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Hot Boiled Peanuts
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IN THE AUTUMN CHILL, they seem
to undulate like a thousand giant nudes reclining under cover of trees
turning to flame. Long before the underground collision that formed
the mountains of the American West, the Appalachians had heaved up and
been smoothed by wind and the raindrops of a million storms.
The mountains begin on Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula, then run 1,500 miles through the eastern United States to their southernmost reaches in Alabama. There is no drama to their demise, no sheered-off cliffs, no waterfalls, no pile of rubble. Here, in the words of a toothless old codger rocking on the front porch of a gas station store, "they fairly peter out all the way to Birmingham." Macon County 9 curves along rivers, farms, and pastures where cows startle and buck at the unfamiliar noise of my motorcycle. Kudzu vines climb tree trunks in an intimate embrace that slowly strangles each tree. The topmost strands drip in heavy green clumps from the victim's branches, which will eventually break and fall with a soft thud in the carpet of vines below . . . . . . read the rest of this story in American Borders - the book
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