Everything I Know About North Carolina, I Learned From Moonshine
Originally published at RJCantrell.com. Please leave any comments there.
Amanda’s a college student again, and I’ll be damned if I let an excuse to have a Spring Break pass me by. Upon her suggestion, we decided to pick up where we left off at our eight-day hike of the Georgia Appalachian Trail and see if we can’t run across any… tar… or whatever else North Carolina is famous for. With these visions of glory in our minds, we set off. If by “set off” you mean, see snow in the forecast and decide instead to frolic madly in a snowy Piedmont Park, then gorge ourselves on $1 beers and $5 buckets of oysters at Park Tavern. Then we set off, except for really reals.
What you’ll notice about North Carolina the first time you see a topographical map of it is that it’s pretty smooth the whole way across except for its western border, dripping in chunky little mountains. Those would be the Appalachian Mountains, formerly the tallest in the world, and exactly where our walk took us. I was a bit apprehensive; the cold weather raised my pack weight up to 35 pounds, we were only bringing our ultralight single-wall tent, and the sort of people you can meet in the state’s backwoods are downright terrifying to someone like me who got a real purty mouth.
Parking at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, by the gorgeous, shallow, and relatively tame Nantahala River, put me in the perfect mood to go on a kayaking trip, and letting thousands of gallons of water gently propel you through the valley seemed an infinitely better idea than trudging up and down mountains on only two of my four meatsticks, but just as soon as I lost myself in that reverie, I was greeted by our shuttle to the south: the absolute best conversion van the 1970’s had to offer, and one Ron Haven.
Ron Haven is a figure that looms large in Franklin, NC and over the 50 miles of AT surrounding it in either direction. Even though he looks like the bastard lovechild of Ron Jeremy and Jed Clampett, Ron is the most disarmingly charming man you’ll ever meet, so long as you’re agreeing to attend his FREE Hiker Bash and pay the required $10-per-person-per-day donation. As best as I can tell, his Hiker Bash is to be just like the ATC’s annual Trail Days festival, but smaller, with less things to do, and directly profiting Ron, but I’m sure I’m being cynical. He’s really just putting it on because he loves Franklin, NC. He has to - he owns most of it. That’s right, owning over 100 properties in town (and hundreds more across the country), Ron’s come back to Franklin to drive his crusty van between his hotels and trailheads, and to re-popularize the second-person plural “you’uns.” He’s apparently lived a Forrest Gump-esque life of intrigue and adventure, but nobody calls him on the truthfulness of his stories because they tend to be amusing. “Did you know that the US Government is based after the Cherokee tribal councils?” he’d ask us, after regaling us with tales of how 1920’s moonshiners used to mutilate and burn revenuers alive as a warning. “Well, no, Great Britain had had a bicameral parliament and tribunals of judges for over a hundred years by the time-” you might be thinking, but before you even think of finishing such a heretical thought, Ron desperately needs to know if you know the native language word for ‘mountain.’ Because he does, and it’s important for you to know too.
$60 lighter, and with the smell of the Haven Budget Inn smashed into our clothes, we began our hike in a gap filled with ice needles. Ice needles (related to and sometimes confused with ice flowers) are probably common in colder areas, but this was the first time I’d ever seen them; they’re patches of hundreds of filament-like (and sometimes dagger-like) upward pointing strands of ice, and rather fatiguing to one’s feet to walk on all day. Worse if you’re a dog. Many of them were quite beautiful, but you’d never know that from seeing my pictures because the batteries we thought were fresh were actually nearly dead, and gave us only about three shots before giving up the ghost. It was a unique experience and somehow refreshing for me to hike over the frozen streams that ran across (and sometimes along) the trail, often with tiny air bubbles slipping downstream like migrating fish through the water below, and to plow through the five-inch-deep snowdrifts that built up in the bends. What you may already know if you are of a more northerly persuasion than I is that, with the sun so low in the sky during winter, only the equator-facing sides of mountains tend to melt their snow, so a hike like this gives you a multitude of opportunities to turn a corner from a sunny, dry side of a valley into a fresh white frozen ramp of snow, howling winds pervading.
Monday and Tuesday nights were probably two of the coldest nights I’ve ever had the misfortune of spending outside a real house. Monday’s low dropped to three degrees Fahrenheit, and Tuesdays was a comparatively-miraculous fifteen. The shelters along the AT (spaced every 8-10 miles so that slower hikers can reach one per day, and faster hikers can reach two) are typically three-sided mouse-infested lean-tos made of logs, and the ones in NC are no different. If it helps describe how cold I felt, I couldn’t even read the book I’d brought. I’ve never been so cold I couldn’t concentrate or move my eyes slightly side to side, so instead the entertainment of the evening was to alternately remove each glove so I could shove a numb hand into my armpit to restore feeling to my fingers. With the appropriate gear, I made it through the night in better shape than I’d expected, only awoken twice by mice chewing on my pack.
