Bryson City Secrets: Even More Tales of a Small-Town Doctor in the Smoky Mountains (16 page)

“I think I did in my first year of college, but I can't say as I remember all he had to say.”

“Great writer. No educated man should avoid him is what I say. Thoreau wrote, ‘Walking is a blessing,' and, my favorite, ‘It is a great art to saunter.' When he was older, Thoreau wrote, ‘The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.' I agree with the man. Webster said that sauntering was walking leisurely with no apparent aim. But that's not how I like to saunter.

“When I come into my forests here in the park,” he continued, “I just want to absorb the surroundings. The hiker is focused on the physical process of locomotion and arriving at the next point in his journey. I focus on the
journey
and what nature is telling me along the way. You go slow and listen, son, and you'll even hear God speak out here.”

Stupka paused, and then added, “This is really a hiker's park. I'm proud to have been a part of making her that. And I'm proud to have done a little to protect her from evil.”

“Evil?”

“Indeed. Evil people who want to take this beautiful wilderness and rape her — clear-cut her, bulldoze her, develop her. They actually believe
they
can improve her. They are fools! They're only interested in getting what they want when they want it. They don't think of the future, and they don't think of others — only themselves and their own selfish needs. Their sickness would destroy this park, son. Destroy her! And without good men to fight back, they would have.”

The intensity of his voice and the strength of his conviction both surprised and intrigued me. “OK, enough history!” he stated. “Let's go see what she wants to teach us today.”

And with that we moved deeper into the woods.

The further we walked, the more questions I had for this interesting man. I learned that Stupka first came to the Smokies in October, 1935.

“I really had no idea what my assignment would be when I reported to J. Ross Eakin's office,” Stupka explained. “He was the park superintendent. When I told him I'd been sent to be his park naturalist, he looked at me in shock and disbelief. ‘A park naturalist!' he had exclaimed. ‘What in the devil would
we do with a naturalist?' ”

Stupka paused to laugh. “I assured him that I had indeed been sent out for duty in the Smokies by the National Park Service and was eager to begin my service in the Smokies.”

“Was this your first assignment with the Park Service?”

“Oh, no! Four summers before that I worked as a naturalist ranger in Yosemite. Then I went back to finish my degree in zoology at Ohio State University. Graduated in 1932. My first appointment was as the first junior park naturalist at Acadia in Maine. In '35 the NPS sent me here. I was the first full-fledged naturalist in any national park in the East.”

“So what did you do when you started working here?”

“Well, the superintendent looked at me and said, ‘Stupka, there's nothing in this park that visitors can get to at this stage of the game and little to show except along the transmountain road.' The park was so new then that his job was to concentrate on construction, not interpretation. He told me, ‘When the boys in our sixteen CCC camps get finished constructing hiking trails, fire control roads, and some facilities for visitors, maybe then you'll have something to do. In the meantime, go build your collections. Get around the park. But please don't bother me if you can help it.' ”

Stupka laughed again. “Without knowing it, son, the man gave me a great gift. For the first three years on the job I was able to concentrate on assembling basic information about the area that had never been assembled before. Not only was I able to collate the work of the scientific observers who had explored the Smokies before me; I could also catalogue this incredibly diverse part of the world. I found more than thirteen hundred kinds of flowering plants, almost 350 mosses and liverworts, 230 types of lichens, and more than two thousand types of fungi. Then there were the trees — I was able to document over a hundred different types. And about twenty of these, I found, had reached their world- or national-record size right here in the Smokies.”

In a classroom, this type of lecture might have been boring, but with this animated man the words painted a picture that was framed by the natural beauty of the park herself.

“Red spruce, eastern hemlock, mountain magnolia, cucumber tree, Fraser magnolia, yellow buckeye, and mountain silver-bell all have the largest members of their species right here. And plants that would normally be considered shrubs elsewhere grow and thrive here as large as trees. The staghorn sumac, witch hazel, rhododendron, and mountain laurel stand erect in many areas of the park with tall, woody stems at least nine or ten feet high. Fact is the rhododendron and laurel grow so tall and thick in some areas that it's dark and cold in their interior. The old-timers tell stories of folks getting lost in the thickets and never finding their way out.

“One old-timer, a mountaineer friend who called himself ‘Uncle Jim' Shelton, first showed me what's now been recognized as the world's largest mountain laurel. That beauty measured a fantastic eighty-two inches in diameter. My guess is that the aggregate growth of the sprouts fused into a single trunk. I showed it to the late Dr. Harry M. Jennison of the University of Tennessee. He officially named it Shelton's Ivy Stalk in honor of my friend.”

Just then Arthur stopped and pointed. “Look there! There she is. The Queen.”

I looked in the direction he was pointing. A massive tree soared toward the sky, clothed in a rough, deeply furrowed bark.

“Most of the pioneers called that tree a weed tree,” Arthur explained. “She's a black locust — the largest one in the park. Let's go visit with her and take her measurements.”

We walked over to the massive trunk, and I helped him measure the tree's circumference. Then he pulled out a small notebook and a pencil from his pocket and scribbled a bit as he figured. “Fifty-two inches in diameter, Walt. She's put on nearly an inch since I last visited with her.”

He stood back and gazed at the tree as an art connoisseur would admire a painting.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“I'm not certain, son. But she was here long before any settlers were, that's for sure.” He pointed up to the branches of the tree, which were at least fifty feet above the ground. “See those white and sweet-pea-like clusters of flowers up there?”

