I was born, raised, and hope to live out my time in a place where the lofty peaks poke holes in the heavens.  Living in the Southern Highlands is like spending time inside a picture book.  It is one of the few places on earth, with waterfalls so high, that sometimes on a full moon rainbows appear at midnight.  It is place where clear mountain water runs so cold it aches your teeth.

"Shaw!" one old mountain man said, as he stood by our spring and drank from a gourd.  "This here water's cold enough to keep meat!"

It was a time when full corn cribs and fat hogs gave a family all the peace of mind they could ever ask for.  It was a time before the great stands of hemlock and oak timber first felt the ax and saw.

I recall places of my youth, like Sandy Mush, Bone Valley, High Lonesome, Bear Wallow, Long Hungry, World's Edge, Needmore, and Pumpkin Town.  Some of these were little more than a grist mill and a church.  To my people, they were hometowns.

I reckon, by any standards, we were poor and life was hard.  However, we never knew this to be the case; we had never been below the mouth of Hiawassee River.  When coming home, I never had to ask, "What's for supper?"  I smelled coffee and hog meat cooking as I crossed the foot log.

Time passes, as it has a way of doing.  Things change, as they must.  Still and all, the people's birthrights and cemeteries are now lost deep inside a national park, covered by man-made lakes.

Over twenty million people call Appalachia home, and some three times that many have close ties.  Appalachians are not a race, a tribe, nor a clan.  They are a stock of plain mountain folks who, for over two hundred years, have grubbed out an existence in the deep hollows and on the high peaks.  There are pockets of these proud people still found from Alabama to Maine, farming corn and tobacco, and raising what they eat.

A man with a large family who lost his eye while working in a tannery was asked by a rank stranger to whom he had given a ride, "Why don't you get on welfare?"

"I’ffen I ever do, you can tell.  I'll be comin up this cove road totin this sack of flour, not haulin it in this here automobile."

The first breath I drew was the smoke-colored air of the Southern Appalachians.  What I know about these people, was learned from living and listening.  I waded the creeks, walked the trails we called roads, and drank the potent liquid fashioned from corn malt and spring water.  I have felt the damp, black earth while chopping corn on a hillside so steep I had to lean on my hoe handle to keep from falling.

What I learned sitting by a cabin fire deep in the Snowbird Mountains, hearing bear hunters swap stories of the great dogs they had owned or known, cannot be studied in schools.  I heard my grandmother snicker at their tales.  "A body'll go to Hell for lyin same as they will for stealin."

I have drunk their teas and smelled their potions as they tried to keep body and soul together in this remote land.  I have seen one man, who was true to his calling, keep law and order where an army might fail.  They are hard and humble, generous to a fault, and independent as the old farmer's mule that got out on a frozen creek.  "He braced his feet and I couldn't do narry a thang with him!"

Their manner of speech has changed little over time.  Some words and speech patterns, common in the mid-part of the last century, were used by Shakespeare over three hundred years before.

One mountain woman, in her late eighties, was told she must move to make way for more of what government calls progress.  She chained her leg to the corner post of her house.  She sat, day after day, in a shuck-bottom rocker, with a rifle-gun across her lap.  Then one day, the authorities came to her home with a paper.

"We have a life lease for you."

"Don't rightly know what that thar means.

"Why, it means you can live in this house until you die."

She pulled a rusty key from her apron and unfastened the lock.  Then she thanked the man.  "Well sir, I spect that thar's 'bout as long as I'll have a need for it."

Individually, these mountain folk are as different as chalk and cheese.  I have known many of them, and loved most.  I am an Appalachian.  These are my people.