December 14, 2005

My environmental professor once ridiculed these mountains. He had climbed Mt. McKinley and many other very high mountains, and in climbing them he had lost several fingers to frostbite. He was sitting at the head of the table when he did the ridiculing. “Those mountains?” he said one day of the southern Appalachians. “Those are hills.” He waved a hand dismissively. It had only two whole fingers.

I’m in a warm hotel room in Blairsville, Georgia, which occupies a mostly level spot in the southern Applachians. In the summer, tourists come. There is much fishing and buying of split-sapling furniture. In the winter, the locals get the town back and Blairsville becomes the type of place where you would like to sit in front of a hardwood-fed fire with a furry dog and a mug of chocolate, add some whiskey if you’re feeling frisky. Hardwood floors, of course, and the fire must crackle. You might also add a comely young woman, if you’re a young fellow with a tendency to think along such lines.

It’s funny how winter changes our choices of adjectives. Not only does “newfallen” make its annual appearance, but words like “cozy” and “comely” become more popular. Winter changes the way we think about things. Earlier tonight, as I was sitting in “Cook’s Country Kitchen,” a blonde-haired girl of about twenty walked in with her mother. I was eating alone. The girl was a little wider abeam than I usually prefer, but tonight she looked nice. I smiled at her. After her uninterested and slightly bovine return glance, I had the good fortune of being able to enjoy my own thoughts through dinner. I thought of a skinny man I once knew. I do not have to worry about him reading this, because he cannot read, but he was educated in other ways, as we shall soon see. He had a taste for wintertime women. “Jeb,” he would tell me, “my wife weigh 250 pounds. When it get cold at night I just curl up under her and go right to sleep.”

Tonight I will have cause to appreciate his wisdom, for I will be sleeping alone. Not even my beloved bird dog, Chap, is with me. But I suspect I will sleep soundly, because I am going deer hunting in the mountains tomorrow and it will be very cold. Something about cold mornings makes warm nights very restful. That is one of the benefits of winter. But I believe that the benefits of a wintertime worldview should be balanced against the need to preserve one’s digits, which is why I’m glad I’m in the southern Appalachians instead of on Mt. McKinley or on any other mountain tall enough to be called by its own name rather than that of the range to which it belongs. Not that it has helped me any, but no Appalachian peak is so tall that one cannot carry a warm ladyfriend up it.