I quit my father on his mountain project any number of times before it stuck. He was invited in early fall by a Gadsden State Community College administrator to speak on his 15-year devotion to the restoration of American Chestnut trees to the American forest. My father was burned out on the American Chestnut Foundation, at least at the national level, because of the leadership’s reliance on the dogma of science to solve their fundamental problems. My father, an old sculptor, printmaker, and photographer, believed in the interdisciplinary power of artistic symbols and cultural history to move people to action. Whereas cloning and genetic tampering may have been important in the northeast corner of the United States, my father saw these members of the chestnut organization as failing to consider the potency of “meaning” when it was constructed by a competent artist. The irony of a Southerner using art to teach Northerners something about how to create coalitions of caring is not lost on me.
Hensley Mountain was to be a test case for the American Chestnut Foundation; it was something he could use later as a canned program to be delivered to nationals about the power of art to move people toward environmental action. It was also a legacy project for my father: The mountain stood for six generations of Carp South ownership, and if he preserved it as a wild vista for a small Southern town such as Gadsden then that could be viewed by many as a heroic act. My father is a hero in his own way, though he is as imperfect as the next individual.
My father took the invitation to speak to the antiquarian society as an opportunity to inscribe his mountain property with cultural heritage and symbolic power for the town. My father’s goal was to charm these ladies with his talk about the cultural history and symbolic power of the mountain. This, he envisioned, would be achieved so masterfully that these society elites would write city government and request that he be permitted to set aside a conservation easement out of Hensley Mountain.
When I tried to quit my father it was because I had been told by my wife that we were pregnant. This meant my career as a writer would be placed on hold, and I would be compelled by her to get certified to teach secondary history classes. Teaching is nothing to sneer at, in fact it is vitally important, but because my father’s wife had a rare neurological illness, I felt the project would be too difficult to pull off, and the timing was not appropriate. As the disease raged onward against my stepmother’s body, the mountain project became the only escape my father had from his role as sole caregiver.
“Searching for Meaning in an Enduring Relict” was the title he selected for the 38-slide PowerPoint presentation he put together about the history of the town’s mountain landscape, and the close physiographic relationship to the Coosa River. My father’s lecture meandered about through every hill and dale like the Coosa itself before faces hardened, and the audience of octogenarian women stiffened to the idea of stripping away “Lost Cause” symbols from the Gadsden seal. I watched in the ballroom of the Gadsden Country Club as ladies scoffed at the suggestion of removing Emma Sansom from the center of the seal to be lost with all the other figural representations of Civil War heroes. Governor Kay Ivey, who staunchly opposes such a movement, is their archetype. They seemed to be thinking, “This old art professor is telling us to forget Emma Sansom for something as inert as a mountain?” They had been expecting an innocuous talk about southern art and chestnuts; they received instead a piece of Southern performance art from a tired professor of art and his ne’er-do-well son.
These ladies squirmed when the professor showed them an image of the “Fearless Girl” statue in front of the Merrill Lynch bull, and they squirmed when he showed a slide where a sculpture of a black woman replaced a former Jefferson Davis sculpture in New Orleans. In the slide, film director Zac Manuel used the removal of Jeff Davis in place of an anonymous black girl sculpture, and my father had selected this image. And at this moment in the lecture I felt myself fall in love with the mountain project. He never actually requested that they write city government, so like the great Don Quixote he fought an impossible fight with a windmill of Southern indifference. I, like Sancho, tried to bat cleanup with a lyrically styled piece of creative nonfiction about the mountain:
Mountain as a Living Icon
The first time I saw a wild turkey I felt I’d seen an alien. I was just a child. So when I came face to face with the gobbler, I was closer than any non-hunter should ever be to this bird. Ugly. Scary ugly. His protean red, white, and blue head was wrinkled with hairs and iridescent feathers that never quite grew in. Warts and bumps shaped his eyes. He looked intensely at me in my bright green shirt. Frozen still, ice cream dripped down my tiny hands, and then like a real life-version of the cartoon road runner, he made his “beep-beep,” a sudden sound of a screeching gobble: GOB-gob-GOBBLE. Instantly the empty woods filled the silent terrain with his crowded sounds, so that all that then mattered was Ole Tom’s pitchy, shredded cry. In a flash he took off through the forest following the hens beyond sight.
The next time I saw wild turkeys, I was riding a girlfriend on my four-wheeler to the top of the satellite tower that nests atop the highest point in the Dunaway chain. This forested peak anchors the backside of the Gadsden Country Club. Though the gaggle of birds never saw me this day, they flew majestically in a lumbering fashion out and down towards an opening in the dense canopy. Fans pumping up and down, deftly they navigate the old growth hardwoods. With their gnarled and spurred feet tucked under their massive bronze-black bodies they coasted to a safer field down below.
