the 21st-century variety of seasonal settler known as the second-home owner (Homo sapien domesticus montanus sometimesia), the Blue Ridge and Smokies are replete with reports of romance and legends of lust.
At least three distinct geologic formations owe their colorful place-names to myths that, while unsubstantiated by evidence, would make for a helluva Charles Frazier novel, with Daniel Day Lewis starring in the major motion picture. Two of those structures—Paint Rock and Lover’s Leap—loom above the French Broad River as it rolls mightily toward Hot Springs, while Jump-Off Rock in Henderson County features long-range views of the southern Blue Ridge. All share similar tales of Cherokee maidens or warriors throwing themselves to their bloody demise on the rocks below in despair upon learning of the deaths of their truly beloved. Fact or folklore? Inquiring hearts and minds want to know.
Fast forward a couple hundred years, and you’ll find far less dramatic—and far less deadly—examples of how these mountains can spark the flames of passion. From the cozy confines of the bevy of bed-and-breakfasts dotting the landscape to the heart-shaped hot tubs beckoning the masses in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tenn., there’s a whole lotta shakin’ going on.
It doesn’t require a rustic cabin with a roaring fire or a mountaintop chalet with hot-and-cold running bubbles in the Jacuzzi and the champagne flutes to fan the embers. The mood can strike while on a leisurely stroll along a wooded trail or in the backseat at a Blue Ridge Parkway overlook. I know one couple whose el fresco au naturale interlude in the forest took place not on a bed of roses, but in a plot of poison ivy. Not exactly what Bob Seeger had in mind when singing about “the fire down below.”
For all the hot-blood activity motivated by these mountains, there’s more in the air than just old-fashioned eros. To me, the mountains represent a different kind of love, one that is more paternal or maternal in nature. The ridges that surround us are like the strong, comforting arms of a kindly parent, wrapped snuggly around the children to keep them safe from the dangers of the outside world.
As is often the case in our relationships with fellow human beings, our relationships with the mountains are complicated. Our affair with these peaks and valleys is marked by, well, peaks and valleys. It can take a little counseling to help navigate those rocky patches, when sometimes we tend to take for granted those we hold dear. And sometimes it takes a relationship time to gel, to blossom from a passing acquaintance, to a friendship, to something bordering on obsession.
Take yours truly. Growing up in Black Mountain, I was hardly the outdoorsy type, dropping out of scouting at early age because I didn’t like being called a Webelo. Instead of exploring the forested hills near Montreat or hiking up to Greybeard, I’d ride my bike through town or terrorize the neighbors by leaving flaming bags of poop on their porches or by ordering them pizzas in an era before caller ID rendered such pranks undoable. I had never set foot in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park or ventured onto the Blue Ridge Parkway until I left for a college education downstate.
It was not until my first trip home at fall break my freshman year that I discovered what had been right in front of me all along—the awesome beauty of the place where I lived. So taken was I with the newfound, yet there all along, splendor of the region that I later described the experience for a paper in a feature-writing class, getting an A for my depiction of the way autumn’s colors dappled the beard of Grandfather Mountain. Years later I realized it wasn’t the craggy face of Grandfather I was seeing on the trip up Interstate 40 from Chapel Hill, but Table Rock; however, the A still stood. After all, the class was feature-writing, not N.C. geography.
Now, as a long-time resident of WNC, I am raising two kids of my own who probably don’t see the beauty of the mountains because they can’t avert their attention away from the cell phone and PlayStation 3. And, on an evening’s drive between Sylva and Waynesville, with the denuded trees of winter revealing the lights of the McMansions on the hills, another theme of love comes to mind—love gone wrong. Because of the rampant development across WNC, with houses rising on slopes where once only bobcats and rattlesnakes dared to tread, we risk ruining the very thing that makes our region so special—our mountains. I worry we are loving this place to death, and that one day we’ll be singing that old, sad refrain: “You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.”