It happens that the last literary thing I’m going to do before moving from Highland Farm, my own rustic home of fourteen years, is to write a few porch words on behalf of Thomas Rain Crowe’s Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, a thoughtful, well-wrought volume which celebrates Thomas’s rustic life in western North Carolina. Thomas knows my country here in Virginia’s Blue Ridge and I know his; our kinship runs deep through the rivers and bedrock of the southern Appalachians, a country unto itself for those who know it and one that continues to inspire lives and...

While sitting on his front porch looking out over the hills surrounding the Green River Gorge where his kin had farmed and fought the landscape and the elements for generations, local legend and mountain sage Zoro Guice turned to me and said, “The best way to learn about life, nature, and these mountains is to just go out into the woods and set down in one spot and let the nature and the teachings come to you. A man don’t need to go searching for God or answers. Why go searching for something you can’t find? All you need is...

It all began with this quote from Emerson’s essay “Nature,” which is echoed by Thoreau in Walden where he writes: “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

From an early age these words of Emerson and Thoreau were for me as much a mantra as a dare. A challenge to take my self-motivating sense of self-confidence and self-sufficiency and put it to the test. Now, almost twenty years later, I am calling their bluff, living alone here in the woods, retired from chamber as well as society, from time and technology,...

Here, at the end of what was once an old drovers’ road—a footpath for the Catawba, Creek, and Cherokee turned into a wagonwheel concourse stretching from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Charleston, South Carolina, now known as Old Howard Gap Road—time stands almost still. Stands still in the sense that I am not living according to man-made time. Rather, I am living by the signs and the seasons. By the light- and heat-providing presence of the sun. By the phases of the moon. Zoro calls it “sun time.” When he uses this phrase he means living a life that is...

When Gary Snyder signs his letters to me, “yours in the wild work,” I know what he means. He’s talking about organizing a local watershed institute, preparing presentations for the board of county commissioners, participating in forest-fire training sessions with the volunteer fire department, writing another poem for his Mountains and Rivers without End cycle … planting a garden, making a firebreak, splitting firewood, sewing beads onto a peyote-meeting fan, putting a water pump on his old flatbed truck. The highbrow and the lowbrow of the work of self-sufficiency. The intellect intensely engaged alongside the forearm.

I watched him and...

I met Walt Johnson many years before I moved into the cabin he had once inhabited next to Zero’s field. I was going to school in Greenville, South Carolina, and had borrowed a friend’s car and driven up into the Greenville watershed to try to locate an enormous bridge I had been told had been built over the Green River, sans road, somewhere in the vicinity of the town of Saluda. I had taken Old Macedonia Road, missed the bridge, lost my way, and found myself in the dirt yard of an old mountain house that sat on the edge...

The very best friends to anyone who would attempt to live the self-sufficient life are his tools. Without the proper tools, a man is as useless to this life as any member of the natural order would be in trying to reinvent itself as a human and take on the manners and customs of the upright race.

I am remembering an experience I had with Zoro, not long after beginning my life here in the woods, and the important lesson learned on that day. As on many previous occasions, I had traveled by foot up Old Macedonia Road to Guice...

A man can’t have too much wood laid up for winter,” Zoro says as he watches me split a big round of white oak with a single blow. “I’ve usually got two or three winters’ worth, just in case of bad times or a bad winter. One never knows when he might need the extra wood to help himself or his neighbor. And with Bessie using wood for her cookstove all year long, we’re always piling in small stuff as well as anything else we can cull from the woods.” Looking up from what I’m doing, I can see the...

The first two months of my first year in the woods were spent down on my knees. Not in prayer, but under the floor joists of the north side of the cabin with pick and mattock in hand, digging a root cellar. Digging an underground room. A red-clay pantry in which to store my food. The cabin, it turned out, was built on a shelf at the base of a small hill that was composed almost entirely of sandy shale and hard red clay. Since I had to start the root cellar on my knees—there was barely four feet...

The first thing I planted in Zoro’s field was several rhubarb roots that Zoro had given me from his garden over at his home on the Guice Road farm. He wanted me to have some of the plants from his plentiful rhubarb bed because the field in which I would be gardening was once, he hinted, a plethora of rhubarb. “I want you to take some of this rhubarb home with you and put it in that field of yours. When I was growin’ up, that field was almost plumb full of rhubarb. That was our rhubarb patch. More rhubarb...

When I came into the woods to live a self-sufficient life, I thought of myself as a pacifist. I had lived for thirty years without killing, intentionally, another living thing other than ants, spiders, and a few snakes—which were acts of unconsciousness during my youth. Years later, I became a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and went on to protest nonviolently against that war. All this was based on my belief in the kind of pacifism that was exhibited by Gandhi—who, interestingly enough, got his ideas on civil disobedience and nonviolence from reading Emerson and Thoreau. I...

I awake from a sound spring sleep to the noise of knocking at my cabin door. It’s still dark outside. In my half-conscious state, my mind immediately leaps to Poe’s poem “The Raven”: “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, / As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.” I am slow to move, and the knocking comes again before I pull myself out of bed and ramble over cold wood floors to the door. Opening it, I see Horace Pace standing out in the dooryard. “I’m goin’ down to the river to fish....

While the subject of distilled liquids is well documented here in the southern Appalachians, everyone has their own story when it comes to the devil’s drink. And what stories they are! I could probably fill these pages with nothing other than the tall tales I have heard about local moonshiners and their product—which might be a more entertaining read than what I am writing about my solitary life in the woods. In fact these woods reek of fermented corn and the smoke of gunpowder from bygone days. And barrel rings, old steel drums, and remnants of copper stills can...

