At the far end of the living tunnel, beyond it and in the open, under a shimmer of summer sun or behind a curtain of whirling snow or within a lavender mist of twilight condensing toward darkness, stood the house. An austere and ancient clapboarded farmhouse, taller than wide when seen from the road, it had filigreed porchwork, a steep-pitched roof and on the roof lightning rods pointing straight up at the sun or stars; half the year there would be smoke winding out of the chimney and amber lamps burning behind the curtains of the windows.

Slinking toward me across the damp grass would come a familiar dog, always older, always more arthritic than she was ten years before. Too timid to growl, too shy to bark, she always remembered me. Her job was to guard those doors that, in nearly thirty years, had never been locked. Nobody even knew if there was a key.

Home again. Time to slop the hogs, Paw.

That’s what going back to the Big Smokies always reminded me of. That hill country in North Carolina, eastern Kentucky and eastern Tennessee seems today something like Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, thirty years ago. Like Seneca and Powhatan, like Home, Pa., where many of us were once brung up. All of it Appalachian, winter or summer, then and now. Land of the breathing trees, the big woods, the rainy forests.

Treat Yourself To The Best

That’s what it says on the side of most any barn in these parts. “Chew Mail Pouch,” it says. “Treat Yourself to the Best.” That way a farmer gets at least one wall of his barn painted free, by the tobacco company. Coming down through the extreme southwest corner of Virginia into Tennessee, we saw that legend many times, as often as “Jesus Saves” and “Get Right with God.”

When I saw the red claybanks, though, I knew I was in the South for sure. Land of romance and myth, of chitlin and chigger, of country-cured ham, Dr. Pepper and Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken, finger-lickin’ good. Of good poets, too, like Newton Smith of Tuckasegee, for example, and brave good men like Harry Caudill of Letcher County. Homeland too and burial place of Thomas Wolfe. That alone justifies the existence of North Carolina.

Approaching Gatlinburg, Gateway to the Big Smokies, we drive down a highway whose shoulders are sprinkled and ditches lined with glittering aluminum litter. Immortal beer can, immutable chicken basket, eternal plastic picnic spoon. At night the round ends of the cans gleam in your headlights like the glowing eyes of foxes. The hillsides are carpeted with a layer of automobile hulks. Trentville, Tennessee, where all old cars come to die, explained a man at a filling station. Poor hillbillies buy them used in Cleveland and Detroit, get laid off and come home, abandon them when the clutch gives out, the valves burn up, the retreads peel off, the pistons freeze within the worn-out rings.

Orphans. Another thing we notice coming into the South is this: while most of the farmhouses get smaller and flimsier, a few of them get bigger and fancier. Along the road, unpainted frame shacks one story high, but here and there, now and then on a hilltop, you see a grand brick plantation house with white columns framing its entrance, the house centered in a spacious park of lawn and shrub and tree, approached by a winding asphalt drive. Power.