Winter gets longer every day, it seems. Groundhog Day Saturday--but whether the little critter sees his shadow or not, it still means six more weeks of winter.

For all that I laugh about the South Pacific, and retreat to Hawaii when the cold breaks my laughter and my heart, my favorite place on earth is Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I've blogged about it before--about the baby's grave in the cemetery at the Primitive Baptist Church--but I've never blogged about the feeling I got standing at the window in the John Oliver cabin--one of the earliest surviving structures in the Cove--as if I were looking across a place that once belonged to me. I came back to the flatlands feeling that for the first time in my life, I had gone to my true home.

It feels that way every time I go back. Gonna be awhile this year; it's such a long trip, and hard to arrange things. But I can look at pictures and dream.

No illustrations for this one, friends: just songs and stories.

According to Wikipedia, the technical definition of a hobo is a wandering homeless person, usually a man, especially the ones who hop trains, riding on empty freight cars from place to place. A hobo would differentiate himself from a tramp--who would travel but not work--or a bum--who did neither. A hobo prided himself on doing both, but society at large seldom made such distinctions.

Although hobo culture (the derivation of the term hobo is hopelessly intricate, and I won't even attempt to untangle it) began to develop in the years after the Civil War, as a phenomenon its glory years were during the Great Depression, which began in 1929. Coincidentally, those years spanned the career of Jimmie Rodgers, a former railroad man himself, who met hoboes in the course of his work and turned their stories into songs of gentle ironic humor, pathos and poetry. His most famous songs of the hobo lifestyle are "Hobo Bill's Last Ride," "Hobo's Meditation," and "Waitin' For a Train." "Hobo Bill's Last Ride" is an especially sentimental but nonetheless affecting piece about a hobo who is dying, alone, on a boxcar, on a rainy winter's night. It concludes with a chilly comment on society's dismissive attitude toward these men who rode the rails:

There was no mother's longing to soothe his weary soul
He was just a railroad bum who died out in the cold.

That one has been covered by several singers, but none of them quite match up to the original; Hank Snow probably came closest.

I have already mentioned the Parton-Harris-Ronstadt cover of "Hobo's Meditation," with lead vocals by Linda Ronstadt; it's quirky and the harmonies are flawless. As for "Waitin' For a Train" my favorite cover was by Jim Reeves. Put off the train in Texas--"a state I dearly love"--by a brakeman, the hobo ends his song

My pocketbook is empty, my heart is full of pain
I'm a thousand miles away from home, waitin' for a train.

Hank Williams Sr. did a series of recitations in the course of his short career under a name that would be appropriate for a hobo--Luke the Drifter--and a few of his songs make reference to the hobo life, most particularly "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow." However, since the nameless protagonist of that song ends up in prison for life, it is usually classified as a prison song.

Next up is the immortal cheeky 1965 Roger Miller classic, "King of the Road." It is sui generis; there is no other hobo song quite like it, and though George Jones among others tried valiantly to cover it, nobody ever sang it with Roger Miller's joyful insouciance. This is one that nothing will do but the original, if you want to check it out.

May I also mention the great Boxcar Willie (1931-1999), who performed parttime as a singer in the hobo style (complete with the layered clothing and scruffy unshaven look) throughout a twenty-seven year career in the Air Force, only becoming a full-time entertainer when he left the service in 1985. Born Lecil Travis Martin, he met hoboes in train stations in the 1940s and wrote a number of his own songs, in addition to performing Jimmie Rodgers with an elan that would please the Singing Brakeman himself. I used to listen to the Grand Ol' Opry a lot; Box was a member beginning in 1981, and one of my fondest memories of him was a night he did an entire set of Hank Williams songs. He alone of all those who have made the kamikaze flight of singing Hank Williams did not embarass himself. My favorite of all his recorded performances, though, is a duet from Hank Williams Jr.'s 1981 album THE PRESSURE IS ON. Called "Ramblin' in My Shoes" it's an exuberant celebration of trains, hoboing and great music.

No doubt I've missed a whole lot of great performers and performances; Woody Guthrie, for example, was a hobo for awhile, and his experiences turn up in his music. Bob Dylan was never a hobo, but he sang about them. Hopefully, though, I've hit the high points.

Thanks for holding your yawns, and till next time, fair thee well.



PS It's official. Miss A DOES NOT have mono. One less worry.

It may seem that I'm having a fit of morbidity this past week, what with train wreck songs, ghostlights, and ghost monks, but the following story does sort of tie all those themes together. This particular place also is the only one of all the "haunted" places I've read and written about that I have actually stood and looked at.

About thirty-five or forty miles up Highway 11, as the crow flies, from my hometown lies Cleveland, Tennessee, and in downtown Cleveland stands the gorgeous Gothic Revival St. Luke's Episcopal Church, designed and built by the architect Peter Williamson beginning in 1872.

Next to St. Luke's is the Craigmiles family mausoleum, built shortly after the church. My story is about the tragedy that struck the Craigmiles family and what has since happened at the mausoleum.

Church and mausoleum both were built with money donated by John Henderson Craigmiles, in memory of his little daughter, Nina. Nina was born on August 5, 1864, and died on October 18, 1871, when the buggy in which she and her grandfather, Dr. Gideon Blackburn Thompson, were riding was struck by a train. Dr. Thompson, thrown clear, survived, but Nina was crushed to death by the cowcatcher, that quaint contraption on the front of the train that protected the engine from damage should it hit a large animal on the tracks.

