Rob Merritt

Nantahalas: “No Recognized Boundaries”

An Essay and Five Poems

Rob Merritt

I didn’t think too much about what “Nantahala” meant when I was 7, vacationing with my family at Fontana Dam in The Nantahala National Forest. I bought a tomahawk, found some arrowheads, and saw real Indians cooking over a pot at Oconaluftee Village. Fifty years later, “Nantahala” has taken on multifoliate connotations for me, beyond the title of this web-based celebration of out-of-the-ordinary Appalachian art.

While mountaintops are blasted into valleys for coal in West Virginia and Kentucky, the Nantahala River flows on. It begins in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, near the Georgia line and runs forty-two miles, through the gorge, into the Little Tennessee River, and then into the placid, dammed Fontana Lake. I am not thinking about The Nantahala Outdoor Center and the thousands of whitewater adventurers making an open-air economy, but of how a north-flowing river can be a focal point that brings together the regenerative energy of a region and propel it outward to teach a world-wide community endurance, compassion, and acceptance. As says the Tao Te Ching:

The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.

The Nantahala River starts in a high valley below Standing Indian Mountain, stony and treeless because, according to legend, a winged monster swooped down, picked up a Cherokee child and carried him to a mountain cave. The people prayed for days to the Great Spirit to save the boy, then a blast of thunder and crash of lightening killed the monster and the landscape. The child walked out onto the smoking rocks, alive. That explosive power sources the river.

Water takes the shape of what borders it— whitewater gorge, dammed lake— telling us to take on the silhouettes of the landscapes we pass through acclimatizing ourselves to environments, not blasting our appetites upon them . As Tennyson’s Ulysses says, “I am a part of all that I have met.” Nantahala, be it river, forest, or placeholder for personal and cultural memory, represents a focal point that allows me to perceive a pattern in events and geography that lie around me.

I have never been to the headwaters of the Nantahala River; most people have never been to the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, yet we depend upon these places; we are better off because they exist, nurturing the diversity of the planet—ecologically, spiritually, and aesthetically. As Thomas Rain Crowe told the Nantahala editors one sunny afternoon in 2004, sitting outside his writing tower built by John Lane in the woods near Cullowhee amid the sounds of stream and birdsong:

diversity is a sustaining concept throughout all of nature--and, in fact, the universe. It is, in the end, diversity which allows for the quality of life of all living things, as well as allowing everything to survive and to evolve and to continue. Once the idea or the fact of monoglot or monoculture takes root, everything starts becoming like everything else around it--the gene pool is lessened, and the quality of life is compromised. Diversity, for me, is essential in a philosophical and, as well, practical way. It’s essential to the natural world, meaning it’s also essential to the human world. I think it’s a wonderful thing that we have different cultures, and different peoples, different races, different belief systems. Otherwise, life as we know it wouldn’t exist. Life would be fairly dull, don’t you think, if we were all the same color and there was only one variety of tree and one kind of salamander, and one way to think of or worship God? In this kind of mono-world, our imaginations, which are essentially fueled by the natural world and the diversity and mystery of the Universe, would go flat, dry. Entropy would set in. We would cease to evolve.

Many people live in metropolitan environments. Thoreau did not want everyone to follow him into the woods, yet his project fuels our imagination. Likewise the mountains of the eastern United States not only offer literal a buffer against over-urbanization, they counter-balance ways of seeing and approaches to problems, personal and social.

As James Still said, "Appalachia is that somewhat mythical region with no recognized boundaries." This website projects a message far and wide that Appalachian art is more than quilts and outhouses— it is a boundary-breaking mythology universal in its particularity (see Cameron Dennis’s photographic essay “Swimming in Rivers,” for example), freeing us to find beauty and compassion in unexpected places. This issue probes the idea of "no recognized boundaries." Nigerian poet residing in Ireland Emmanuel Jakpa, included here, has never been to Appalachia. He says, “Appalachia amazes” and

While marvels conjure up

from mountains

that challenge the Twelve Ben

I want you to tell everyone

through trumpets played with the fragrance of roses

here contrast the affairs of our modern life.

This boundless notion has a geographic reality underlying the spiritual and philosophical. Once, literally, there were no borders. Some may be surprised to know that there is an International Appalachian Trail, an organization founded upon the idea that when drifting land masses merged to form Pangea 260 million years ago, the Appalachian Mountains formed as a result of the collision. When Pangea broke up 60 million years after that,

Each of the newly formed continents carried a piece of the original Appalachian Mountains with it. This origin and dispersal of the ancestral Appalachian Mountains confirms the truly international nature of an “Appalachian Trail.” Pieces of the original Appalachian Mountains exist with their own trail or mountain names in many countries around the North Atlantic.

(http://www.internationalat.org/Pages/SIAIAT_Pages/membership)

The American Appalachian terrain continues as the Caledonides of Ireland and Scotland. When immigrants from the highlands of Scotland and Ireland came to the highlands of eastern North America, they were living in the same mountains that had lived in in Europe. No wonder their songs and stories “fit.”

Limitless landscapes are internal as well as external. The Nantahala River and National Forest become maps for psychological terrains. Not only do the forest and river offer guidelines for adapting to experience— taking the shape of what we flow through— but they give humans a language (as Emerson observed) and a model for being silent. The Cherokee Trail of Tears runs beside the Nantahala River. Sorrow inhabits the river’s mazy motion. As Kate Hauk says in her essay:

If those who mourn shall be comforted, I‘m convinced it has something to do with the old Quaker saying, “don’t speak unless you can improve upon the silence.” My strength comes from those who make no attempt to explain or remove my grief. Instead, we wait together, weary and heavy-laden, in the stillness of all that remains unanswered. When we pause there long enough, angels incarnate before our eyes into images and memories that sustain us.

