Fairweather Lewis by Fairweather Lewis

This week at Take This Tune, our theme is "love of place", riffing on those poignant words Gerald O'Hara says to his impetuous daughter Scarlett about holding on to their plantation, Tara: "It'll come to you, this love of the land. There's no getting away from it, if you're Irish" and on the Damon Black song "Arkansas" as performed by the Wilburn Brothers.

With a family history in East Tennessee that goes back to the Lost State of Franklin, you'd think that this little plot of ground, less than an acre, where our family home of more than forty years stands, would be the place where I'm rooted. But strangely, my heart has put down roots someplace else, in a place I saw first in a painting.

In the mid 1980s, at a crafts fair in Varnell, Georgia, I ran across a print, from an original painting by the artist Ida Pryor, of the John Oliver cabin in Cades Cove--that beautiful valley that is the crown jewel of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I was just out of college then, working my first job, and money was, due to my dad's illness, very tight, but I shelled out twenty-five dollars for the print. There was something in that building--less so than the painting itself--that drew me to it, heart and soul.

At the time, I had never been to Cades Cove and never expected to go; it was a round trip of over a hundred miles and we never had vehicles capable of making it there and back. Then, a few years later, a friend took me to the Cove for the first time. Those of you who have been into that gorgeous lush place know that the John Oliver cabin, built c. 1818, is the first stopping place around the Loop Road; you can walk to it through field or woods. We went through the field that time, and came back through the woods. But I remember standing at one of the windows, looking out over the Cove, and hearing the words "this belongs to me" in one of those crazy places that lurk in our souls.

It was not only there, though, that I felt that odd sense of ownership. I felt it everywhere I went that day. In the graveyard of the Primitive Baptist Church, I had the single most memorable psychic experience of my life. At the grist mill in the Visitors' Center/Cable House area, I stood looking out the little window at the back of the building, listening to the flume turn the wheel, watching the leaves, in full fall glory, drop into the little stream out there, and knew that sound as I know the sound of my mother's voice, or my own heartbeat.

Now Fairweather, I can hear some of you ask, how can you feel that way about a place two million people, in most years, tromp through? How can you feel rooted in a place where a thriving, prosperous, and anything BUT primitive mountain community was uprooted and forced out in 1937 after the area was deemed essential to the formation of the GSMNP?

I don't know. I just know my heart says, for some God knows what reason, that Cades Cove is home.

I've been many times since then. And always, as long as I'm there, I'm home.

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Take This Tune is a weekly meme hosted by my friend and fellow music lover, Jamie. Each Friday, a song/video is posted there, and participants are asked to write about their thoughts, associations, or impressions that spring from that song. If you'd like to join in, please click on the link above. Full instructions are given there.