Fontana

We live at around 4.400 feet, surrounded by Blue Ridge Mountains—where the winds sound like roller coasters. Here there’s nobody to look up to, and our beautiful view sometimes vanishes behind the clouds that folks below call “the sky.”

We used to know who kings were by where they built their houses. I have no roots and no lineage to pay honor to; no legacy to live up to. And the people who live below often have more money and power than me.

Mountains don’t mean the same they did in the time of kings. There’s less mystery—less myth—and more people with nothing than ever before.

I live in the mountains partly because my story has roots in the Smokies, about a three hours’ drive from here. 

I thought my mother was a lesbian. At least she dressed like one. And by dressed like one, I mean she looked like the two singers in the Indigo Girls—who were the only lesbians I’d ever seen. Or, they were the only lesbians I knew I had seen. What I mean to say is, I hadn’t met many gay people by the time I first saw what my mom looked like in the ’70s. So, I really had no idea what the hell I was thinking. 

Maybe I was just trying to figure out why my parents slept in separate beds.

She wore plaid flannel shirts, jeans, and giant belt buckles. Which, now that I think about it, might have had more to do with her romance with Western cowboy culture than lesbianism.

She was a Western barrel racer. She owned many horses at one point or another. She told me when I was a boy she had to sell her last horse to pay for me. His name was Fury. He was 19 hands and dark as night. She would ride him around the block on North Street with jingle bells hanging from his saddle during Christmas, handing out candy canes to the neighborhood kids. My mom could fit her frame under his throat. 

She had a best friend named Karen who also had horses. She had two kids and a husband who killed himself when I was little. So, I was very young when I learned my daddy could choose to leave me forever. 

I’ve been fascinated with suicide ever since. Not that I’m suicidal. When I hear of someone killing themself, I spiral down a tangent of research. I’m curious about the lengths people go to escape pain or loss.

Years later, my mother passed notes to us under her locked bedroom door, saying goodbye but that she loved us. I’m not sure how many times this happened, but it was more than once—and once is more than enough. I’d think of Karen’s husband as I tried to throw my little body—trembling and gushing tears—against her door. I was certain that if I broke down the door, I could save her life.

I never broke in. But she hasn’t followed through either.

She and Karen would haul their horses to Fontana Village every year for July 4th.

They rode through the parks, around the lake, anywhere they could get away with. I’ve only seen pictures and heard stories, but that is where my family’s love for the mountains began—on those trips shared by two best friends, dressed like the Indigo Girls.

Every year, no matter where we lived, we went to Fontana. It’s the only place I have left that feels like a childhood home.

The village is the reason I am a historian. It may even be the reason I am a writer. It got to a point for me where I couldn’t just visit the Smokies. I had to know more and tell others.

I don’t know the first year she took us there. There are photos from when I was at least 4—they may be gone—either way, the photos were taken, and, at some point in my life, I’ve seen them.

I always remember a face. And I remember mine, squinting, as usual, sitting on the edge of Fontana Dam. Miles of green mountains sneak up behind me. I can’t tell if I’m smiling or if the squinting has pushed the corners of my mouth upward. I look happy.

Every time we went to the dam I wanted to watch the video in the gift shop. It featured black and white jumpy images of large machines that looked somewhat, but not entirely, familiar. Flittering men, all with hats, clamored around the worksite, dumping a city’s worth of concrete into a hole in the river. The dam is massive, with steep drops down both sides. On one side is a giant lake just a few feet from the top. The other is far enough from the water to squash a falling elephant. I was amazed cars could drive over. I imagined a disaster every time we crossed it—like that movie I watched with grandma Doris featuring a very wet Shirley Winters.

“In the center,” the movie taught me, “the concrete is still wet.”

Dad would tell us stories of the town under the lake and the caskets that sometimes popped up.

I always imagined church steeples from a birds-eye-view, like an Andrew Wyeth painting, lurking, telling the tale of some deep sorrow long passed and misunderstood. I’d swim with my eyes open to try to catch a glimpse.

We’d take the “Dragon’s Tail” up. The tight winding roads reminded me of the roller coaster at Lowry Park. The twist and turns that make some sick compelled me to hoot and holler and throw my hands up.

“It’s fine if you go over the line,” my father the truck driver taught me. “Everybody does it.”

“Well if everybody does it,” I asked, “wouldn’t we hit somebody eventually?”

“Hasn’t happened yet, and I’ve driven more miles backward than most drive forward, son.”

Sometimes we’d wander over the double lines and barely miss one of many motorbikes on the road. Other times we’d take some turns so tight I feared we’d slip off the right edge and tumble down the slope, landing in the pretty creek I’d traced for miles.

