Smokey Mountain Wedding/July 13, 2013

July 15.  Our travels across the USA have taken us on a short jaunt to the Smokey Mountains of eastern Tennessee for Melanie’s great-nephew’s wedding.  Zack is a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Tennessee and now married to a lovely veterinarian, also a graduate of the university.  Family and friends of the bride and groom gathered together for a weekend of celebration at Montvale, a camp residence just south of Knoxville.     Unwilling —really, too accustomed to creature comforts— to rough it in the communal living setting of a cabin, we opted to spend the weekend in a nearby motel.    Friday afternoon was spent at the camp with the usual wedding preparations.    We whiled away the afternoon meeting new friends, playing games, and drinking Zack’s homemade brews.  I particularly liked the oak brew.  Dinner was a communal feast of individually aluminum foiled wrapped vegetables steamed over a large campfire with grilled hamburgers.  The titillating homemade brews enhanced the taste of the meal making for a memorable evening.   Early Saturday evening, at the top of a grassy knoll under a cupola, Zack and Greta exchanged simple wedding vows of love and respect.   As the wedding celebrant noticed, it was a union of both ends of the Appalachian Trail, Greta from Tennessee and Zack from Maine.   After the customary wedding pictures, the radiant couple served the felicitous guests a sumptuous meal.    The wedding cake was a potpourri of eleven cakes baked by friends.  Later in the evening, Melanie and I, and Melanie’s brother and his wife, danced a waltz to the fiddle of Melanie’s great-niece, Regan, from Maine.  We were surprised no one else joined us.

Sunday morning, we recommenced our journey to North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest to visit former Liberal Arts and Sciences dean, Miriam Shillingsburg and her husband, Peter.  Their home sits on the side of the mountain at an elevation of 3500 feet.  Built several years ago in the round, they live off-grid.  On Monday morning, Peter and I went out in his newly purchased Kubota to check on his hydro-electricgenerator and water collectors.  Climbing up and down the mountainside through thickets of brush, dense foliage and muddy ruts was quite a thrill.  The Kubota met the challenges beautifully.  This is our second visit to Miriam and Peter’s mountain hideaway.  Peter took great pride in showing me the amenities added since our last visit.  Reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe wilderness survival, there are the plantings of fruit trees and berry bushes; but what is most interesting are the ingenuously planned stockpiling of rocks as a home for rat snakes and the purposefully built bat houses.  These “pet” habitats attract snakes and bats to control rodents and mosquitoes.  No doubt, these two English professors are living the liberating effect of their liberal arts education.  Adding to their home’s interest is the wooden floor laid out by Peter from trees on their property.  The beautiful pie-shaped pattern is made of hickory, chestnut oak, red oak, sugar maple, hard maple, ash and cherry.

Tonight’s chili dinner is being prepared by Miriam and Melanie in the outdoor fireplace; the heavy black kettle hovers gingerly over the lapping flames on a swinging arm.  We’ll sit on the raised deck that wraps around their home at the height of the leafy tree branches.  Joining us for dinner is George, the retired art professor from Florida State University who lives about halfway up the mountain.  Earlier in the day, Peter drove his tractor smoothing the rutted trail that leads to their homestead. At the moment, we’re sitting in their glass-enclosed living room drinking gin and vodka tonics.  I’ve discovered that moonshine, which is distilled legally in North Carolina, is a recommended substitute for gin or vodka.  Peter is regaling us with stories of his childhood in Colombia, South America.  Our wide-ranging, animated conversation covered many topics, one that quixotically turned to Wilfred Owens’ poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est” about WWI.  We arrived there circuitously when Miriam called Peter “sweet”, to which I playfully uttered, “Pedro es dulce.”