Appalachian Mountains: A Visual Journey

By: Erik Rittenberry

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

I packed light, as I always do—a camera, a journal, a few worn books—and left Florida behind, heading north until the pavement gave way to winding dirt roads that cut through meadows, mountains, and forgotten hollers scattered with rusted trucks and the crumbling remains of old cabins.

There's something in these quiet, forsaken places that draws me in, reconstitutes the chemistry of my blood, a gravitational pull toward getting lost, toward solitude and the stories that linger in the ruins.

Spring in the Appalachians was awakening with a quiet grace, subtle and soft, like a painting slowly revealing itself. Dogwoods opened beneath a blue haze, and the streams ran full and swift with the recent snowmelt. I came for a little solitary adventure, and to roam beneath the budding trees, and to let what’s little left of this unspoiled land remind me of something slower, older, and quieter.

A brief withdrawal from the feverish machinery of the civilized world.

The Appalachians had long been a refuge for wandering souls. The novelist, Thomas Wolfe, with his insatiable hunger for life and language, had been born in Asheville, just over the ridge from where I was wandering.

His childhood there seeped into every corner of his writing—those steep streets and smoky hills became both cradle and crucible. But he came to realize after he left this sleepy mountain town to pursue his writing full-time: “You can’t go home again.”

“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, … back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time -- back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Nearby, in the early 1900s, Horace Kephart left behind a librarian’s life in St. Louis to live in a cabin deep in these woods. He studied the customs of mountain folk, slept beneath their stars, and wrote Our Southern Highlanders, a beautiful yet complicated love letter to the people and the place that adopted him.

"When I went south into the mountains I was seeking a ‘Back of Beyond.’ This for more reasons than one. With an inborn taste for the wild and romantic, I yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality. Again, I had a passion for early American history; and, in Far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors of a century or two ago."

As I wandered down the trails beneath the cool shadows of the mountain trees, the camera at my side felt less like a tool and more like a companion, a silent pupil sharing the eternal moment.

I wasn’t just capturing the renewal of leaf-laced forests or the solitude of weathered cabins tucked away in the hills, but something older, more elusive—a trace, perhaps, of something ancient, more mysterious and hidden—a remembrance of those who had walked this path in solitude before me.

The pioneers, the seekers, the hermits of spirit, all those in search of a better life in the “Back of Beyond.”

The mountains, ancient and dignified, kept their own counsel. And I was just passing through, hoping to carry a little fragment of their grandeur back down the mountain with me.

I’d like to share a visual record of my brief time in these mountains. Some of the photographs were taken in Cades Cove—a broad valley in the Great Smoky Mountains once inhabited by the Cherokee. The rest were captured at unplanned stops along muddy, lesser-known roads. I hope you enjoy it.

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"I love these raw moist dawns with
a thousand birds you hear but can’t
quite see in the mist.
My old alien body is a foreigner
struggling to get into another country.
The loon call makes me shiver.
Back at the cabin I see a book
and am not quite sure what that is."

-- Jim Harrison

“Hell came right along with God, hand in hand. The stink of sulfur swirled in the air of the church, fire burned in the aisles, and brimstone rained out of the rafters. From the evangelist’s oven mouth spewed images of a place with pitchforks, and devils, and lakes of fire that burned forever. God had fixed a place like that because he loved us so much.”

~ Harry Crews

“This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.”

—Rick Bragg

“How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”

― Edward Abbey

“I like to sit on the front porch of an old cabin I built in the woods and just listen to the birds; I like to fish in the pond and I always throw the fish back.”

—Johnny Cash

"The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change."

— Thomas Wolfe

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

—Flannery O’ Connor

"There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin."

--Alexis de Tocqueville

“A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.”

—Ryszard Kapuściński

"The man with the knapsack is never lost. No matter whither he may stray, his food and shelter are right with him, and home is wherever he may choose to stop."

— Horace Kephart

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.”

― Ernst Fischer

“I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.”

—Anne Lamott

“Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible.”

—Mary Oliver

“I like things that go into hidden, mysterious places, places I want to explore that are very disturbing. In that disturbing thing, there is sometimes tremendous poetry and truth.”

~ David Lynch

“I think it’s the land. The streams, the forests, the vast emptiness. The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots. But I have a love for humankind, a love of truth, and a love of justice.”

— Bob Dylan

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