a tribute to a centering house

 

The Cabin on the Creek

here on the border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,

my parents found the way to buy the last land by the creek,

including the easement all the neighbors downhill were not allowed to own,

so our house was built in the middle of the old sled road, next to the creek,

just up from the ford where generations of locals crossed the rocky stream,

for 35 cents an hour, a local man from Wears Valley

built the house with knotty pine paneling, creek stone,

and with a big screened porch close by the dropping stream,

a favorite place for meals, for naps, for reading, for visiting,

for being comfortable while  being within the woods,

rosebay rhododendron, oak, maple,  buckeye, and a magnificent beech tree

just outside where the creek falls fast, and sounds like rain,

the fall enough for a tub mill to have been here to grind corn,

before the Park transmuted this land from feeding the body to feeding the soul,

for over 60 years we have preserved and improved this home

to take care of the body with comfortable beds in comfortable bedrooms,

 full bathrooms, engaging social areas, and a  functional kitchen so well-equipped, 

that anyone with a desire to cook and serve the group has effective tools to do so,

what a gift to all of us is my parents’ vision of a place

where family, friends, and an expanding circle of connections,

can find their way here, afford the stay,

and feed their soul with whatever rock, water, and plant are called to give,

let alone the gift of black bears who love to walk through this corner of nature,

I particularly love June into July when the rhododendron

celebrate in blossom, a garden holding us inside itself,

or when in deep winter the water phase changes into icy sheets,

building from the banks and from the rocks, 

stalagtiting from branches above splashing water,

sometimes snow covers all for a bit,

with the phase change that transforms everything,

my mother and many parents and grandparents,

have loved to sit on the screened porch 

and watch little ones play in the creek,

their connections transformed by place into who inside them

can synchronize with the magic water knows,

what we can rediscover if place and time are right,

in the Trust Mother set up, 

we feel honored to be as stewards

for the best of place, and of ourselves.

by Henry H. Walker

July 28, ‘22

returning home, to mountains

 

“from the sea to the sky”

“from the sea to the sky”

promises the naming of the road we follow

as we leave Vancouver on the coast

for mountains that volcanoes and plate tectonics

have fought gravity to endure high,

I had thought that these last days in British Columbia

would be different from the edges that keep calling to me,

instead, I now savor the streams cascading down toward the sea,

laughing as waterfalls that both hold and erode,

the way up and the way down, so parallel and contrasting,

I imagine the salmon, born high up these streams,

spending their lives in the ocean,

and then, driven by a primal need to come home,

climb up the rivers to where their mothers laid them,

the First Peoples’ harvesting many of them for their own needs,

never taking too many,

the same with the bears’ feeding,

the ocean and the mountains connected into one,

like the salmon I feel coming to the mountains as coming home,

I am drawn to stare at bare rock, partly swathed in white snow,

I am drawn to rivers returning to the sea, with enormous energy,

these days are for us of mountains,

and I feel drawn to both the climb  up and to the return down to the sea,

both mountains and sea are of the  beginnings.

by Henry H. Walker

July 20, ‘22

revealing the stories

 

Waterfalls

there are stories hidden in the rock

water unlocks and releases for us,

stories of genesis and the earliest of the worlds humans inhabit,

underlying rock is igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic,

and origin tells it how to resist water flowing over it,

and thus reveals an opening to its past,

at waterfalls something holds hard,

and thus the waters’ drop shouts geology’s story,

at one waterfall, Brandywine Falls,

13,000 years ago a volcano erupted here

and left the rock to resist and hold, or slough away,

then the glaciers melted and for 10,000 ;years,

water has revealed what holds and what doesn’t,

the long drop of the falls pulls the trail and the eye to it,

along a creek the town uses for its water,

torrents drop as rapids, and then, interrupted by hard stone,

make an energetic waterfall, Rainbow Falls,

which morphs below into roaring cascades,

miles away, the Green River races down its valley

and then creates Nairn Falls,

as resistant rock forces the water

to use only the convoluted channels it allows,

plate tectonics’s inexorable movement, plus volcanos’ aggressive work,

create the fields upon which water plays and works,

trails and our hearts find the fields where the play is spectacularly good.

by Henry H. Walker

July 21, ‘22