Six months or so ago, a friend from the past I found on the Internet, now living in Missouri, asked me in our email correspondence why I came to the mountains and why I go on staying in the mountains. It occurred to me then that everything I write is an answer to those questions.

Since that realization I answer them more consciously. I came here because I wanted to work at outdoor physical labor and learn what early American life was like before motors and electricity in one of the last places to get them.

I like electricity and motors and plumbing. Curiosity did not go so far as to carry water from a spring in a bucket and use an outhouse, right on and on, which I did the first nine months, the cold months. I like splitting wood with an axe and a sledgehammer wedge, did it for twenty years and would be doing it yet, but for working full time in town.

To keep on heating by wood I'd be starting a new fire every evening in a cold house that takes until bedtime to warm everything but the bed, and cutting firewood every weekend for weeks and months without a break. I'm too lazy to do all of that, and don't see any sense in it either.

I like getting my firewood, and take it as an art form that requires certain knowledge and skills. In my first year of working with Tom Pruitt and his nephews, Bill and Don, they taught me about a chainsaw, how to make a tree fall where you want it to and how to get out of the way before the tree hits the ground, because sometimes there is no guessing which way the trunk of the tree might jump. A solid object that weighs a few thousand pounds flying through the air is no small matter, like a piano falling on your head.

Tom taught me the importance of accuracy using an axe. He could put the second hit with the axe in the slice he made with the first hit every time. I believe he was known just about all over the county for his skill with an axe, as people back in the old days were known for their skills. And still, in the mountains skill with a rifle or a bow, or working with motors is important, the same as working with hammer, saw and measuring tape. The men of these mountains with various skills of self-sufficiency taught them by their daddies have resources invisible to the people moving to the mountains.

You see it in the motor parts in the garage, the woodworking equipment in the basement, antlers in the living room, rifles in the gun cabinet. A country song comes to mind that was a big hit in my early years here, "A Country Boy Will Survive." There's no doubt about that. He can grow a garden, too.

Before I came to the mountains I had no practical skills other than reading. I know Tom didn't believe I'd make it through the first winter. He gave me work to do that was equivalent to boot camp. He didn't know I was liking it. I wanted to get into shape fast. I approached my life here as a baby newborn into the world, a stranger in a strange land. I wanted to know mountain people and learn mountain ways, mountain culture, mountain religion, mountain music.

In my first months of getting acquainted with a few people, there was something so familiar it was uncanny. I caught on one day that it was in the language, the figures of speech. My grandmother, who grew up on a farm around Perry, Kansas, a place then about like Sparta with a First Baptist Church, talked like the people here. She was the greatest and most positive influence in my childhood. Looking back, she sort of held my hand through it like a guardian angel.

I don't think I realized how much she meant to me until I recognized that I was drawn to the music in mountain language perhaps primarily because it was her language, the music in her voice that was my comfort.

I felt from the beginning that I had found home. It was enigmatic because I'd never been in the mountains before, except crossing them once on the highway near Asheville.

After making it through the winter, much of which was spent cutting firewood as needed from the side of the road in snow over a foot deep, one day in July a moment passed that I recognized was my point of no return. Riding along Air Bellows Gap Road with Van Pruitt in his old Dodge he called the Goat, because it would go anywhere, we passed the field just up the mountain from the Brown Road turnoff. Then we called it Pine Swamp Road. The field was completely covered with the white, yellow-centered daisies, a couple acres of them.

I've no idea what it was that caused me to know at that moment there was no going back. The field has never had daisies like that since.

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