I nodded.

“They have a sweet fragrance and will draw droves of bees all through April and May. Makes a mighty sweet honey, I'll tell ya that.”

He walked around the tree, gazing at her canopy. “Because the wood is so durable when it's in contact with the ground, the pioneers used it for fence posts. You'll see lots of them still standing today. I had black locust wood that was harvested in the park made into the numbered posts along every trail in the park.”

“Is the locust your favorite tree?” I asked.

“Nope. Not even close.”

“Then what is?”

“The chestnut. If the locust is the queen, the chestnut is the king of the park — at least when I began my career here. Lots of the old houses and barns were made from chestnut. It was as easily sawn and nailed as was the locust or the tulip poplar, but in one way it was better.”

“Which was?”

“It had the advantage of being decay resistant. In modern times, that made the rot-resistant logs from the tree very popular fence posts and utility poles. But for the pioneer it was ideal as split-rail fences. It had a straight grain that split easily, and it was much more available than the cedar or the black locust. The old-timers told me that one in every four trees in these mountains was once a chestnut.”

“Once?”

“Yep. Most are gone now.”

“Lumbered out?”

He looked at me quizzically. “Haven't you heard of the blight?”

I felt ignorant as I shook my head.

“It was a fungal disease that destroyed the bark tissue of the chestnut. It was first noticed in New York at the Bronx Zoo in 1904 but had probably been brought into the northeastern U.S. sometime in the 1800s on Asiatic chestnut trees. It spread like wildfire from the northeast southward, killing almost every American chestnut tree throughout the eastern U.S. Our native chestnuts had almost no resistance to this exotic fungus. Most of the trees died from the blight in the 1930s and practically all were gone by 1950, but the blight didn't directly harm the roots. This king of trees continued to sprout back year after year with a vengeance. Some chestnuts have repeatedly died and sprouted again from their root collars for the past seventy years. But the vigor and number of these sprouts have been declining.”

I stood in amazement as this ancient professor lectured in words both illuminating and refreshing. His love for the forest and her inhabitants was contagious.

“I miss my friends,” he sighed. “But so does every creature in the park. The nuts were a dependable food for wildlife. When the acorn and hickory crops were lean, deer, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, wild turkey, and other birds could rely on a chestnut crop. Since chestnut trees bloomed late, they escaped the spring frosts that often ruined other mast crops.”

His eyes were gazing into a different world as he continued. “Farmers often let their pigs run loose in the woods in the fall to fatten up on the freshly fallen chestnuts. Children loved to gather and eat the sweet-tasting nuts — fresh or roasted. Many of the mountain folks depended on chestnuts as a no- or low-maintenance cash crop. The nuts were free for the taking, and the only work was in the gathering and marketing.”

His eyes came back into focus as he looked up at the giant locust tree. “Son, this tree is a mere babe compared to the mature chestnut — which were the giants in this forest. In my early days here I'd see chestnut trees ten feet in diameter and over a hundred feet tall. As far as I was concerned, the chestnut was the redwood of the East. We lost a tree that I think would have become our national tree.”

Suddenly the naturalist turned and headed down the path, sauntering even more deeply into the forest. I followed close behind.

“Oh, here's a beauty,” he commented as he stopped and pointed to a small tree I'd never seen before.

“She's a yellowwood. The natives call her a gopherwood. This one's rare in the park, but she's hearty. In fact, one of her ancestors was the final survivor of all the specimens collected in these mountains by John Bartram and planted by him in his garden in Philadelphia.”

He pulled down a small branch with a cluster of white flowers. “Smell this.”

I took in the fragrance of the small flowers. “Sweet.”

“Yep. This actually smells just like the locust flower. Probably because they are related. Both are members of the bean family, or
Leguminosae
.”

I smiled to myself in enjoyment as we moved further down the trail.

Arthur pointed to a sloping field strewn with massive jumbled boulders. “Know what this field is telling us, Walt?”

I looked and thought carefully for a moment, but nothing came to mind.

He continued. “It tells us of an ancient age when the climate was bitterly cold in this region. Massive rocks were torn loose from the higher ridge by the process of freezing alternating with thawing. Then this bouldery debris field slowly began to march down the slope. The boulders were almost imperceptibly rolled and pushed down by frost and erosion and the pull of gravity. They continue their downward journey even today — slowly moving toward disintegration and dust. They age at an imperceptibly slow speed — but, like us, to dust they shall return.”

As our time together progressed, I sensed Arthur Stupka was not just a naturalist but, in his own way, a preacher. His sermon was couched in the language of biology and botany, but his lessons were even more timeless than the nature he admired — for he instinctively understood and admired not just nature but also her Creator — the One about whom all nature sang.

“Walt, the variety of plant life along this one little trail is incredible. Those gray-barked trees are the white ash. They aren't so very big, but each of these trees was growing right here long before the white man arrived. Up there,” he pointed to a grove, “is a large grove of old sugar maples. Over there are silverbells, basswood, and yellow poplar. Those ferns at their bases are the evergreen walking fern. The Cherokee call it ‘sore eye.' It's a strange ancient plant that only grows on moist, mossy rocks. It has a peculiar habit of spawning offspring when the tips of its finely tapered fronds touch the ground.”

He took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. “Now isn't this a spectacular site!” Arthur exclaimed, his eyes youthful and sparkling. “This is my favorite fern, and this is the most luxurious collection of them in the entire eastern United States. I've shown it to very few people.”