Purt Nigh Gone: The Old Mountain Ways
by Zell Miller
$17.95
Your Price: $14.36
ISBN
0-9796462-3-5
Paperback
192 pages
From the Preface
As old Brasstown Bald Mountain looks down upon my valley home, Shirley, my wife of fifty-five years, Gus, our yellow Lab, and I stand along U.S. Highway 76, waiting to cross. It takes a while. The traffic is steady—more than 11,000 vehicles a day, I’m told.
As a child, I played hopscotch on that road with a rare car interrupting our game only every thirty minutes or so.
Less than an hour away, in a narrow slit of the North Carolina Nantahala Mountains, Rail Cove has a newly paved county road now running by Shirley’s old homeplace. When her father and mother, Luke Carver and Bea, came there to live, the only way to get a vehicle into the area was to drive up the creek bed.
A few decades ago, Bob Dylan sang, “the times, they are a-changing.” Today in our southern mountains, the changing has “advanced” to vanishing. That’s what this book is about: a way of life that once was but is no more, a way of life that is purt nigh gone.