Like the Appalachians themselves, I have learned, the history of the turkey species is rich in these hills. Local Cherokee Americans unquestionably made them their quarry. After the indigenous were removed the turkeys were nearly wiped out as a result of unethical hunting practices and our human sprawl. But we began trying to conserve the bird by preserving its habitat and capturing turkeys in nets to relocate them. I have always been a slow learner. I never studied wild game at Auburn, and despite the conservation class my father insisted I take, I had little grasp on why game were where they are. They just were. Unlike the very mountain whose stillness suggests eternity, these ugly birds are today its meandering and soulful inhabitants, ricocheting through the hills and hollows like pinballs put into play by an inadvertent contract worker or, worse still, a thoughtless adolescent on his four-wheeler. From the peak of Hensley where turkeys roost today, one can easily see the mighty Coosa River winding and ‘essing’ through a series of bends, the closest being Whorton’s Bend.
In the 19th century immigrants from Europe introduced an Asian species of fish known today as the common carp. I have always loved to fly fish, but like turkey hunting, I picked up fishing for this species very slowly. It took me about five years of being devoted to the sport to achieve a level of skill that allowed me to consistently find these golden ghosts. Fishing on the Gadsden flats, I spent hours among relict roadways now submerged by the damned waters of the Coosa waterway. Much like the happy accident of finding a turkey, I would never have realized that carp populated these backwaters had I not been surveying the James D. Martin bird sanctuary for a local engineer. It was my end-of-high-school summer employment intended to be a dose of life’s practical side. Instead, I remember vividly the carp’s allure--large-bodied fish gracefully pushing and sliding contrails of escaping muck clouds. It was like the turkey I had witnessed with sticky ice cream hands.
These relocated creatures constitute our impressions of the wild but are actually living accretions of man’s preservation of food source and his ancient agricultural regime. The carp are happy in the muck of former ag-rows and terraces, modeled from the geological remnants of nearby mountain pinnacles, timelessly eroded.
I bought a boat that moves in very skinny waters to guide others in catching their first carp on a fly. Though this entrepreneurial dream is not yet financially rewarded, I do still believe in the act of stalking carp by studying their movements, by watching them tail in the mountain mud and by pushing the boat towards the discolored water irregularities. I am more patient when it comes to searching for the wily and keen-sighted birds in the spring. When I see their tail rise from the placid water’s surface, I move just as if I had yelped a gobbler into revealing his secreted spot on top of Hensley Mountain.
If Ole Tom gobbles but refuses to join my decoy party for his ultimate dirt nap, then I am forced to move up on this regal strutting monster. But for the Ugly, his nearly two inch spurs are his only protection. It is the very same tactic for moving up on a content carp. If it refuses to move or work itself towards me then slowly and stealthily as possible I move on that prey to get my client close enough to cast his 40 feet of line onto the carp’s dinner plate. For turkey we yelp, cut, cluck, and purr to communicate our love and respect for the Tom in the hen’s language of come-hither. For carp we strip it, twitch it, move it, and let it sit. Sex and food are the tools of communication in these outdoor endeavors. With each, we as sportsmen learn from our mistakes.
The mountain on the horizon can be seen hanging forebodingly over the commercial lights of barbeque and car dealership. Here, though, the muck clouds tell us the anglers where to find fish. The full-throated thunderous GOBBLE is how we know the mountain is not dead, as the muck would have you believe; rather the call of this wild turkey lets us know that we are blessed with a living wild relic in a town full of contradictory Southern charm.
The lights came on, and I had to ask the ladies as kindly as I could muster, “Can we please turn the lights back off for the short film I made about fly fishing for carp with the mountain as the backdrop?” The volume was up too high, and when Libby Roderick’s “Thinking Like a Mountain” song came roaring through the speakers, I thought for a split second I was going to give one of the ladies a heart attack. I rushed up to the projector to turn the sound down. Then after the three-minute film concluded we received loud applause. They had been swayed somehow, but they did not know what to do with their newly minted environmental sensibility. We forgot to tell them.
I left in a rush because I was unsure how truly successful the program had been. When I got home I realized that I had left my 1950s-era gobble box. I drove back to the country club and asked the I.T. man for my gobble box back. I needed it because I was clinging to the hope of a late-season Pulaski, Tennessee, turkey hunt. My father rode home alone to care for Ginger, clinging to the hope that there was still time for heroes, and that his mountain project may like a loose ember ignite for someone a vision for Gadsden’s future.