Sharyn McCrumb, A Novelist Looks at the Land


	A Novelist Looks at the Land by Sharyn McCrumb August 21, 1997 “Land is who we are,” says Randall Stargill, a character in my Appalachian novel The Rosewood Casket. I have said that my books are like Appalachian quilts. I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South. It is from the family stories, the traditional music, and from my own careful research of the history, folklore, and geography of the region that I gather the squares for these literary quilts. I find that the more I write, the more fascinated I become with the idea of the land as an intrinsic element in the lives of the mountain people, and of the past as prologue for any contemporary narrative. This connection to the land is personal as well as thematic. My father’s family—the Arrowoods and the McCourrys—settled in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina in 1790, when the wilderness was still Indian country. They came from the north of England and from Scotland, and they seemed to want mountains, land, and as few neighbors as possible. The first of the McCourrys to settle in America was my great-great-great grandfather Malcolm McCourry, a Scot who was kidnaped as a child from the island of Islay in the Hebrides in 1750, and made to serve as a cabin boy on a sailing ship. He later became an attorney in Morristown, New Jersey; fought with the Chester Militia in the American Revolution; and finally settled in what is now Mitchell County, in rural western North Carolina in 1794. I have scores of cousins who have never left that mountain fastness: no amount of money, and no dazzle of city lights could ever tempt them to abandon the land. I feel some of that power of place as I write, looking out across the ridges of mountains stretching beyond the Roanoke River Valley. My office sits perched on the edge of the ridge so that I can see green meadows far below, and folds of multi-colored hills stretching away to the clouds in the distance. It could be any century at all in that vista, I tell myself. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I began the novel, The Rosewood Casket, with a quote from the English dramatist Pinero: “I believe the future is simply the past entered through another gate.” In order to make sense of the present, I look to incidents in the past, and I like to know where things came from, so that I can understand how they came to be what they are today. This sense of inquiry led me to read books on such diverse subjects as the legends of the Cherokee, mountain botany and ornithology, and the natural history of Appalachia while I was researching my novels. In The Rosewood Casket, I wanted to talk about the passing of the land from one group to another, as a preface to the modern story of farm families losing their land to the developers in today’s Appalachia. The voice of Daniel Boone is central to the novel’s message, a reminder that the land inherited by the farm families was once taken from the Cherokee and the Shawnee. The novel begins with Cherokee wise woman Nancy Ward, in the last springtime of her life, as she realizes that her people are about to lose the land that she tried so hard to preserve for them. As a reminder of that transience of ownership, in a passage in chapter one of The Rosewood Casket, I trace the passing of the land even farther back: to a time at the end of the last Ice Age, twelve thousand years ago. Appalachia was a very different place at the end of the Ice Age, when the first humans are believed to have arrived in the mountains. The climate of that far-off time was that of central Canada today: too cold to support the oaks and hickories of our modern forests. Appalachia then was a frozen land of spruce and fir tree, but it was home to a wonderful collection of creatures: mastodons, saber-tooth tigers, camels, horses, sloths the size of pick-up trucks, and birds of prey with wingspans of twenty-five feet. The kingdom of ice that was Appalachia in 10,000 B.C. was their world, and they lost it to the first human settlers of the region, who hunted the beasts to extinction in only a few hundred years. Losing the land is an eternal process, I wanted to say. It seemed fitting to start with these early residents, as a reminder that even the Indians were once interlopers. Because I write to music, I had to choose a “leitmotif” for the novel, a song whose message would unify plots and subtexts into one fluid movement.. The obvious choice: Will the Circle Be Unbroken? When I wrote She Walks These Hills, a novel of intertwining journeys, past and present, a scholarly publication on Appalachian geology provided me with one of the central themes. In Traces on the Appalachians: A History of Serpentine in America by geologist Kevin Dann (Rutgers University Press, 1988), I learned that the first Appalachian journey was the one made by the mountains themselves. The proof of this can be found in a vein of a green mineral called serpentine which forms its own subterranean “Appalachian Trail” along America’s eastern mountains, stretching from north Georgia to the hills of Nova Scotia, where it seems to stop. This same vein of serpentine can be found in the mountains of western Ireland, where it again stretches north into Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Orkneys, finally ending in the Arctic Circle. More than two hundred and fifty million years ago (before even fish existed yet) the mountains of Appalachia and the mountains of Great Britain fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift pulled them apart, at the same time it formed the Atlantic Ocean. I thought this bit of geology was a wonderful metaphor for the journeys reflected in the book, and in a sociological way, it closed the circle: When our pioneer ancestors settled in the mountains because the land looked right, made them feel at home— they were right back in the same mountains they had left to come to America. I imagine my ancestor, Malcolm McCourry, snatched from the hills of Scotland as a child. Perhaps when he saw the green mountains of North Carolina, he felt that he had come home. When I visit Scotland, I marvel at the resemblance between their land and ours— surely the pioneers felt the same awe in reverse. In She Walks These Hills an elderly convict escapes from the Northeast Correctional Center in Mountain City, Tennessee, and tries to make his way home through the same stretch of wilderness in which a Virginia Tech history professor is re-enacting the eighteenth century journey of a pioneer woman who escaped from captivity with the Shawnee. The climax of the novel is the convergence of these epic journeys. I wanted to show that the wilderness itself has changed dramatically in two hundred years. In the time of the pioneer woman’s journey, the endless forest stretched unbroken from Georgia to Maine. In the convict’s youth there will still great tracts of wilderness, but now, as the Virginia Tech professor hikes the Appalachian Trail, he keeps crossing highways, and passing convenience stores, irritating reminders that the “wilderness” is in danger of becoming just another theme park on the outskirts of civilization. A sense of place is the strongest element present in fiction set in the mountain South. It is the key to understanding the people who settled here, those who are drawn to live here now, and those who cannot leave. In my work I try both to celebrate the land, and to understand its power over those who have become a part of it. As I have.

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