It was in creeks like that I’d find smooth stones to skip, always wearing shoes for fear of crawdad pinchers—when they ran amok in Appalachian streams, anyway. I’d flip over rocks, looking for salamanders to release and watch squirm away.

In the woods, I invented stories of Indians and Cowboys—the type that never existed in Appalachia. I scavenged for twigs to fashion into bows and arrows. Using fishing line from Dad’s tackle, I’d finish the job of creating the world’s least effective weapon. I enjoyed whittling the pointed tips of the arrows with daddy’s pocket knife the most. Being a city boy, I didn’t own one of my own.

I’d hunt my sister or cousins. Poorly, unfortunately.

I think the first time I smelled old buildings was at Fontana. The large hall in the center of the village included a video store and some arcade games. It reminded me of the one from Dirty Dancing, but the only dancing there was square.

The only stores I’d seen back home were 7-Elevens, Albertsons, and the Cuban shop where we bought chocolate-covered espresso beans. Fontana’s small general store—stocked with tiny, more expensive versions of food—reminded me of the Fisher-Price grocery playset my sister and I shared.

Each year there’d be something missing or moved. I never knew swimming pools could relocate. One year there’d be an incredible arcade, the next all games would be turned off. The pool would be inside, then out, then in again, then gone, then just a lazy river.

The jukebox remained, but the songs changed, always trending several years behind whatever was hip.

The restaurants changed menus and locations as often as the pools.

Poor craftsmanship and purely financial decisions left traces of history everywhere—like faint fingerprints. My first attempts at reading a landscape and noticing how people change things, both natural and not, first came from this place. It was there I first noticed how decisions create consequences and how you can’t really erase the past.

Many years later, when we first visited Boone, my wife Mal and I were eating on a restaurant patio. I looked around and saw nothing but mountains for miles. I knew this would be my home.

“It’s funny,” I told her. “These are mountains but they’re not my mountains.”

I am attached to the Smokies. I don’t need a map to know we’re there. They look different than other ranges, somehow lower but broader, with a gray haze atop a haunting fog.

It was in those woods I felt like an Indian. On those roads I first learned to ignore the casual lines some bureaucrat put down. It was there that my mother killed a rattlesnake with her feet. It was at the base of that dam where I brought my first girlfriend. It was in that village I tested the woman I’d marry with the only vacation we’d take with my family. It was there that Mal and I enjoyed our first vacation together, where we began our own tradition of visiting that place, where once I traipsed bow-in-hand.

When I met Mal, I wanted nothing more than to show her Fontana. I hadn’t yet figured out how to tell her how I felt. I took her there to show her who I am, even though I didn’t know that then.

It was there that my curiosity, love, and wilderness combined.

Home is not a place. It is a series of memories strung together, connected to my senses. It attaches to the sensations I had then—a sharper nose, a tongue that had not yet tasted whiskey, a body that had yet to grow. 

Like projections sprung from hidden droids, when I step into those woods I see myself, but back then. I smell that mossy, mustiness, and feel the slimy salamanders in my hands. I taste the tears I shed. I see the whiskered, only slightly wrinkled face and smile of my father. I smell him. And I miss him.

In those woods, I’m curious, again, about who trampled through them long before my white, privileged ass. Who there looked up and saw only stars—no satellites, no planes, no light pollution, no acidic clouds?

What were the lives of those dam builders like? Did they have children or wives? Were any of them gay or Italian? What pain did they feel? Did they know how damaged the mountains would be when they left?

Our family dreamed of owning a cabin there, or at least a timeshare. But somehow we could never make that work. It wasn’t about the money. Owning a second home, or even an eighth of one is something our kind couldn’t figure out. Or, us Sadler’s and Grecos needed a few more generations to get there.

It took me too long to realize home is not a house. And, upon that realization, it made me feel like I had none. Now, I feel the freedom that comes with rootlessness. I try not to take moments for granted. I know that later I’ll remember these smells and the wind on my neck—not with the senses I will have then, but those I have now. Because, for me, that’s how it works.

I tell myself the story of my life daily and I believe it. The story isn’t always the same. Today, I was relaxed, loved, and grateful for my family. I was a great dog dad to Roscoe and husband to Mal. Today, I was the kind of man who cooks breakfast for his family. Today I was happy.

That isn’t always the case. And I struggle with remembering the stories I’ve told before—especially those that made me feel proud, grateful, and less like a fuck up.

We’re all storytellers, some of us just get stuck on one tale. I’m not always in control, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be.