Fig. 8-Wears Valley

The previous crew had used special walnut to stain the loft ceiling so that it absorbed all light. By four o’clock I’d pretty much have to knock off as I was reading my tape measure in less than 1/16ths of an inch. I’d pack up my tools, run a broom over the floor of the butchered addition to my aunt’s cabin and begin my descent, in the truck, down the mountain. I only came down from that mountain to get my beer, food, or cigarettes. No one much spoke to me at the stores in town. I’d been hired to build stairs and a balustrade, but I pretty much had to move in and fix everything the other guys had fucked up. I don’t remember the name of that family, I never met them. I worked alone all day and slept there at night. My wife and three year old son would sometimes visit on the weekends.

I mortised the stringer on the wall side, wedged the treads and risers with shims and glue. The outside stringer was mitered for the risers, the treads returned with a jack miter. I fabricated newels and filled my basement shop with the chalk dust of basswood for the balusters. I built the rail out of heart pine beams salvaged from a timber frame barn, each notched for the rafters, numbered I-VI with a chisel. The heart pine so dense it hardly accepted stain, each night I’d scrape pine pitch from my router bits. I loaded the whole thing onto my truck and drove it through Cosby, through Cocke county, past Gatlinburg in to the heart of Smokies.

I learned true loneliness up there. Spring thawed, blossomed and eventually I went insane as the summer dragged. Appalachia all around, mean and flint-edged, on the road away from family, rocky and suddenly jagged, Appalachia enough to break a man’s heart. I hung the stairs, walked them a thousand times to run the rail, I slept in the loft, I slept under stars. I kept my chisels and plane-irons sharp. I kept a sledgehammer handle under the seat of the truck.

I got to where I could run the hour down to town without hitting the brakes. The WPA ran the road next to an ancient creek, buried a mile down in limestone crevices, overhangs, doglegs and switchbacks. The house, exposed on a outcrop would get over eighty in june, but the hollers in the road could stay below sixty, it felt. I’d roll both windows down, stick a beer between my legs and let the cool creek air bathe me going down at the end of each day. Sometimes later in the after-dusk, hallucinating shadows, I could still hear the voice of the water just outside.