The forest offers the stillness and the opportunity for us to find images and words to “improve upon the silence,” in this case, a song:

Kathy Reeds’ song, “Nantahala,” restores my soul when she sings of her memory and asks with each chorus, “Who knows where they go when they’re carried away?” This eternal question, above all, honors what is beyond our understanding and hence, the dead, themselves, who exist within that sacred mystery. Her song ends with these words: “Wherever you may be, may peace be there.” As we look and wait for what we already know of love’s eternal, hidden presence, may her benediction be ours, as well.

This place has given us language. . The land has answers for our anxieties, if we listen. The land creates us, and we construct a landscape to grow in.

“Nantahala” is derived from The Cherokee words Nvda’ and aye’li ("sun" and "middle"). “Nvda” can mean either sun or moon, so one must specify “nvda iga ehi” (living in the day) or “nvda sunoye ehi” (living in the night). Light and dark are inseparable, yet always a piece of light— a sliver of moon, sun only at midday.

“Global Appalachia: From Regional Nexus to the World,” a 2009 production by Nantahala: A Review of Writing and Photography from Appalachia celebrates the healing power of art and the natural world to help individuals cope with personal loss or an entire region bear cultural and geographic tragedies.

Nantahalas are omnipresent. Every location is the land of the noonday sun, a place where the dark nights of the soul are penetrated by brief light: sun at noon flashing upon whitewater; no humans need be present.

Five Poems

Nantahala

Shadows descend the hills.

Morning light comes late to the Blue Ridge.

Sing to the wounded land

curling in upon itself

wary and waiting.

Shapes The Nantahala Takes

for Kate Hauk

Rivers

are shaped

by the frontiers

they flow through.

Sounding the Nantahala,

you sing

its current northward

seeking stillness.

From those waveforms

you make metaphors

to cope with

your losses.

Nantahala means

sunlight so slight

that waters move

in darkness

except at noon.

When I tell you

my hurt

is bit to yours,

that my losses

have been gradual,

I hear you singing

the river falling,

gorge into gorge,

alongside

the Trail

of Tears,

navigating ambiguity

in your kayak,

your platinum hair

arcing

like the whitewater,

taking silhouette

of the surge,

eternal pattern

where

the soul wakes,

and you intone

an unaccompanied

elegy

rising

with the mist

of the falls.

Rivers of forgetfulness

can no more drown loss

than fire exploding through pines

can burn out the Nantahala.

I can approach

your depths

because you dropped

a gracenote

into

river.

Queen of the Rocks

Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa

from Warri

I met near Sligo

one Saturday afternoon—

we had both come to see

where Yeats, a boy,

encountered the sidhe

upon Knocknorea.

“Hunched like a sleeping camel”

Emmanuel wrote in his notebook,

reminded him of the yam terraces

of Nigeria.

Studying at Waterford

Institute of Technology,

Could he be more exiled,

rubbing his fingers

over the rocks

of Queen Maeve’s cairn

as if it were a

Rosetta Stone?

We left our vanity way below

in Dragon Wood

when we picked up stones

to lay upon her tomb.

He wanted to be a doctor,

the ocean sprawling below us.

“like the throbbing heart

of the world,” he wrote,

and I was in a poem in his making,

Nigerian studying wordcraft

in a city of glassmakers,

listening for correspondences

between dry air of high savannahs

and this mountaintop

where we placed pebbles

to keep a Celtic queen undead.

Telling Wilderness Road

James Still worked

as a janitor

in the library

at Lincoln Memorial University,

a book on his knees

by Livy

about bees

migrating,

a broom against the wall

at midnight.

Romans knew bees could foretell weather.

James remembered when his mother told the bees

his uncle was dead—

then, no more life would end that day.

James told me never be

without a story,

read Thomas Hardy,

discover

some new narrative

everyday

after work,

listen to the women talking

so that genealogy

will stay on the table.

The Cumberland Gap,

like a Bermuda Triangle,

swallowed explorers

heading west.

through the needle’s eye

of Tennessee.

Missouri lay over

the ridge

somewhere.

All Saint’s Day,

I drive past A.P. Carter’s store

on the sunny side of life,

a song in every old barn,

every trailer,

every story told,

the circle

unbroken

like the fidelity of bees.

Jousting with Gloom

for Jean Battlo: playwright, imaginer of West Virginia

When mountain shadows of McDowell County

begin to symbolize the entire murky

universe, and despair crouches by your

doorway like a gargoyle in coal,

you go searching for healers — Don Quixote

and Emily Dickinson— to continue

to wrestle with the gloom

you do not want to become

Those two offer landscape-transforming gleam.

I went to Spain looking through countrysides

and old books to find imaginers

to rebut these tawdry times.

Southwest of Madrid,

Franco’s “Monument to the Fallen”

commemorates the forty thousand

Civil War dead.

A titanic black cross with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

at its base looms over the basilica

where Franco is buried. But that gloom cannot

cancel Quixote’s sunlight in the La Mancha valley below.

I returned to West Virginia aching

for Spanish heroes until

you gave me your play Don Quixote,

and I recognized my heart in a world leaking romance.

Jean, you joust at dark Appalachia

with Spain and Amherst.

You found Emily Dickinson’s grave

weedy, untended and rushed

to report outrage

to a custodian who let you into

Emily’s bedroom alone to watch

the rocking chair tremble.

You saw that certain slant of light

but concocted the same exhilaration

The Don felt when he saw El Dorado in the desert,

you, leaning against the sun.

Jean, thank you for this energy field

of Don Quixote, Emily Dickinson and thou—

a three- pronged attitude

for jousting with gloom.