Wednesday was a bit warmer, as if trying to tell Georgia State that their Spring Break was too early, and the hike was a bit more pleasant. It’s important to note that, in the cold, sweating is the worst thing you can do. As soon as you stop moving, or as soon as you descend into a windy valley, that sweat will cool you down far too much and can possibly trigger hypothermia. It’s therefore important to notice when you’re about to start sweating and remove a layer of clothing, regardless of how cold you are. This would explain why you’d have seen me standing in the snow Wednesday, still frigid, in my underwear, removing my lower base layer, an action that is as singularly depressing as any I’ve ever done. Wednesday ended well, though, because as we neared our destination, we were visited by the heavenly host.
Trail angels, as they style themselves, are typically retired middle-class caucasians who have nothing better to do with their time and money than feed and shelter hikers. The 70-pound expedition-class 12-person tent with stove that we came across in the woods belonged to one such fella named Apple, who lives in the woods full-time for a month or two out of the year catering to northbound through-hikers. Apple, who is really one of the nicest and most dedicated people I’ve met in awhile, goes by his trail name. Trail names are one of the more interesting facets of a through-hiker’s life, because among a self-selecting crowd of people who think it’s a good idea to walk 2200 miles across the country (and sometimes right back to the start), you are not memorable. You have to have a clever call sign for people to remember you by, so it’s considered good form to do things that are really embarrassing or stupid so that others can give you one. You really want to do this, because if you don’t, you’ll be forced to come up with your own, and if my experience is telling, that leaves you with a 90% chance of calling yourself “Lone Wolf.” By the time showering once a week becomes natural to you, it’s not much further to get used to calling people Booger and Tatanka with a straight face. That night, we stayed with a representative sample of hikers, which is to say 19 year olds and retired pensioners, but at least this time we had 1/3000″ of plastic between us and the elements, and the residual heat of a stove to dry out our socks.
The highlight of my time in the angel’s tent was definitely the moonshine. Tatanka has been hiking the trail on-and-off for 30 years and apparently knows everyone. He’s prototyping tents and gear for a few designers, is good friends with Miss Janet (legendary for running a hiker hostel in Erwin, TN, but recently brought into the Havensphere to run one in Franklin, NC for Ron), and knows most of the good moonshiners in the South. “Good moonshine” would have been an oxymoron to me until the thermosfull he brought to the angel’s tent, because most of the gustatory abortions I’ve had in the past wouldn’t have passed muster in a prison, but apparently the cream of the crop have been perfecting and jealously protecting their recipes for decades. The shine he brought had a bit of a delicate floral aroma like sake, and similarly had a taste that was simultaneously complex but not strong. Extremely smooth, A bit herbacious, with very light citrus notes, I enjoyed it neat and felt it was wasted in coffee. Having less burn than cheap tequila, a lighter body and significantly better mouthfeel than vodka, with a better finish than many scotches I’ve had, I’d easily add this to my liquor cabinet if I could find it again.
Tearfully leaving Apple and his horde of Resse’s cups, we had to beat feet to make up the mileage we’d lost on Wednesday by stopping early, and so we did. The highlight of the day Thursday was the watchtower on Wesser Bald, from which you could see at least 40 miles, and three forest fires that we later found were controlled burns. Even to someone like myself without a strong affinity for nature, it’s depressing to see a large swath of smoke rising from the forest, but seeing all the way up to the Smokies was worth it. Here is where you see the reason for the weather changes every 20 minutes, because of the ridges of hills that run into a single main ridge of each mountain. At the risk of making you hate me, the topography of the mountains looks rather like that of Kalimdor’s Barrens, but with more trees and less dinosaurs. Most of the day Thursday was a controlled fall into the Nantahala Gorge, sometimes requiring jumps down piles of boulders along a narrow ledge walkway. My knee didn’t appreciate this, but my other alternative was to be one of the people every year who call 911 to pick them up in a helicopter because they don’t want to walk down a mountain.
About four hours, or 40 cc’s of fluid in my knee, later, we found ourselves back at the NOC, still drooling over their nice selection of creek boats and playboats. Drooling was all we could do, because the NOC’s beautiful scenery and perfect location has you by the short and curlies, and they know it. They won’t stay open for a second longer than they have to, won’t stop shutting down the register if a famished hiker walks through the door, and generally won’t give you the time of day unless you’re meaningfully contributing to their bottom line. To spite them, we chose not to eat at their restarant (slightly famous for their “Sherpa,” a bachelor-chow mix of rice, beans, cheese, and whatever else is in the fridge that day), and drove defiantly to a Taco Bell instead. After all, my calculations had me at a 5,000 calorie deficit for the week, and I never let the opportunity for a guilt-free Grilled Stuft Burrito pass me by.