finding ourselves and nature

 

of Mynatt Park, then and now

when the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

first coalesced from acquired land,

it began where Airport Road merged with Cherokee Orchard Road,

and then the Methodist Church held title

to where the Sugarlands Visitor Center, the Park headquarters,

and housing for Park employees is now,

somehow an exchange was made

and the national park's boundaries

moved upstream on LeConte Creek, a.k.a. Mill Creek,

and the Holston Assembly Grounds came into being,

sort of like a halfway house between private and public,

there the Methodist Church felt and acted upon a calling

to have a camp, a facility,

where young people could reside for a time

in basic, rustic cabins,

and enlarge themselves through immersion in nature and camaraderie,

using well the proximity to the natural world recovering itself,

these camps encouraged young people

to exercise both body and spirit,

to ground themselves in natural truths

our headlong rush toward the future might forget,

my mother oversaw that camp till 1947,

building and using a house up against LeConte Creek,

bordering on the Park on two sides,

my father often commented that our backyard

encompassed hundreds of thousands of acres of Park,

before bear proofing, bears would every night 

find the food in our trash cans

and allow us to marvel at them

as emissaries of the wild world 

rebuilding itself as the national park,

it is wonderful that Gatlinburg found the vision and wherewithal

to conserve much of the land as a city park

where visitors can picnic by the dropping creek,

kids can fish,

where visitors can exercise with tennis, pickle ball,

playground, and local youths enjoy baseball,

visitors also find their way up trails

into the resurging natural world,

on our land we have posted signs

welcoming visitors to pass through, to and from the Park,

for we planted our house right in the middle of the old road,

on our land we talk of Jean's Dream

and work to keep it alive so that generation after generation

can find nature and ourselves, and be true to both,

our time here on Earth is best used 

in service to seeing and appreciating

that which God makes every day,

when the natural world is allowed to be, to do,

to let the glory inherent in the world

reach up and out, 

like the great mountain, LeConte, 

towering above us.

by Henry H. Walker

July 26, ‘26

the ubi weed

 The Ubi Jihad

there is an insidious plant,

Gill Over the Ground,

a plant that my brother Clarence called "Ubi Weed,"

because it is so ubiquitous,

I am called to fight it, 

to weed-whack it back to its roots,

to hoe it away anywhere

it worms itself into the garden,

in To Kill a Mockingbird

one character describes a weed

as so insidious and malevolent

that it required extraordinary efforts to fight it,

that's how I feel about the "ubi weed,"

maybe something about it redeems its soul,

but right now I find its every manifestation wrong

and to be eliminated,

anywhere within my control,

I want it gone from any land I tend,

to me it corrupts the Garden.

by Henry H. Walker

June 9, ‘26

the murmur from the stone

 I ache for continuity

what can I know of earlier peoples

who lived upon this land,

who lived within this land?

who walked these same hills, valleys, streams?

who wrested a life from the forest here, long before us?

out West the Indigenous peoples still have a large footprint,

their ancestors worked their souls into petroglyphs, 

crafted shapes on the rock,

back East the Indigenous peoples are still here 

but severely diminished in numbers, in their footprint,

the abundant water here works hard to dissolve the traces of their lives,

like the bulldozers of the new people, both erasing the past with impunity,

most of what I know of native peoples here

comes from stone artifacts

that survive water's power of forgetfulness,

last week I found a quartz spurred graver,

the theory is that earlier peoples used it 

to work on bone or leather,

here on our acre I have found 

and savored projectile points from long-ago epochs,

I have imagined them in use, imagined them in creation,

I have sought to feel that older world from such clues,

what most speaks to me

is a soapstone pendant, the like of which no one 

at the University of North Carolina's archeology department 

had ever seen, in their vast collection,

I guess that it was a pendant worn around the neck,

maybe made from soapstone quarried just north of us,

years after I found it, we did work on an outbuilding nearby,

one day I looked down and found a plethora of artifacts,

 a "cache," all within a foot of each other,

on the top of the ground exposed by rain-powered revelation,

our guess is that these stone treasures

were buried with someone deeply loved,

who maybe was buried with the soapstone pendant around their neck,

gorgeous projectile points, impressive scrapers, a chunky stone, 

lovely pieces of flint and clear quartz, a potsherd,

gathered and given to accompany them on their next step,

we feel a commonality with those folks,

from maybe a thousand years ago,

right here where we find home,

I crave to forge a continuity,

a connection with those long-gone,

imbued in the stone traces that still speak of their life.

by Henry H. Walker

July 22, ‘26