Standing in the middle of Zero’s field, covered from head to toe with bees, I thought I was having a heart attack. I had been up at the edge of the field working the hives. Checking for new honey. In trying to lift the uppermost super gently off the top of the hive, I had inadvertently lifted not only the top super but the lower one as well, as the bees had sealed the two supers and the queen excluder divider with wax. The lower super stayed glued to the upper super for only a second before it came loose...

People like to talk. And people like to talk about each other. Such is the case in a small mountain community. If the adage “everyone knows what everyone else is doing” ever applied, it applies to the borough of Saluda and its environs. In a part of the world where the oral tradition and the art of storytelling is still prevalent, some of the best tales, of course, are true stories. And in a land where truth is indeed stranger than fiction, yarns and rumors abound. Over time some tales find their way into the realm of oral history and...

Returning to these mountains three years ago, I immediately took up the literature that was created here and marks the place: Horace Kephart (Our Southern Highlanders), William Bartram (Travels), James Mooney (Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee), Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again). In Kephart one passage in particular spoke to me and my new life here in the woods:

I came to dwell in the wilderness, not as one fleeing or hiding, but that I might realize, in a mature age, a dream of youth. Here, in the wild wood, I have found...

With rain coming down in snarelike drumbeats on the tin roof of my cabin, Tm holed up this afternoon inside. Sitting here in my sheep-skin-lined nineteenth-century rocker held together with twine, grapevines, and Elmer’s glue, reading Donald Culross Peattie’s Flowering Earth and thinking deeply about the time I spent in Gary Snyder’s community up along the San Juan Ridge north of Nevada City in the Sierra foothills. In his book Peattie writes: “For every man there is some spot on earth, I think, which he has pledged himself to return to, some day, because he was so happy there once.”...

When visiting Cherokee people I have come to know over on the Qualla Boundary, as well as Snowbird Cherokee whom I know going back to my boyhood in Graham County, I’ve taken time to listen intently and have learned a lot about people, their cultures, and how one goes about living in the natural world. The Cherokee and the Scots-Irish settlers have dwelled side by side here in these mountains for generations, and while being similar in that both embrace clanlike social systems, pagan spiritual beliefs, and a fiercely independent self-sufficiency, they differ noticeably in perspective, mind-set, and attitude. I’ve...

When I returned to western North Carolina in 1979 after being gone for almost twenty years, on the surface things looked about the same as they had when I left. With the exception of a few new interstate roads, the countryside, the towns, the rivers, the wilderness that I enjoyed as a boy growing up in Graham County at first glance seemed to have survived intact. I reveled in this misperception as I began setting up house beside Zero’s field. Living wild and self-sufficiently and far from the “real world,” I allowed this illusion of an undisturbed environment to continue...

I’ve been having a hard time sleeping lately. It’s not because I’m not tired after working all day, fixing a meal, setting a fire for the night, and reading myself silly; it’s the overhead drama being played out in the ceiling at night. It begins as I turn down the wick of my kerosene lamp after climbing into bed. The lowering of the light must be the signal, as that is when the nuts begin to roll. Like a little bowling alley in my attic. The only thing missing is the crashing of pins. The round nuts roll, and something...

Today is the first day of spring, though you’d never guess it to look. What tricks nature plays on us and on our imagined schedules! On a day designated to celebrate the end of winter, when I might otherwise be out searching for the first blooming wildflowers or signs of early tree buds, Mother Nature gives us, instead, a winter wonderland: a blanket of new-fallen snow. In an hour’s time the whole mountain world has been clothed in a saggy white suit. From my writing desk at the window, I watch the snow fall. Big leafy flakes settle on branches...

While any time of year is a good time to walk in the woods, winter is probably the best. “When the snakes ain’t a-crawlin’,” as Zoro would say. This time of year, with copperheads and rattlesnakes deep in their dens, one doesn’t walk defensively or reach into blind crevasses with fear. With the leaves off the trees, the line of sight expands and vistas open up in the forest giving a better view of the lay of the land and of whatever is moving about. Rock outcroppings make themselves known, faint pathways expose themselves, and old home sites and log...

Surprise is part of the story of life in the woods. This and the constant reminder that at any moment we can become subject, even victim, to Nature’s overriding eccentricities and whims. This was never more evident than in May of 1981, when Nature let loose with one of its more memorable paroxysms.

It was a sunny late spring day with the temperature in the low seventies. A little warm for early May but otherwise normal for that time of year. I was outdoors doing some exterior decorating in the woods around the cabin—cutting the vines and underbrush, thinning...

It’s been a long slow year, my fourth here in the woods, and time has, from equinox to equinox, seemed to stand still. Last fall Zoro died. And then this spring Mac followed him to that old mountain farm in the sky. During the autumn days and weeks preceding Zoro’s death, I spent most of my time over at the Guices’ place. When Zoro was first diagnosed with terminal cancer and was feeling the effects of the disease that ravaged his body, I went regularly to help with jobs around the farm and house, and to keep Zoro and Bessie...

Not long after Mac died, the veil of protection lifted, confirming my premonitions and exposing the pristine world where I was living to the gremlins of postindustrial and monocultural America. Various family members appeared from across the country, and soon there was talk of clear-cutting the 250-acre mountain farm as well as cutting down the old orchard in order to graze some Scottish breed of long-haired cattle. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before the sounds of chainsaws and timber trucks could be heard from holler and ridgetop all across the land. While this was going on, I raised another...