Too Busy Praising God

The eighty-four years had passed swiftly. He had learned the habits of the Appalachian wildlife by trodding the game trails of his mountain since boyhood. He knew the secret hiding places of the trout that lurked in the dark pools of John’s River. Wagon teams were a familiar part of his boyhood life. He had driven them; the big stout Morgan horses, up the Blowing Rock Mountain with their bellies stretched out just over the roadbed as they struggled to move the produce-filled wagon up the steep grade. The mountains were his life. His father’s farm snuggled in a hidden valley sequestered between the rugged peaks of their blue mountains.

Each morning as he peered out of his gabled window he could see their jagged tops where they allowed the sky to filter through their timbered barrier. Timber also played a large role in his life. After the farm crops were gathered in the fall, he and his brothers cut trees on the mountainsides and using his horses, drug the forest’s bounty of chestnuts, maple, and hickory trees down into the valley to the waiting teamsters. They in turn loaded the giant tree trunks onto their logging carts and transported them to the busy sawmill in Colletsville.

Hard money came just that way, hard. The strenuous work developed his muscular frame and provided the strength to comb the hollows and ridges for deer and squirrels to supplement the family larder. His mother’s flaky buttermilk biscuits helped too. And still the years passed swiftly.

Life went on pretty much the same in the hidden valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. Prosperity in the rest of America plunged into the depths of depression during the late twenties and thirties. Strong leaders began to emerge around the world. The influences of Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, and Franklin Roosevelt were beginning to change the world’s societies. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs included the CCC or Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC offered young Americans hard money in return for their labor in building highways, parks, and governmental buildings across the nation. Adventure coupled with the lure of wages beckoned him and he joined the Corps.

He met a young city girl in Asheville. They married, her urban ways influencing him, changing his views, and opening new vistas. But still the mountains beckoned and on each holiday and vacation for the rest of his life he would return to the familiar game trails of his boyhood.

I came to live with them, this highland couple, when he was older at thirty-one winters. I grew up with them and as a boy; he and I roamed the forests of the mountains and fished for the wily trout in John’s River.

My education consisted of learning her love of books and his adoration of the wilderness. During the cold days of winter she read and warmed our home and when the buds of spring arrived, he and I would tramp the forests and wade creeks until the first snows of winter.

We hunted and roamed together for many seasons. Again the years passed swiftly. He didn’t know it but time had grown short. He opened the screen door and stepped from the porch and paused, savoring the freshness of a new summer’s day. He bent over to pull the axe from the nearby chopping block and as he did, a small blood vessel in the back of his head burst.

He lay in a hospital bed for weeks unable to move the strong muscles on one side of his body. Each day he allowed his mind to wander the forests of his mountains while he viewed them from the windows of his mind and peered through the window of the hospital at the beckoning grass and trees outside. I was with him there, from day to day.

The end was approaching. He and I both knew it. Time was short. I began our last conversation.

“I’ll join you shortly." I said. He looked at me and waited. “There’s got to be mountains and rivers up there. God wouldn’t leave anything as beautiful as that out of heaven." He sort of nodded and I continued.

“You and I have hunted and fished over a large part of this country. It has been good." We both smiled.

“We will do more up there, you and I, with new places to hunt." His last words to me were spoken then.

“No," He said. “No time then, we’ll be too busy praising God."