Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain follows Inman, a confederate soldier deserting and walking back to his home on Cold Mountain. Today, Cold Mountain lies nearly entirely within the Shining Rock Wilderness of Pisgah National Forest. Frazier’s lyrical writing transports you back to 19th century Appalachia, but looking out into the Pisgah Forest can transport you into the world of Frazier’s novel. In turn, when Inman was in the hospital recovering from nearly fatal wounds, he read William Bartram’s Travels written in the 18th century to transport him back home.
Yellowstone Prong of the Pigeon River, Pisgah National Forest
“It was not a book that required following from front to back, and Inman simply opened it at random, as he had done night after night in the hospital to read until he was calm enough for sleep. The doings of that kind lone wanderer—called Flower Gatherer by the Cherokee in honor of his satchels full with plants and his attention all given to the growth of wild living things—never failed to ease his thoughts. The passage he turned to that morning became a favorite, and the first sentence that fell under his eye was this:
Continued yet ascending until I gained the top of an elevated rocky ridge, when appeared before a gap or opening which continued as the rough rocky road led me, close by the winding banks of a large rapid brook, which at length turning to the left, pouring down rocky precipices, glided off through dark groves and high forests, conveying streams of fertility and pleasure to the field below.”
Great Balsam Mountains, Pisgah National Forest
“Such images made Inman happy, as did the following pages wherein Bartram, ecstatic, journeyed on to the Vale of Cowee deep in the mountains, breathlessly describing a world of scarp and crag, ridge after ridge fading off blue into the distance, chanting at length as he went the names of all the plants that came under his gaze as if reciting the ingredients of a powerful potion. After a time, though Inman found that he had left the book and was simply forming the topography of home in his head. Cold Mountain, all its ridges and coves and watercourses. Pigeon River, Little East Fork, Sorrell Cove, Deep Gap, Fire Scald Ridge. He knew their names and said them to himself like the words of spells and incantations to ward off the things one fears the most.”
Cold Mountain, pages 10-11
Cold Mountain and the Shining Rock Wilderness
Inman reflects back to courting Ada. I think back to Kangua Road that we would take from Camp to head up into Pisgah, and perhaps to take the trail up to Shining Rock.
“—Look there, he said. He tipped his head back to take in Cold Mountain, where all was yet wintery and drab as a slate shingle. Inman stood looking up at the mountain and told her a story about it. He had heard it as a child from an old Cherokee woman who had successfully hidden from the army when they scoured the mountains, gathering the Indians in preparation for driving them out on the Trail of Tears. . . . [T]he tale . . . was about a village called Kangua that many years ago stood at the fork of the Pigeon River. It it long since gone and no trace remains other than potsherds that people sometimes find, looking for stickbait at the river edge.
One day a man looking like any other man came into this Kanuga. . . .
—What town is it you come from? they asked.
—Oh, you have never seen it, he said, even though it is just there. And he pointed south in the direction of Datsunalasgunyi, which the snake woman said was the name they had for Cold Mountain and did not signify either cold or mountain at all but something else entirely.
—There is no village up there, the people said.
—Oh yes, the stranger said. The Shining Rocks are the gateposts to our country.
. . . .
. . . I come to invite you to live with us. Your place is ready. There is room for all of you. But if you are to come, everyone must first go into the town house, and fast seven days and never leave during that time and never raise the war cry. When that is done, climb to the Shining Rocks and they will open as a door and you may enter our country and live with us.
. . . .
On the morning of the seventh day the people began climbing Dasunalasgunyi toward the Shining Rocks. They arrived just at sunset. The rocks were white as a snowdrift, and when the people stood before them, a cave opened like a door, and it ran to the heart of the mountain. But inside was light rather than dark. In the distance, inside the mountain, they could see an open country. A river. Rich bottomland. Broad fields of corn. A valley town, the house in long rows, a town house atop a pyramidal mount, people in the square-ground dancing. The faint sound of drums. . . . “
Cold Mountain, pages 197-198.
Mississippian mound builders had lived in these mountains, and had built mounts. Later the Cherokee lived here until most were forcibly removed. Some survived in the Smokies west of here. People now “owned” this land. Eventually, and after the time of Inman and Ada, the Vanderbilt family would own most of this land, and then it became the first National Forest. If you’ve seen the TV series Westworld, a scene of the Native American Ghost Nation leaving Westworld seems to be described by the Cherokee woman’s story that Inman tells.
Autumn fog on the Yellowstone Prong
“They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on great slabs of rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the lip of a cliff, for the smell of the thin air spoke of considerable height, though the fog closed off all visual check of loftiness. The rain tailed off into a thin drizzle, and then turned to hard pellets of snow that rattled against the stones. They stopped to watch it fall, but it lasted only a minute and then the fog started lifting, moving fast, sheets of fog sweeping on an updraft. Blue patches of sky opened above him, and Inman craned his head back to look at them. He reckoned it was going to be a day of just every kind of weather.
Pisgah Ridge view from John Rock bald and the Davidson River Gorge
“Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the lower world was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He was indeed at the lip of a cliff, and he took one step back. A river gorge—apparently the one he had climbed out off—stretched blue and purple beneath him, and he suspected he could spit and nearly hit where he’d walked the day before yesterday. The country around was high, broken.”
Looking Glass Rock from John Rock
“Inman looked about and was startled to see a great knobby mountain forming up out of the fog to the west, looming into the sky. . . On its north flank was a figuration of rocks, the profile of an immense bearded man reclining across the horizon.
—Has that mountain got a name? he said
—Tanawha, the woman said. The Indians called it that.
Inman looked at the big grandfather mountain and then he looked beyond it to the lesser mountains as they faded off into the southwest horizon, bathed in faint smoky haze. Waves of mountains.”
Cold Mountain, page 209
Autumn view from Pisgah Ridge
Near the end of the book, Inman still carries his coverless, rolled up copy of Bartram’s Travels, and reads from it by candlelight in an old chicken house.
“A picture of the land Bartram detailed leapt dimensional into Inman’s mind. Mountains and valleys on and on forever. A gnarled and taliped and snaggy landscape where man might be seen as an afterthought. Inman had many times looked across the view Bartram described. It was the border country stretching endlessly north and west from the slope of Cold Mountain. Inman knew it well. He had walked its contours in detail, had felt all its seasons and registered its colors and smelled its smells. Bartram was only a traveler and knew but the one season of his visit and the weather that happened to fall in a matter of days.
But to Inman’s mind the land stood not as he’d seen it and known it for all his life, but as Bartram had summed it up. The peaks now stood higher, the vales deeper than they did in truth. Inman imagined the fading rows of ridges standing pale and tall as cloudbanks, and he built the contours of them and he colored them, each a shade paler and bluer until, when he had finally reached the invented ridgeline where it faded into sky, he was asleep.”
Cold Mountain, page 276
