When I commented to one of the town’s leading citizens, a fine old Southern gentleman, about the perpetual stink in the air, he replied, “Why, son, that there smells lahk money to me.” Smug and smiling all the way to the bank, where—I hope—he drops dead on the doorstep. Pascal said somewhere in words to this effect that in order to grasp the concept of the infinite we need only meditate for a while upon human stupidity.

Looking at the foul mess industry has made of a town like Sylva, I am also moved to reflect, once again, that capitalism, while it sounds good in theory, just doesn’t work. Look about you and see what it has done to our country. Mene, mene, tekel…

I don’t know. One suffers from hope. Maybe we can learn something from what we have done to this land. Probably not. And in any case, is it any better elsewhere? No matter in what nation I lived I am certain I would find much to detest. All big social organizations are ugly, brutal, inhuman—prone to criminal acts which no man or community of men, on their own, would even think of. But just the same I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from hope. For me that’s patriotism.

Enough of these gloomy thoughts. We must hasten on to Tuckasegee, Judy and Suzie and I, to visit old Newt Smith and his marvelous chestnut pigpen again. And after that—home.

And where might that be? Where is home? That old gray gaunt Gothic farmhouse along a red-dog road in the hills of northern Appalachia? No more; never again. Where then?

A Russian writer named Prishvin said that “Home is where you have found your happiness.” I think I know where that may be, at least for myself. I’ll reveal this much: it has something to do with those mountains, those forests, those wild, free, lost, full-of-wonder places that rise yet (may they always!) above the squalor of the towns.

Appalachia, we’ll be back.

My Life as a P.I.G., or The True Adventures of Smokey the Cop

THE SMOKEY we’re talking about is not the natty chap in the sharp sombrero, bane of truck drivers, who lurks behind billboards along the Interstate. No, the one under discussion here is the fellow in the suit of forest green who hands you the ticket, leaning out of his box office, when you buy your admission to Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Great Smokies or any one of our many national parks. The Crown Jewels of America, as someone once said. No doubt. Guarded, patrolled, looked after, explained more or less by the rangers of the National Park Service. Also known, formerly, as tree fuzz, tree pigs or Smokey Bears—no kin of that other Smokey Bear (the famous ursine bore) who used to serve as a fire-fighting symbol of the Forest Service until he died (of tertiary syphilis) in a Washington, D.C., zoo.