A Tough Hike to See the Caudill Cabin at Doughton Park.

I made the hike up to see the Caudill Cabin. I left my house very early so that I could get to the trailhead around 7:30, 8 at the latest. However, my directions from NC 21 were not accurate, so I had to get on the Blue Ridge Parkway and go down NC 18 toward North Wilkesboro. This, coupled with a stop along the Parkway to take photos at the developed section of Doughton Park slowed me considerably.

Finally, I made my way down to Longbottom Road and began to trek toward the trailhead. But I managed to pass it by about three miles and had to turn around. By the time I got to the parking area it was almost 10:30.

According to the map and directions I had the hike looked to be about 4.5 miles each way with about 1600 feet of elevation gain. One descriptor I read said that there were seven creek crossings. I ended up discovering, though, that all mileages were off by at least a mile each way; and there were, in fact seventeen creek crossings! Seventeen! Add to this the fact that the humidity levels were off the scale and I ended up being put through the wringer on this hike. It was horrible!

The first 1.7 miles or so is on the Grassy Gap Fire Road which apparently is a jeep road that has been used for fire suppression and to get equipment farther into the forest for trail maintenance. It's a slow, steady, easy climb along Basin Creek. This is all National Park property. It forms a big pie shaped wedge of land from the Blue Ridge Parkway down to the parking area on Longbottom Road. There are over thirty miles of trails on over 7,000 acres of land. Most people see only the part of the Park directly adjacent to the Parkway. But most of it is very different from these open meadows and it is, in fact, very heavily forested by recovering stands of hardwoods and white pines. This is what you hike through as you leave Longbottom Road and head up toward Caudill Cabin.

I was extremely impressed with the forests here. They are not composed of vast, ancient trees, but they are still imposing. Some of the stands of white pines are rather grand, but it is the groves of various hardwood species that are the most stirring.

All of the two trails that I used to access the Caudill Cabin site are adjacent to rushing streams. But it is when you reach Basin Creek that you find yourself in classic, southern Appalachian landscape. Trees tower over you, rhododendron blossoms are all around, rocks abound, and the sound of water crashing against polished stone is everywhere. This is indicative of the great blue wall of the mountains that rise up from the Piedmont so abruptly here in my native South.

The climb to the cabin was pleasant in many ways, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't difficult for me. The route is steep, and the seventeen creek crossing took a toll on me whenever I'd encounter one that was too deep to rock-hop and had to take the time to remove my boots and socks and then put them back on once I'd reached the opposite shore. In high heat and humidity, minor things like that take a toll. By the time I got to my destination I was as drenched as if I'd been doused by gallons of water, but it was all sweat that had soaked through my clothes. Yeah, it was pretty miserable in that respect.

As you climb you pass through what had once been the old Basin Creek community. Not quite a town, it still held a population of farmers who lived along the banks of the creek, farming the land and earning livings enough to support large families. That all came to an abrupt end one day in 1916 when a flood came roaring down the tributary washing away most of the houses and killing most of the people who had lived there. The community never recovered and in the 1930s the National Park Service purchased this large plot of land that is now Doughton Park.

The principle reason I went to hike there was to see the historic Caudill Cabin, the last remaining structure from the days just before the flood. But I also went to enjoy some solitude while I hiked, which has been missing from most of the outdoor trips I have taken recently. And it paid off. I did encounter one group of ladies who were coming down the mountain just as I was passing a large waterfall, and they asked me to take a group photo of them with their phone cameras (which I was happy to do).

Even though the hike did me in, I had a great time, suffered some hamstring cramps when I got home, but physically did okay compared to what I suffered through from some other more recent trips tromping up and down the steep slopes of the southern Appalachians.

 

The trail map for Doughton Park. As I have said, most people only see the strand of land adjacent to the Parkway road. But journey into the trail system and into the forests and you will find a completely new world.

This is the only part of the buildings at Doughton Park that is still being used as a visitors center. It was closed when I got there.

The large building adjacent to the visitors center is the old coffee shop that once served meals as an old-fashioned grill. Like most of the rest of the structures at Doughton Park it is now in sad shape and unused. This nation has plenty of money to piss trillions into war machines, but can't take care of its National Parks. The old coffee shop has recently undergone some basic repairs, and there are rumors that it will once again find use, but who knows?

Typical groomed lawn along the Parkway.

Basin Creek as I hiked along.

Rhododendron in full bloom.

The following few photos are the ruins of farms that once lined the creek. Many were killed in the 1916 flood.

The waterfall where I met the nice ladies hiking down the mountain. 

My initial view of the Caudill Cabin as I emerged from the deep forest.

This one-room cabin once served as home for an entire family.

I travel to the cabin.