The church was consecrated on October 18, 1874, the third anniversary of Nina's death, and incidentally on the feast day of Saint Luke in the old tradition. The mausoleum was built almost immediately after the church was completed. It is made of imported Carrara marble--that lovely Italian rock favored by Renaissance sculptors--and is also Gothic in appearance, with a spire topped by a cross that towers nearly forty feet in the air. Inside are six sarcophagi, but only four are occupied: one by Nina, one by an unnamed infant son who was born and died the same day, one by John Craigmiles, who died in 1899 of blood poisoning, and the fourth by his wife, Adelia Thompson Craigmiles Cross. She remarried after John Craigmiles' death, but was entombed with her first husband and children when she died in 1928, after being struck by a car as she was crossing a street in downtown Cleveland.

The "haunting" appears in the marble of the mausoleum. Shortly after Nina's body was placed there, red streaks and splotches began to appear in the stone. Some say that the townspeople tried replacing the stones at first, or scrubbed the stains away, only to see them return. Although it is possible the stains are the result of climatic conditions or undetected flaws in the marble, the story has grown over the years that they are blood--dark reminders of the tragedies that wiped out an entire family.

Some years ago, on a trip to Cleveland, I conned my mom and aunt into letting me stop at Saint Luke's. I walked around the Craigmiles mausoleum; I saw the stains. And even though I am not the most psychic person in the world, I could feel the sorrow in that place.

I wish I could have located an actual picture of the mausoleum; no luck, but I think this one will do:



Till next time, fair thee well.

Sunny early but still a chilly damp in the air this morning. So I went looking for anyplace that's warm. This was the best image I found--an imaginary place, maybe like James A. Michener's Bali Ha'i from TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC. When Rodgers and Hammerstein made this great episodic tale of WWII on far-off exotic islands into their hit musical, SOUTH PACIFIC, they gave the song about the island to the immortal character Bloody Mary, one of the great hustlers in all of literature and music.

This morning, with that chill of midwinter hanging around me, clouds moving in that may bring snow flurries or (more welcome) rain, Bloody Mary wouldn't have a hard sell. Just to sit on the beach and feel the warm wind on my skin and listen to the surf ease up onto the sand, lapping at my toes--

Sounds like paradise. And on that seductive note, fair thee well.

Welcome to the weekend, friends. Miss A may have mono. I have a sinus infection, my brain is moving like molasses and my ears are stopped up. But I want to contribute a little something in case there's a blog crawl tonight, so here goes: one of my favorite local ghost stories.

About thirty miles northeast of Chattanooga, on the Hiwassee River, sits the little town of Charleston. Nowadays it's famous mostly as the site of a giant Bowater plant. On days when the air hangs close to the ground like a wet blanket and the wind is just right, you can smell the sickly sweet scent of wood pulp being made into paper products all the way over in my county, some thirty miles farther east. If you drive by the plant itself, it burps great stinking clouds of white smoke. If there's fog on the river, smoke and fog can turn into a deadly soupy mess of low visibility and agonizingly slow traffic--if you're lucky; if not it can turn into a chain reaction wreck, as it did some years ago, when several people were killed.

There was no Bowater plant in Charleston in 1867, though. Then it was more or less just one of the small towns that sat on the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad. In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, Union sympathizers burned the railroad bridge at Charleston to keep the Confederate army from using the tracks to move soldiers and materiel. The bridge was rebuilt after the war, and all was fairly quiet until 1867.

That year was a flood year. The rains came and did not stop. The waters of the Hiwassee rose and rose. Most dangerously, the flood undermined the roadbed under the railroad bridge. One train did not make it much beyond the bridge before sections of the roadbed gave way under the heavy train, and one by one the engine and cars tumbled down an embankment and into the swollen river.



The citizens of Charleston worked heroically to save as many people as they could. There were many dead, and many injured. A temporary morgue was set up in the depot so families could come and hopefully locate their dead, only to load them on another train for their sad last journey home.

Charleston had only one doctor in 1867. He nearly worked himself into his grave in the couple or three weeks after the wreck, and once the crisis was past, he was forced to spend some time at one of the spas, or "watering places" where the sick (or sometimes hypochondriacs) went to get well. No sooner had he left town, though, when a family arrived from Baltimore seeking their brother, a Catholic monk who had been on the train, on his way to New Orleans.

Survivors from the train remembered seeing and even talking with the young monk, but he had simply vanished in the aftermath. The family hung around Charleston for a few weeks, waiting for the doctor to return, hoping he might have treated their brother or at least seen him, but they had to return to Baltimore without knowing what happened to the young monk.

When the doctor came home, he was well and ready to go back to work, and he brought with him a new piece of office equipment, you might say: a fully articulated skeleton, something he'd always wanted. The skeleton remained in his office as long as he was in practice.

Some years later, when the doctor retired (taking the skeleton with him), a younger doctor bought his practice and set up his office in the same building the old doctor had used. From the earliest days of his tenancy in the building, the new doctor was plagued by sightings of a robed figure that always disappeared before he could turn to speak to it, and most annoyingly by a sound that reminded him of beads clicking against each other. It was not until a patient told him the story of the monk who vanished after the 1867 flood that the young doctor realized that he was hearing the click of rosary beads, and that the robed figure was the ghost of the monk--and surmised where the old doctor had gotten his skeleton.

In 1932, so the story goes, the doctor's office building was torn down. The workmen found, in a space between the interior and exterior walls, a brown robe and a rosary hanging from a nail.

For perhaps the best version of this spooky tale, see Kathryn Tucker Windham's 13 TENNESSEE GHOSTS AND JEFFREY (1977).



And on that watery note, fair thee well.