Perpetual.

A line from one of the many hundred of treaties the US government signed with one of the many Native American nations that were here before the USA was established.

The hatchet shall be forever buried, and the peace given by the United States, and friendship re-established between the said states on the one part, and all the Cherokees on the other, shall be universal; and the contracting parties shall use their utmost endeavors to maintain the peace given as aforesaid, and friendship re-established.

I am reminded that the only thing that comes anywhere near "perpetual" is the land. And even that is infinitely malleable and will, in its own good time, change.

In 2004 I seemed to recall some things that were truthful to me in youth and which I had forgotten. And for reasons that are no mystery to me, I returned to those places in which I find a measure of peace in solitude.

Almost everything from Men are lies. Nothing from Nature is untrue. Here, then, are my journeys around what was mainly once land of the Cherokee Nation.

2004: My return to outdoor activities.

Another Train Ride!

Carole had researched another rail trip that runs from Blue Ridge Georgia to McKaysville Georgia/Copper Hill Tennessee. It's a short trip, as such go; only about one hour each way with a couple of hours layover at the northern destination before returning to Blue Ridge. We both enjoy these outings which give you a good idea of what it was like to ride the rails back in the day.

The town of Blue Ridge has changed much since I was a kid. These days it's an exceptional tourist destination and the town has blossomed in many ways. It seems to be doing well with lots of cool stores and no empty buildings with plenty of customers. I can't say the same for McKaysville which did have some cool stores, but not so many as Blue Ridge.

When I was a teenager, McKaysville/Copper Hill was an ecological wasteland. Union Carbide, easily one of the most vile corporate entities on the planet, operated mines there at the Georgia/Tennessee border that raped the land and polluted the water and air. They actually vented acid directly into the atmosphere in those days and one could stand on the mountaintops in the Cohuttas and look north to see a vast, dead, brown scab-like terrain where the company operated, wrecking Mother Earth.

These days, at least vegetation has returned to the area, although I can't say with any certainty if it's healthy or if the water table is still polluted. But at least it doesn't look like Satan's asshole any more.

We enjoyed the trip and I can recommend it. There are things to see and do at either end of the ride and the trip itself is fun with some interesting scenery bordering the river.

The town of Blue Ridge, Georgia. We had a good time here.

More shops.

This is the car we rode in.

The conductor. This guy really played the part.

Our car. Very comfortable. Nice and air conditioned.

The conductor stopped and let us take this photo. What a great guy.

McKaysville, Georgia. Just down the street is the Tennessee border where you can walk into the village of Copper Hill.

One of the engines. There was actually an engine at either end of the train. One pulled us to McKaysville, then the other one pulled us to Blue Ridge.

Carole, just as we were leaving to return to Blue Ridge.

North Georgia was once a major part of the Cherokee Nation. Almost everything they built has been removed or buried by the Europeans who took it all from them. However, there are five of these fish traps on the river between the Tennessee border and Blue Ridge. The natives constructed these V-shaped funnels in the river. They would chase fish from the deeper, wider section toward the tip of the "V" where they would catch them in the shallows in baskets.

I took this video to show an old iron bridge the train takes on its journey. Toward the end of the video you can hear this horrid little kid screaming. He had the worst parents. Ever. Total freaking assholes. The kid would start screaming and the parents reactions were to give him exactly what he wanted to make him stop. This only made him start screaming again a few seconds later when he decided he wanted something else. This went on and on. When they saw how much it was irritating everyone else, they moved to a separate compartment where no one could hear the little bastard. A message to his parents: SCREW YOU, ASSHOLES!

Ridgepole Mountain

Years and years ago I went hiking on the Appalachian Trail to get to a point where I could bushwhack to the summit of a mountain named Ridgepole Mountain. The old story when I was a kid was that Ridgepole Mountain was originally supposed to have been in Georgia. That is, the northern boundary of Georgia was to have been struck slightly north of where it ended up. However, the local Cherokees were in an agitated state and the surveyors tasked with marking the northern boundary were afraid to proceed, so they just picked a convenient spot and called it the northern boundary of the state.

Therefore, as all good little hiking Georgians from the days of my youth would say, WE WUZ ROBBED!

Robbed of what?

Well, apparently we were robbed of some 5,000-foot peaks. That was the buzz along the trail when I was a kid. If only those surveyors hadn't been such scaredy-cats, then we'd have some fivers in my native state. And I would always think about what would have happened if Ridgepole Mountain had become our highest point. Instead of Brasstown Bald having a road carved onto its slopes and all the way to the summit; instead of Brasstown Bald having its top leveled and a huge brick and concrete visitor's center lodged on its high point, then all of those crimes would have been committed against Ridgepole Mountain.

And what is Ridgepole Mountain now? It sits in the middle of a relatively enormous (by eastern standards) wilderness. There is nothing built on its summit. There are no roads gouged into its flanks. It sits in a sea of green, just one more 5,000-foot mountain surrounded by other 5,000-foot mountains.

Hiking on Ridgepole Mountain and the surrounding untouched wilderness, I'm always very happy that those Cherokee braves scared off those European surveyors.

Off in the distance there is Ridgepole Mountain. I took this shot from a mountain called Pickens Nose, named for the Revolutionary War general, Andrew Pickens (whose life served as the fictional basis for the character in the film THE PATRIOT). In real life, Pickens was a stealer of Cherokee land and killer of that nation's people.

This was, as near as I could figure through line of sight, the actual summit of Ridgepole Mountain. There is no visitor's center here. No road. No cars, no trucks, and other than me that day, no people. Just a great southern hardwood forest. It also has the highest bear population density in the southeast.

I found this really excellent campsite on the way to the bushwhack to Ridgepole. It's not far off the Appalachian Trail. Another neat feature of this campsite is that just a few feet away is a sheer cliff that plummets many hundreds (maybe over a thousand) feet.

Just beyond those shrubs is the edge of the cliff. Since I was all alone, that was as close as I dared go.

For contrast, this is what could have become of Ridgepole Mountain if it had ended up in Georgia instead of North Carolina. If it had been Georgian territory, it would have been our only 5,000-foot peak and would be ruined, as the summit of Brasstown Bald is ruined...

Instead, this is the extent of the engineering done on the slopes and ridges of Ridgepole Mountain. You can thank the Cherokee warriors of many generations gone...

Dead Facebook Friends

I have Facebook friends who have died. Actually, in reality died. Dead Facebook friends whose icons still stare at me from the screen from time to time when the system mysteriously dredges them up to float there, reminding me. I suppose a lot of people here have dead Facebook friends. If you defriend them, they'd haunt you in other ways if there were such things as ghosts.

Marley, a famous ghost from fiction (psst! The only kind).

My dad, who is also dead, had this to say about ghosts--we were sitting in the forest in the mountains of north Georgia just looking at the trees. And he suddenly said:

"You know how I know that there's no such things as ghosts?"

Since I was twelve at that point and had not believed in gods or the supernatural since I was eight years old, I already didn't believe in ghosts. But my dad was sharp and almost always had something interesting to say, so I bit.

"Nope. Why?" I asked.

Then he swept his arm to indicate the forest all around us growing on the steep Appalachian hillsides that had once been part of a vast Indian Nation but which (at least this 120 acres on which we sat) now belonged to him.

"Because this was once all Indian land, before we slaughtered them all. If there were such a thing as ghosts, they'd rise up from here and kill every fucking white man around."