More Southern Dialect

Sometimes within the context of a story or novel I prefer to write a character's dialogue in dialect. In the old days this was often done with lots of hyphens and apostrophes. If you've read much of H.P. Lovecraft's work then you will have encountered this type of dialect written into his fiction. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this method of illustrating dialect kind of sucks. There are generally so many little marks and squiggles in the form of those previously mentioned apostrophes and hyphens that it seems as though what you are trying to read is hieroglyphics rather than English letters.

I try to avoid that method for transferring dialect to the published page.

For years I would work in some apostrophes, avoid hyphens, and then just use phonetics to translate the sounds. The first few editors to whom I submitted did not seem keen on this tactic and they tried to school me on writing dialect. Most of the time their advice was for me to just cut it the heck out and forget about dialect.

Yeah. Well. Fuck them.

Sometimes dialect is really hard to convey. The types of dialect I try to use in my work are the types of dialect I encounter in my life--mainly various southern dialects. One kind that is really hard to show on the page is one that I hear when I'm dealing with people who live in the lower foothills of Appalachia. Yeah, that's right. There are actually variations of the dialects of the mountain-speak one hears in the higher mountains. I suppose these are people who either went no farther than the upper edge of the Piedmont and were influenced by folk from lower elevations, or they are people from the Piedmont whose speech patterns have been altered due to relatively recent contact with those moon-shine makin' butt-fuckers from the mountains. Either way, it's a funny dialect that is so unique that I find myself wanting to use it in my fiction.

But damned if it is very easy to do. These people tend to make two syllables out of one-syllable words. Simple words like "and" become "AY-and". While "pan"turns into "PAY-an". Or "bit" is pronounced "BEE-yit". If you try to write anything like that within a line of dialog you are going to run into a Jupiter-sized world of trouble. So the best way to get the idea across is the all-knowing narrator to mention the facts of life of the speech patterns one or two times so that the reader gets it locked into their mind's ear, or to have one of the other characters think to themselves how the speaker of this dialect enunciates their words.

However, for sheer effectiveness, the best method I see is to write stretches of dialect phonetically with no goddamned apostrophes, hyphens, or commas that muck it all up so that the lines end up looking like something Jackson Pollock dribbled onto the page.

I had almost gotten it right a few times when I combined phonetics with apostrophes. My mistake was in allowing the apostrophes at all. The idea first hit me when an old friend of mine from Atlanta was showing me a batch of Civil War letters he had purchased in a collection. These were genuine Civil War letters written by a Confederate soldier to his family back home. In those days a lot of people were only mildly educated unless they could afford advanced schooling. What you ended up with were men and women who had a rough understanding of the written word but not the finer details. In those cases those people wrote phonetically. I'll give you an example from one of the actual letters I was allowed to read. It concerned the outcome of a horrible battle in which the soldier had been involved, and I will quote him exactly as he wrote the line.

"They was considerbel many killt today."

Now...we all know what he meant. What an educated man would have written was: "There were considerable many killed today."

And his letter went on and on in this way. Words like "Yalls" for "your", etc.

When I read this letter I knew how I'd write dialect from then on. The first story I wrote after that was set in the 1870s and was created using snippets of letters from a man in Colorado written to his parents in Tennessee, along with scenes of action and dialog between his compatriots. All dialog was written just as they would have said it--in phonetics. I did not use hyphens or apostrophes to butcher the written words as the characters were slicing and dicing the English language. The reactions I got from editors were less kind than my other methods--they all seemed to prefer Master Lovecraft's manner of conveying dialect.

Some years later I encountered the work of writers like Cormac McCarthy and Harry Crews who were penning critically acclaimed fiction using just such a technique as I had envisioned. This felt good and I knew I had been right all along, and that the editors I'd encountered who had complained were full of shit.

Or SHE it, if you will.

This here is a house I encountered one day in 2008 when I was hiking to the top of a mountain in western North Carolina. Why is it here? Because the South, goddammit. This is an area where you can hear some really amazing, kick-ass dialects, while at the same time seeing some tremendous scenery where ol' Mother Nature works overtime. (On a side note, I have never wanted to own a house so much as I did when I set eyes upon this one. I stood at the edge of the fence and took photos and didn't approach any closer because southerners know not to encroach on private property--it just ain't done. But I would have bought this house instantly if it had been for sale and I'd had the money to complete the purchase. It remains the most ideal home in the most perfect of spots I have ever seen--at the edge of field and forest, just below the summit of an impressive mountaintop.)

This video has nothing whatsoever to do with my blog. I do listen to this guy's videos on YouTube from time to time because he talks often of camping and woodcraft. Also, I love the guy's dialect and try to think of how to translate it to the written page.