Today was my first day
working for the National Park Service! It was a day for getting oriented – to
government protocols for using computers, but also to the beautiful Mountain Farm
Museum and Oconaluftee River.
The museum is a collection of original structures – a house, barn, blacksmith
shop, corn crib, spring shed, and others from dwellings originally scattered
across these mountains. Hogs and chickens mill about, and original tools and
other artifacts depict the way of life of (mostly white) settlers in these
parts. The GRSM (the official government acronym for this park) has largely
tiptoed around the Cherokee story. As Bess says, “we don’t want to tell their
story for them, and they have a visitor center devoted to that themselves.” My
colleagues express a desire to incorporate Cherokee history into the park
narrative, but don’t feel adequately equipped to initiate a co-authorship. 
As I meandered through the
Visitor Center I paused to chat with two older
couples relaxing on the porch. They were very interested in my Indian heritage,
my non-Indian husband, how we met, why we lived in Singapore, complimented us on our
plans to have both adventures and kids, and expressed astonishment at how many
places I’d lived. As I walked inside, and looked at photographs of the old
settlers, I thought about the people who spent their whole lives in this place.
Tilling the same soil, making sorghum molasses with the same neighbors,
reshaping the same piece of iron into tools and horse shoes every year. And
even about those visitors I met, who lived their whole lives in Kentucky, and thought
how peculiar it was for me to feel connected to so many different places.
Walking back to the office
I spied a large Indian family, picnicking under a tree behind our building,
next to the river. My colleagues observed that Indian visitors and those of
other, certain ethnicities, seem especially content to seek out a quiet,
undesigned and ungroomed space to commune with nature and each other. (I didn’t
tell them that I’d witnessed the same group in a shouting match in which one
young man stormed off, followed closely by two relatives!) I thought about my
own family’s tradition of walking/biking/roller-skating to Singapore’s
Botanical Gardens every Sunday when I was a kid, about the African-American
families barbequing in Anacostia Park, the Salvadorian and Mexican families at
every picnic table in Rock Creek, and it made me glad to be a brown woman
working in the service of this park, and donning the volunteer uniform come
tomorrow.
At lunch I met a volunteer
from the area, who I asked about the local old time scene. She was a great
resource, and pointed me to two upcoming music festivals, and the monthly jam
that happens right here in the Oconaluftee
Visitor Center.
The South District supervisor is a budding guitar player, and we stoked each
others’ enthusiasm, exchanging song titles, sheet music, and stories about
communities of musicians. I charged home with my park radio and uniform, pulled
out my mandolin and played through all my tunes that appeared on the
Oconaluftee jam list. My fingers and hands are out of shape, but eager.
I tossed some spinach,
almonds, and blueberries into my tiffin, packed it into my bag along with my
cell phone, and rode a few miles into town to eat dinner on Cherokee Welcome
Center bench and call
Brian. Riding home I took the Oconaluftee River Trail, confirming my original
assumption that my 3-speed Kabuki is not well-suited for trail-riding. I passed
a jogger, dog-walkers, and fishermen, finally riding back across the Mountain Farm Museum
field. What a magical time of day, spent gently rumbling beside that tall grass,
golden in late afternoon light.
Reading about the unique biodiversity of this park – the
sheer numbers of rare, threatened, and resurrected animal and plant species
–made my head spin. I sat outside at a picnic table, under a hemlock that has
not yet succumbed to the hemlock woolly adelgid, needles falling on the pages
as I read, and marveled that such a place as this exists at all, and that I
should be so fortunate that its lifetime intersects with mine. The words from a
Tabasco Donkeys song, which paraphrase Edward Abbey, are in my head constantly:
“it’s not enough to fight for the land, it’s even more important to enjoy it
while you can, while it’s still here.”
Reading about the various environmental threats affecting
the park also filled me with a sense of inevitability that made me wonder how
environmental scientists maintain a sense of optimism. My hat goes off to
those, like my sister, who know more about what damage is being done, and what
it would take to slow or halt it --- they must know, even more keenly than the
rest of us, how remarkably precious it all is.
